Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Exodus 39:37 describes the menorah and its lamps, but adds a line the Hebrew never says aloud. The lamps, the meturgeman tells us, were ordained to correspond to the seven stars, that rule in their prescribed places in the firmament by day and by night.
Heaven on a branch of gold
In the ancient imagination, seven wanderers moved across the night sky — the sun, the moon, and the five visible planets. They were called the seven stars, and their paths were thought to govern seasons, rains, harvests, and the turning of time. The meturgeman takes this and folds it into the sanctuary.
The seven lamps of the menorah, he says, are not just lights. They are a map of the firmament, kindled indoors. When Aharon trimmed the wicks each morning and lit them each evening, he was tending the cosmos in miniature. The lamps burned below exactly where the stars wheeled above.
Order, not worship
The targumist is careful. The lamps correspond to the stars; they do not venerate them. Israel had been warned on Sinai not to bow to the host of heaven (Deuteronomy 4:19). The meturgeman is making the opposite point. The sanctuary does not worship the stars. It tames them. The heavens and their ordered rulers are pulled down into a single piece of hammered gold, their power contained within the service of the God who made them.
The oil for the lamps was olive oil, pressed carefully, never extinguished. The menorah's light did not depend on the heavens. The heavens depended on it. When the lamps were lit, the ancient rabbis taught, the whole cosmic order came into alignment with Israel's prayer.
The takeaway: the sanctuary was never a miniature of the world. It was the world's source. The stars above copied the lamps below.