Torah Portion

Terumah

תרומה

Exodus 25:1-27:19
First Kings 5:26-6:13

Israel, Where Is Your God?

Israel, Where Is Your God?

In the ancient Near East, when a city was conquered, its gods were godnapped to the victor’s city. Where did YHWH go after the Temple was destroyed?

Prof.
Jean-Louis Ska
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Gersonides’ Scientific Interpretation of the Tabernacle

Gersonides’ Scientific Interpretation of the Tabernacle

Warning: Using contemporary science and philosophy to explain the Torah may soon render your interpretation obsolete.

Prof.
Menachem Kellner
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The Torah Scroll: How the Copying Process Became Sacred

The Torah Scroll: How the Copying Process Became Sacred

For most Second Temple scribes, the Torah’s sanctity did not translate into a requirement to avoid the imprecisions common in all books. The Paleo-Hebrew and Proto-MT scribes were an exception, although the latter were committed to precise copying of all biblical scrolls. Only with the emergence of scrolls containing all five books (2nd cent. C.E.) did Torah scrolls take on their special level of sanctification.

Prof.
Emanuel Tov
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Menorah, Its “Branches” and Their Cosmic Significance

Menorah, Its “Branches” and Their Cosmic Significance

Midrash Tanchuma relates how Moses didn’t understand God's instructions for how to construct the menorah. This highlights the complexity of the Torah’s instructions, which commentators from antiquity until today struggled to visualize. One approach, taken by Philo and Josephus, was to interpret the menorah symbolically.

Prof.
Steven Fine
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Reconstructing the Features of Solomon’s Temple

Reconstructing the Features of Solomon’s Temple

A small shrine model, found in an archaeological excavation of the 10th century B.C.E. city at Khirbet Qeiyafa, together with a 9th century B.C.E. Temple excavated at Motza, help us better understand the Temple of Solomon, known only from the biblical text.

Dr.
Madeleine Mumcuoglu
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Prof.
Yosef Garfinkel
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Ptolemy II’s Gift to the Temple in the Letter of Aristeas

Ptolemy II’s Gift to the Temple in the Letter of Aristeas

The Letter of Aristeas embellishes its account of Ptolemy’s gift of a table and bowls to the Jerusalem Temple with what Greek rhetoric calls ekphrasis, a graphic description of a thing or person intended to bring the subject vividly to the eyes of the reader. What is the purpose of this embellishment?

Prof.
Benjamin G. Wright III
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The Poles of the Ark and Tutankhamun’s Chest

The Poles of the Ark and Tutankhamun’s Chest

The description of what is to be done with the ark’s carrying poles (בַּדִּים) seems to differ between Exodus ch. 25 and Numbers 4. Medieval Jewish commentators offered many different solutions to this contradiction, but the best answer lies in what we learn from the construction of ancient Egyptian portable chests.

Prof.
Raanan Eichler
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The Tabernacle: A Post-Exilic Polemic Against Rebuilding the Temple

The Tabernacle: A Post-Exilic Polemic Against Rebuilding the Temple

The Priestly Torah discusses the Tabernacle at extraordinary length, emphasizing its portability. Nothing in P ever says this structure was meant to be temporary. P’s Tabernacle was not foreshadowing the Temple, but was a polemic against Haggai and Zechariah’s agitation to build the Second Temple.

Dr. Hacham
Isaac S. D. Sassoon
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The Bronze Plating of the Altar: Numbers Versus Exodus

The Bronze Plating of the Altar: Numbers Versus Exodus

After Korah’s failed rebellion, God commands Elazar to plate the altar with the bronze firepans of the two hundred and fifty tribal leaders (Num 17). But didn’t Bezalel already plate the altar in bronze as God commanded when it was first built (Exod 27 and 38)?

Prof. Rabbi
David Frankel
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The Tabernacle in Its Ancient Near Eastern Context

The Tabernacle in Its Ancient Near Eastern Context

The parallels between the Tabernacle and ANE structures such as Rameses II’s military tent shed light on the meaning and function of this ancient structure.

Prof.
Michael M. Homan
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What Kind of Creatures Are the Cherubim?

What Kind of Creatures Are the Cherubim?

Winged children, winged adults, griffins, or sphinxes? A survey of the iconographic and archaeological evidence.

Prof.
Raanan Eichler
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The Cherubim: Their Role on the Ark in the Holy of Holies

The Cherubim: Their Role on the Ark in the Holy of Holies

Babies, birds, angels, even Torah scholars, tradition has interpreted cherubs in various ways, but what was their function on the ark?

Dr. Rabbi
Zev Farber
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Highlighting Juxtaposition in the Torah

Highlighting Juxtaposition in the Torah

The well-known rabbinic principle of אין מוקדם ומאוחר בתורה (there is no chronological order in the Torah) is often understood to be a hermeneutical solution to a textual, peshat problem. The principle, however, should be understood as midrashic, formulated to highlight other reasons for which biblical accounts could have been juxtaposed.

Dr.
Isaac Gottlieb
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In the Presence of God

In the Presence of God

The Difference between God’s “Name (שם)” and “Presence (כבוד)”

Dr.
Michael Carasik
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The Materiality of a Divine Dwelling

The Materiality of a Divine Dwelling

What makes a material suitable for constructing a sacred space, and why, given all of the details and repetitions concerning the Tabernacle, are none of its manufacturing techniques narrated?

Prof.
Jonathan Ben-Dov
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Terumah

תרומה

Exodus 25:1-27:19

וְעָשׂוּ לִי מִקְדָּשׁ וְשָׁכַנְתִּי בְּתוֹכָם׃

שמות כה:ח

And let them make Me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them.

Exodus 25:8

Exodus

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