17 And it came to pass in the first month in the second year, on the first day of the month, that the tabernacle was reared up.

The tabernacle was fully established on the first day of the new year. This was the beginning of Year 2, the Israelites having reset their calendars when God broke the pride of the Egyptians and led His people out of the land. Thus, the Israelites had been on this sojourn for exactly one year. The feast of the Passover would be happening in just over a week, the first one since Israel’s liberation, and the tabernacle would be ready for that holy day.

I assume that it took a few months for the Israelites to travel through the wilderness and reach Mount Sinai. Once there, we know that the process of obtaining the Lord’s law took two periods of forty days each, so nearly three months, and construction on the tabernacle began after that. Thus, I would assume that at most the Israelites had only half a year to complete construction on the Lord’s dwelling. It may have been considerably less. That seems like a remarkably short time for such a large and complex undertaking, but somehow it was accomplished.

Thus far, we have heard God’s initial description of the tabernacle to Moses, Moses’s retelling of those instructions to the Israelites, the work of the Israelites in creating each part, and the presentation of the completed elements to Moses. Thus, we have run through all the different elements of the tabernacle four times already, and now we will do so for a fifth time to describe how Moses had each element assembled for the full construction. This description will be a little different, though, as we will hear function and life being instilled into each component along the way. Bread will be placed for the first time on the table, fire lit for the first time in the lamp, incense offered for the first time on the incense altar, and so on. At long last, it is all coming alive.