1 And take thou unto thee Aaron thy brother, and his sons with him, from among the children of Israel, that he may minister unto me in the priest's office, even Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, Eleazar and Ithamar, Aaron's sons.More instructions from YHWH to Moses...
2 And thou shalt make holy garments for Aaron thy brother for glory and for beauty.
3 And thou shalt speak unto all that are wise hearted, whom I have filled with the spirit of wisdom, that they may make Aaron's garments to consecrate him, that he may minister unto me in the priest's office.
4 And these are the garments which they shall make; a breastplate, and an ephod, and a robe, and a broidered coat, a mitre, and a girdle: and they shall make holy garments for Aaron thy brother, and his sons, that he may minister unto me in the priest's office.
5 And they shall take gold, and blue, and purple, and scarlet, and fine linen.
6 And they shall make the ephod of gold, of blue, and of purple, of scarlet, and fine twined linen, with cunning work.
7 It shall have the two shoulderpieces thereof joined at the two edges thereof; and so it shall be joined together.
8 And the curious girdle of the ephod, which is upon it, shall be of the same, according to the work thereof; even of gold, of blue, and purple, and scarlet, and fine twined linen.
9 And thou shalt take two onyx stones, and grave on them the names of the children of Israel:
10 Six of their names on one stone, and the other six names of the rest on the other stone, according to their birth.
11 With the work of an engraver in stone, like the engravings of a signet, shalt thou engrave the two stones with the names of the children of Israel: thou shalt make them to be set in ouches of gold.
12 And thou shalt put the two stones upon the shoulders of the ephod for stones of memorial unto the children of Israel: and Aaron shall bear their names before the LORD upon his two shoulders for a memorial.
13 And thou shalt make ouches of gold;
14 And two chains of pure gold at the ends; of wreathen work shalt thou make them, and fasten the wreathen chains to the ouches.
15 And thou shalt make the breastplate of judgment with cunning work; after the work of the ephod thou shalt make it; of gold, of blue, and of purple, and of scarlet, and of fine twined linen, shalt thou make it.
16 Foursquare it shall be being doubled; a span shall be the length thereof, and a span shall be the breadth thereof.
17 And thou shalt set in it settings of stones, even four rows of stones: the first row shall be a sardius, a topaz, and a carbuncle: this shall be the first row.
18 And the second row shall be an emerald, a sapphire, and a diamond.
19 And the third row a ligure, an agate, and an amethyst.
20 And the fourth row a beryl, and an onyx, and a jasper: they shall be set in gold in their inclosings.
21 And the stones shall be with the names of the children of Israel, twelve, according to their names, like the engravings of a signet; every one with his name shall they be according to the twelve tribes.
22 And thou shalt make upon the breastplate chains at the ends of wreathen work of pure gold.
23 And thou shalt make upon the breastplate two rings of gold, and shalt put the two rings on the two ends of the breastplate.
24 And thou shalt put the two wreathen chains of gold in the two rings which are on the ends of the breastplate.
25 And the other two ends of the two wreathen chains thou shalt fasten in the two ouches, and put them on the shoulderpieces of the ephod before it.
26 And thou shalt make two rings of gold, and thou shalt put them upon the two ends of the breastplate in the border thereof, which is in the side of the ephod inward.
27 And two other rings of gold thou shalt make, and shalt put them on the two sides of the ephod underneath, toward the forepart thereof, over against the other coupling thereof, above the curious girdle of the ephod.
28 And they shall bind the breastplate by the rings thereof unto the rings of the ephod with a lace of blue, that it may be above the curious girdle of the ephod, and that the breastplate be not loosed from the ephod.
29 And Aaron shall bear the names of the children of Israel in the breastplate of judgment upon his heart, when he goeth in unto the holy place, for a memorial before the LORD continually.
30 And thou shalt put in the breastplate of judgment the Urim and the Thummim; and they shall be upon Aaron's heart, when he goeth in before the LORD: and Aaron shall bear the judgment of the children of Israel upon his heart before the LORD continually.
31 And thou shalt make the robe of the ephod all of blue.
32 And there shall be an hole in the top of it, in the midst thereof: it shall have a binding of woven work round about the hole of it, as it were the hole of an habergeon, that it be not rent.
33 And beneath upon the hem of it thou shalt make pomegranates of blue, and of purple, and of scarlet, round about the hem thereof; and bells of gold between them round about:
34 A golden bell and a pomegranate, a golden bell and a pomegranate, upon the hem of the robe round about.
35 And it shall be upon Aaron to minister: and his sound shall be heard when he goeth in unto the holy place before the LORD, and when he cometh out, that he die not.
36 And thou shalt make a plate of pure gold, and grave upon it, like the engravings of a signet, HOLINESS TO THE LORD.
37 And thou shalt put it on a blue lace, that it may be upon the mitre; upon the forefront of the mitre it shall be.
38 And it shall be upon Aaron's forehead, that Aaron may bear the iniquity of the holy things, which the children of Israel shall hallow in all their holy gifts; and it shall be always upon his forehead, that they may be accepted before the LORD.
39 And thou shalt embroider the coat of fine linen, and thou shalt make the mitre of fine linen, and thou shalt make the girdle of needlework.
40 And for Aaron's sons thou shalt make coats, and thou shalt make for them girdles, and bonnets shalt thou make for them, for glory and for beauty.
41 And thou shalt put them upon Aaron thy brother, and his sons with him; and shalt anoint them, and consecrate them, and sanctify them, that they may minister unto me in the priest's office.
42 And thou shalt make them linen breeches to cover their nakedness; from the loins even unto the thighs they shall reach:
43 And they shall be upon Aaron, and upon his sons, when they come in unto the tabernacle of the congregation, or when they come near unto the altar to minister in the holy place; that they bear not iniquity, and die: it shall be a statute for ever unto him and his seed after him.
Have Aaron and his sons start up a religion shop, and make them some sharp looking uniforms.
The clothing specs are, of course, offered in considerable detail, including "the curious girdle of the ephod." I'd love to hear Carnac the Magnificent say that: "May the yak of Canaan be caught in the curious girdle of your ephod!"
Throughout Exodus "the children of Israel" usually refers to all of Jacob's descendents, but here it's a shout out to the golden oldies.
In a tiny precursor to the Vietnam Veterans wall, the names of Jacob's 12 children are ordered to be written on two onyx stones and again on a dozen varied gemstones. The 12 boys, that is. No gurlz allowed.
And like wearing Phil Rizutto's #10 or Jackie Robinson's #42, Aaron wears the baubles bearing the names of those fortunate sons.
Verse #13 has another great phrase: "ouches of gold." Recalls a 3 Stooges short where one of the boys is being smashed on the head with a huge bag of cash and responds, "Oh, as long as you're hitting me with money!"
Aaron is supposed to don this Michael Jacksonish getup in "the holy place" continually, which sounds pretty often.
In the "breastplate of judgment" Aaron's supposed to put "the Urim and the Thummim," which apparently is Hebrew for somethingorother.
Aaron will wear a little cowbell when he goes about his continual ministering, so the Lord will hear him and... not kill him? Keep him from dying?
Then there's a golden plate, which I guess got left in upstate New York for Joseph Smith to find millennia later. Well, it must have been a small plate, or Aaron had a big forehead on which to wear it 24/7 and "bear the iniquity of the holy things." That apparently means Aaron's the designated scapegoat should anything go all pear-shaped at the tabernacle. Good think he has a silver tongue to go along with that golden plate.
Aaron's sons will wear girdles and bonnets, just like Rudy Giuliani.
It falls onto Aaron's sons and their progeny to be God's official priests forever more. Which is nice.
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Yet again this is the priestly source pretending that an eyewitness account of these objects in the days of the Jerusalem Temple is a set of instructions from Moses. The obsession with absurd levels of detail about priestly things is one of the main reasons that the priestly source is called the priestly source.
This chapter is more complex than it at first appears, and many words are mistranslated in the King James Version, because it bases the translation of very obscure Hebrew words on the Greek Septuagint's rendering of them, and forgets that the Greek words themselves don't have the same meaning in modern times as they did when they were written.
Firstly, note how its Aaron that's identified as THE quintessential priest, and the founder of the priesthood. That's the Aaronid bias of the Priestly Source rearing its head; the non-Aaronid priests, centred at Shiloh, would have profoundly disagreed. In a couple of chapters, you'll see what the Elohist (closely aligned with the Shiloh group) thinks of the Aaronid priesthood, and its not exactly complimentary.
The Ephod. As a garment, its a bit strange, its somewhere between a mini-skirt-with-braces and a mini-corset (historic Jewish writers have favoured the latter). Seems fairly simple here but it really isn't; you see, David is described as dancing in one in the Book of Samuel, and it being seen by his wife as very rude (in the same way that people wearing miniskirts, and nothing underneath, in a strong upward draft would be). But he is also described as finding a sword behind a free-standing Ephod that was in a sanctuary (at a place called Nob). And in the book of Judges, there is an Ephod made of Gold that was worshipped, and another closely connected to Teraphim (the strange household idol things that may have been skulls). So, its a sort-of mini-skirt thing that was sometimes made from solid gold and worshipped?
The description of an Ephod here is clearly a ridiculous elaboration of a once much simpler garment. Although David is described as dancing in an Ephod, the text only states that David "girded" one to himself, and "gird" just means that it was bound somehow to his loins; similarly Samuel is described as wearing a tunic AND girding an Ephod to himself at the same time. In the Book of Samuel, the kings are inferred to have asked priests to hand over their Ephod whenever they wanted to perform divination. The Ephod itself must once have been a container for the Urim and Thummim (see below), and therefore must have been some sort of cloth pocket.
However, this clearly can't apply to the golden ones that were worshipped. These Ephods must have been something that the Urim and Thummim were used in the presence of; ie. they were idols. And the Ephods that the kings ask the priests to hand over are only described as being carried by the priests not worn by them (despite a couple of bad modern translations), so they could just as easily have been portable idols. The connection between these and the garment is probably that these particular idols were known for wearing the garment, and the term gradually came to describe the idol as a whole.
The breastplate; not an ordinary breastplate. Its a cloth bag, that was hung from the shoulders, and possibly also attached to the waistband (its not clear from the text). Its basically the cloth bag that the Urim and Thummim went into, and were drawn from (the drawing of lots). Hosea (which predates the Priestly Source, and Ezekiel) seems to indicate that Urim and Thummim were part of the everyday religion - people would use them in normal daily life, rather than have to go to one single location on rare occasions; ie. there were originally many urim and thummim, and many containers to put them in.
A translation from Hebrew of Urim and Thummim would be something like "lights and faultlessness", traditionally "lights and perfections" or more allegorically as "revelation and truth". But Urim is a corruption of the word "Arrim" - meaning "curses", so we have "cursed and faultless", ie. "yes and no". They are essentially sticks where pulling out one would mean "yes", and pulling out the other would mean "no"; something similar was practiced in pre-Islamic Arabia, where they used two arrowshafts in a container in the Kaaba at Mecca. Where the bible mentions God being asked a question and an answer being given, its usually either by a dream or with this sort of yes/no question is asked (an example of this yes/no question can be found in the way the Israelites are whittled down to point to Jonathon as the culprit in the Book of Samuel).
To fit inside the "breastplate" they would have to have been small and flat, presumably piece(s) of bone or wood; they may even have been a single object where the side it was on would determine whether it was "yes" or "no" (like tossing a coin). The priestly source evidently didn't know what they were as they are hardly mentioned in it, and it concentrates instead on the decoration of the breastplate; as a result, the Talmudic writers (in the first few centuries AD) thought that a question would be written down and put into the slot in the breastplate, and then the jewels on the breastplate itself magically moved around somehow to spell out the answer.
The Jewels on the breastplate are not what they seem to be. Almost every english translation gives a different list. The KJV translation is one of the worst. The Hebrew words in the masoretic text are very obscure and often describe qualities (like "red" and "shiny") rather than specific names, while the Septuagint's Greek is sometimes vague and even when its clear cut can be confusing because modern english sometimes has co-opted the Greek words for uses that they were not originally put to. One of the best examples is the "Sapphire"; Sapphires were not mined until AFTER the Roman Empire began, "Sappir" (Hebrew) / "Sapphiros" (Greek) actually just means "blue [thing]".
They are in four rows, with 3 on each row.
-Row 1 Column 1 - Sard, Red Jasper, or Carnelian. (Septugint=Sardios, Masoretic=Odem [think "Adam"], both just mean "red", the latter in an earthy sort of way)
-Row 1 Column 2 - Chrysolite. NOT Topaz (which was barely discovered before 500BC). (Septugint=Topazios, Masoretic=Pitdah). The Greek refers to a greenish-yellow mineral found on a very particular island in the red sea [the mineral mined on the island is now known to be Chrysolite], the Hebrew [via Assyrian] refers to shimmering.
-Row 1 Column 3 - Heliodor. (Septugint=Smaragdos, Masoretic=Bareketh). The greek is the same word that "emerald" comes from, but actually just means "green stone", and in greek literature refers to a particularly BRIGHT gem found in columns. The Hebrew just means shiny.
-Row 2 Column 1 - Carbuncle. (Septugint=Anthrax, Masoretic=Nophek). Anthrax is just the Greek word for "coal", as a colour it means the colour of burning coal, the Hebrew is a loan word from somewhere, one of the Targums views it as meaning a gem of blueish-green colour, while the other as a gem of reddish colour.
-Row 2 Column 2 - Lapis Lazuli. (Septugint=Sapphiros, Masoretic=Sappir). Why lapis lazuli? Well, basically you're looking for something thats very definitely blue that was also common enough to be known by the colour alone; lapis lazuli fits the requirements very well, as it was a common gift to Egypt from the region during the Amarna period, and its the right colour.
-Row 2 Column 3 - Green Jasper. (Septugint=Iaspis, Masoretic=Yasepheh)
Jasper comes in many colours, but the thing the greeks specifically called "Iaspis" was the green variety, because it was the rarest (and thus most expensive).
-Row 3 Column 1 - Antimony-coloured Agate. (Septugint=Ligurios, Masoretic=Lesem). Lesem is a place name, Liguria seems to be as well. But pliny describes the Ligure as having electrical properties, so a load of scholars jumped to the conclusion that it was amber (elektron is the greek word for amber, and electricity is so named because amber was one of the first things it was discovered in). But pliny is a very dubious source for very many things, and other Greek writers describe the Ligure as a pale gold colour, one even suggesting that its a corruption of "Lykos Ouron" - "White Urine". Medieval Jewish writers argued that the stone was an Agate.
-Row 3 Column 2 - Sky Blue Agate. (Septugint=Achates, Masoretic=Sebo). The greek means "Agate", and the Hebrew means the same, via Assyrian. Classical Jewish writers argued that the colour was sky blue (Hebrew thought differentiates between sky blue and dark blue in the same way that English thought considers red and pink to be different colours).
-Row 3 Column 3 - Amethyst. (Septugint=Amethystos, Masoretic=Ahlamah). Did you know that "Amethyst" means "can't get drunk" (a-meth-[ystos]), referring to the once popular belief that amethysts would prevent you getting drunk no matter how much you had to drink. Ahlamah means "strong"; the Babylonian Targum translates it as "strong drinking", clearly referring to the Amethyst, but the Jerusalem Targum mistranslates it as "calf's eye".
-Row 4 Column 1 - Yellow Jasper or Serpentine. NOT Chrysolite. (Septugint=Chrysolitos, Masoretic=Tarsis). Tarsis is a place (Tarshish). Chrysolithos means "golden stone", and not specifically what we later called "chrysolite". Given the stones already on the breastplate, it would look odd to have two clear yellow stones next to each other, so it must have been something else; the Greek use of "Chrysolite" includes opaque golden stones like yellow Jasper or Serpentine, and things containing flecks of gold like lapis lazuli.
-Row 4 Column 2 - Malachite. NOT Beryl nor Onyx (Septugint=Beryllios, Masoretic=Shoham). We've had this before; the Septuagint can't be consistent about whether the thing that the masoretic text calls "shoham" is a "beryllios" (beryl), "onchion" (onyx), "smaragdos" (green stone), or "leek-green stone". Shoham seems to be related to the arabic "musahham", meaning stripy and fitting onyx. The best match to all of these is Malachite (green, cloudy, and stripy).
-Row 4 Column 3 - Fairly Obscure. (Septugint=Onchion, Masoretic=Yahalom). Like with Shoham, the Septuagint is inconsistent in its translation of Yahalom, and sometimes has Beryllos instead. Yahalom either means "strike hard" or "flint"; the former would suit diamonds, while the word involved in the latter connection ("hallamish") is connected with an Assyrian word referring to something from which rings were made. Onyx itself is a word borrowed into Greek from Assyrian, where it means "ring".
If you take the KJV translation the choice of gems isn't obvious at all. But here, if you assume that the final gem is Sardonyx (red Onyx), you'll see that there are three each of red, green, blue, and yellow, and each colour is present in clear, opaque, and striped form. And red/green/blue/yellow is the most primitive set of four colours visible, due to the way the brain interprets colour (at the ganglion cell layer - you perceive whether something is red or green and whether it is blue or yellow; draw a chart with these two lines on - spectrum colour along horizontal and one line marking how blue rather than yellow it is on the vertical, and another marking how green rather than red it is on the vertical, and all the other colours will pop out)
The other thing about this pattern of gems is that its in the book of revelations, in disguise. Take the first two rows together and rotate them by 180 degrees, and flip the bottom two rows upside down. What you now have is the sequence of gemstones in the "city wall" in chapter 21 of Revelations. An important point is that it clearly uses the Septuagint version, not a direct translation from the Hebrew (its clear if you look at ancient manuscripts of Revelations, not so clear with english translations); one thing you need to consider when you come to the New Testament (which was originally written in "New Testament Greek") is why would a Jewish person who also knew Greek use the Septugint text rather than just translate the Hebrew? When they say "Jesus said 'Scripture says ...'", why does Jesus appear to be quoting the Septuagint not the masoretic text? Of course if Jesus had really spoken words along those lines, he'd have quoted the masoretic, and it would have been translated directly; and if the author of Revelations was really John the Apostle, then he'd have quoted the Masoretic text, and it would have been translated into Greek. But more on that later... in fact, at this pace, and with linear order, in several years time...
The "robe". More like a purple tank-top with bells on, quite literally. Purple has been the royal colour in many countries in the eastern mediterranean; in particular, here's that Phoenicia connection again, Purple came from a particular dye from Phoenicia (the greek word for purple was consequently "Phoenix"). Another famous colour is Tyrian blue, from Tyre, in Phoenicia. The Phoenix (bird) was also named for Phoenicia. The bells seem to have originally been to scare away evil spirits (like many ancient cultures, evil spirits were scared by random noises; why a spirit that supposedly was "evil" would be scared by something so basic as a bell is beyond my comprehension - you don't need "the force" to fight darth vader, or harry potter to fight voldemort, all you need is a tamborine?).
The hat is a turban; the KJV gives a bad translation, and turban is clearly meant by the Hebrew. For the middle east, a turban is a fairly normal piece of headgear.
By "coat" it means something more like a cassock, fairly light rather than some big woolen thing.
We'll get onto scapegoats later, in Leviticus if I remember rightly. And that really will be a bit wierd.
By the way, "ouches" here is the plural of "ouche" not "ouch".
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