Part C: The Five Columns

Introduction: The Question Part B Left Open

Part B built the page of Exodus and read it across its rows. The page has four rows of units. The two upper rows belong to the first book, the story of the people and its law; the two lower rows belong to the second book, the dwelling. Read across any row, each pair of units moves from something begun to something completed: Moses is told what to do at the bush, and in the next unit he does it. Read from the centre outward, the rows pair off. The two outside rows hold one relationship at two different times: at the bush Aaron is given to Moses, and at the consecration Moses gives Aaron his office. The two inside rows face each other as opposites: the plagues take a world apart, and the plan of the dwelling puts one together.

But the page also has five columns, and Part B left them unread. Three units, the sea, the covenant and the calf, stand down the middle column. Two columns of four units stand to the left of them, and two more to the right. Do these columns mean anything, or are they only what is left over when the rows are laid one above another? What holds a column together?

In Genesis and Leviticus it is the rows that carry the orientation, and the columns that carry the subject. In Genesis YHWH acts in the first row, Elohim in the third, and both together in the row between, while each column is a triad with one matter of its own. In Leviticus the six days of creation give each row its orientation, toward the deity, toward the people, or between them, and the columns are the rings round chapter 19. In Exodus the orientation has already been found, and it runs down the rows too: the people above, YHWH below, in each book and in the book as a whole. So the question is what the columns carry. The names of the deity do not mark them. When the names change in Exodus, they mark a movement inside a single unit. Sometimes the movement takes one verse: “Elohim spoke to Moses and said to him, I am YHWH” (6:2). At the sea it takes the whole unit: its first row tells how “Elohim did not lead them by the way of the land of the Philistines” (13:17), and its last row is the song “to YHWH” (15:1). Nor does any single word or theme run the length of a column.

So we have to ask a different question. This author built many structures of five parts. If we can see how he builds them, we will know what to look for in the five columns of the page.

Five Parts in the Author’s Hands

Begin with the Ten Words. As I have shown in my articles on the Decalogue, “The Exoteric Decalogue” and “Divine Speech in Two Dimensions,” in the Masoretic division they fall into five pairs, written across two tablets. The first pair speaks of the deity: “I am YHWH your deity,” a jealous deity, and his name. The last pair speaks of the person who covets: the house, the wife, the ox and the ass of a neighbour. Between them the second pair commands the Sabbath and the honour of father and mother, the only two positive commands, both acts that carry out the divine will. The fourth pair forbids theft and false witness, acts of the human will against a neighbour. The third pair, in the middle, is murder and adultery: physical human life, its end and its beginning. The Ten Words run as a scale from the deity to the self, and their middle is the place where the two meet.

The second half of the Covenant Code, Unit 9, is laid out in five rows of three. In the article in which Paul Hocking and I set it out, its rows run from outsiders to the nation. The first row shuts out three figures who have no place in the people, beginning with “a sorceress you shall not let live” (22:17). The last row gives the nation its calendar: the seventh year, the seventh day, three festivals in the year. Between them, the sojourner opens the second row (22:20) and closes the fourth (23:9), so that rows 2 to 4 stand together inside the frame. And the middle row ends with “people of holiness you shall be to me” (22:30), the point where the individual and the community meet.

Part of the law code of Deuteronomy (21:10–25:4) is built the same way, on a larger scale, as I have set out in my commentary on Deuteronomy Unit 8, “The Beautiful Weave.” Its laws can be set out in ten rows, and the ten rows go together two by two, so that the whole has five parts. The first part is about a man and a woman: the captive taken as a wife, the bride accused by her husband, the wife who is divorced. The second is about the community and who may belong to it. The third is about property and what is owed to a neighbour. The fourth is about the distinctions the law keeps, between man and woman, brother and foreigner, father and son. The fifth is about the field and its harvest. The scale runs from the closest of all bonds outward, to the land. What is compared here, with this code as with the Ten Words, is the shape of the five parts, not shared wording.

Exodus itself has units built in five rows. Three of them show the shape clearly.

The first is the plagues of Egypt before the last one, Unit 3. When the unit is set out as a table, it has five rows. The top row is short. It holds only the opening scene, in which Aaron throws down his staff before Pharaoh and it becomes a serpent (7:10). The bottom row is short too. It announces the last plague and closes with a sentence that sums up the whole unit: “Moses and Aaron did all these wonders before Pharaoh, and YHWH strengthened Pharaoh’s heart, and he did not send the children of Israel out of his land” (11:10). Between these two short rows stand three rows of three plagues each. So the form of the unit already shows a frame, a short row above and a short row below, with the main body between them. Now look at the three middle rows. In the first of them Aaron raises his staff over the waters of Egypt (7:19). In the last of them Moses stretches out his hand toward the sky (9:22). But in the middle row YHWH acts by himself: “YHWH did so” (8:20), “YHWH did this thing” (9:6). It is also in this middle row that YHWH first sets a line between his people and Egypt: “I will set apart on that day the land of Goshen, where my people dwell, so that no swarms shall be there” (8:18). The middle of the unit is where the deity meets the scene of the plagues directly, without Aaron below or Moses above.

The second is the plan of the dwelling, Unit 11. Here too the top and bottom rows are short, a single passage each. At the top, YHWH asks for gifts and says, “let them make me a sanctuary, and I will dwell in their midst” (25:8). At the bottom, the people are to bring pure olive oil “for the light, to kindle a lamp continually” (27:20). The three rows between hold the furnishings and the structure of the dwelling. In the middle row stands the veil, the curtain that “shall divide for you between the holy and the holy of holies” (26:33), and the screen for the door of the tent (26:36). The middle of the plan is the place where one part of the house meets the other.

The third is the golden calf, Unit 15, five rows of two scenes each. In the first row Moses comes down the mountain with the tablets in his hands, sees the calf, and breaks them (32:15, 19). In the last row he comes down the mountain again with tablets in his hands, and this time his face shines, so that the people are afraid to come near him, and he covers it with a veil (34:29–33). So the first and last rows answer each other. The second and fourth rows answer each other as well. In the second, after the calf, YHWH says, “I will not go up in your midst” (33:3), and Moses pitches a tent far outside the camp (33:7). In the fourth, Moses pleads, “let my Lord go in our midst” (34:9). And in the middle row, between these two, Moses asks to see YHWH’s glory, and YHWH answers, “here is a place with me, and you shall stand on the rock” (33:21). The middle of the unit is the place where Moses and YHWH meet.

Set side by side, these structures share four features.

1. A scale between two poles. Each of these structures runs from one thing to its opposite. The Ten Words run from the deity to the self. The second half of the Covenant Code runs from the outsider to the nation. The Deuteronomy code runs from a man and a woman to the field. The scale can be read from either end.
2. The poles are rows 1 and 5, and they frame the rest. The first and last rows answer each other. In the Ten Words, the deity who calls himself jealous stands at the top and the person who covets at the bottom. In the calf, Moses comes down with tablets in the first row and again in the last.
3. Rows 2 and 4 face each other across the middle and enclose it. In the Ten Words, the second pair is what the deity wills and the fourth what a person wills. In the Covenant Code, the sojourner opens row 2 and closes row 4. In the calf, row 2 says “I will not go up in your midst” and row 4 answers “let my Lord go in our midst.”
4. The middle row is where the two halves meet. In the Ten Words, it is human life, where the deity and the self meet. In the Covenant Code, it is “people of holiness you shall be to me.” In the plan of the dwelling, it is the veil between the holy and the holy of holies. In the calf, it is “a place with me.”

If the page of Exodus was built by the same hand, it should show the same four features, and it does. One thing has to be kept in mind in comparing them. A five-part structure is an order of five parts, and what matters is the order: which part is first, which last, which in the middle, and which two stand on either side of the middle. Inside a unit the order is the order of reading, and the five parts are the unit’s rows, read from the top. On the page of Exodus the rows are already taken: they carry the orientation, the people above and YHWH below, as Part B showed. So the five parts of the page are its columns, read from the left, and the comparison that follows sets the first column against the first part of each structure, the last against the last, and the middle column against the middle.

A Scale from One Man to All Israel

Read the first column of the page from the top. At the bush, YHWH speaks to one man, alone in the wilderness with his father-in-law’s flock. In the signs, YHWH speaks to Moses again and again, at times to Moses and Aaron together (7:8; 9:8), and he gives Moses a standing no one else has: “See, I have made you a deity to Pharaoh, and Aaron your brother shall be your prophet” (7:1). In the plan of the dwelling, “YHWH spoke to Moses, saying” (25:1), and Moses alone is shown the pattern on the mountain. In the consecration, the whole rite is put into Moses’ hands: “this is the thing that you shall do to them” (29:1). In every unit of the column the word of the deity comes to Moses, with Aaron at his side in the signs.

Now read the last column. At the mountain, “all the people answered together and said, all that YHWH has spoken we will do” (19:8), and Moses brings them out of the camp to meet the deity (19:17). In the second half of the law, the nation is given its year to keep: “three times in the year you shall keep a festival to me” (23:14). In the building, “all the wise-hearted among those who did the work made the dwelling” (36:8). And at the end, “the children of Israel did according to all that YHWH commanded Moses; so they did” (39:32), and the cloud and the fire stand on the dwelling “before the eyes of all the house of Israel in all their journeys” (40:38). The last column is not uniform. At the mountain the people answer; in the law they are given what to keep; in the building they do the work. But in every unit of the column the people is in view, as a whole or through those who act for all of it: in the building it is “all the wise-hearted among those who did the work” who make the dwelling, out of what everyone brought. They stand for the whole because the text makes them so: Bezalel is called “by name” before all the congregation (35:30), the gifts come from “every man and woman whose heart moved them” (35:29) until there is too much, and what the makers make of them is “one” dwelling (36:13).

So the page has a scale, and it runs from Moses’ own commission at the left to Israel’s answer and work at the right. It is the scale of the second half of the Covenant Code, which moves from a single outcast to the nation with its calendar. It is also the scale of the Ten Words read from their last pair to their first. Read that way, as I have read them in my articles on the Decalogue, they describe a society growing out of one person: from desire, to dealings with others, to life itself, to time made holy, to the deity.

The Frame: The First and Last Columns

The first and last columns, the poles, answer each other, and they do it across every row.

Take the rows one at a time, from the top. In the first row, which runs from the bush (Unit 1) to the mountain (Unit 7), Moses is given a sign at the bush: “this shall be the sign for you that I have sent you: when you bring the people out of Egypt, you shall serve the deity on this mountain” (3:12). At the far end of the same row the people come back to that mountain. Jethro comes “to the wilderness where he was camped, the mountain of the deity” (18:5), and Moses brings the people out “to meet the deity” (19:17).

In the next row, which runs from the plagues (Unit 3) to the second half of the law (Unit 9), Moses speaks to Pharaoh of a festival that does not yet exist: “we will go with our young and our old … for we have a festival of YHWH” (10:9). At the far end of the row the festival stands as the nation’s law: unleavened bread “seven days … for in it you went out of Egypt” (23:15), and the harvest and the ingathering with it.

In the lower half of the page, the inside row runs from the plan of the dwelling (Unit 11) to the making of it (Unit 17). At the left Moses is shown “the pattern of the dwelling and the pattern of all its vessels” (25:9), and at the far end of the row “all the wise-hearted” make it (36:8). The outside row runs from the consecration (Unit 13) to the raising of the dwelling (Unit 19). The consecration commanded at the top, “Aaron and his sons you shall bring near to the door of the tent of meeting and wash them with water” (29:4), is commanded again, in the same words, when the dwelling is raised (40:12).

The Bounds: The Two Inner Columns

Between the poles stand two columns, and their model is in the Covenant Code. There the sojourner stands at the opening of row 2 and the close of row 4. The same law, nearly word for word, on either side of the middle row ties the three inner rows into one body. The page of Exodus does the same thing, but it does it around the sea and the calf. Each of the two comes, in the book, between a unit of the second column and a unit of the fourth. In each case the unit just before it and the unit just after it share words that appear nowhere else nearby, as if the single unit stood between two bookends.

Around the sea, Unit 4 (the Passover), just before the sea, and Unit 6 (the road through the wilderness), just after it, share what the rest of the first book does not. The Passover lamb is kept “for keeping” (למשמרת) until the fourteenth day (12:6); the manna is laid up “for keeping” on the Sabbath and in the jar (16:23, 32–33). The Passover is “a memorial … for your generations” (12:14); the jar of manna is kept “for your generations” (16:32–33). Around the calf, Unit 14 (the daily service), just before the calf, and Unit 16 (the gifts for the building), just after it, share the two things that close the plan and open the building. Bezalel is called “by name … and filled with the spirit of Elohim, in wisdom, in understanding and in knowledge” (31:2–3), and the same words return when Moses presents him to the people (35:30–31). The Sabbath, “a sign between me and you for your generations” (31:13), is the last command of the plan and the first command of the building (35:2–3).

The two bounding columns also lean in different directions. This is a tendency of the columns, not a rule that every unit in them keeps. The second column leans toward what is set to last: the Passover kept “for your generations, a statute forever” (12:14), the daily offering “a continual burnt offering for your generations” (29:42), the Sabbath “an everlasting covenant” (31:16). The fourth column leans toward what is measured and judged: the manna “an omer a head” (16:16), the cases of Unit 8 sent “to the judges” (21:6; 22:8), the gifts brought until there is “enough, and too much” (36:7), the gold and silver weighed “by the shekel of the sanctuary” (38:24–26). In the second half of the Covenant Code, too, the fourth row is about justice. As Paul Hocking and I showed in our article, its laws form two pictures: the balance, which must not be tilted toward the poor or against the stranger, and the court, with its witnesses, its judges and the two parties between them. The second column looks mostly to time and the generations; the fourth mostly to the measure between one person and another.

The Middle Column

The Test

The middle column is the one Part A first set apart: the three units that belong to no block. Here the four features meet the strongest test, for if the middle column is where the halves meet, these three units must show how the parts of the page on either side of them stand to each other.

The test is the one the other structures set: the middle is where the two halves meet. Each of the three single units stands between two blocks, and each holds something of both sides. The sea stands between the two blocks of the first book. In the row of Moses’ commission the word for the people’s response is belief: “that they may believe” (4:5), “and the people believed” (4:31). In the row of the plagues the word is knowledge: Egypt is to know “that I am YHWH.” At the sea the two come together for the first time. “Egypt shall know that I am YHWH” (14:4, 18), and “they believed in YHWH and in Moses his servant” (14:31). The calf stands between the two blocks of the second book. The gold earrings the people tear off for the calf (32:2–3) are the same ornaments they bring for the dwelling (35:22), and the gift that was turned to an idol is given again to the house. The covenant stands at the centre of the whole page, between the two books. It takes up the words and the judgments of the first book, “all the words of YHWH and all the judgments” (24:3), and it gives the second book its first sight of what the dwelling will hold: the glory that “dwelt on Mount Sinai” in the cloud (24:16).

A Division, a Joining and a Connection

They meet the test, then. And the three are one feature, not three observations, because they are three moments of one sequence, and in each the thing done in the story is the thing done on the page. The sea divides Israel from Egypt, and it stands between the block of Egypt and the block of the wilderness. The covenant binds YHWH and the people, and it stands between the book of the people and the book of YHWH’s house. The calf connects the mountain above with the camp below, and it stands between the plan given on the mountain and the building done in the camp. The sea separates. Israel crosses out of Egypt, and “Israel saw Egypt dead on the shore of the sea” (14:30). The covenant joins what was separate. Moses takes the blood and divides it, “half of the blood he put in basins, and half of the blood he dashed on the altar” (24:6); then he sprinkles the rest on the people: “behold the blood of the covenant” (24:8). One blood is now on the altar and on the people. The calf connects above and below. The people see that Moses “delays to come down from the mountain” (32:1); he “turned and went down … and the two tablets of the testimony were in his hand” (32:15); at the end he goes up again with new tablets, and “YHWH came down in the cloud and stood with him there” (34:4–5). So the middle column holds, in order, a division, a joining and a connection, and at each the single unit does to the story what its place does to the page: Egypt is set apart from the wilderness, the people are bound to YHWH, the mountain is kept in traffic with the camp. That is what it is to be the middle of this page.

The Names on Stage

There is more to the three than their order, and it is in the names. The pattern of separating and connecting is Elohim’s. In the creation, as I showed in the commentary on Genesis Unit 1, the second day only separates, the waters above from the waters below, and the fifth day fills what was separated with the creatures that cross it; the two days are a pair, and there is no third term between them. When the signs undo that creation in Egypt, as I have set out in the article on the plagues as creation in reverse, the pairs become triads, three rows of three, each with a middle. The middle is the new term, and it is YHWH’s: the place where the deity deals with people. The middle column of the page is built the same way, and the names say so. I count the name as on stage, here as throughout this commentary, only where Elohim stands bare, as the one who acts or whose work is named; with the article, or in construct, or with a suffix, it is the common noun, “the deity”, “the deity of Israel”, “your deity”, and names no one. By that count Elohim is on stage at the column’s two ends. The sea opens with him: “Elohim did not lead them by the way of the land of the Philistines … and Elohim led the people round by the way of the wilderness” (13:17–18). The calf opens with his tablets: “written with the finger of Elohim” (31:18), “the work of Elohim … the writing of Elohim” (32:16). In the covenant between them Elohim does not act. Every mention of the name there is “your deity”, “the deity of Israel”, “the deity” whom the nobles beheld (23:25; 24:10, 11, 13), and the one who speaks, cuts the covenant and is seen is YHWH. The pair of separation and connection is Elohim’s; the covenant in the middle is YHWH’s, the term that Elohim’s creation does not have.

The Two Sets of Tablets

The tablets show the difference in small, though not without a knot the author seems to have tied on purpose. In the covenant unit YHWH promises Moses “the tablets of stone, and the teaching and the commandment, which I have written” (24:12). When those tablets come down the mountain in the next book, they are “written with the finger of Elohim”, “the work of Elohim, and the writing of Elohim” (31:18; 32:16). One set of tablets, promised as YHWH’s writing in the unit that is YHWH’s, called Elohim’s work in the unit where Elohim is on stage: whatever else that is, it keeps the two names to their places. And the first tablets, however named, were the deity’s own making. The second were made between two. “Hew for yourself two tablets of stone like the first, and I will write on the tablets the words that were on the first tablets” (34:1); Moses hews them and carries them up the mountain (34:4); and at the end, “write for yourself these words” (34:27), “and he wrote on the tablets” (34:28), the writer left unnamed, YHWH who said “I will write” or Moses who was told “write”. The text does not say which, and I do not think it means us to know. Whoever held the pen, the first tablets were the deity’s alone, and the second were a joint effort.

Where Death Stands Close By

The middle column is also where the page is most dangerous. The middle pair of the Ten Words, murder and adultery, are the sins that carry death, and the middle column of the page carries death. Egypt lies dead on the shore. After the calf the Levites go through the camp, “and there fell of the people that day about three thousand men” (32:28), and YHWH says, “whoever has sinned against me, I will blot him out of my book” (32:33). Even Moses, standing at “the place with me,” is told, “no man shall see me and live” (33:20). At the covenant the danger is of the same kind, and it is averted: the nobles of the children of Israel behold the deity, “and he did not lay his hand on them … and they ate and drank” (24:11), the text noting what did not happen, a note I read as saying that it might have; and the covenant itself is sealed in blood, half on the altar and half on the people. In all three, death stands close by.

The Same Pattern at the Smallest Size

Part B found that the shape of the page repeats at every size, from the whole book down to a single unit, and it noted that at the smallest size the evidence rested on one unit, the second half of the Covenant Code. The five rows of that unit, with their frame, their bounds and their middle, are the pattern itself.

A second case is more limited. The first half of the Covenant Code, Unit 8, is written as twenty cases that come in ten consecutive pairs, each pair two cases on one matter:

1. the Hebrew slave and the daughter sold as a maidservant (21:2–6; 21:7–11);
2. he who strikes a man dead and he who strikes his father or mother (21:12–14; 21:15);
3. he who steals a man and he who curses his father or mother (21:16; 21:17);
4. the man who strikes his neighbour and the man who strikes his slave (21:18–19; 21:20–21);
5. the blow that harms a pregnant woman and the blow that harms a slave’s eye or tooth (21:22–25; 21:26–27);
6. the goring ox and the open pit (21:28–32; 21:33–34);
7. the ox that gores an ox and the stolen ox or sheep (21:35–36; 21:37–22:3);
8. the field grazed and the field burned (22:4; 22:5);
9. the deposit of goods and the deposit of an animal (22:6–8; 22:9–12);
10. the borrowed animal and the seduced virgin (22:13–14; 22:15–16).

Taken two pairs at a time, the ten pairs make five rows. Read in that order, the unit runs from the persons closest to a man (his slave and the slave’s wife, his daughter, his father and mother) to property held for a neighbour; the first half concerns persons, the second half property; the open paragraph of the Masoretic text after 21:27 falls between the fifth pair and the sixth, in the middle of the ten; and the middle row holds the one place in the unit where the law says “life for life” (21:23). What a reader can check from this is that the pairs are consecutive, that the break falls in the middle, and that the middle carries the life-for-life law. Whether the five rows carry the rest of the pattern is for the unit’s own commentary.

The Rows Read as Five

So far the centre of the page has been read as part of the middle column. But the covenant stands alone in its place, with no unit to its left or its right, between the two books. Take it as a row of its own, and the page has five rows as well as five columns, and the rows show the same four features. Read from the top, they are the outside row of the first book (Units 1, 2, 6, 7), its inside row (Units 3, 4, 8, 9), the covenant (Unit 10), the inside row of the second book (Units 11, 12, 16, 17), and its outside row (Units 13, 14, 18, 19).

The two outside rows frame the page, and they answer each other, as the first and last columns do. Part B showed that they hold one relationship at two times, turned round. At the bush Aaron is given to Moses: “he shall be to you for a mouth, and you shall be to him for a deity” (4:16). At the consecration Moses gives Aaron his office: “you shall fill the hand of Aaron and the hand of his sons” (29:9). In the wilderness YHWH gives each person his bread, “an omer a head” (16:16). In the accounts each person gives his silver, “a beka a head” (38:26).

The two inside rows face each other across the centre, as the two inner columns do, and in each column they are opposites that complete each other. The plagues take a world apart, so that Egypt may know “that I am YHWH” when he brings Israel out “from their midst” (7:5); the plan puts a world together, so that he may “dwell in their midst” (25:8). At the Passover Israel stays inside under the blood, and none may “go out of the door of his house until morning” (12:22); Aaron goes inside the holy place under the garments, “that he not die” (28:35). The cases of Unit 8 are about what is taken from a neighbour and must be paid back; the gifts of Unit 16 are what each person brings freely, “every man whose heart lifted him” (35:21), until there is “too much” (36:7). The second half of the law gives the nation its time, the seventh year, the seventh day and the festivals of the year (23:10–17); the making of the dwelling gives the house its space, measured cubit by cubit.

And the middle row, the covenant, is where the two halves meet. It stands between the two books, and it is the one unit on the page that stands in both the middle column and the middle row.

The rows also have a scale, and it runs the opposite way from the scale of the columns. Across the page, one becomes many: from Moses alone at the left to all Israel at the right. Down the page, many become one. The first book begins with the many: “these are the names of the sons of Israel who came to Egypt with Jacob, each man and his house” (1:1). The second book makes one house. The curtains of the dwelling are joined to each other, “and the dwelling shall be one” (26:6); when it is made, “the dwelling was one” (36:13).

The two scales cross at the centre, in the covenant. There, when Moses tells the people all the words of YHWH and all the judgments, “all the people answered with one voice” (24:3). The many speak as one. In Exodus only the dwelling and the tent that covers it are said to “be one” (26:6, 11; 36:13, 18), and only here do the people speak with “one voice.”

The two directions are not identical in every respect. The frame of the columns is a word given to one man and taken up by all; the frame of the rows is one relationship at two times, turned round. And the middle column holds three units, while the middle row holds one. But the shape is the same both ways: two poles that answer each other, two inner lines that face each other, and a middle where they meet.

The Square and Its Corners

With five columns and five rows, the page is a square. The covenant has the middle row to itself, and the three single units have the middle column to themselves, so the covenant stands at the centre of the square. Its four corners are the bush (Unit 1) at the top left, the mountain (Unit 7) at the top right, the consecration (Unit 13) at the bottom left, and the raising of the dwelling (Unit 19) at the bottom right. Each corner answers the corner across from it, and the two lines that join them cross in the covenant.

The first line runs from the bush to the raising of the dwelling. At both ends the holy presence of YHWH fills a place, and Moses stops short of it: told not to come nearer at the bush, unable to enter at the dwelling. At the bush he is told, “do not come near here; take your sandals off your feet, for the place on which you stand is holy ground” (3:5). When the dwelling is raised, “Moses was not able to enter the tent of meeting, because the cloud dwelt on it, and the glory of YHWH filled the dwelling” (40:35). The book’s first meeting with the presence and its last answer each other, with a difference worth keeping: at the bush Moses is warned off and keeps his distance; at the dwelling he is not warned, he simply cannot go in. At both ends, a holy place and a man outside it.

The second line runs from the consecration to the mountain. At both ends someone stands for the many before the presence: at the mountain one man, at the altar a priestly house. At the mountain the people are kept back by a boundary, for “whoever touches the mountain shall surely be put to death” (19:12). Moses carries their answer up: “Moses brought back the words of the people to YHWH” (19:8). When they hear the voice, they ask him to stand between them and the deity: “you speak with us, and we will listen; but let not Elohim speak with us, lest we die” (20:15). “The people stood far off, and Moses came near to the thick darkness where the deity was” (20:17). At the consecration the same office passes to Aaron and his sons. They are made the ones who may come near, “and the priesthood shall be theirs as a perpetual statute” (29:9). What they eat at their consecration “a stranger shall not eat, for they are holy” (29:33). And the altar they serve is governed by a law written in the same words as the law of the mountain, with the opposite end: “whatever touches the altar shall be holy” (29:37). At the mountain one man stands for the people; in the dwelling, the priests do.

The two lines cross in the covenant, and both are found there. One stands for the many: “Moses alone shall come near to YHWH, and they shall not come near” (24:2). And the presence is seen. Of the nobles of the children of Israel, who went up with Moses, the text says, “he did not lay his hand on them; and they beheld the deity, and ate and drank” (24:11). At the corners no one comes near the presence except those who stand for the many, Moses at the mountain and the priests at the altar; and at the bush and the finished dwelling not even Moses. At the centre, for one meal, the leaders of the people see the deity and live.

Where the Pattern Is Thin

• The scale is clearest at its ends. That the first column centres on Moses, the one man to whom the word comes, and the last on all the people, is plain in every unit; “one man” describes where the word is addressed, not every scene, since in the signs Moses and Aaron often act together. The columns between are not graded as neatly as the pairs of the Ten Words, and I have not tried to force a step-by-step ladder on them.
• The fourth column is not the only place of judgment. Jethro sets up the courts in Unit 7 (18:13–26), in the last column, and the breastpiece of judgment is made for Aaron in Unit 12, in the second. The measures and the cases gather in the fourth column, but justice is not confined to it.
• The bounds are strongest around the calf. Around the sea the shared words are few: “for keeping” and “for your generations.”
• The square is read only at its corners and its centre. The units that lie between them on the two lines (the Passover and the gifts for the building on one; the garments of the priests and the cases of Unit 8 on the other) have not been read for this.
• The comparison with the Deuteronomy code is one of shape, as said above; some laws are shared, and some fall in matching places, but nothing here rests on that.

What Comes Next

The page of Exodus now has its columns and its rows, and both are read as five. Across the page, every pair moves from what is begun to what completes it, and the whole runs from one man at the left to all Israel at the right: one becomes many. Down the page, the whole runs from the sons of Israel to the one dwelling: many become one. In both directions the outer lines answer each other, the inner lines face each other, and the middle joins them. The two directions cross at the covenant, where all the people answer with one voice. And the corners of the square answer each other across it: the holy presence at the bush and in the finished dwelling, and the one who stands for the many at the mountain and at the consecration.

Two questions remain, and they are the questions of Part D. The page of Exodus stands with its second book on Leviticus, and Numbers stands under that: what becomes of its columns when they run on down into the two books below it, and of its three single units, standing in one column, beside the single units of the other books? And what does it mean that a book which begins with the names of the sons of Israel ends with all the house of Israel watching the glory of YHWH fill the dwelling?