Tabernacle, Revisited

 

                                                                   Life-size Tabernacle model at Timna 

 Then Solomon assembled the elders of Israel and all the heads of the tribes, the leaders of the ancestral houses of the people of Israel, in Jerusalem, to bring up the ark of the covenant of the Lord out of the city of David, which is Zion. And all the Israelites assembled before the king at the festival that is in the seventh month. And all the elders of Israel came, and the Levites carried the ark.  So they brought up the ark, the tent of meeting, and all the holy vessels that were in the tent; the priests and the Levites brought them up. 

                             2 Chronicles 5:2-5 NRSVue 

                                                              Model of the Ark of the Covenant 

Earlier this week one of the daily scripture readings was from the Older Testament book called 2 Chronicles. I appreciate that this wouldn't be on your go-to list of scripture scanning but I thought I would take a look, even though I was actually searching out the psalm.

2 Chronicles 5 is about the completion of the temple of Jerusalem under Solomon as a permanent home for the Ark of the Covenant. The Ark contained the two stone tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments and was the focus of worship for the people of Israel as they made their way through the wilderness from Egypt to the Promised Land. It was kept in a portable tent called the Tabernacle set up along the way. The tent and all the "holy hardware" were entrusted to a designated priestly group for assembly at each site. 

This could have been one of those "shrug and move on" passages except for our experience in Israel a couple of years ago. Ruth's sister and brother-in-law took us to Timna National Park, a remote and stunningly beautiful area in the Negev desert to the south of Israel. There are remnants of Egyptian culture thousands of years old including the remains of a temple and petroglyphs.We were able to crawl around in passages which were ancient copper mines. This may also have been on the route for the nomadic people of Israel as they moved toward their destination. 

                                                                       Timna sandstone columns 

Our brother-in-law was keen for us to visit a life-size reproduction of the Tabernacle within Timna, owned and operated by the Christian ministry which employed him. It was created by a man in Germany and he went there, purchased it, and shipped in to Israel where they pieced the puzzle back together in this remote location with permission of the Israeli government. The two guides offer tours, both a Christian and generic version, depending on the groups that show up. 

This may sound, well, quixotic at best, and while it was interesting, the park in general was more fascinating for us than the Tabernacle. 

There have been plenty of Tabernacle churches over time including a United Church in Belleville that was torn down. This name is a tribute to the "holy of holies" that was an unlikely priority for a people on the move.