24:5-9
We move from lamps to loaves. This is the only place where the recipe is given for the bread. As with the lamps, there is an emphasis on purity and continuity. Pure incense was to be used, and they were put on a table of pure gold. This was to happen Sabbath after Sabbath. Great importance was attached to this bread and its offering to the Lord. At the end we are told “it belongs to Aaron and his sons”.
24:10-12
We now come to the sentence for blasphemy, and this is then widened out into the general lex talionis (“law of the claw”), i.e. the “eye for an eye....” rule. This might seem a bit of a jump from the start of this chapter which dealt with olive oil and bread. However, maybe there is a link. One of the key points in the previous section was purity. Now we have an incident outside the tabernacle, and it is dealt with with extreme severity. Maintaining “holiness” was not just something for the tabernacle nor the temple, but applied to all of life. So the man who gets involved in a fight and curses the Lord, no doubt in the heat of the moment, is used as an example. He is the son of an Israelite and an Egyptian father. Nothing is made of the latter, it may well be that he was conceived back in Egypt, indeed it is highly likely that this was so. He is held in custody until the Lord’s will is revealed. It is interesting that the immediate ancestry on the mother’s side of the man is given, but the man himself is not named.
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