Lectures on the weekly Torah reading by the faculty of Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel. A project of the Faculty of Jewish Studies, Paul and Helene Shulman Basic Jewish Studies Center, and the
Office of the Campus Rabbi. Published on the Internet under the sponsorship of Bar-Ilan University's
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"And let them make Me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them" (Ex. 25:8). "Among them" - in other words, in the middle or the center of the Israelite encampment.
1 Thus the
Lord said towards the end of the command concerning the details of the Tabernacle (Ex.
29:45-46): "I will abide among the Israelites, and I will be their G-d. And they shall know that I the Lord am their G-d, who brought them out from the land of Egypt that I might abide among them." 2
It follows that one of the objectives, if not the primary objective, of taking the Israelites out of Egypt was for the Lord's Divine Presence to dwell among them by means of the rather magnificent Tabernacle-Sanctuary described in the readings of Terumah, Tetzaveh, and the beginning of Ki Tissa (Ex. 25-31). But the glory of the Tabernacle, with its silver and gold, its expensive blue and purple fabrics, and its rare dolphin skins, stands in striking contrast to
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Dr. Ben-Yashar teaches at Ashkelon College.
1 Numbers 2 describes the Israelites' encampment around the Tabernacle.
2 Rashi, loc. cit., following Tanhumah (Buber), Behukotai 5, and Tanhumah, loc. cit., 3, comments:
"That I might abide among them"—meaning I took them out and liberated them from Egypt on condition that I dwell among them.

the simple altar which the Lord commanded be built immediately after giving the Ten
Commandments, that is, at the end of Parashat Yitro (Ex. 20:21-22): 3
Make for Me an altar of earth and sacrifice on it your burnt offerings and your sacrifices of well-being, your sheep and your oxen; in every place where I cause My name to be mentioned I will come to you and bless you.
And if you make for Me an altar of stones, do not build it of hewn stones; for by wielding your tool upon them you have profaned them.
Midrashic texts on the Halakhah harmonize the two passages.
4 Everything is seen as in respect of the Tent of Meeting, and its successor, the Temple: the "altar of earth" is identified in these sources with the bronze altar that was in the nomadic Tent of Meeting during the Israelites wanderings in the wilderness, which was filled with earth when the
Israelites encamped; the "altar of stone," with the bronze altar that continued to exist (or was renewed from time to time) in the nomadic Tent of Meeting inside the land of Israel and in the Solomonic Temple and was filled with stones.
5
Indeed, according to Scriptures' depiction of the First Temple, it contained a bronze altar, 6 although the Babylonian Talmud presents a controversy among the tannaim as to whether
Solomon's Temple, and even the altar at Shiloh, was made of stones or bronze, 7 or whether there were two altars in Solomon's Temple, one of bronze and another of stone.
8
3 Verse numbers accord with the prevalent practice in most editions of the Bible. There are other verse markings based on different divisions of the verses of the Ten Commandments. See Rabbi
Mordechai Breuer, "Halukat `Aseret ha-Dibrot le-Fesukim u-le-Dibrot," in `Aseret ha-Dibrot be-Re'I ha-
Dorot, Benzion Segal, ed., 1986, pp. 223-254.
4 Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael, Yitro, Parashat de-be-Hodesh 11; Mekhilta de-Rabbi Simeon bar Yohai,
loc. cit.
5 Tanhumah, Terumah 11, expresses wonderment how it was that the fire on the altar did not burn up the wood and bronze plating on the altar. According to the plain sense of the text it appears that the fire burned on the earth or among the stones that filled the entire height of the altar. See Menahem
Haran, under "Mizbe-ah", Encyclopedia Mikra'it, vol. 4, Jerusalem 1963, pp. 763-780 (esp. p. 773).
6 I Kings 8:64; II Kings 16:17; II Chron. 3:1, 7:7; Ezek. 9:2. Also cf. Haim Moshe Gavryahu, "Genizat Klei
ha-Mikdash," Yavneh 2 (1948), pp. 80-88; Tzvi Weinberg, "Atarei ha-Mizbeah—Ha-hok ve-ha-
Metziut," Beit Mikra 41 (1996), pp. 241-248; Yaakov Kurtzweil, "Mizbeah Hitzon be-Vayit Rishon uv-
ve-Bayit Sheni," Sinai 142 (2008), p. 31-42.
7 Zevahim 60a.
8 Ibid., 61b.

The biblical documentation, however, is not unequivocal, since both in Kings (II, 25:13) and
Jeremiah (52:17), the bronze altar is absent from the list of large bronze vessels that the plunderers of the First Temple broke up and carried away to Babylon. The reason might be the cultic revolution made by King Ahaz in the Temple (II Kings 16:10-18), in the course of which a new altar for burnt offerings was built, modeled on an altar the king had seen in
Damascus, and apparently this altar had been used for pagan worship. The old bronze altar in the sacred precinct was removed from the center of the area and placed on the north side, where it apparently was used by the king himself when he wished occasionally to make an offering, while the pure worship was done by the priests on the altar built according to the Damascene model. It turns out that, like most altars in the ancient Near East, it was built of stones or perhaps of bricks, 9 and thus it served and remained until the destruction of the
Temple. It might be that the bronze altar which Ahaz had profaned by improper worship was removed by Hezekiah or Yoshiah when they purified the Temple after the time of
Ahaz.
10
The exiles who returned from the Babylonia rebuilt the altar immediately upon their arrival in Jerusalem (Ezra 3:1-3) and, according to evidence from a classic Greek source, 11 they built it according to the dimensions of Solomon's bronze altar: twenty cubits square and ten cubits high.
12 It turns out, however, that unlike Solomon's altar, the returning Jews built it of
9 Haran (note 5), pp. 769-770. As Zevahim 54a-b describes, the altar of the Second Temple, as well, was built from hunks formed from a mixture of various materials, e.g., some sort of bricks.
10 II Kings 18:1-6; ibid., 23:1-25; II Chron. 31; 34:1-14. However Ezekiel (9:2), who prophesied at the time of the destruction of the First Temple, in his vision beheld a bronze altar on the northern side of the courtyard, where Ahaz had transferred it, in addition to the altar for burnt offerings which was before the portico (Ezek. 8:16). One must remember, however, that this was only a prophetic vision describing the sins the people had committed in the Temple, and mentioning the bronze altar that no longer existed served as a reminder of their sins. See Lamentations Rabbah, Buber ed., 2: the altar
"calls to mind the sin of Ahaz."
11 Josephus, Against Apion, I. 22 (http://www.earlyjewishwritings.com/text/josephus/apion1.html);
Haran (note 5), p. 773.
12 According to Mishnah Middot 3.1, the altar was 32 cubits square. In the Second Temple period the altar was enlarged, perhaps when it was restored by the Hasmoneans (I Maccabees 4.45-47; II
Maccabees 10.2-3), to match the rise in demand of the number of sacrifices. See Letter of Aristeas
87: "The construction of the altar was in keeping with the place itself and with the burnt offerings which were consumed by fire upon it."

stone, since they erected it in haste, "because they were in fear of the peoples of the land"
(Ezra 3:3), who were hostile to them. They had neither the leisure, nor perhaps the technical ability, to build it of bronze. Nor was there need to make it of bronze, since the former bronze altar in the Temple carried on the tradition of the portable bronze altar that had been in the Tent of Meeting. Once this tradition had been severed in the time of King
Ahaz, with a stone altar becoming the reality towards the end of the First Temple period, the
Second Temple population continued the use of a stone altar, relying on the law about a stone altar at the end of Parashat Yitro and on the precedent on Mt. Ebal.
Thus far we have dealt with the bronze and stone/earthen altars in the Tabernacle and the
Temples, according to the Sages' interpretation which reconciles the commands regarding the altar that appear at the end of Parashat Yitro and the commands regarding the
Tabernacle, further on in the book of Exodus. An exegete such as Ibn Ezra, who adheres to the plain sense of the text, does not accept the attempt to harmonize the texts by saying that a bronze altar filled with earth or stones could be called according to its filling either an altar of stone or an altar of earth. Ibn Ezra approaches the seemingly contradictory scriptural passages by differentiating between the permanent bronze altar in the
Tabernacles and the altars for one-time use mentioned at the end of Parashat Yitro, which were temporary provisions. One such was the altar of earth erected at the foot of Mount
Sinai when the "covenant of basins" was made (Ex. 24:4-6). There a non-permanent altar of earth was made, for the Israelites would leave it when they journeyed onward, 13 and perhaps it would be all for the best that it be destroyed before the gentile inhabitants of the region used it for idolatry. The other was an altar of stones, whose construction was commanded by Moses in Deuteronomy (27:5-7) and which Joshua would later build on
Mount Ebal (Josh. 8:30-31). This altar was built of stone so that it would remain, even to this very day, in the land of Israel to be inherited; it was to be testimony to the covenant of Israel with the Lord, established by Moses and Joshua. Ibn Ezra bases his remarks on the fact that burnt offerings and sacrifices of well-being are mentioned in all four scriptural passages, both at the end of Parashat Yitro (Ex. 20:21), as well as in the above-mentioned passages in
Exodus 24, Deuteronomy and Joshua. We add that both with respect to the stone altar in
Parashat Yitro (Ex. 20:22) and those in Deuteronomy and Joshua, the text refers to construction of whole stones, not hewn 14 or touched by iron.
15
13 Ibn Ezra's long commentary (the one printed in most editions of Mikraot Gedolot) on verse 21, s.v.
"mizbah avanim."
14 Deuteronomy 27-28; Josh. 8:30-35.

The sense of contradiction between the various laws regarding the altar is to some extent based on an optical illusion, or perhaps we should say the problem of textual arrangement.
The question is which passage of text should be associated with the last five verses of
Parashat Yitro. According to the division of our weekly readings, the triennial division into
sedarim, and the division into paragraphs (closed before the five verses and open after them), as opposed to the division of the text into chapters, which is of non-Jewish origin, these verses comprise "commandments that complement the Decalogue"; 16 they are laws stated in relationship to the Ten Commandments, and should not be seen as contradicting the instructions for building the Tabernacle.
Some commentators 17 couple these five verses with the body of laws in chapters 21-23, and rightly so, for all this was told to Moses in a continuous sequence upon conclusion of the Ten
Commandments, when Moses "approached the thick cloud where G-d was" (Ex. 20:18).
Moses read the entire sequence out loud for the Israelites to hear when concluding the covenant of the basins (Ex. 24:11). Thus it comprises a single unit: the unit of the covenant at Mount Sinai, beginning with the command to build an altar of earth for the purpose of concluding the covenant, and ending with the construction of that altar. In conjunction with the command to build an earthen altar there follows a command regarding a stone altar - the altar which will later be built on Mount Ebal, where a new covenant made on the soil of
Canaan by those who entered the land, which will complement the covenant made at Sinai with those who left Egypt.
Two dimensions of the obligation of the Israelites towards their Creator and Master are expressed by the two types of altars: a covenantal relationship in the altars of earth and stone, for after all the covenant includes giving the earth and stones of the land of Canaan to
Israel; and a relationship of ritual worship in the bronze altar in the Tabernacle, an altar which itself was formed by the labor and craftsmanship of those who worshipped the Lord.
15 Ex. 20:22. Wielding a sword, according to the florid style of this passage and in view off the sense of "you have profaned it," can be interpreted as follows: a sword, which shortens the life of man, should not be wielded on the altar, which lengthens the life of man by atonement. Thus Rashi interprets the passage at hand, based on the Mekhilta of Rabbi Ishmael, Yitro, Parashat de-be-Hodesh
11.
16 This is the heading given in the commentary of Amos Hakham, Da`at Mikra, Jerusalem 1991.
17 Ibn Ezra (note 14); Moshe David Cassuto, Perush shel Sefer Shemot, Jerusalem 1952, in his introductory remarks on the passage continuing from here until Ex. 23:33. Following him, also Elia
Samuele Artum, Tel Aviv 1969.

Indeed, the Tabernacle and the Temple as a whole also contain something of the covenant motif, namely the tablets of the covenant which are housed in the Ark of the Covenant in the sanctuary. Thus the motif of covenant, which finds one-time expression in the altar at
Mount Sinai and later in the altar on Mount Ebal, combines with the motif of ongoing worship in the Temple.