Posted on by Abe Austin

Scriptural Analysis- Exodus 40:12-16

12 And thou shalt bring Aaron and his sons unto the door of the tabernacle of the congregation, and wash them with water.

13 And thou shalt put upon Aaron the holy garments, and anoint him, and sanctify him; that he may minister unto me in the priest’s office.

14 And thou shalt bring his sons, and clothe them with coats:

15 And thou shalt anoint them, as thou didst anoint their father, that they may minister unto me in the priest’s office: for their anointing shall surely be an everlasting priesthood throughout their generations.

16 Thus did Moses: according to all that the Lord commanded him, so did he.

As the final step of preparation, Aaron and his sons would be dressed, anointed, and sanctified. These were the priests that God had chosen, and they had to be prepared in just the same manner as all the other elements of the tabernacle. This suggests that they are as much a part of the place as every altar and curtain. Living vessels for the Lord.

Verse 15 is the first time that we see the word “priesthood” in the KJV Bible, though the Hebrew word that is derived from, כְּהֻנָּה (kehunnah), appeared once before in Exodus 29:9, where it was rendered as “the priest’s office.” At different times, God called different categories of men to bear the priesthood, but always men. This may not actually mean anything, but it interesting to note that nouns are gendered in Hebrew, and “priesthood,” as well as most other abstract nouns, is feminine.

This may simply be a coincidence of linguistics, or perhaps the language was formed around the cosmological perception of the people who used it. Perhaps the abstract and conceptual was seen as the domain of the divine feminine, and the calling of men to it was a deliberate unification of the feminine to the masculine. Perhaps the ancient Hebrew view was that the man represented the concretization of the abstract. That the priesthood had both a feminine and masculine side, feminine in its unseen authority and masculine in the priest that utilized it.

Posted on by Abe Austin

Scriptural Analysis- Exodus 16:31-34

31 And the house of Israel called the name thereof Manna: and it was like coriander seed, white; and the taste of it was like wafers made with honey.

32 And Moses said, This is the thing which the Lord commandeth, Fill an omer of it to be kept for your generations; that they may see the bread wherewith I have fed you in the wilderness, when I brought you forth from the land of Egypt.

33 And Moses said unto Aaron, Take a pot, and put an omer full of manna therein, and lay it up before the Lord, to be kept for your generations.

34 As the Lord commanded Moses, so Aaron laid it up before the Testimony, to be kept.

Moses commands that a single portion of manna be gathered into a pot and preserved for future generations. It is interesting to note that the portion is an omer, exactly the amount that was meant for one person for one day. It almost seems as if it is being stored in anticipation of someone yet to come to receive it, much like how the Jewish people always leave one open seat for Elijah at their seder.

In time, the pot of manna would be placed within the ark of the covenant, but obviously that had not been constructed at this time. Sometimes God does not give His blessings in linear order. Sometimes we receive something that we do not fully understand, and only later receive the perfect place that it was meant to belong to. God giving His blessings in this way shows that it is all according to a plan, based on a perfect knowledge of what will be.

Verse 34 introduces us to a word that we have not yet encountered in the Bible. “Testimony,” as translated from “eduth” in the Hebrew, only appears 25 times in the Bible, all of them in the books of Moses, and almost all of them (21 of the 25 instances) in Exodus. In all 25 instances it is used exclusively as a reference to the laws and rituals that Moses delivered to the people. There are refences to the “tablets of the testimony,” the “ark of the testimony,” and the “tabernacle of the testimony.” These are the physical evidence of God’s blessings and commandments, a visual reminder of the Lord’s unseen spirit.

But “eduth” is not the only word that is translated to “testimony” in our English Bibles. There is also the Hebrew word “ed,” sometimes translated as “testimony” and sometimes as “witness.” Interestingly, these two Hebrew words are actually the same word, “ed” being the masculine form and “eduth” the feminine. This does raise the question why it is the feminine word for “testimony” that is used exclusively for the physical representations of God’s law. As mentioned before, the tablets, ark, and tabernacle of “testimony” were the material manifestation of the unseen God, which mirrors how a woman grows the unseen progeny into a material person in her womb. Another reason might be that these feminine testimonies all had to do with the law that was meant to nurture the newly-reborn Israelite people, cultivating them through their spiritual infancy, just as a mother nurtures and cultivates her child.

In any case, throughout the rest of Exodus we will see twenty more instances of the feminine “testimony,” always in reference to the physical tokens of God’s providence to His people.