The Biblical Tabernacle (click on our drawings to enlarge them)

The Tabernacle provides the pattern for the design of the biblical Temple. Described in the book of Exodus, probably the oldest building specification known to man, it has been claimed as the source of both Classical and Modern architecture. In a lecture delivered at the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1982, the well known British architect Quinlan Terry suggested that the 1st century BC Roman architect, Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, suppressed the Tabernacle as the true origin of the classical orders in his Ten Books on Architecture to please the 'god Augustus' to whom his books were dedicated. Rediscovered at the Renaissance, the Ten Books became the main source of classical architecture. Half a millennium later the biblical origin of the Tabernacle was also suppressed by the French architect, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret (Le Corbusier) (1887-1965), known as the 'father' of Modern architecture, when he re-wrote the biblical account of the Tabernacle, calling it 'A Primitive Temple', in his 1923 blueprint for International Modernism, Vers une Architecture.

		Le Corbusier's drawings compared with reconstructions by biblical commentators.

Designed by God?

In view of this, it it hardly surprising that most modern architectural textbooks do not even give the Tabernacle a token acknowledgement. Few architectural historians since the Renaissance have been prepared to believe that God actually designed an important building. But that is exactly what the book of Exodus in the Bible intends us to believe.

God's specification for the Tabernacle and its furnishings are contained in Exodus chapters 25-31, written, according to the text, by Moses himself under God's instruction shortly after the escape of the Israelites from Egypt. The specification is supported by a description of the construction which fills most of the rest of the book. The 'Mishkan' described is a demountable two-room 'dwelling' with timber wall frames supporting a four-layer tent-like roof covering. How likely is it that an ancient portable shrine, constructed 3,500 years ago and pre-dating the Parthenon by a thousand years, could hold the key to either classical or modern architecture, and what significance does this building have for us, today?

The antiquity of the biblical Tabernacle is attested by the 3rd century BC Greek historian Hectaeus of Abdera and it is described by the historian Flavius Josephus, writing in the 1st century AD, a century after Vitruvius. Jewish and Christian Bibles during the Middle Ages and Rennaissance commonly illustrated the Tabernacle, so that most educated people, including architects, were familiar with its basic form until the early modern period. It would therefore have been an important historical source for medieval architects, who seem to have drawn freely on it as a pattern for church building design, although we have not come across any studies which confirm this. The Renaissance prompted a more practical approach to the Tabernacle, as bible illustrators and architects like Jacob Judah Leon and Villalpando searched it for geometrical and numerical perfections. However, humanism gradually made scholarly consideration of most pre-Greek architecture a purely archaeological and, in the case of the Tabernacle, a religious preoccupation. During the 19th century theologians of the German critical school, such as Welhausen, decided that the Tabernacle account was an extravagant fantasy of a 5th century BC Hebrew priest. However, the opening up of the Middle East in the 18th century rekindled archaeological research into the historical books of the Bible, and in the latter half of the 19th century a group of architects with archaeological leanings, including Ferguson, Schick, Brown and Proby, made the design of the Tabernacle an object of serious architectural discussion. Over the last 50 years or so, with more and more literary, archaeological and ethnographic data supporting the authenticity of the biblical description, few modern biblical scholars would question the historical existence of some form of biblical Tabernacle, even if modern architects have not yet rediscovered its architectural importance.

The Tabernacle seems to have existed for about 500 years between the second and first millennium BC, when it was replaced by Solomon's Temple. The bare facts about its construction are as follows. Soon after the Exodus and arrival of the Israelites at Mount Sinai, Moses ascends the mountain and spends 40 days with God viewing plans and receiving the written specification for the Tabernacle and its furnishings. A few months after his descent the work is put in hand. The materials are donated, Bezalel and Oholiab, the master craftsmen, are appointed and the building is prefabricated and first erected in about six months. It functioned as a repository for the Ten Commandments, incribed 'with the finger of God' on two tablets of stone and kept under the 'mercy cover' in the Ark of the Covenant. As such, it provided a symbol of God's presence among his chosen people as well as a visual aid explaining the way that Israel could relate to God. While the structure as a whole expressed divine qualities such as rationality, creativitity and beauty, the special treatment of the Ark provided an illustration of the extreme holiness and 'otherness' of God, with an elaborate system of substitutionary animal sacrifices proscribed to 'cover' or atone for contraventions of the commandments and enable access to God. In this way, the Tabernacle was a meeting place between man and God, a symbolic dwelling for a God and hence a temple, but a temple that was very different from those known in other ancient cultures, because it laid such emphasis on God's specification, holiness and sacrifice, and significantly, contained no idol.

The specification

After dealing with the furnishings, the specification works from the inside to the outside, starting with the roof. Cubits and handbreadths are used, the Hebrew cubit being based on an Egyptian cubit of about 500 mm or 6 handbreadths. Although figures in ancient literature are easily corrupted, it is remarkable that those given here appear to be consistent. For example, the dimensions of the 10 embroidered linen strips with which the building specifications begins, and of the conventional woven goat hair strips covering them, precisely fit the height and width of the timber frame walls when the strips are stretched from side to side in the traditional Bedouin way. The span also compares well with the Bedouin black tent although the Tabernacle is about four times as long and more akin in construction to a Lur tent. The dimensional relationship between the wall frames and coverings can be summarised as follows:

Length: 10 strips x 4 wide each - 10 high rear wall = 30 cubits. 20 side wall frames x 1.5 each = 30 cubits.

Breadth: 6 rear wall frames x 1.5 = 9 + thickness of side walls = 10 cubits. Length of goat hair strips = 30 - (2 x 10) high side walls = 10 cubits.

The tent is therefore virtually flat roofed, a large black box, like those of some desert nomads although the catenary method of tensile roofing has archaeological parallels even among some stone buildings of the ancient near east. The two inner layers of the roof covering are each made in two halves, joined together, presumably to make transport practicable. The open weave goat hair layer is covered with insulation and waterproof layers of dyed rams skins and sea cow hides (once plentiful in the Red Sea), guyed out from the walls to provide priests' accommodation and storage areas on three sides. These areas are somewhat reminiscent of the surrounding colonnade of a classical dipteral temple.

Precious metals

The timber structure which supports the coverings is completely coated with gold. The lavish use of precious metals in the Tabernacle was at one time a principal reason for regarding it as fictitious. But since discoveries like that of Tutankhamen's treasures in 1922, archaeologists have come to view this aspect as a true reflection of contemporary Egypt. The timber-frame stucture also has parallels in Egyptian portable pavilions and it is known that the Egyptians used laminated timber. Forty-eight standardised timber frames are specified, made up from the almost infinitely durable Acacia still found in Sinai wadis, each with its uprights morticed into a couple of small silver bases. Crossbars are specified to bind the frames together. Traditionally shown as solid boards, the frames would be more portable as open structures, allowing the richly decorated coverings to be visible as wall linings. The crossbars would then brace the frames, the end wall and column entablatures providing lateral stability, and the fifth, central cross bar, acting as a ridge pole. The interior is partitioned by an embroidered curtain hung from four columns. The rooms are analogous to, and may conceivably be the origin of, the classical naos and pronaos also commonly found in pre-Greek Canaanite temples. A roughly cubical inner compartment contains the Ark, the outer, double cube room, the seven branched lamp, table and incense altar. At the entrance, a second embroidered curtain is supported by five similar columns standing in antis: not a normal Classical elevation. The intercolumnation had to allow the Ark to pass through so that their height is a minimum of some 14 diameters, assuming the bases are as small as those of the four columns. Even taking into account an entablature, they are exceptionally slender by Vitruvian standards, though it should be remembered that Vitruvius was concerned with stone, not timber buildings.

Egyptian models

The structure of the Tabernacle is clearly much more akin to ancient Egyptian models, for example those illustrated by the Palace of Zoser at Sakkara, than any known Greek temples. The progression of spaces to an inner sanctuary, the lavish use of precious metals over wood, the idea of a portable shrine and even the jointing techniques described are all typically Egyptian and the Israelites were of course well versed in Egyptian building technology. One might expect the column capitals and other decorations also to have Egyptian parallels, however, as Quinlan Terry has suggested, the entrance capitals may have been a decorative expression of the sacrificial rams' horns and the origin of the Ionic order. In support of this, the earliest Aeolic or proto-Ionic capitals are in fact recognised as Semitic in origin and even Vitruvius admits Asia Minor as the place of origin of the Ionic order, though he relates the volutes to the curled hairstyle of Ionian maidens! The Corinthian capital is a much more obvious development of Egyptian lotus and papyrus derived orders. The specification places the Tabernacle within a 100 x 50 cubit linen curtained formal enclosure or court, with a third 'order' of 60 columns with capitals. These have been suggested by Terry as the origin of the Doric order since Egyptian examples lack the bands or fillets which are described to facilitate the curtain and guy rope fixings. It is certainly no less likely that the three Classical orders originated in the Hebrew account of the Tabernacle than in the Greek mythology of Vitruvius, even if it is fanciful to suggest that the Tabernacle was a fully fledged classical building.

In addition to the building itself, the furnishings, usage, method of transport and erection of the Tabernacle are also covered in great detail in the books of Exodus, Numbers and Leviticus, lending further weight to its real existence as an historic structure. As with all historic architectural reconstructions, however, certain aspects remain obscure: for example the method of dealing with the lap of the roof covering at front and rear, and the corner detailing of the wall frames. The building specification is an outline only and was either supplemented by other information or by prior knowledge of the kind of structure intended, or most likely by both of these. Clearly more research is required.

However, substantial reconstruction of the Tabernacle is no matter of mere conjecture. Nor is it pure speculation, like the primitive timber megaron shown in every architectural text book as the origin of Greek architecture: we know more about the Tabernacle than about any other building of comparable date. This makes it all the more strange that such a seminal building should have been so consistently ignored by most architectural historians and theorists.

ROBIN KENT

References

Atwater, Edward E. History and significance of the sacred Tabernacle of the Hebrews. NY, 1877.

Cornwall, Judson. Let us draw near. Logos, Plainfield NJ, 1977.

Davidson, Rev. I E. The Tabernacle its symbolism and spiritual significance. Barbican, Chislehurst, nd.

Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture. Architectural Press, 1972 (Fr. 1923).

Olford, Stephen F. The Tabernacle, camping with God. Loiseaux, Neptune NJ, 1971.

Rouw, J and Kiene, PF. House of Gold. Nathanael, Ontario, nd.

Soltau, Henry W. The Tabernacle, The Priesthood and the Offerings, Grand Rapids, 1972.

Tiller, Lawrence V. Garments for glory and for beauty. Grenehurst, Cheltenham, 1981.

NOTE | This article is copyright. No responsibility is accepted for errors or omissions. It is based on Robin Kent's 1976 graduate historical study on the symbolism of the biblical Tabernacle and published articles. From 1977-8 Robin Kent was Architect to the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem, working on and around the Temple Mount and he maintains an active interest in Biblical structures. We have not been able to source the copyright holders of all the material illustrated and the article is subject to ongoing revision and updating. Comments are very welcome.

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