Part B: The Map of Exodus

Introduction: From a List to a Map

Part A found Exodus’s nineteen units and gave each its verses. It set them down one after another, already grouped: four blocks of four units, with a single unit standing between each block and the next. But a list is not yet a map. Do these nineteen units simply follow one another, or were they arranged into something that has to be seen as a whole?

This part tells how the question was answered, in eight stages. We begin with the book as a whole and work inward, looking at smaller and smaller stretches of it. At each step the same shape comes back. Only then do we set the units out on a page, and only after that do we ask what the page shows.

Stage One: One Book in Two

Part A began with the impression that Exodus is two books: a story with its law, and the plan and building of a dwelling. The list bears it out. Three units belong to no block: the sea (Unit 5), the covenant at the foot of the mountain (Unit 10) and the golden calf (Unit 15). They do not fall just anywhere. Each comes after four units, so that the book runs four, one, four, one, four, one, four. The covenant stands at the centre of the list, the tenth of nineteen units, at the seam between the two books, with nine units before it and nine after. The sea and the calf each stand in the middle of one of the books.

The two books also face in different directions. The first is turned toward the people. It begins with “the names of the sons of Israel” (1:1), and from there to the end of the law it is the story of a people, its bondage, its going out, its road, and the law of its life together. The second is turned toward YHWH. Its first words ask for gifts “for me”: “let them take me an offering” (25:2). From there to the end of the book it is a house for YHWH and the service done in it, and its last words are “the glory of YHWH filled the dwelling” (40:34).

Stage Two: Each Book Is Two Blocks

Each book is in turn two blocks of four units, with a single unit between them. And in both books the second block completes the first.

In the second book this hardly needs showing: the building carries out the plan. But the text shows it in detail. When Moses calls the wise-hearted at the start of the building, he names the objects of the plan in their order: “the dwelling, its tent and its covering, its clasps and its frames, its bars, its pillars and its sockets” (35:11), down to “the holy garments for Aaron the priest and the garments of his sons” (35:19). The half-shekel that the plan asks of “all who pass over to those counted” (30:13) is counted in the building in nearly the same words (38:26). And the consecration in the plan, “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 at the raising of the dwelling in the same sentence (40:12).

In the first book the text states the relation outright. At the bush Moses is given a sign: “when you bring the people out of Egypt, you shall serve the deity on this mountain” (3:12). The first block brings the people out of Egypt. The second brings them to that mountain, “the mountain of the deity” (18:5), and there the promise made in Egypt, “I will take you to me for a people” (6:7), is spoken again as done: “I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to me … you shall be to me a treasure out of all the peoples … a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (19:4–6).

Stage Three: Each Block Is Two Pairs

The division goes further down. Each block is two pairs of units, and the two pairs differ in the same way as the two books: the first pair is turned toward the people, and the second toward YHWH, so that each block is the whole book in small. In every block the line between the pairs can be seen without any theory.

• Egypt (Units 1–4). The first pair is enclosed by the two lists of names that Part A found at 1:1 and 6:14. The frame begins with the family that came into Egypt and ends with the two men told to bring it out: “this is Aaron and Moses, to whom YHWH said, bring out the children of Israel from the land of Egypt” (6:26). Inside it Moses is sent to the people: he gathers the elders, Aaron speaks, and “the people believed” (4:31). The second pair is the ten plagues, a series every reader knows, and it is turned toward YHWH. The demand put to Pharaoh again and again is “let my people go, that they may serve me” (7:16), and the series ends in the first act of that service: “it is the sacrifice of the Passover to YHWH” (12:27).
• The wilderness and the mountain (Units 6–9). The first pair is story, and the second is law. “These are the ordinances that you shall set before them” (21:1), and from there to 23:19 nobody travels, nobody complains and nothing happens; a voice speaks, and what it speaks is law. The ten words might seem to belong with the law, but they are spoken inside the story, to a people at the foot of a mountain in thunder and smoke, who beg Moses, “you speak with us and we will listen, and let not Elohim speak with us, lest we die” (20:15). In the first pair the law is given inside the life of the people on the road and at the mountain. The second pair is spoken after “the people stood far off, and Moses came near to the thick darkness where the deity was” (20:17), and in it the law is set out as a system, given so that they may be “people of holiness … to me” (22:30).
• The plan (Units 11–14). The first pair is objects to be made, from what the people give, for the people’s midst: “let them make me a sanctuary, and I will dwell in their midst” (25:8). Unit 12 opens “you shall make holy garments” (28:2), and on the garments Aaron carries “the names of the sons of Israel” on his shoulders and over his heart (28:12, 29). The second pair is acts to be done, and its two units open in matching words: “and this is the thing that you shall do to them, to consecrate them” (29:1); “and this is what you shall do on the altar” (29:38). They are acts of service, down to the evening lamb, “a pleasing odour, an offering by fire to YHWH” (29:41).
• The building (Units 16–19). The first pair is what the people give and make of their own will, “every man whose heart lifted him” (35:21); and through the whole making of the dwelling, in Unit 17, neither name of the deity occurs. The second pair is the work measured against YHWH’s command. The refrain “as YHWH commanded Moses” closes item after item in it, seven times in each unit, and is found nowhere else in the building.

To be fair, the turn is not equally plain in the four blocks. In Egypt, in the wilderness and in the building the text itself draws it, in the contrasts just listed. In the plan the line is fainter, because the plan opens “let them make me a sanctuary” and the garments carry the names of the sons of Israel; both directions are present in its first pair, and the turn is read from where the pair’s weight falls. I say so again below, where the pattern is thin.

Stage Four: Each Pair Is Two Units

Now the smallest division of the list. Inside each pair, is the relation the one we found between the blocks, the second completing what the first begins? This is where the evidence is closest to hand, and where the reader can check it most easily.

First, what “completes” means, since it will be asked of eight pairs that do not all look alike. In each pair the first unit sets something up and leaves it unfinished, and the second unit finishes that very thing and nothing else: it carries out an instruction, or brings an event to its end, or gives a thing its use, or measures a piece of work against the command it was made by. These are four forms of one relation, and the test for all four is the same. Nothing in the second unit begins afresh; and the first unit, read on its own, stops short. Where the second unit takes up the first’s own words, the reader can see the relation on the page; where it takes up the first’s matter without its words, the relation has to be argued. I will mark which is which as we go.

Units 1 and 2. At the bush Moses is given his instructions. He is to gather the elders and tell them that YHWH has “surely visited” them (3:16). “They will listen to your voice,” he is told, and then he and the elders are to go to the king of Egypt (3:18). Aaron “shall speak for you to the people” (4:16). In the second unit each of these is carried out. “Moses and Aaron went and gathered all the elders of the children of Israel” (4:29). Aaron “spoke all the words that YHWH had spoken to Moses” (4:30). “The people believed, and they heard that YHWH had visited the children of Israel” (4:31). The words of the instruction come back in the telling: “visited”, “listen”, “heard”. Then “Moses and Aaron came and said to Pharaoh” (5:1). The first unit sets out what is to happen; the second unit is where it happens. The relation is in the words themselves.

Units 3 and 4. The author has divided the ten plagues between two units: nine in Unit 3, and the tenth in Unit 4. Why divide them? Because the nine do not work. Unit 3 opens with YHWH telling Moses that Pharaoh will not listen (7:3–4), and Pharaoh does not. More than once he gives way under a plague and then takes it back: let the frogs go, and “I will send the people” (8:4); “I have sinned this time; YHWH is the righteous one” (9:27). The nearest he comes is “go, serve YHWH; only let your flocks and your herds be kept back” (10:24). Then he sends Moses away: “see my face no more” (10:28). The unit closes with a sentence that sums up all nine: “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). After nine signs, Israel is still in Egypt.

The tenth is announced inside Unit 3, and in words that count it with the others. “One more plague (עוד נגע אחד) I will bring on Pharaoh and on Egypt; afterwards he will send you out from here” (11:1). But it is struck in Unit 4, and there it works at once. “At midnight YHWH struck every firstborn in the land of Egypt” (12:29). Pharaoh rises in the night and calls for Moses and Aaron: “rise, go out from among my people … go, serve YHWH as you have spoken; take your flocks and your herds too, as you have spoken” (12:31–32). What he held back in Unit 3, the flocks and the herds, he gives up in Unit 4. Egypt presses the people to leave in haste (12:33).

The tenth plague also differs from the nine in kind. The nine were signs done before Pharaoh. The tenth is not set among them. It is set inside a rite that Israel keeps in its own houses, on the night of the first Passover. Unit 4 opens with the month that is to be “the head of months” (12:2), and with the lamb, its blood on the doorposts and the lintel, and the meal eaten in haste: “it is a Passover to YHWH” (12:11). The death of the firstborn is announced in the middle of the instructions for that meal: “I will pass through the land of Egypt on this night, and I will strike every firstborn” (12:12). And the blood on the doors is itself a sign: “the blood shall be for you a sign on the houses where you are” (12:13). Nine signs before Pharaoh changed nothing. The sign that brings Israel out is on Israel’s own doors, in the night of the Passover. Here too the words carry the relation: “as you have spoken,” twice, in Pharaoh’s mouth.

Units 6 and 7. The story divides where one stranger gives way to another. The first unit ends with a war. “Amalek came and fought with Israel at Rephidim” (17:8). Joshua defeats him, Moses builds an altar, and the unit closes on an oath: “YHWH will have war with Amalek from generation to generation” (17:16). The next unit begins with another stranger coming to Israel, with the same verb and in a very different spirit. “Jethro came, Moses’ father-in-law, with his sons and his wife, to Moses in the wilderness where he was camped, at the mountain of the deity” (18:5). Amalek came to fight. Jethro comes because he has heard “all that Elohim had done for Moses and for Israel his people” (18:1). He brings a burnt offering and sacrifices, and Aaron and all the elders of Israel eat bread with him “before the deity” (18:12). Up to this point the people are on the road. From here on they are at the mountain, and they will not leave it for the rest of Exodus.

The two units are also bound by a thread that runs through both and nowhere else in the book: testing. At Marah, where the first unit begins, “there he set for them a statute and an ordinance, and there he tested them” (15:25). With the manna: “that I may test them, whether they will walk in my teaching or not” (16:4). Then the people turn it round. At Rephidim they test YHWH, and the place is named for it, Massah, “because they tested YHWH, saying, is YHWH in our midst or not?” (17:7). The question is left hanging, and Amalek attacks. It is answered at the mountain. When the people stand back in fear from the thunder, Moses tells them, “do not be afraid, for it is to test you that the deity has come” (20:16). The verb “test” (the root נסה) occurs in Exodus only in these two units. On the road the people ask whether YHWH is among them; at the mountain the deity comes.

The Sabbath goes the same way. It is first given with the manna, as a matter of bread: “six days you shall gather it, and on the seventh day, the Sabbath, there will be none” (16:26). At the mountain it is one of the ten words, the third, for every person and every beast in the household. What is set out on the road is given its full form at the mountain. In this pair the relation is one of matter rather than wording: the road ends where the mountain begins, and what was tested and given on the road, the deity’s presence and the Sabbath, is answered and given again at the mountain. The ties are the verb “test” and the Sabbath; the completion is the arrival.

Units 8 and 9. Part A drew the line between these two units by the way they speak. The cases of Unit 8, “when a man …” and “if …,” with what is then to be paid, give way at 22:17 to commands addressed to “you,” beginning “a sorceress you shall not let live.”

The difference is more than one of form. Case law cannot stand on its own. It assumes a society in which it is applied: people who belong to it and people at its edges, an authority above the parties, someone to judge, a shared measure of time. Unit 8 assumes all of this and describes none of it. Its cases keep sending the parties to judges whom the unit never describes. The slave who will not go free is brought “to the judges” (21:6). When goods left for safekeeping go missing, the householder “shall come near to the judges,” and “the case of both shall come before the judges; whom the judges condemn shall pay double” (22:7–8). The Hebrew word is אלהים, and the verb “condemn” is plural. The Aramaic Targum of Onkelos renders it “the judges” in each of these places.

Unit 9 sets out that society. It names those at its edges, who must be protected: the stranger, “for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (22:20), the widow and the orphan (22:21), the poor man who borrows (22:24). It names those who hold authority: “judges (אלהים) you shall not curse, and a leader among your people you shall not revile” (22:27). These are the judges to whom the cases of Unit 8 were sent. And it says what the people is to be: “people of holiness you shall be to me” (22:30). It sets up the court: the witness who must not join hands with the wicked (23:1), the crowd that must not be followed to pervert justice (23:2), the judge who must not turn aside the judgment of the poor or take a bribe (23:6–8). It gives the society its time: the seventh year, the seventh day, and three festivals in the year, the first of them kept “for in it you went out of Egypt” (23:15). And it ends at “the house of YHWH your deity” (23:19). The cases of Unit 8 need a society to be judged in; Unit 9 is that society.

The first law of Unit 8 points ahead in another way too. “Six years he shall serve, and in the seventh he shall go out free” (21:2). It is a rule for one man and his master. Near the end of Unit 9 the same count of six and seven returns for the whole land and the whole household. “Six years you shall sow your land … and the seventh you shall let it rest,” so that the poor and the beasts of the field may eat (23:10–11). “Six days you shall do your work, and on the seventh day you shall rest,” so that the ox and the ass, the son of the handmaid and the stranger may be refreshed (23:12). What began as one slave’s release ends as the rhythm of the whole society. In this pair the relation is partly in the words, the judges of 21:6 and 22:8 answered by the judges of 22:27, and partly an argument: that case law presupposes the society the second unit describes.

Units 11 and 12. Unit 11 is the house and its vessels, made “according to all that I show you, the pattern of the dwelling and the pattern of all its vessels” (25:9). Unit 12 is the garments: the ephod and the breastpiece, the robe, the tunic, the turban and the sash (28:4), and the gold plate engraved “holy to YHWH.” But Unit 12 also says something Unit 11 never says. At its beginning and again at its end it names what the garments are for: “for glory and for beauty” (לכבוד ולתפארת, 28:2, 40). Unit 11 makes a house so that YHWH may “dwell in their midst,” and the word “glory” does not occur in it. Unit 12 opens and closes with that word. It is also the word on which the book ends: “the glory of YHWH filled the dwelling” (40:34). Unit 11 makes the house; Unit 12 names what the house is made for. This is the loosest of the eight: a thing and its purpose, not an instruction and its carrying out, and the tie is one word, “glory,” at the garments’ two ends and at the book’s.

Units 13 and 14. Unit 13 is the consecration of the priests and the altar, done once, over seven days: “seven days you shall fill their hand” (29:35). Unit 14 is what is done every day after that, beginning with the lambs offered morning and evening, “a continual burnt offering for your generations” (29:42). Unit 14 has objects of its own, the incense altar, the basin, the anointing oil and the incense, but each comes with its use. The incense is burned “morning by morning” and “between the evenings” (30:7–8). The basin is for washing, “that they not die” (30:20). The oil is for anointing the tent and the ark (30:26). In this pair the objects serve the acts. The consecration done once comes first, and the service that goes on always follows it. The two units announce themselves in matching words, “and this is the thing that you shall do” / “and this is what you shall do,” so the relation is on the page.

Units 16 and 17. Unit 16 opens with Moses gathering the whole congregation, and then the gifts come from “every man whose heart lifted him, and everyone whose spirit moved him” (35:21). They keep coming “morning by morning” (36:3), until the craftsmen tell Moses that the people are bringing too much, and word goes through the camp to stop: “the material was enough for all the work, and too much” (36:7). In the very next verse, which opens Unit 17, “all the wise-hearted among those who did the work made the dwelling” (36:8). Unit 17 goes through what they made. The gathering and the making are two stages of one task, side by side, joined in the text by a single verse.

Units 18 and 19. Unit 18 begins with the accounts of the dwelling, “counted at the command of Moses” (38:21): the gold, the silver and the bronze, each to the shekel. Then the garments are made, and each one closes with the same words, “as YHWH commanded Moses” (39:1, and six times more). Unit 19 begins, “all the work of the dwelling of the tent of meeting was finished, and the children of Israel did according to all that YHWH commanded Moses” (39:32). The finished pieces are brought to him, and “Moses saw all the work, and behold, they had done it as YHWH had commanded … and Moses blessed them” (39:43). Then he sets each piece in its place, and the same words close each step, seven times more. What the people gave freely is counted, checked and set up according to the command. The relation is in the refrain, which the two units share and no other unit has.

Stage Five: Even Within a Unit

The shape reaches one size further down, to the inside of a single unit, in one case that we can show. The second half of the Covenant Code, Unit 9, is itself laid out in columns. In the article in which Paul Hocking and I set it out, its first column “addresses mundane or worldly matters,” while “every segment” of its last column “refers to the deity, YHWH, by personal name or in first-person address.” The first column opens with “a sorceress you shall not let live” (22:17) and ends with the field left to rest in the seventh year, “and what they leave the beast of the field shall eat” (23:11). The last column opens with “except to YHWH alone” (22:19) and ends at “the house of YHWH your deity” (23:19). Inside a single unit, the worldly stands first and what is turned toward YHWH stands last, as in the block and in the book.

A figure that repeats its own shape at every size is what mathematicians call a fractal. Exodus seems to be built that way. One unit is a small sample for the smallest size; Part C will add others. The book is two parts, one turned toward the people and the other toward YHWH; so is each block; so, in the case of Unit 9, is a single unit.

Stage Six: The Page

We now have a shape found at every size, and it can be put on a page. Before the page is laid out, the shape can be set down as a chart, from the whole book at the top to the units at the bottom. The three single units are left out of it; they stand between the parts at each level, the covenant between the two books, the sea and the calf between the blocks of each book.

At each level the parts divide the same way, and the two relations alternate: a whole is two parts turned in different directions, and each of those is two parts of which the second completes the first.

Now the units can be laid out, and the layout follows from what we have seen. Each pair is set side by side, its first unit on the left and its second on the right, because the second completes the first. Each book’s two blocks are set side by side for the same reason, with the sea or the calf standing between them. The two pairs of a block stand one above the other, because they are two parts of one thing, turned in different directions, the upper toward the people and the lower toward YHWH. And because the book has the same shape as the block, its two books also stand one above the other, the story above and the dwelling below, with the covenant between them. Set midway between the two books, the covenant falls in the middle column of the page, the column in which the sea and the calf already stand between the blocks on either side of them. It is the centre of the page in both directions.

The page is set out as the maps of the other books are, and read as they are, from the left: Units 1 and 2 at the top left, the plagues and the Passover beneath them, and so on to the raising of the dwelling at the bottom right. Two things in this are choices of display, and should be named as such: that the page reads from the left, as the other books’ maps do; and that the two units of a pair stand side by side rather than one above the other. Everything else on the page, the division into books, blocks and pairs, what stands between them, and which parts are turned which way, is what the stages above found in the text.

Notice what has happened. The layout follows from the divisions and relations argued above, and the result is a page with four rows of units running across it, the covenant on a line of its own between the two books, and five columns running down it. The three single units, which began as dividers in a list, now stand in one column through its middle, with the covenant at the centre of the page.

The page itself follows. Each unit has a short description, so that the relation inside each pair can be read across the page. The sea and the calf each stand between the two blocks of their book.

Stage Seven: A Proportion

The shape we have followed from the whole book down to a single unit can be stated in one line, as a proportion. Call the four rows of units, from the top, a, b, c and d. Then:

a is to b as c is to d; and a and b together are to c and d together as a is to b.

Down the page, “is to” means “is turned toward the people, as against what is turned toward YHWH.” In each book the upper row, turned toward the people, stands to the lower, turned toward YHWH, in the same way; and the first book as a whole stands to the second book as its own upper row stands to its lower. The whole is in the same ratio as its parts. Across the page the same proportion holds with a different relation: there “is to” means “is begun, as against what completes it.” The left-hand unit of each pair stands to the right-hand as the left-hand block of each book stands to the right-hand. Two relations, one down and one across, take the same form at every size. It is a proportion of relations, not of quantities: nothing is being measured, and the formula is an analogy of form. The formula proves nothing that the stages before it have not shown. It gathers them into one statement, and it gives names to the four places on the page.

A proportion has its own names for its four places. In “a is to b as c is to d,” the outer terms, a and d, are the extremes, and the inner terms, b and c, are the means. On the page of Exodus the two outside rows, the first and the last, are the extremes, and the two inside rows are the means.

The extremes face each other across the whole height of the page. The first is the row of the first book turned toward the people; the last is the row of the second book turned toward YHWH. So they hold one relationship at two times, begun in the story and completed in the dwelling, with the positions 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). In the consecration Moses gives Aaron his office: “you shall fill the hand of Aaron and the hand of his sons” (29:9), and the holy garments “shall be his sons’ after him” (29:29). 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 phrase “a head” (לגלגלת) occurs in Exodus in these two places only.

The means stand on either side of the covenant, and they are the means in the plain sense too: what the extremes are joined through. In the story the means is a nation, made known to Egypt and given its law. In the dwelling it is a house, with its vessels and its gifts. Both are placed “in the midst.” The signs are given so that Egypt may know “that I am YHWH in the midst of the land” (8:18). The plan begins, “let them make me a sanctuary, and I will dwell in their midst” (25:8). One sentence joins the two, and it closes the plan’s account of the daily service: “they shall know that I am YHWH their deity, who brought them out of the land of Egypt to dwell in their midst” (29:46). The two means also face each other across the centre as opposites that complete each other. The first of them, the signs that undo the world in Egypt, faces the plan that puts a world together. How far that holds, row by row, is a question for Part C.

The proportion explains why the page has to be read from its centre as well as from its top. Because the same movement, from what is turned toward the people to what is turned toward YHWH, is repeated without being turned round, the two rows at any distance from the centre are always one of each kind. Every pairing down the page joins the two. Genesis does it the other way. Its second cycle repeats the first turned round, so that like faces like, covenant on both outsides and family on both insides; there the comparison runs across the columns, because that is where Genesis sets its two tracks. Exodus repeats its first book without turning it, so that like always faces unlike.

Stage Eight: The Corners

Where the extreme rows meet the first and last columns stand the four corners of the page: Unit 1 at the top left, Unit 7 at the top right, Unit 13 at the bottom left and Unit 19 at the bottom right. In Genesis the corners hold the crises at the boundary of the family, the matriarch taken or threatened in a foreign house. In Exodus I read all four corners as holding the boundary of the holy: who may come near, and who may not.

• At the bush: “do not come near here; take your sandals off your feet, for the place on which you stand is holy ground” (3:5).
• At the mountain: “set bounds for the people round about, saying, take heed not to go up the mountain or touch its edge; whoever touches the mountain shall surely die” (19:12).
• At the consecration: “the altar shall be most holy; whatever touches the altar shall be holy” (29:37).
• At the raising of the dwelling: “Moses could not come into the tent of meeting, for the cloud rested on it, and the glory of YHWH filled the dwelling” (40:35).

Follow the boundary across the first book and down to the second. In the story it widens, from one man warned off a place at the bush to a whole people fenced back from the mountain. Then, down the page, the words of the warning at the mountain return at the altar, with their effect turned round: “whoever touches the mountain (כל הנגע בהר) shall surely die” (19:12) becomes “whatever touches the altar (כל הנגע במזבח) shall be holy” (29:37). What killed on contact in the story makes holy in the dwelling. And at the last corner, when the glory fills the house, the boundary closes before Moses himself, as it did at the bush.

Where the Pattern Is Thin

The case for the page rests on many ties of different kinds pointing to the same places. Not all of them are equally strong, and some places resist the pattern.

• The first pair of the plan faces both ways. Units 11 and 12 are counted here as the pair turned toward the people, yet the plan opens “let them make me a sanctuary” (25:8). The same verse goes on, “and I will dwell in their midst,” and the garments carry the names of the sons of Israel. Both directions are present in this pair, more evenly than in the other first pairs.
• Unit 8 looks like the people’s own business. Its cases are disputes between neighbours over slaves, oxen, pits and deposits, and yet it stands in a pair turned toward YHWH. What places it there is not its subject but where it is spoken and what it is for. It is spoken from the thick darkness after the people have stood back (20:17), and it is the first half of the law given so that Israel may be “people of holiness … to me” (22:30). Its cases are sent to the אלהים (21:6; 22:8). Stage Four follows the Targum of Onkelos, and the plural verb at 22:8, in reading the word here and at 22:27 as “the judges.” A reader who takes it as “the deity” finds Unit 8 turned toward YHWH all the more, and the tie to 22:27 holds either way.
• The proportion joins two different relations. Down the page “is to” means a difference of direction; across the page it means a difference of stage. The claim is not that these are one relation, but that each, taken on its own, has the same form at every size.
• The smallest size rests on one unit here. Only Unit 9 has been shown to carry the shape inside itself. Part C adds further cases; until then the claim at that size should be held lightly.

What Comes Next

The page has now been built and read across its rows. It can also be read down. It has five columns, and the middle one holds the three single units, the sea, the covenant and the calf, which the list of Part A first set apart. What the five columns hold is the subject of Part C. And because the page stands with its second book on Leviticus, its columns do not stop at its foot: how they run on into Leviticus and Numbers is the subject of Part D.