Canter Bridge

The Hebrew Bible is stingy with assignations of wisdom. ‘Wisdom’, perhaps the Bible’s most polished virtue, is hard to come by.

Indeed, it is the elder rather than the young man who accrues wisdom precisely because it’s a long time in the making. If wisdom is a polished virtue, that is because it has come into contact with innumerable objects, not all of them smooth.

Israel’s sages are one of its most revered parties.

Kings may rule, prophets declaim, young men win glory in battle. Yet it is the wise who dispense discernment in the day-to-day arena, those most pragmatic of counselors who have stewed long enough in the ‘fear of the Lord’ to have hearts soft for understanding. When the Jews of the Levant met calamity 70 and 135 years into the present era, it was Israel’s sages—not her kings and prophets—who remade Judaism. Resurrection, it seems, is sometimes evinced by soft, well-studied voices.

One therefore meets the Bible’s description of Israel’s earliest craftsmen with some astonishment. Bezalel and Oholiab, master craftsmen whose skills are summoned when the tabernacle of YHWH and its instruments become a pressing matter of divine presence in Chapters 35 and 36 of Exodus, are introduced back in chapter 31 with lavish use of vocabulary normally reserved for Israel’s religious and philosophical sages. Indeed, these men are drawn into the dialect of revelation when the Lord describes their qualifications to Moses:

See, I have called by name Bezalel son of Uri son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah: and I have filled him with divine spirit, with ability, intelligence, and knowledge in every kind of craft, to devise artistic designs, to work in gold, silver, and bronze, in cutting stones for setting, and in carving wood, in every kind of craft. Moreover, I have appointed with him Oholiab son of Ahisamach, of the tribe of Dan; and I have given skill to all the skillful, so that they may make all that I have commanded you: the tent of meeting, and the ark of the covenant, and the mercy seat that is on it, and all the furnishings of the tent, the table and its utensils, and the pure lampstand with all its utensils, and the altar of incense, and the altar of burnt offering with all its utensils, and the basin with its stand, and the finely worked vestments, the holy vestments for the priest Aaron and the vestments of his sons, for their service as priests, and the anointing oil and the fragrant incense for the holy place. They shall do just as I have commanded you.

Because the religious heart often privileges too narrow a band of human endeavor as the outworking of a divine summons, this passage repays careful reading, as does its elaboration in chapters 35 and 36.

Bezalel and Oholiab, elsewhere strangers to religious panthea, deserve rehabilitation as Mosaic sages of a kind. YHWH’s own spirit wafting in them and among their guild is credited with the enduring glory of their labor, an assessment that elevates rather than diminishes them as divinely equipped practitioners.

The divine presence, it would appear if the reader lowers himself without reservation into the narrative flow, has a preference for beautiful things. Artistry and craftsmanship appear not only as the servants of God offered with a reverential dash of style. They are given by the Creator himself with doxological intentions.

YHWH with us, Moses might be presumed to have instructed the people, is duly reverenced by gold, purple, acacia, and the human know-how that enables the exceptional eye to envisage praise in gem, metal, wood, and fabric. Prising away the aesthetic barriers that prohibit lesser eyes from seeing well, they invite us to glimpse, to linger, to reverence, to praise the One whose spirit glories in and is honored by what is beautiful.