A tent pitched outside the camp, a cloud at the door, and a God who talked with Moses like a friend. Then John says the Word pitched His tent among us.
The tent of meeting, in Hebrew ohel moed, was the tent where God met with Moses and spoke with His people in the wilderness. Its whole purpose is in the name: a meeting place.
Exodus uses the phrase for two pictures: a simple tent Moses pitched outside the camp in Exodus 33, and the tabernacle built at the center of the camp in Exodus 25 to 40. Whether those are the same tent is honestly debated. What they share is the point. God wanted to meet with people, and John 1:14 says He finally did it in flesh.
The tent is not a floor plan to memorize. It is a story about how close God wanted to be, and how close He came.
The ordinary word for a tent, the same word used for the tents families lived in. Nothing about it is grand. God's meeting place and a shepherd's home share a noun.
An appointment. The word covers a fixed time, a festival, an assembly, and the place where people gather. It comes from the verb ya'ad, to appoint or to meet by arrangement.
The other name, usually translated tabernacle. It comes from shakan, to dwell. Where ohel moed says meeting, mishkan says dwelling.
Exodus 40:34 uses the two names in one breath. The cloud covered the tent of meeting, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle. Meeting and dwelling, side by side.
A meeting is an appointment: you come, you speak, you go home. A dwelling is where someone lives. The wilderness story moves between both, and Exodus 29 puts them two verses apart.
“There I will meet you and speak to you; there also I will meet with the Israelites, and the place will be consecrated by my glory.”
Exodus 29:43The tent of meeting was named for what happened there. It was an appointment God kept with people, and He was the one who set it.
The first time the tent of meeting shows up in a story, the setting is painful. Exodus 32 is the golden calf. In Exodus 33:3 God tells Moses the people can go on to the land, but He will not go with them. Right after that, the text says Moses used to take a tent and pitch it outside the camp, some distance away, and call it the tent of meeting.
Many readers see the distance as a sign of the breach, a fair reading though the text never says it outright. What the text does say is that the tent was open.
Exodus 33:7 says anyone who sought the Lord went out to it. No priest, no ritual. Seeking was the requirement.
Whenever Moses walked out, the whole camp rose and stood at their tent doors, watching until he went inside.
The pillar of cloud stood at the entrance while the Lord spoke, and the people worshiped, each at the door of their own tent.
When Moses went back to the camp, his young aide stayed behind. See our study of Joshua in the Bible.
“The LORD would speak to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend. Then Moses would return to the camp, but his young aide Joshua son of Nun did not leave the tent.”
Exodus 33:11Face to face is an idiom for directness, not a claim that Moses looked at God's physical face. Nine verses later in the same chapter God tells him, you cannot see my face. The writer holds both on purpose: open, unhurried conversation, the kind friends have, without seeing the fullness of God's glory. For his life story, see who Moses was.
And Joshua, who would one day lead Israel across the Jordan, spent his formative years where God spoke. Deuteronomy 31 closes the loop: God had him commissioned at the tent of meeting, with the cloud over the entrance. His leadership was formed in God's presence long before it was exercised in public.
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Manage My Giving"Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver."2 Corinthians 9:7
Here is where careful readers get stuck. Exodus 25 to 31 gives the instructions for the tabernacle and Exodus 35 to 40 builds it. But Exodus 33, sitting between those blocks, already has Moses using a tent of meeting, and the two do not look alike.
The Exodus 33 tent stands outside the camp with Joshua inside and no priests at all. The tabernacle stands in the middle of the camp, served by Aaron's family and guarded by Levites, and Numbers 1 warns that any outsider who came near was to be put to death. At one, God comes down for a conversation. At the other, the glory settles and stays. People have read that difference in three main ways.
The medieval Jewish commentators Ibn Ezra and Ramban read Exodus 33 as a tent Moses used as the meeting place until the tabernacle was finished. Most Christian readers hold some form of this.
The nineteenth century Italian scholar Samuel David Luzzatto, known as Shadal, read God's refusal to go up among the people as a pause on the tabernacle plan, with Moses' tent standing in.
Many modern scholars see two older accounts kept together, a simple prophetic tent outside the camp and a priestly sanctuary at the center. Rabbi Zev Farber lays out this case, along with the medieval answers, in his essay on the other ohel moed.
Our position: nobody can prove which of these is right, and anyone who says it is settled is overclaiming. The traditional view makes good sense of how Exodus is ordered. The view that Scripture kept more than one memory of Israel's worship is also honest, and it threatens nothing we believe. Scripture came through human authors and editors, over time, and it shows. What we reject is flattening it, either by shrinking the outside tent to a footnote so the blueprint can be the main event, or by treating the tension as proof the whole thing was invented.
Hold it up to Jesus and it gets clearer. The guarded sanctuary, where coming near could mean death, was a real stage in how Israel understood holiness, not the final word on what God is like. The open tent, where anyone who sought the Lord could walk out and God talked like a friend, sits much closer to the Father Jesus revealed.
Numbers 11 belongs with that open tent. Seventy elders gather around it, the Spirit rests on them and they prophesy, and so do Eldad and Medad back in the camp. Joshua wants them stopped. Moses wishes all the Lord's people were prophets. The tent was never meant to keep the Spirit in.
Who stayed inside the tent of meeting when Moses went back to the camp?
Exodus 33:11. Moses returned to the camp, but Joshua son of Nun did not leave the tent. Aaron belongs to the tabernacle chapters, the seventy elders to Numbers 11.
Exodus closes on its most dramatic scene.
“Then the cloud covered the tent of meeting, and the glory of the LORD filled the tabernacle. Moses could not enter the tent of meeting because the cloud had settled on it, and the glory of the LORD filled the tabernacle.”
Exodus 40:34 to 35Next to Exodus 33 you feel the change. Outside the camp, Moses walked in and talked like a friend. Here he cannot go in at all. Then Numbers 2 arranges every tribe around the tent under its own banner. God is no longer a visitor at the edge. He is the center everything is organized around. For the cloud itself, see our study on the Shekinah glory, and for what sat in the innermost room, the ark of the covenant.
Make a sanctuary, God says, so that He can dwell among them. Nearness is the goal from the start.
The golden calf. God says He will not go with them. Moses pitches a tent outside the camp, and God still meets him there.
Moses pleads, and God replies that His Presence will go with them and He will give them rest.
The finished tabernacle is covered by the cloud and filled with the glory of the Lord.
The God who said I will not go with you now travels in the middle of the tribes.
The story runs from a God who says I will not go with you to a God whose glory sits at the center of the camp. Moses' intercession is the hinge.
“The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.”
John 1:14The verb translated made his dwelling is skenoo, which means to pitch a tent or to encamp. It comes from skene, the word the Greek Old Testament used for the tabernacle and the tent of meeting. Literally, the Word tabernacled among us, and John adds glory, the very thing that filled the tent in Exodus 40.
Moses spoke face to face and still could not see God's face. John 1:18 says no one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is Himself God, has made Him known. Jesus is not another visitor to the meeting place. He is the meeting place, God come to dwell with us and the clearest picture of the Father we will ever have. Our study on the incarnation of Jesus walks through what it means for God to take on flesh.
The tabernacle is a spiritual map. Move from the outer court to the holy place to the Most Holy Place, step by step, and you will finally get into God's presence.
The meeting place is a Person. God pitched His tent in human flesh. You do not work your way through courtyards to reach Him. He came out to you.
As a devotional picture the courtyard map is mostly harmless. As a system for earning access, it quietly rebuilds the curtain Jesus tore. Matthew 27:51 says the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. Top to bottom is the direction of a gift.
Hebrews 8:13 says the first covenant was obsolete and would soon disappear, and it did when the temple fell in AD 70 and the covenant transition was complete. The meeting place did not vanish with it. It had already moved into a Person, and by His Spirit into His people. Our study on being the temple of God carries that part of the story.
Everything in the tent of meeting story leans toward nearness. God meets, speaks, fills the tent, moves to the center of the camp, and then pitches His tent in flesh. So the question is not how to get into a tent that no longer stands. It is whether we will go out to meet Him, the way anyone who sought the Lord did. Joshua stayed. The Kingdom is here now, the Spirit is poured out on all God's people, and friendship with God is not reserved for a Moses. Jesus said it plainly to His disciples: I have called you friends.
That can look ordinary: a kitchen table before the kids are up, the Northern State with the radio off, a Sunday in Deer Park with people seeking the same Lord.
For related reading, see the presence of God, the glory of God, the throne room and the temple and the law of Moses. If you would like someone to pray with you, send us a prayer request, or plan a visit and meet with us in person.
The tent of meeting was God's appointment with His people, first a simple tent outside the camp where He spoke with Moses as a friend, then a tabernacle filled with glory at the center of Israel, and finally Jesus, the Word who pitched His tent among us so that anyone can come near.
You do not have to find the tent on your own. Send us a prayer request and someone at Sound of Heaven will pray with you.
The tent of meeting, ohel moed in Hebrew, was the tent where God met with Moses and spoke to Israel during the wilderness years. Exodus 33 describes Moses pitching a tent outside the camp, where anyone seeking the Lord could go and where God spoke with Moses face to face. Later chapters use the same name for the tabernacle at the center of the camp, which the glory of God filled.
In most of Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers, yes. Exodus 40 uses tent of meeting and tabernacle for the same structure. The harder question is the tent in Exodus 33, pitched outside the camp before the tabernacle was built. Ibn Ezra and Ramban saw it as a tent Moses used until the tabernacle was finished. Many modern scholars see two older traditions preserved together. The text does not settle it, and both point to God meeting His people.
Exodus 33 places it outside the camp right after the golden calf, when God had said He would not go with the people. Many readers see the distance as a sign of that broken trust, though the text does not say so directly. What it clearly shows is access: anyone who sought the Lord could walk out to it. Later the tabernacle stood at the center of the camp, God moving toward His people.
It describes directness and friendship, not a literal view of God's face. The same chapter has God tell Moses, you cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live. Moses spoke with God openly, the way a person talks with a friend, without riddles or a go between. John 1:18 then says the one and only Son has made God known, which is the fullest face to face there is.
John 1:14 says the Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us. The Greek verb comes from the word for tent, so a literal rendering is that He tabernacled among us, and John immediately adds that we have seen His glory. Jesus is the meeting place between God and people, and through Him anyone who seeks the Lord can come near.