Quantifying the Sacred

The abundance of numbers and measurements in the tabernacle building account in Exodus 25–31 and 35–40 has long been noted by scholars. Typically, these measurements are read as a form of ekphrasis, enabling readers to draw a mental image of the space. However, the sheer density of measurements more often overwhelms than informs, and the lack of detail frustrates attempts at architectural reconstruction. In this article, I argue that these numbers and measurements should be analyzed against the backdrop of numerate education and day-to-day mathematical practices in the mid-first millennium BCE. Unlike other biblical and Second Temple period temple building texts, the priestly tabernacle building episode privileges the counting of objects rather than the measurement of spaces, and that the mathematics in these chapters reflects a knowledge of economic administration. This new reading both offers a new vantage point for a possible scribal context for the text’s composition and illuminates what I call a “priestly administrative imagination” that shapes the literary composition and theological profile of the priestly source as a whole.