1. And Moses assembled all the community. This initial clause, which brings us back to the interrupted instructions regarding the Tabernacle, beginning with the law of the sabbath that concluded those instructions (31:12–17), is a neat reversal of the inception of the Golden Calf episode: “the people assembled against Aaron” (32:1). Instead of a rebellious assembling of the people, their leader now assembles them in order to rehearse before them all that God has enjoined them.

2. Six days. This very brief version of the law of the sabbath is a kind of digest of the earlier iteration of the sabbath obligation. There is a good deal of summarizing repetition of earlier material in all that follows.

3. You shall not kindle a fire. This prohibition is a new specification. The lighting of fires might well be associated with the “tasks” involved in constructing the Tabernacle because fire would have been required for all the metalwork, and in one Ugaritic text, fire is burned six days in order to erect a sanctuary for Baal. But the kindling of fire—as against merely making use of fire that has been set accidentally—is clearly a primary labor of civilization, as the Prometheus myth suggests, a kind of inauguration of technology, and so it is understandable that a special prohibition of it on the sabbath should be spelled out.

5. Take . . . a donation to the LORD. Whose heart urges him, let him bring it. The language here and in what follows takes us back to the beginning of the Tabernacle section, chapter 25, and then to passages from the subsequent chapters. The structure of command and implementation in mirroring language is common to the Bible and other ancient Near Eastern literatures. The Priestly editor, now reverting to a Priestly text, seeks to make this a thematically purposeful structure (though the return to cultic regulations is not likely to please modern readers). That is, the design for a perfect earthly abode for God in the midst of the Israelites has been traumatically disrupted by the story of the Golden Calf and the shattering of the tablets of the Law. Now that divinely mandated order has been restored with the making of the second set of tablets, the text can return to the actual fashioning of the Tabernacle, once again relishing every resplendent detail of indigo and crimson, gold and silver and bronze.

gold and silver and bronze. It is worth noting that although the Torah is a product of the early Iron Age, the report of the metals used for the Tabernacle remains faithful to the late Bronze Age setting of the Wilderness narrative.

10. wise-hearted. As before, the wisdom (ḥokhmah) in question slides from the notion of insight or intelligence to skill in a craft—in part because intelligence itself was thought of as a kind of teachable craft for those who had the capacity. The craft valence of the collocation used here is especially pronounced in verse 25, which speaks of “every woman wise-hearted with her hands” in the skill of spinning.

19. the service garments to serve in the sanctum. In this instance, the writer puts together serad, “service,” and sharet, “to serve,” either because he considered them to reflect the same root or because he is punning on the phonetic similarity.

21. every man whose heart moved him and everyone whose spirit urged him. The impulse of generosity indicated in 25:2 is stated more emphatically here and in the verses that follow. One may detect in this new emphasis a response to the Golden Calf episode, in which the people were quick to offer their golden rings for the fashioning of the molten image. Now they outdo themselves in donations for the LORD’s sanctuary.

22. the men . . . besides the women. The Hebrew construction, haʾanashim ʿal hanashim, is unusual. It would appear to suggest that the women queued up first to offer their donations. Because of the gender-bound nature of impersonal constructions in Hebrew, all the preceding references to “everyone” were masculine. Now we are alerted to the fact that women played an important role in the outpouring of contributions for the Tabernacle—another way of highlighting the comprehensiveness of the new impetus of generosity. The women were also more likely to have possessed an abundance of ornaments than the men.

earrings. The item in question, nezem, was also worn on the nose.

25. spun. Spinning is of course the one craft particularly associated with women.

34. to instruct. God has endowed Bezalel, together with his chief assistant Oholiab, not only with the skill to execute all these sundry crafts but also with the capacity to instruct the crews of ordinary craftsmen how to carry out their work. Canaanite myth, like the Greek, had a craftsman god; here, instead, the LORD inspires a human being with the skill, or “wisdom,” of the craft as well as with the ability to administer the project.

36:1. This verse is a summary of the nature of the workforce for constructing the Tabernacle and therefore would seem to belong here rather than at the beginning of the next chapter.