The Divine Warrior in His Tent

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Yahweh could have asked Moses for just about anything—a temple, a palace, even a pyramid. Instead, Yahweh requests that Moses build him a tent (Exodus 25:8–9). Once the tent has been constructed according to Yahweh’s exacting instructions, the Israelite deity moves in. For the rest of the Israelites’ stay in Sinai, throughout the desert wanderings, during the conquest and settlement of Canaan, through the reigns of Israel’s first two kings, all the way to the completion of Solomon’s Temple—that is, from the Book of Exodus through 1 Kings 8—Yahweh dwells in a tent.

Of course, the desert Tabernacle, with its elaborate construction of gold, silver, bronze, wood, linen, goats’ hair and leather (Exodus 26), is no ordinary tent. Its greatness is indicated by Yahweh’s own lack of enthusiasm at the prospect of moving from tent to Temple. When David asks Yahweh if he is interested in giving up the tent lifestyle and settling down in a lovely three-room temple built on prime Jerusalem real estate, Yahweh responds negatively:

Are you to build a house for me to dwell in? I have not dwelt in a house from the day that I brought the people of Israel up from Egypt to this day, but I have moved about in a tent and in a tabernacle. As I moved about wherever the Israelites went, did I ever speak to any of the tribal leaders whom I appointed to care for my people Israel, saying: “Why have you not built me a house of cedar?”

2 Samuel 7:5–7

Yahweh seems quite content with his portable accommodations, which are described in more detail (Exodus 25–27 and 36–38) than any other structure in the Bible—even the Jerusalem Temple. But despite the attention given to the Tabernacle’s construction and the grand role it plays throughout the Hebrew Bible, the historicity of the Tabernacle account has suffered greatly, as Kenneth Kitchen notes in the preceding article in this issue. The description of the Tabernacle is regularly dismissed as a fiction, a mere retrojection of the Jerusalem Temple’s design. But the Temple is not the closest parallel to the Tabernacle. As we shall see, one particular ancient structure is much closer in design to the Tabernacle than the Temple is. This structure not only offers a historical precedent for the Tabernacle’s design, but also helps us understand just what kind of deity would ask his people to build him a tent rather than a temple.

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But before we turn to this example, let’s look at how the historicity of the Tabernacle account first came under fire.

In the late 19th century, the German Bible scholar Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918) synthesized the work of earlier scholars in developing what has come to be known as the documentary hypothesis. According to Wellhausen, it is possible to detect the work of at least four authors in the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible): J, named after this author’s frequent use of “Yahweh” (German, Jahweh) for God’s name; E, who prefers the name Elohim for God; P, an author concerned with priestly issues; and D,^a for the author of Deuteronomy (as well as portions of Joshua through Kings).¹ The detailed descriptions of the Tabernacle’s construction and the maintenance of its cult, as well as the vast majority of legal material, were all attributed to P, the priestly author.^b

These various authors wrote at different stages in the history of Israel. But of all the sources, Wellhausen argued, P alone wrote after 539 B.C.E., when the Persian leader Cyrus the Great ended the Babylonian Exile of the Jews and allowed them to return to Israel and rebuild the Temple. P was motivated by a desire to establish a centralized cult in Jerusalem through stringent ritual legislation. P’s motives, according to Wellhausen, were selfish: The priestly author’s focus on the Tabernacle and its cultic implements and associated rituals was inspired by his ambition to secure a stronghold in the business of post-Exilic Jewish religion.

The Tabernacle, for Wellhausen, was the primary evidence of the priestly source’s fraudulence. He insisted that the Tabernacle never existed outside the priestly author’s imagination. How did the priestly author come up with the design of the Tabernacle? He simply halved the dimensions of the Temple, thereby making it portable, Wellhausen argued. The Temple measured 60 cubits in length by 20 in width (1 Kings 6:2); the Tabernacle measured 30 cubits in length by 10 in width (Exodus 26:15–25).² This was no coincidence, according to Wellhausen. In support of his theory, Wellhausen noted that both structures were oriented to the east, with the holy of holies to the west. He insisted that this orientation necessitated a fixed 026building, not a tent.³ The priestly Tabernacle, he concluded, “is in truth not the model, but the copy, of the Jerusalem Temple.”⁴

Although many aspects of Wellhausen’s portrayal of P have been challenged,^c and several scholars, including Frank Moore Cross, Kenneth Kitchen and myself, have traced the history of cultic tents well into the third millennium B.C.E.,⁵ current opinion in the field continues to conform to Wellhausen’s basic premise; that is, although an early tent shrine may have played some minor role in the cult of early Israel, it would have been far more austere than P’s ornate tent, which was influenced by the Jerusalem Temple.⁶

But the Jerusalem Temple does not provide a definite model for the Tabernacle, as is revealed by a quick comparison of their plans. Contrary to Wellhausen’s theory, the Tabernacle does not simply follow the Temple plan at half scale. Although the length and width of the Temple and the Tabernacle do maintain a 2:1 ratio, the same cannot be said of the height of the buildings: The Temple stood 30 cubits, while the Tabernacle stood only 10 (Exodus 26:16)—a ratio of 3:1.⁷ Furthermore, the Tabernacle is surrounded by a rectangular courtyard (Exodus 27:18), while there is no specified rectangular courtyard surrounding the Temple. Lastly, the Temple consisted of three rooms: the forecourt (’uïlaµm), the main hall (heïkaµl) and the innermost shrine room (dbiïr) (see plan of Yahweh’s Tabernacle and Ramesses II’s Camp). The Tabernacle, on the other hand, was a two-room structure. A lamp stand, an incense altar and a bread table stood in the outer room. In the inner chamber were the Ark of the Covenant and the golden cherubim, which represented Yahweh’s footstool and throne.

In this issue Kenneth Kitchen has enumerated several ancient structures that mirror the Tabernacle better than the Jerusalem Temple does. I would like to focus on what I consider the closest parallel—the tent and military camp used by Ramesses II when facing the Hittites at the Battle of Kadesh, which took place on Egypt’s Syrian front in about 1275 B.C.E. Based on the evidence of Ramesses’ camp, it now seems that the priestly author’s description of the Tabernacle was strongly influenced by the form and function of Egyptian military camps. P’s sources must have drawn on, or been influenced by, traditions that dated hundreds of years earlier than Wellhausen reckoned.

The Battle of Kadesh is one of the most momentous battles in antiquity and, arguably, the best documented (see the first sidebar to this article). In the fifth year of his reign, Ramesses II marched 20,000 troops up from his new capital city of Pi-Ramesses, in the Delta, through Canaan and Israel and along the Beq’a Valley (in modern Lebanon) to Kadesh, on the Orontes River in Syria. Meanwhile, the Hittite king Muwatallis had quietly amassed his troops, including 2,500 chariots, just outside Kadesh. As Ramesses approached the Orontes, Muwatallis led a surprise attack.

The outcome of the clash for the Egyptians was, at best, a stalemate. But when Ramesses returned home to Egypt, he nonetheless boasted of his victory over the Hittites. His narrow escape from the Hittite ambush is detailed in inscriptions and reliefs on the walls of his mortuary temple at Thebes (the Ramesseum) and his temples at Karnak, Luxor, Abydos and Abu 028Simbel. On papyrus as well as stone, in both poetic and prose form, Ramesses recorded how his men deserted him during the battle and how he nevertheless prevailed over “a hundred thousand men.” Proclaiming himself “lord of victory and lover of valor,” Ramesses declared himself the winner of the battle. The story of the Battle of Kadesh became required reading for Egyptian schoolboys, who practiced their writing by copying the story. A Hittite record of the battle and a victory stele erected by the Egyptians at Beth-Shean in the Jordan Valley, which was then an Egyptian stronghold, are also extant.

What interests us here are the images of Ramesses’ camp found in four Egyptian reliefs he commissioned, one on the north wall of the Great Hall at Abu Simbel (see above), another on a pylon at Luxor (see below), and two at the Ramesseum at Thebes—one on the first pylon and the other, now damaged, on a wall of the second court.

All four reliefs depict Ramesses’ camp as rectangular, its perimeter lined with large leather shields standing side by side. At the center of the camp is a rectangular tent. In the courtyard horses are being harnessed to chariots, soldiers are being fed, and the wounded are being treated. In the lower-right-hand corner of the camp as it is depicted in the Abu Simbel relief, a captive who falsified reports concerning the position of the Hittite forces is being beaten; the Hittite chariotry is shown breaking into the camp immediately above.

An unprecedented effort at realism characterizes these pictorial records—perhaps owing to the indelible impression left by such a narrowly averted military and political disaster. For example, each relief depicts Ramesses’ pet lion relaxing outside the tent in the center of camp. Even more striking, the images of the soldiers in the pharaoh’s army, in contrast to typical Egyptian battle scenes, are no larger than the images of their enemies. Similarly, while the pharaoh himself is not depicted, the pharaoh’s cartouche,^d displayed in the pharaoh’s tent in the Abu Simbel relief, is no larger than the warriors. As the distinguished 030Egyptologist Gaballa Ali Gaballa wrote, “The scenes of the battle of Qadesh constitute, undoubtedly, the zenith of all…attempts and ventures of the Egyptian artist [up to that time] to give a specific rendition of a specific event.”⁸

The parallels between Ramesses’ camp and the biblical Tabernacle, beginning with the dimensions, are striking.⁹ In each of the reliefs, Ramesses’ camp forms a rectangular courtyard twice as long as it is wide. The main entrance to the courtyard is located in the middle of one of the short walls. A road leads from this entrance to the first of two adjacent tents, the so-called reception tent, the entrance to which lies directly in the middle of the courtyard. The length of the reception tent is twice its width (and, judging from the Abu Simbel relief, its height). The reception tent leads into the pharaoh’s throne tent, which is square, each side being equal to the width of the reception tent. The tent and the camp lie on an east-west axis, with the entrance to the east. Although the orientation is not clear in the reliefs, an inscription at the Ramesseum records that the Hittite chariots pursued the Egyptian princes to the west end of the camp, that is, the camp’s back side.¹⁰

How does this compare with the desert Tabernacle? The Tabernacle is encompassed by a rectangular courtyard 100 cubits in length and 50 in width, mirroring the 2:1 ratio found at Ramesses’ camp. Like the Egyptian camp, the Tabernacle is oriented east-west, with the entrance to the courtyard in the middle of the eastern wall. The Tabernacle entrance lies directly at the center of the courtyard. The first room consists of a forechamber, the length of which is twice its height and width. The second room, the holy of holies, is a cube, the measurement of each side equaling the width of the forechamber.

The similarities reach beyond the ground plan: At Abu Simbel Ramesses II’s cartouche, in the inner tent, is flanked on either side by a representation of the winged falcon god Horus; the birds’ wings cover the pharaoh’s golden throne. In the innermost room of the Tabernacle, the wings of two cherubim cover Yahweh’s golden throne:¹¹

Make two cherubim of gold—make them of hammered work—at the two ends of the cover [of the Ark of the Covenant]…The cherubim shall have their wings spread out above, shielding the cover with their wings. They shall confront each other, the faces of the cherubim being turned toward the cover…There I will meet with you, and I will impart to you—from above the cover, from 031between the cherubim that are on top of the Ark of the Covenant—all that I will command you concerning the Israelite people.

Exodus 25:18–22

The evidence from Egypt suggests that the elaborate tent described by the priestly author need not have been a fictitious, half-sized copy of the Temple, as Wellhausen claimed. The design appears to have been borrowed from Egyptian military camps.

Unfortunately, the Kadesh reliefs are the only known depictions of an ancient Egyptian military camp. Consequently, we do not know how long this design remained in use and how widespread it was.¹² Apparently the priestly author, like a good historian, made use of written documentation composed centuries earlier that recorded in detail the Tabernacle’s form.

The incorporation of foreign iconography and ritual into Israelite religion is nothing new. Many aspects of the Israelite cult reflect the religious concepts and practices of neighboring cultures. Biblical descriptions of Yahweh, for example, are replete with the same kind of royal and solar imagery used to describe various ancient Near Eastern solar deities. Thus the praise of Yahweh in Psalm 104 bears a strong resemblance to a 14th-century B.C.E. Egyptian hymn to the sun god Aten that is carved on the wall of a tomb in Pharaoh Akhenaten’s capital city, Akhetaten (Tell el-Amarna).^e

In his camp Ramesses, like Akhenaten and other Egyptian pharaohs, presented himself as the living sun god. Ramesses’ name even means “Begotten by Ra,” the solar deity. The common Egyptian expression “waking in life in the tent of the pharaoh” signaled the beginning of a new day, as Ramesses, the solar deity, waked with the sunrise. Thus he carried out the common Egyptian practice of orienting his monumental architecture, as well as his military camp, to the direction of the sun’s dawning. This solar imagery perhaps explains the orientation of both Ramesses II’s tent and the Tabernacle. (In any case, Ramesses’ tent negates Wellhausen’s theory that the Tabernacle’s eastern orientation necessitated a fixed building rather than a portable tent.)¹³

The concept of the divinity living in a tent may also be a borrowed one. As Frank Moore Cross of Harvard University pointed out many years ago in his seminal article on the Tabernacle, the deity El, head of the Canaanite pantheon, is described in Ugaritic texts as residing in a tent.¹⁴ And the fertility deity Min, held by 033many to be Egypt’s first deity, also lived in a tent. One other New Kingdom text shows the use of tents by the Egyptian pantheon. In the “Contest of Horus and Seth,” the gods quarrel, and following some name-calling, “the gods went to their tents. The great god [Re] slept in his pavilion.” Thus the Israelite god Yahweh living in a tent is by no means an anomaly in the ancient Near East.

The Kadesh battle reliefs are even more significant, however, because they imply that the tent dweller, Yahweh, was regarded as a divine warrior who commanded his troops from a military tent. In the inscriptions recording the battle of Kadesh, Ramesses likens himself to a divine warrior. He is frequently referred to as the “son of Re” and has intimate conversations with his father the sun god. Simultaneously, Ramesses is “a strong wall about his army,” “brave” and “fear inspiring”: Abandoned by his cowardly troops in the heat of battle, he fearlessly put on his armor, mounted his horse (Victory in Thebes) and charged the enemy’s 2,500 chariots, where, he boasted, “I killed among them as I willed, not relaxing.” In the end Ramesses claimed to have “overthrown by my strong arm hundreds of thousands.” At times, Yahweh is also far from a passive, peace-seeking God. The Bible describes Yahweh as a “man of war” (Exodus 15:3), a “warrior” (Psalm 24:8), who single-handedly fights for Israel (Exodus 14–15). On occasion, Yahweh even calls for the total destruction of Israel’s enemies, including women and children.¹⁵

The description of the way the Tabernacle was disassembled and carried from place to place, accompanied by trumpets and standards, with troops in tribal formation, also corresponds to what we know of ancient Near Eastern armies on campaigns. The Kadesh-bound Egyptian forces were divided into four separate units, with Ramesses at their head. The Israelites, led by Yahweh, likewise marched in four distinct units (Numbers 2). Even the pillar of fire and cloud that guided the Israelites (Exodus 40:35–38) may have had a military basis. Remember, Alexander the Great notified his troops when to break camp by placing on a pillar a signal of smoke by day and of fire by night.¹⁶

Of course, the Tabernacle was more than a war tent: It was the locus for communion between the Israelites and their deity. This was a function it shared with the 055later Temple. The source of the Tabernacle design was not the Temple, however; nor was the design simply the product of P’s fertile imagination. Rather, the layout and dimensions of the Tabernacle reflect those of Egyptian military camps. The biblical authors borrowed Egyptian imagery in order to present the Tabernacle as the traveling headquarters, the terrestrial office, of Yahweh. Stationed between the cherubim on his golden throne, the Divine Warrior Yahweh used his forces—both divine and human—to battle against the enemies of ancient Israel.

022 Yahweh could have asked Moses for just about anything—a temple, a palace, even a pyramid. Instead, Yahweh requests that Moses build him a tent (Exodus 25:8–9). Once the tent has been constructed according to Yahweh’s exacting instructions, the Israelite deity moves in. For the rest of the Israelites’ stay in Sinai, throughout the desert wanderings, during the conquest and settlement of Canaan, through the reigns of Israel’s first two kings, all the way to the completion of Solomon’s Temple—that is, from the Book of Exodus through 1 Kings 8—Yahweh dwells in a tent. Of course, the desert […]