Exodus 40 ends with a single line of deep significance. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan renders Exodus 40:33 simply: Moses reared up the court around the tabernacle and the altar, set the hanging at the gate, "and Mosheh completed the work."
The rabbis noticed that the Hebrew verb used here — va-yekhal, "he completed" — appears in only one other place in the Torah. Genesis 2:2 says God va-yekhal the work of creation on the seventh day. Moses finishing the Tabernacle is cast, deliberately, as a human echo of divine creation. The midrash in Pesikta Rabbati 6 spells it out: the world was built in seven days, and the Tabernacle in seven days of assembly, and both ended with the same word.
The court as boundary
The final act was not the ark, not the altar, not the menorah — it was the fence. Moses raised the curtains of the outer court and set the embroidered hanging at its entrance. Only then was the sanctuary finished. A sacred space is not complete until its edges are defined. You must know where the ordinary world ends and the holy one begins.
What completion meant
The Targum's phrasing is spare, almost anticlimactic. No fanfare, no pillar of cloud yet. Just one man, doing the last thing on a very long list. Every board, every socket, every curtain accounted for. The midrashic tradition in Tanchuma Pekudei 11 imagines Moses unable to finish the lifting of the walls himself and the Tabernacle miraculously rising of its own accord at his touch. But the Targum stays closer to the text — Moses did it, and it was done.
The takeaway: to finish what you started is itself a kind of creation. The Tabernacle was not holy because God showed up. God showed up because the work was complete.