20 And he made boards for the tabernacle of shittim wood, standing up.

21 The length of a board was ten cubits, and the breadth of a board one cubit and a half.

22 One board had two tenons, equally distant one from another: thus did he make for all the boards of the tabernacle.

23 And he made boards for the tabernacle; twenty boards for the south side southward:

24 And forty sockets of silver he made under the twenty boards; two sockets under one board for his two tenons, and two sockets under another board for his two tenons.

25 And for the other side of the tabernacle, which is toward the north corner, he made twenty boards,

26 And their forty sockets of silver; two sockets under one board, and two sockets under another board.

27 And for the sides of the tabernacle westward he made six boards.

28 And two boards made he for the corners of the tabernacle in the two sides.

29 And they were coupled beneath, and coupled together at the head thereof, to one ring: thus he did to both of them in both the corners.

30 And there were eight boards; and their sockets were sixteen sockets of silver, under every board two sockets.

We’ll progress through these verses quickly, given that they are repeating information that we have discussed previously. These are not word-for-word rewrites, however. The differences are small, but they are there. For example, verse 22’s detail that the two tenons were “equally distant” from one another was not included in the first description. Presumably, this detail means that the gap between each tenon was perfectly centered, and perhaps that there was an equivalent gap on the ends before reaching the tenons of the next board.

Was that design decision detailed by God, and just not recorded in the earlier chapter, or was there enough room for personal design decisions that Bezaleel was able to exercise his own judgment? We do not have a clear answer. What we do see, though, is that the recording of both the vision and the execution were two separate events. As I just said, the scribe did not copy word-for-word from the previous account. Each was observed and recorded individually, and so the great symmetry between the two speaks to how precisely the Israelites adhered to the Lord’s commands.