BEMA Episode Link: 331: Sanctuary — Resting with the Mishkan
Episode Length: 1:47:09
Published Date: Thu, 18 May 2023 01:00:00 -0700
Session 6
About this episode:

Brent Billings, Josh Bossé, and Elle Grover Fricks muse on the mysteries of rest and holiness, and conclude the anthology on the tabernacle.

Presentation for Sanctuary — Resting with the Mishkan (PDF)

Strong Bad Email #58: Dragon — YouTube

The Sabbath by Abraham Joshua Heschel

“When You Believe” from The Prince of Egypt — YouTube

“Doubting Doubts” by Citizens & Saints — YouTube

Notes

*Note: The following notes are handwritten by me, Adam, and I reserve the right to be wrong.

Title & Source Summary

Episode: 331: Tabernacle Anthology Conclusion: Shabbat, Rest, and Holiness
Hosts: Brent Billings, with guests Josh Bosse and Elle Grover-Fricks
Focus: Genesis 2:1–3; Exodus 31:1–18

This episode ends the Tabernacle (Mishkan) anthology by looking at the seventh day of creation and the Sabbath commands in Exodus 31. Josh, Elle, and Brent study a paradox in the text: creation is described as already finished, yet it is also finished on the seventh day, through God’s rest. The discussion covers the key Hebrew words for “armies” (tzeva’am), “work” (melakhah), “make holy” (vayekadesh), “profane” (chalal), “guard” (shamar), and “was refreshed” (vayinafash). It also looks at Bezalel, the craftsman God “called by name,” and the unusual “garments of service” that covered the Tabernacle furnishings. Josh closes the series by arguing that Shabbat is an act of faith: we rest inside an unfinished creation and an unfinished faith, and that rest completes the work. He speaks especially to people going through deconstruction and reconstruction.

Key Takeaways

• Rest completes creation. Genesis 2 says creation was already finished and also that God finished it on the seventh day. Rest is part of what makes the work whole.
• Creation was never meant to be static or “perfect.” God created (bara) so that God could keep making and shaping (la’asot). Creation is an ongoing, dynamic process.
• Holiness first appears in Scripture through rest. The seventh day is the first thing called holy, and the text gives the reason: “because on it God rested.”
• The seventh day is unusual: God speaks no words, the blessing has no stated content, there is no “evening and morning,” and it is not called “good.” The missing “God saw that it was good” raises the question of what God had not yet seen.
• Melakhah is a specific kind of work. It is related to mal’akh (messenger or angel) and the root for “to fill.” It suggests work done because you have been filled with a task on someone else’s behalf.
• Shabbat must be guarded (shamar). It is fragile and can be “pierced” or “wounded” (chalal, usually translated “profane”).
• Sabbath restores the soul. In Exodus 31:17 God “rested and was refreshed” (vayinafash), literally “was ensouled.” Keeping Shabbat makes a person more fully soulful, and neglecting it leaves them depleted.
• Faith is the key ingredient. Resting takes trust that things are “okay where they’re at,” even when life, the world, or one’s theology feels half-built or half torn down.

Main Concepts & Theories

1. The Paradox of Completion (Genesis 2:1–2)

• Verse 1 uses a completed-action form: “the heavens and the earth were finished.”
• Verse 2 then says God finished the work on the seventh day.
• Josh’s reading: The rest itself completes creation. Something can be finished and still unfinished, and rest is what makes it whole.
• Modern difficulty: In post-industrial work we seldom enjoy what we make. Much of our labor serves someone else’s ends, and our personal projects, like a half-painted house, never feel done.
• Elle’s birth analogy: Delivering the baby is not the end of the process. The true completion is resting and looking into the child’s eyes.

2. “All Their Armies” (Tzeva’am)

• The phrase usually translated “all their vast array” or “host” literally means armies, a military term.
• It is probably not a reference to stars, because the ordinary Hebrew word for stars appears just one chapter earlier.
• Possible readings:
  • Spiritual beings: It may quietly mention the creation of angelic or spiritual beings that appear later in the story. Josh recommends Jewish mystical ideas such as tzimtzum and the “four worlds,” read from Jewish sources.
  • Order and tension: Armies suggest both ordered ranks and conflict. Creation contains built-in tension and competition, and God can still call it complete and rest in it.
• Brent pushes back with the image of a humpback whale simply enjoying the water: joy and delight are also built into creation.

3. The Silent, Unspecified Blessing

• On every other day, God’s action begins with “And God said.” On day seven God does not speak at all.
• Earlier blessings (for example, on the fish) come with spoken content: “be fruitful and multiply.” This blessing has none.
• Interpretation: The blessing is partly the holiness itself. It is also a dare or challenge to discover what the blessing of Shabbat actually is.
• The silence suggests a spiritual discipline. Elle mentions Quaker worship.

4. Holiness Born from Rest

• Vayekadesh (“and he sanctified it”) is one word: “made holy” is a single idea.
• This is the first mention of holiness in the Bible.
• The text explains the holiness: the day is holy because God rested on it. It is not holy by arbitrary decree.
• Implication: Rest invites sanctity into a time, space, or moment. As Elle puts it, we usually link holiness to what we do, not to what we refrain from doing.

5. Bara → La’asot: Created in Order to Keep Making

• Genesis 2:3 ends with “which God created (bara) to make (la’asot).”
• Bara means bringing something into being. Asah means shaping, molding, or working with it.
• God did not create in order to reach a finished perfection. God created in order to keep engaging with creation.
• Application to deconstruction: If faith is a fixed structure that must be perfect, losing one piece can bring the whole thing down. If God always meant to keep shaping us, change is expected, and we can rest in the middle of it.

6. Why Isn’t Day Seven Called “Good”?

• Each earlier day follows the refrain “God saw that it was good.”
• So the question becomes: what did God not see?
• Elle jokes that God’s eyes were closed, and Josh half-embraces the idea. The main proposal draws on the rabbinic pairing of days (1↔4, 2↔5, 3↔6). Day seven has no partner.
• Traditional Jewish answer: Shabbat’s partner is the Jewish people.
• Josh’s answer: Shabbat’s partner is demut, God’s likeness. God was waiting to see us resting with God. That is the goal of the Mishkan: God dwelling (shakhan) with people in mutual enjoyment.
• Connection to day two: Day two is also not called good. Holiness means being “set apart,” and days one through three are about separation. Josh suggests a hidden connection, following Ramban’s hint about day two’s mystery.

7. Bezalel: Called by Name (Exodus 31:1–11)

• God says, “I have called Bezalel by name.” Josh could not find this exact phrasing anywhere else in the Torah.
• Meaning of the names:
  • Bezalel: “in the shadow of God.” It shares a root with tselem (image), so it could also be read as “in the image of God.”
  • Uri: “my light.” Elle connects this to chiaroscuro, the art technique of drawing light out of darkness.
  • Hur: Bezalel’s grandfather, who helped hold up Moses’s arms against Amalek and served as a judge alongside Aaron. Elle wonders whether the name hints at Horite (Canaanite) ancestry, making an outsider an insider.
• Shadow imagery: It suggests protection, provision, and closeness. Elle adds the ancient Near Eastern image of God as a mountain: things grow in the mountain’s shadow, where the rain falls.
• Light and image: Light on day one is the only direct expression of God with no intermediate step. Humans made in God’s image are another expression of God. Bezalel’s lineage (image, son of light) joins the beginning and the end of creation.
• Adam as namer: Adam names three times: the animals, “Isha” (woman, a generic name), and “Havah” (Eve, a personal name). This models the move from a general identity to a personal one.

8. Melakhah: The Work Forbidden on Shabbat

• Melakhah is a relatively rare word for work. It is related to:
  • Mal’akh: messenger or angel.
  • Male: “to fill.” Bezalel was “filled” with the Spirit.
• Elle’s explanation: In the ancient world, a messenger memorized the king’s words and spoke in the king’s voice. That is why angelic speech can sound like God speaking in the first person. Melakhah is work you do because you have been filled with responsibility to someone else.
• Practical example: Baking lemon bars to enjoy yourself on Shabbat may be fine. Baking them because the church asked you to bring refreshments would break Shabbat.
• Traditional Jewish view: The forbidden work on Shabbat is the set of activities used to build the Tabernacle. Josh applies this spiritually: on Shabbat, stop building your “spiritual Mishkan.”

9. The “Garments of Service” (Bigdei ha-Serad)

• Exodus 31:10 mentions garments not listed before. They appear alongside Aaron’s holy garments (“and the holy garments”), which suggests they are something different.
• A common rabbinic view: These were cloths used to cover the sacred furnishings while the Tabernacle was moved, keeping holy objects hidden.
• Significance: The Mishkan’s furnishings are “clothed,” which reinforces the Mishkan-as-body image. Clothing also points back to Genesis 3, a story of messiness and incompleteness that still ends in covering.

10. The Sabbath Commands (Exodus 31:12–17)

Hebrew Term	Common Translation	Deeper Sense
Ot	Sign	A marker between God and Israel “throughout the eras.” Elle links it to Cain’s protective sign.
Shamar	Keep / observe	Guard, as a watchman guards
Chalal	Profane / desecrate	Pierce, wound, or bore a hole in; also “to begin”
Mot yumat	Shall be put to death	“Dying, will die.” The passive hophal form does not say God kills.
Karet	Cut off	Excluded from community. Also the verb used for “cutting” a covenant.
Asah	“Celebrate” (NIV)	To make or do Shabbat, echoing bara… la’asot
Vayinafash	Was refreshed	“Was ensouled.” From nefesh, the animating soul.

• Sign of sanctification: Shabbat is a sign “that you may know I am the LORD who makes you holy.” Because Shabbat became holy through rest, when we rest we take part in and experience God’s way of making things holy.
• Guarding from within: Once you have experienced Shabbat’s holiness, deliberately working on it wounds something whole. Josh’s example is starting a side hustle on your free day.
• The Cain connection: Elle suggests God is not the one threatening. God is the protector, and without Shabbat we are exposed to many dangers.
• Communal damage: Working on Shabbat pulls others in and poisons the community’s rest (“I already did that yesterday”). This may explain the penalty of being “cut off.”
• Inverted repetition: Verses 14–15 swap the penalties (profaning leads to death, working leads to being cut off, then working leads to death). Elle suggests a chiasm, and Josh suspects a deeper structure.
• Guard in order to do: Guarding Shabbat is not only defensive. Its purpose is to make or do Shabbat as an eternal covenant.

11. Nefesh: Soul as Embodied Life

• Nefesh is distinct from chayim (life) and ruach (spirit). It is the animating soul, and the Torah locates it “in the blood.”
• This challenges the Western picture of the soul as something floating and separate from the body. The nefesh fills the whole body.
• Implication: Physical, emotional, and spiritual rest are not separate things. Caring for the body is caring for the soul.
• Shavat comes from the idea of settling down. It means stopping to delight in what has been made, not just ceasing.

12. Shabbat, Faith, and Deconstruction

• Heschel’s quote: “Faith is not the clinging to a shrine but an endless pilgrimage of the heart.”
• Ongoing creation is not a Sisyphean burden. It is something we don’t want to end, because we delight in it.
• Mishkan as body: The body’s organs work without our conscious control, even when we are sick. Josh draws on his own experience of liver cancer. Spiritual “organs” built through practice can likewise be trusted to work on their own.
• Shabbat as a spiritual day off from “surgery”: Stop picking apart your theology for one day and let the body live.
• Elle’s contribution: Shabbat asks us to choose to believe that God is still okay with us during the process. That can be hard when authority figures say otherwise.
• Bezalel as a model of faith: He built without fully knowing what he was building, trusting that God had filled him with the skill.

Examples & Applications

1. The half-finished house: Josh’s new home has unfinished painting and furniture that hasn’t been moved back. Shabbat invites you to rest before everything is done and to treat that rest as part of the completion.
2. Birth and delight: The completion of labor is the parent resting while gazing at the newborn, not the delivery itself.
3. The lemon bars test: A simple way to discern melakhah is to ask whether you are doing it for its own delight or because you have been “filled” with someone else’s assignment.
4. Email on the Sabbath: A coworker who works through the weekend (“I’m already ahead”) shows how one person’s violation of rest spreads to the whole community.
5. The whale: A humpback whale drifting in the water with no task shows that delight and rest are built into creation.
6. Seasonal Sabbath: Josh notes that Shabbat looks very different in seasons of scarcity or crisis than in seasons of plenty. That variation is part of the ongoing “making” of Shabbat.
7. Lighting candles: Jewish practice begins Shabbat by lighting candles, recalling day one’s light and Bezalel’s father, Uri (“my light”).
8. Simple Sabbath practices: Sitting under a tree, eating fruit, petting animals, listening to birds, and feeling the wind are ways to enjoy creation as it is.
9. Two pockets (midrashic teaching): One slip reads “I am dust and ashes.” The other reads “For my sake the world was created.” The point is to hold humility and delight together.
10. Becoming fire: A midrashic story of an elder whose fingers became like flames: “Why not be totally transformed into fire?” The point is to be consumed by God’s presence and by joy.

Potential Areas for Further Exploration

• Tzimtzum and the “Four Worlds”: Jewish mystical ideas about God’s relationship to creation and the layers of reality. Josh recommends reading these from Jewish sources.
• Abraham Joshua Heschel’s The Sabbath: A foundational work on Shabbat as a “palace in time.”
• The 39 categories of melakhah: The Mishnah’s list of forbidden labors, drawn from the activities used to build the Tabernacle.
• Day two and day seven: Why neither is called “good,” and how both might relate to separation and holiness. Ramban’s cryptic comment is a starting point.
• The chiastic structure of Exodus 31:12–17: The inverted penalties and the wordplay between karet (cut off) and covenant.
• Tselem vs. demut: Image vs. likeness in Genesis 1:26 and how people grow into God’s likeness.
• The Horites and Hur’s lineage: Possible Canaanite roots among Israel’s leaders.
• Mal’akh as messenger: How the ancient messenger convention helps explain “angel of the LORD” passages.
• Paul’s body-as-temple language: 1 Corinthians 3:16 and 6:19, read in light of the Mishkan-as-body theme.
• Sabbath and the resurrection on the first day of the week: How Jesus followers relate to the seventh-day rhythm.

Comprehension Questions

1. What paradox appears in Genesis 2:1–2 about when creation was completed, and how does Josh use it to argue that rest completes work?
2. Why do the hosts say tzeva’am (“armies”) matters, and what two readings do they offer for it in the creation account?
3. How is the word melakhah connected to mal’akh (messenger or angel) and to the root meaning “to fill”? How does Elle use that connection to decide what kind of work breaks Shabbat?
4. The seventh day has no spoken blessing, no “evening and morning,” and no statement that God “saw that it was good.” What does Josh propose was missing from God’s sight, and what does he identify as Shabbat’s “partner”?
5. What does vayinafash (“and he was refreshed”) literally suggest in Exodus 31:17, and how does the Hebrew idea of nefesh challenge Western ideas about the soul and the body?

Personal Summary

This episode argues that Sabbath rest is how God finishes things, not a break from God’s work. The first thing Scripture calls holy is a day made holy through rest, blessed in silence, and left open for us to discover. Creation was never meant to be a finished, static product. God created in order to keep shaping it, and the Sabbath invites us into that same rhythm. Bezalel, “in the shadow of God, son of my light,” built the Tabernacle because God filled him. On Shabbat we set down the work we do for others and guard a fragile, holy time, and in doing so we are “ensouled” and refreshed as God was. For anyone whose faith feels half-built or half torn down, the message is to take a day, trust that the spiritual body still works, and enjoy the good creation that is still there. Resting in the middle of an unfinished life is itself an act of faith, and it may be where we start to look more like God.

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