God was hard up for money, so he asked Moses to ask the people for gold, silver and bronze, along with yarns of blue and purple and scarlet, fine linen, goats’ hair, tanned rams’ skins, goatskins, acacia wood, oil, spices, onyx stones and, you know, whatever else they had lying around. He also wanted Moses to have the people build him a house and an ark.

Now, this is not a flood-escaping ark. This ark is a box, and God wanted it to be 36 inches long, 27 inches wide and 27 inches tall. He wanted it to be made out of acacia wood and overlaid with pure gold. “When it’s done,” God said, “make a cover for it out of gold, and do it up with gold angels and stuff. Then you’re going to make a table and overlay that with gold, too. And when it’s done, make me some bread and serve it to me on that table with gold dishes. I’m also going to need a golden lampstand. Make it pretty, with flowers.”

“Oh, yeah,” God said. “I’m going to need a tabernacle made of fine linen, and I want pictures of cherubim woven into it.” Then God talked for like an hour about how exactly he wanted this tabernacle to be made. Then he told Moses how he wanted his house to be arranged. (Some pretty good blueprints can be found here.)

“When all that’s done, you’re going to need to make me an altar. Make it out of acacia wood and cover it in bronze. And the tabernacle is going to need a court, I think twenty bronze pillars ought to do it for the south side. Twenty silver pillars for the north. And I’m afraid of the dark, so I’m going to need an oil lamp to always be burning nearby. Aaron and his crew can take care of that.”

Original text 25 26 27

Moses wrote down all of God’s rules, and then he woke up early the next morning and built an altar at the foot of Mount Sinai, along with twelve pillars to represent the twelve tribes. He got some people to make sacrifices at his altar, and then he took half the blood from the sacrifices and put it in basins. He threw the other half at the altar. When all the people had gathered, he read to them from the book he’d just written, and they agreed to do whatever God said. Then Moses threw blood on the people. Oh, gross.

Moses and Aaron got a couple guys named Nadab and Abihu and seventy elders of Israel, and they all went into the mountain to hang out with God. After some food and drink and partying, God asked Moses to come to the top of the mountain so he could give him some stone tablets with the rules on them. Moses told everyone to wait for him, and then he went up the mountain. As soon as he went, a cloud came along and covered the peak for six days. It looks like Moses wandered around for those six days, and on the seventh he finally found God hanging out in a fireball. Moses wound up not coming back down from the mountain for forty days.

Original text

God talked at Moses for a really long time up on that mountain, telling him all the rules he wanted the Israelites to follow. Here are some highlights:

• You’ll be put to death if you steal a slave and then sell it.
• You’re allowed to kill someone who breaks into your house, but you have to do it at night. If morning comes and the guy is still alive, he has to pay. If he can’t pay, you can sell him. If the stolen animal is found on him, he’ll pay double. Weird desert math.
• If you seduce a virgin and have sex with her, you’d better be prepared to marry her and pay her father her bride-price. If her father won’t give her up, you still gotta pay up.
• You will kill all sorcerers.
• Don’t boil a goat in its mother’s milk.

When he ran out of silly laws to talk about, God told Moses he was going to send an angel to lead the Israelites to Canaan and defeat the people who already lived there.

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