The deep inscription of biblical language onto our culture is glimpsed in an expression of satisfaction like ‘I thought I’d died and gone to heaven!’
Even when spoken by a non-religious person, as is usually the case, it evidences familiarity with the idea that another sphere of life is better than this one, yet recognizable in terms of our experience ‘down here’.
Pre-modern cultures nearly always believed that their shared life reflected in some way a cosmic or celestial template. This, in fact, was the justification of ‘the way things are’ and the source of restraint upon an individual’s behavior for the benefit of a common good.
Modern culture’s rejection of such a notion in favor of an autonomy of the self ungoverned by external commitments is perhaps as close to a novum in human history as one can discover. Some have called the anxiety that prevails in the wake of this society-wide—or so it is alleged—option for the individual as ‘anti-culture’.
The complex instruction for the building of an ark in the afterglow of Moses’ reception of the law on Sinai is an exemplar of this conviction, though one that has extended its influence far beyond the particularity of one people and shaped the common territory of man cultures and subcultures.
Though it is easy to skim over this material as a field manual for an odd and uninteresting profession, the reader who does so would miss a central pillar of biblical conviction: that God has come down, will come down, or once came down to live with his people.
The tabernacle and its accoutrements are to be build according to a celestial blueprint precisely because they are a projection onto earth and into the argumentative and fickle society of a band of Hebrew slaves. God is, according to the text of Exodus, intending to ‘live with us’. The cultic architecture in these pages is meant to assure him an environment in which he can remain, for Israel’s fear is simultaneously that he might get too close and that he might stay away altogether.
Such instruction on the measurements and angles of temple furniture complements the moral architecture of a people that now finds itself summoned uninvited into potentially lethal companionship with Sinai’s enigmatic deity.
Not only must Moses’ Hebrews embrace the lines, angles, boundaries, and exertions that YHWH has declared over them in his virtually unilateral choice to call them by his name. They must also consult, pacify, and thank him with the care normally reserved for handling nuclear weapons on the dock of a tossing ship.
Who is this YHWH, and can he really live with people down here without saturating their lives with unending anxiety or ending them by sudden death?
Canter Bridge 
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