The One-Time Tachash That Covered the Ark of Testimony

The Ark did not travel uncovered.

When Israel broke camp in the wilderness, the holiest object in the camp had to move like everyone else. The Ark of Testimony, the place of Torah and divine nearness, was wrapped layer by layer before the Levites carried it into the dust. The outermost covering came from a creature that existed only for this purpose and then was never seen again.

The Creature That Came for One Job

Bamidbar Rabbah 4:13, part of Numbers Rabbah compiled from earlier midrashic traditions, reads Numbers 4:5-6 as a ritual of concealment. Aaron and his sons take down the screening curtain, cover the Ark with it, and then place a tachash hide over the entire assembly. The tachash skin is the outer layer, the face of the Ark that the world sees when the Ark is moving.

The Talmud and midrashic tradition describe the tachash as a rare and brilliantly colored creature, possibly with a single horn, that appeared only in Moses's time for the construction of the Mishkan, the desert sanctuary. Its skin was necessary because no ordinary hide would do for the object that carried the Ten Commandments. When the sanctuary was complete and no more tachash hide was needed, the animal disappeared from the world.

Some beings are created for one moment of service and then leave. The tachash is the clearest example in the midrashic world. It did not live alongside Israel in Canaan. It did not have descendants. Its hide covered the Ark through the years of wandering, and when the Ark reached its permanent home, the tachash had already done everything it was made to do.

The Ark Wrapped in Reverse

Bamidbar Rabbah notices a distinction in the wrapping instructions. The other sacred vessels receive blue cloth first, then other coverings. The Ark receives the screening curtain first, then the tachash hide, then a blue cloth over everything. The order is reversed.

The midrash reads this reversal as a statement about rank. The curtain that hung before the Holy of Holies becomes the Ark's innermost wrap, touching it directly the way a garment touches skin. The tachash hide goes on over the curtain. The blue cloth goes on last, presenting a uniform surface to the traveling camp.

The Ark, in other words, carries the Holy of Holies with it on the road. The curtain that once separated the most sacred space from the rest of the Tabernacle becomes the Ark's personal boundary. Even when the Ark is moving, it maintains around itself the distinction that the curtain once created for an entire room.

Solomon's Doors and David's Prayer

Bamidbar Rabbah connects the Ark's wilderness journey to its later arrival in Jerusalem. The midrash preserves the story of Solomon bringing the Ark into the Temple's Holy of Holies and finding the great doors refusing to open. He prayed twenty-four prayers. The doors would not move. Only when he invoked the merit of his father David and asked God to remember David's faithfulness did the doors finally open and the Ark entered its permanent home.

The same Ark that had traveled through the wilderness under its tachash covering now stood at the threshold of a stone building that had been built for it. The covering was gone. The permanent structure had been prepared. But even permanence required the living merit of those who had loved the Ark before the building existed to protect it.

Abraham and the Table of Showbread

Bamidbar Rabbah draws a line from the wrapping of the table of showbread to the house of David. The sky-blue wool that covered the table in travel corresponds, the midrash says, to the righteousness of David, because God entered a covenant of kingship with him and his sons that paralleled the covenant made with the sanctuary's furnishings at Sinai.

The table and the Ark were both covered in blue and in tachash hide during travel. The kingdom that would eventually house them was being built at the same time the furnishings were being wrapped. The wilderness coverings were temporary, the tachash hide that vanished after its use, but the covenant they traveled inside was not temporary at all.