A sanctuary that comes apart, measured with a joiner's precision.· Exodus 25–27 and 30 · Exodus 35–40 · Numbers 4
Click the model or the library to open its entry: measurements, passages, and what the text does not say.
A sanctuary that comes apart, measured with a joiner's precision.
A count of every measurement holding this model up, one by one.
Nothing here is stored in metres: everything is in cubits and converted on the fly. Change the standard and the whole building rescales.
Let them make me a sanctuary,
that I may dwell among them.
The sentence that opens the instructions, before the first measurement. Everything that follows — the cubits, the boards, the clasps — exists for that.
Figures that contradict each other between books, and gaps no reconstruction fully resolves. Click to go to the piece.
All three are the same division of space: a court, a greater hall and a square inner room at the far end. The scale changes, the material changes, and what stands inside changes. A tent struck whenever the cloud moved; a stone house raised so the ark would stop travelling; and a vision measured to the cubit in which there is no ark at all. Compare the matching pieces from the link at the foot of each entry.
Every reference, with the pieces that depend on it.
Of a tent of skins and cloth pitched and struck for forty years in the desert, absolutely nothing can survive, and nothing does. In exchange the text here is far more minute than for any other biblical building: it gives the plan twice, in Exodus 25–27 and Exodus 35–40, and the two agree. What is missing is not evidence but the things the text itself chose to leave unsaid.
Exodus 25–27 and 30 · Exodus 35–40 · Numbers 4
References open the full text in an external reader. The project cites chapter and verse and summarises what each passage contributes, rather than embedding one particular translation.