Vayakhel: Construction Projects

There are 3 great construction projects in the book of Shemoth: The building of store cities of Pithom and Ramses for Pharaoh ( 1:11), the golden calf and the Mishkan with its accouterments. The first two projects are devoid of detail. The products, the store cities and the calf, don’t matter. The details of the construction of the Mishkan take up almost half the book .
The plans for the constrution of the mishkan ( and the priestly garb) are described in Terumah and Tetzaveh. The golden calf incident, in KiThitha is followed by a description of the actual construction ( in Vayakhel) and an accounting of the material costs (Pikudei) . This order is consistent with the idea that the golden calf was an attempt to construct an object to aid in the worship, a mishkan-like thing, but not the proper, instructed thing. The golden calf demonstrates he error of worship based upon human understanding, as opposed to divine instruction, perhaps similar the other construction project, the Tower of Babel.

I imagine that there were alot instructions when the slaves built the store-cities in Egypt and the people may have felt that liberation included the freedom that allows free-form worship. Thus when Rashi identifies the airev rav as the instigators of the Golden calf, he is perhaps suggesting that for the airev rav, the liberation from slavery was the primary goal, as opposed to the Israelites who thought they were fulfilling the prophecy.

The details of the construction do not seem to deviate from the blueprint that is recorded previously. For the reader, it is a repetition. The repetition brings out the phonemes:
cofer: covering, atonement
adon: base-socket, master
nechosheth: copper, serpent ( of the Garden of Eden)


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