15 And thou shalt make boards for the tabernacle of shittim wood standing up.

16 Ten cubits shall be the length of a board, and a cubit and a half shall be the breadth of one board.

17 Two tenons shall there be in one board, set in order one against another: thus shalt thou make for all the boards of the tabernacle.

We now discuss the body of the temple, the frame that the curtains will be laid over. The boards are to be constructed of the same shittim wood that is at the core of all the temple instruments.

This raises an interesting question. These boards were not of insignificant length: 10 cubits tall, which is approximately 15 feet. This means that to make a board of this length one needs a tree that grows straight and tall. The shittah tree can grow very tall, even over 60 feet, but it is known for having twisted and gnarled trunks. With careful selection, perhaps the Israelites were able to find angles in the tree from which sufficiently long boards could be extracted. Or perhaps they had to resort to special techniques to reshape curved portions, such as steam bending, or even they might have had to find ways to construct the boards from several composite parts, such as with scarf joints. I don’t actually know if the construction of these boards would have been a special challenge, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it required special thought and selection.

Whatever the process, they were to create dozens of boards that stood 10 cubits tall, a cubit-and-a-half wide, and each with “two tenons” at the bottom, which means the board was forked into two shafts at the base. As we will see in tomorrow’s verses, those forked ends would be perfect for inserting the boards into a solid foundation.

Note: It can be difficult to visualize some of the structures described in these verses. Here is an excellent and extremely focused series of animations that show the visual form of the temple and its instruments, built up verse-by-verse from the Exodus record: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLpjohncRg94EZ55nJrbaKfi-lfeo3MFgl&si=6wm1J9Sdnu7LKYC_