Exodus 26, 27

Moses, eager to get to work on the ark and the table and the candlesticks, is handed some home ec tasks: God wants him to make curtains. Ten serious friggin' curtains with cherubim on them, which I again must stress are absolutely totally not graven images even though they totally seem like they are.

Each curtain must be eight and twenty cubits long and four cubits wide. That's 42 feet by six feet! That's a tall curtain. Once all ten curtains are finished Moses needs to sew five of them together and make two very large curtains. Placed at the top of each of these giant curtains are 50 loops and 50 clasps. These curtains comprise the tabernacle.

But wait! Moses has to make 11 more curtains to cover the tabernacle, this time out of goat hair, and this time 45 feet by 6 feet! That's a lot of goats for a group of people wandering around the desert eating bread dropped from the sky. Again Mo has to create two giant panels—one consisting of five of the goat hair curtains and the other of six goat hair curtains, with the sixth panel acting as the front flap for the tabernacle—with 50 more loops and clasps. 

Now get this: God wants Moses to make another covering for the two previous curtain tents he's already made! Out of ram and badger skins! Dyed red! Unfortunately, badgers are not indigenous to Egypt and the surrounding deserts so Mo and Co have a big road trip ahead of them. 

Just as Moses is trying to get all the dye off his hands he finds out he still has to build an enormous fence-like thing out of shittim wood, which is a name I totally did not make up. And this fence-thing is complicated. Each 15-by-two-and-a-quarter-foot long board has to be made in two parts that fit together with a tenon joint. The north and south sides of the tabernacle's four sides needs to be made out of 20 boards—each. That means the sides are 300 by 45 feet! And on each board are two sockets made of silver. God knows why.

After that, this tabernacle thing goes into overdrive. The west side needs two different walls, and weird corner walls, and there are bars inside that stretch from end to end. And of course all the boards must be layered in gold. Why even bother mentioning that? Rule of thumb: when making something for God just cover the damn thing in gold.

So when the tabernacle is finished, Moses hangs up the curtains with the cherubims on them, then the goat-and-badger hair curtains, then maybe that other curtain that's been dyed red, although the Bible doesn't really say so exactly, and then he fetches the ark and puts the mercy seat on it, and then there's the table, which is placed on the south side of the tabernacle, and the candlestick, which is placed on the south side of the north-side-placed table, and then Moses has to make a door hanger and five pillars and an altar. After all this Moses still has to make an altar!

The altar is just as complicated as the tabernacle. It's seven and half feet square and four and a half feet tall, with brass horns at the corners, with a pit for burning offerings and tons of tools, all of which should be made of brass. Around the altar is a court consisting of 20 pillars covered with an obscene number of brass sockets and silver hooks on which are hung tapestries that are 150 feet long. But there's still more: there's stuff for west side, southwest side, middle-east, rich house, dog house, outhouse, old folks house, house for unwed mothers, halfway homes, catacombs, twilight zones. All that's missing are techniques, turntables, and gramophones! 

And you know what? God's not even done yet! The next few chapters deal with what kind of clothes everyone should wear when they enter the tabernacle and which kind of animals should be sacrificed and the best ways to sacrifice them. All in all, more time will be spent on the proper way to gild shittim wood than was spent detailing how we should avoid killing each other. No wonder the world's so fucked up.