1. called by name. The obvious sense of the idiom is to choose, to designate, or, as Rashi puts it, to summon “to perform a task.” After the formal blueprints for the Tabernacle, God enlists the actual craftsmen who are to execute the plans.

3. wisdom . . . understanding . . . knowledge. As before, “wisdom” and its synonyms suggest both mastery of a craft and something like insight.

task. The two most common biblical terms for “work” are melaʾkhah (the word used here) and ʿavodah (the word used to designate the activity of the slaves in Egypt). ʿAvodah usually implies subservience—in political contexts, it means to be subject or vassal to a superior power; in cultic contexts, divine service—and it also often suggests strenuous physical labor (it is, for example, the verbal root used when Adam is cursed “to work the soil”). Melaʾkhah derives from the verbal root l-ʾ-k found in Ugaritic but not used in the Bible as a verb, which means to carry out a designated task. Thus, a malaʾkh is a messenger or agent (when his sender is God, an angel). In this immediate context, melaʾkhah has a clear connotation of craft, coupled with the requisite manual skill. The term, however, is meant to interact with its pointed recurrence in the immediately following passage about the sabbath, and so the present translation represents it by “task” in both cases.

6. in the heart of every wise-hearted man I have set wisdom. The two master craftsmen just mentioned by name would of course have needed large crews of men with the requisite skills to work under them. Putting wisdom in the hearts of wise-hearted men is a kind of positive counterpart to hardening the heart of Pharaoh: the capacity for skillful artisanship is innate, one of the person’s attributes, but God is the ultimate source of all such capacities and the enabling force for their realization.

7–11. The list of everything that Bezalel and his workers are to execute follows the instructions for the Tabernacle and the priests (chapters 25–30) in the order they were given and thus serves as a recapitulative summary of the long section that it now concludes.

10. the service garments. There is debate over the precise meaning of the Hebrew bigdey haserad. Rashi—and many modern interpreters after him—prefers to relate it to an Aramaic verb s-r-d, which means “to weave” or “to braid.” Others, beginning with the Aramaic Targums in Late Antiquity, connect it with the Hebrew root sh-r-t, “to serve.” Because the term is bracketed here with bigdey qodesh, “sacred garments,” it is more likely that it indicates a particular function rather than the weave or fabric of the clothing. It would seem, then, that bigdey haserad are special garments worn while performing a less sacrosanct service than that of the cult performed by the high priest.

13. Yet My sabbaths you shall keep. The force of the initial ʾakh, “yet” (or “only,” “just”) is to link this reiteration of the prohibition of work on the sabbath to the preceding section on the construction of the Tabernacle. The Israelites have been enjoined to undertake an elaborate set of labors in order to build God a fit sanctuary. Nevertheless, this idea of a sanctuary, inherited from pagan antecedents, for confirming the bond between man and God does not have precedence over the original Israelite idea of the sabbath as the supreme confirmation of that bond, Israel’s imitatio dei, “a sign between Me and you for your generations.”

14. whosoever does a task on it. All work, including even the “task” (melaʾkhah) of the Tabernacle, must cease on the sabbath. The talmudic sages thus showed themselves keen readers of these two adjacent passages in deriving the thirty-nine primary categories of labor (’avot melaʾkhah) forbidden on the sabbath from the sundry activities necessary for the assemblage of the Tabernacle and its furnishings.

doomed to die . . . cut off from the midst of his people. The vehemence of this formulation is predicated on the notion that the sabbath is the ultimate sign of the covenant between God and Israel, so that one who violates the sabbath violates the Covenant and renounces solidarity with the covenanted people.

15. tasks. The Hebrew uses a collective noun, singular in form.

17. caught His breath. For a justification of this physical rendering of the verb, see the comment on Exodus 23:12. The flagrant anthropomorphism would not have been a problem for the ancient audience.

18. when He had finished speaking. The concise summary statement of this verse brings us back from the long catalogue of divine instructions—all that Moses was “shown on the mountain” during his forty days there—to the narrative situation that we left in chapter 24. Moses is now ready to come down to the foot of the mountain, where trouble is already brewing.

written by the finger of God. The phrase “finger of God,” previously used by Pharaoh’s soothsayers, may suggest that God inscribed the stone tablets by tracing a finger over them, without chisel or stylus. Scholars have proposed that behind this image lie both mythological and political traditions of the ancient Near East: gods who inscribe human fate in stone and overlords who inscribe on tablets the conditions of vassalage for their vassals.