TABERNACLE, the name given in the English Bible to the portable sanctuary, erected by Moses in the wilderness as the place of worship of the Hebrew tribes (Exod. xxv. sqq.). It stood within a rectangular court, measuring I oo cubits by 5o, say 15o feet by 75, which formed the centre of the camp in the wilderness. Of the two equal squares into which the court may be divided, the more easterly was that in which the worshippers assembled. In the centre of this square stood the altar of burnt offering, a hollow chest of acacia wood overlaid with bronze. In the western square stood the tabernacle itself. The essential part of the structure was that termed in the original the inishkan, i.e., dwelling. It was formed of ten curtains, in two sets of five, of the finest linen with inwoven coloured figures of cherubim spread over a series of open frames of acacia wood overlaid with gold, each 2o cubits in height by 1 in breadth. These frames, 48 in all, were so arranged as to form the southern, western and north ern sides of a rectangular structure, 3o cubits in length and io in breadth and height, whose eastern end, forming the entrance, was closed by a special portiere suspended from five pillars. The dwelling was divided into two parts by a second hanging, the "veil," 1 o cubits from the western end. These two parts were termed respectively the holy place, and the most holy place or "holy of holies." Within the latter stood the ark of God, in which were deposited the two stone tables of the decalogue or "testimony." On the ark lay a solid slab of the finest gold, the propitiatory or mercy-seat, from which rose the figures of two golden cherubim, forming the innermost shrine of the wilderness sanctuary, the earthly throne of the God of heaven.
The furniture of the holy place consisted of the table of shew bread, the altar of incense—both, like the ark, of acacia wood overlaid with gold—and the golden "candlestick," or seven branched lamp-stand. As a protection the delicate and artistic
curtains of the dwelling were covered by two sim':ar sets of goats'-hair curtains; these, in their turn, were protected by a double covering, the one of rams' skins dyed red, the other made of the skins of a Red Sea mammal, probably the dugong (Exod. xxvi. The aim of the "priestly" writers, to whom we owe this concep tion of the tabernacle, was to provide a sanctuary and a ritual worthy of the higher conceptions of the Deity, which had grown up as the fruit of the discipline of the exile. The thought of the almost unapproachable holiness of the Deity underlies not only the gradation of the parts of the tabernacle—court, holy place and holy of holies, each marked by an ascending degree of sanc tity—but also the careful gradation of the materials employed in its construction. The whole is to be regarded as the expression of a religious ideal. Building on the traditions of the simple Mosaic "tent of meeting," the priestly idealists followed the ex ample of Ezekiel, and elaborated a sanctuary to serve as the model for the worship of the theocratic community of the future. "Let them make me a sanctuary, that I may dwell among them" (Exod. xxv. 8).