Parshat Vayakhel5 min read

Abraham's Tree Floated the Sea and Held the Tabernacle

Abraham planted a tamarisk in Beersheba and named the Word. Angels later cast that tree into the sea, and Israel raised it as the Mishkan's middle bar.

Curated by Arthur · Told by Maggid ·
Table of Contents
  1. A Tree Planted for a Name
  2. When Angels Cut the Old Wood
  3. The Middle Bar from End to End
  4. A People Who Said We Will Do
  5. Shade, Sea, and Sanctuary
Abraham's Tree Floated the Sea and Held the Tabernacle Click for full size

A Tree Planted for a Name

Abraham planted a tamarisk in Beersheba, the Well of the Seven, and called there on the Name of the Word of the Lord (Genesis 21:33). The tree was not landscaping. It was a living marker that this well and this open ground belonged to a covenant conversation. Travelers could sit in its shade the way three men once sat under another tree and ate before Sodom's smoke rose.

Abraham's hospitality had always run through wood and water and bread. He taught thanks in the Name of the Word before guests moved on. The tamarisk stood as a green witness that the Memra was not a private idea. It was a public Name spoken over a well on the edge of the desert.

The tree waited. Trees are good at waiting. Generations of wind moved through its branches while Isaac dug wells and Jacob fled and Joseph ruled and a people learned brick under a king who did not know Joseph.

When Angels Cut the Old Wood

Israel crossed the Sea of Reeds and the Egyptian army drowned behind them. Then, the Aramaic says, the angels descended. They cut down Abraham's tree and cast it into the waters. The wood that had shaded a patriarch's prayers floated like a raft on the same sea that had just become a grave for chariots.

A tree from Beersheba in the middle of the sea is a strange sight. It is also a map. The God who bound Himself to Abraham by the Memra was not finished with Abraham's furniture. What was planted in peace would be harvested in redemption. What once marked a well would soon mark the spine of a portable sanctuary.

Israel saw the wood and did not treat it as drift. They knew, as traditions know things, that some objects arrive on the tide already assigned.

The Middle Bar from End to End

In the wilderness the Holy One ordered boards and sockets and bars for the Tabernacle. A middle bar would pass through the boards from end to end, holding the walls together (Exodus 26:28). Plain engineering. The Targum will not leave it plain. That middle bar, it says, came from Abraham's tree.

The wood that once stood vertical in Beersheba now ran horizontal through the Mishkan, locking north wall to south wall, turning separate planks into one house for the Presence. Covenant history became joinery. The everlasting Word that had cut a covenant with Abraham now sat in a tent stiffened by Abraham's own planted wood.

Every time the camp moved, Levites lifted that bar. Every time the cloud stopped, the bar slid back through the boards and the house stood. Abraham's tamarisk had learned to travel.

A People Who Said We Will Do

Before the boards rose, Israel stood at Sinai and answered together. All that the Lord has spoken we will do (Exodus 19:8). The same unity that made them fit to encamp made them fit to answer. They accepted a covenant whose details they did not yet fully hold, the way Abraham once accepted a land he did not yet own.

The middle bar is the quiet proof that acceptance has a history. It is not only thunder and smoke. It is also a tree planted centuries earlier by a man who thanked the Word after bread, waiting for a nation of his seed to lift it into the walls of holiness.

Stand in the finished Mishkan in the mind's eye. Gold, curtains, incense. Run a hand along the hidden bar inside the boards. That grain under the palm once drank water from Beersheba and heard Abraham pray. The Tabernacle does not begin at Sinai alone. Part of it begins under a tamarisk where a ninety-year-old still believed the Memra could use ordinary wood for an everlasting purpose.

Shade, Sea, and Sanctuary

Think of the wood's three lives. First it shaded a well where Abraham spoke the Name of the Word and fed the open road. Second it floated on a sea that had just closed over horses and riders, cut down by angels as if Heaven itself were a lumber crew with a long memory. Third it locked the boards of the Mishkan so the Presence could dwell in a house that moved when Israel moved.

The everlasting covenant between the Memra and Abraham was never only about land and seed. It was about materials of holiness drawn from a life of hospitality and prayer. A people who said we will do at Sinai were also a people who carried their father's tree through the desert without always knowing they were carrying him.

When the cloud lifted, the bar came out. When the cloud rested, the bar went in. Abraham's planted faithfulness became the quiet engineering of glory. No gold covered that middle beam in the telling that matters most. Memory did.

AbrahamTabernacleBeershebaTreeExodusMishkanMemraBezalelWoodCovenant
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From the tradition

Sources

4 sources

The texts behind this telling. Some cards carry a translation of the source; others are our own retelling of it, and each card says which. Every card links out to the original.

Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Exodus 26:28Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Exodus

Retold in our words. Read the original at the link below.The Targum of Jonathan ben Uzziel, trans. J. W. Etheridge, London, 1862 · Public Domain

(Exodus 26:28) describes an engineering detail. A middle bar, passing through the boards of the Tabernacle from end to end, holding the walls together. Plain Hebrew gives the specification and moves on. The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan cannot let it pass. Into this one verse it inserts one of the strangest and most beautiful legends in Targumic literature.

The tree Abraham planted at Be'er Sheva

The middle bar, the Targum says, came from the tree that Abraham planted in Be'er Sheva, the Well of the Seven, where he prayed in the name of the Word of the Lord (Genesis 21:33). That tamarisk stood as Abraham's living monument to the covenant, and it waited, unremarked, for centuries.

When Israel crossed the Sea of Reeds and the Egyptian army drowned behind them, the angels descended. They cut down Abraham's tree and cast it into the waters. The tree floated The first reading like a raft, visible to every Israelite still trembling on the far shore. An angel proclaimed aloud: This is the tree which Abraham planted in Beara of Sheba, and prayed there in the name of the Word of the Lord.

Why would God give the tree a voice at that moment?

Because Israel had just been born as a nation, and the Holy One wanted to show them that their rescue was not an accident. It was the covenant kept. The same tree that heard Abraham's prayer for a son was now witnessing the descendants of that son walk out of slavery on dry ground. The Targum binds Genesis to Exodus with a single piece of wood.

The sons of Israel gathered it from the sea and carried it into the wilderness. When the time came to build the Mishkan, they shaped it into the middle bar, seventy cubits long, passing through every board. The Targum adds a wonder: when the Tabernacle was reared, the bar coiled through the boards like a serpent, bending impossibly. When the Tabernacle was dismantled, it straightened back into a rod.

What does the middle bar teach?

The Mishkan was not a new beginning. It was the completion of something started by Abraham. The God who dwelt between the keruvim was the same God who had received Abraham's prayers under that tree. Every nail, every curtain, every offering rested on the seventy-cubit spine of Abraham's covenant.

The takeaway the old Maggid would press: nothing in a Jewish life is wasted. A tree planted in hospitality becomes, four centuries later, the beam that holds up the house of God.

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Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Genesis 18:5Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Genesis

Retold in our words. Read the original at the link below.The Targum of Jonathan ben Uzziel, trans. J. W. Etheridge, London, 1862 · Public Domain

(Genesis 18:5) in Targum Pseudo-Jonathan turns a simple meal into a moment of blessing. Abraham will bring bread so that the travelers may strengthen their hearts, and, the Targum adds, give thanks in the Name of the Word of the Lord, and afterwards pass on.

The Aramaic Memra, the divine Word, surfaces again. Abraham does not just feed his guests. He expects them, with the bread in them, to bless the Lord whose Word is the framework of the universe, and only then to continue their journey.

The rabbis would later see in this verse the root of the practice of birkat ha-mazon, the blessing after meals. Food is not just fuel. Food is the occasion for gratitude, and gratitude is what turns eating into something more than animal maintenance.

The visitors, still in the form of men, still angels on the inside, reply with four words of respect: Thou hast spoken well; do according to thy word. Even angels accept that an Abrahamic meal is not a quick bite. It is a small liturgy of gratitude.

The Maggid hears the shape of Jewish hospitality in this one verse. Welcome the guest. Feed the guest. Invite the guest into a blessing. Send the guest back on the road with something more than bread in his belly, with a completed act of worship (Genesis 18:5). The tent of Abraham, the Targum quietly insists, is the first Jewish dining table. Every Shabbat meal is still doing what he did.

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Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Genesis 17:7Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Genesis

Retold in our words. Read the original at the link below.The Targum of Jonathan ben Uzziel, trans. J. W. Etheridge, London, 1862 · Public Domain

When the Lord frames the covenant in (Genesis 17:7), Targum Pseudo-Jonathan slips in one of its most telling technical terms. The covenant is established between My Word and thee.

Not between God and Abraham, as the Hebrew simply says. Between the Memra of the Lord and Abraham.

The Targum's Memra is the way the Aramaic paraphrase names God's active, speaking, covenanting Presence without ever violating divine transcendence. When God walks in the garden, it is the Memra walking. When God speaks at Sinai, it is the Memra speaking. When God cuts a covenant with a ninety-nine-year-old in Canaan, it is the Memra binding itself to him.

The covenant is everlasting, ad le-alma in the Aramaic. And extends to thy sons after thee in their generations. That is what makes it a covenant and not a mood. It outlives its signatories. Abraham will die; his sons will die; the Memra will not. Every generation walks into a contract already in force before they arrived.

The Maggid notices the promise inside the grammar. The Lord says, I will be a God to thee and to thy sons after thee (Genesis 17:7). The after is the point. A covenant is a promise that still applies when you are no longer in the room. Abraham signs, and his great-grandchildren are suddenly parties to a contract none of them ever read. This is the theology Jewish parents hand down on the way to the circumcision of an eight-day-old boy, you were already loved before you could understand the word love.

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Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Exodus 19:8Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Exodus

Retold in our words. Read the original at the link below.The Targum of Jonathan ben Uzziel, trans. J. W. Etheridge, London, 1862 · Public Domain

The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan records one of the most consequential sentences ever spoken by a people: "All the people responded together, and said, All that the Lord hath spoken we will do. And Moses carried back the words of the people before the Lord" (Exodus 19:8).

The Aramaic emphasizes together, echoing the earlier "of one heart" (Exodus 19:2). The same unity that made Israel fit to encamp at Sinai now makes them fit to answer it. There is no dissent recorded. No faction breaks off to negotiate terms. The response is immediate and collective.

The famous expansion of this response, na'aseh v'nishma, "we will do and we will hear", comes in (Exodus 24:7), but the Targum already establishes the pattern here. Israel agrees before the Ten Commandments are articulated. They say yes to a covenant whose contents they do not fully know.

The rabbis of the Talmud (Shabbat 88a) marvel at this. A heavenly voice, they say, called out that Israel had revealed a divine secret, the angels' own order of service is to do first and understand second. In saying yes before asking what, Israel was mirroring the structure of heaven.

Moses then "carried back the words of the people before the Lord", a liturgical shuttling between earth and heaven. The takeaway: sometimes the most consequential yes is the one given before the terms are fully known, when trust in the covenanting partner is the only evidence you have.

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