Exodus 36:34

Summary

The verse describes the overlaying of the tabernacle's wooden frames with gold, the making of gold rings to hold horizontal bars, and the overlaying of those bars with gold as well. Three distinct actions are reported using two different Hebrew verb forms.

Key words

• ke.ra.Shim ("frames", H7175) — definite masculine plural noun, direct object of the first verb.
• tzi.Pah ("he overlaid", H6823) — piel perfect, 3rd masculine singular; the piel stem often marks an intensive or repeated action, here "covering thoroughly."
• ta.be.'o.Tam ("their rings", H2885) — feminine plural noun in construct form with a 3rd masculine plural suffix, tying the rings back to the frames just mentioned.
• ba.Tim ("holders", H1004N) — literally "houses," masculine plural, used here for the sockets/holders through which the bars pass.
• va.yetzaf ("and he overlaid", H6823) — same root as tzi.Pah, but in the vav-consecutive narrative form, marking the final action as part of a sequential storyline rather than a standalone completed fact.

What the text says

The verse contains three verbal clauses built around the repeated noun za.Hav ("gold", H2091), which appears three times, once for each object gilded: the frames, the rings, and the bars. The first two actions — overlaying the frames (tzi.Pah) and making the rings ('a.Sah, H6213H) — use simple perfect verb forms, which in Biblical Hebrew narrative often present background or summary information rather than strict story sequence. The third action, overlaying the bars (va.yetzaf), switches to the narrative vav-consecutive form, the standard verb form for moving a story forward step by step. This shift suggests the text presents the frame-and-ring work as parallel background facts, then resumes forward narrative motion with the bar-overlaying as the next concrete step.

The phrase ba.Tim la.be.ri.Chim ("holders for the bars") uses ba.Tim, literally "houses" (H1004N), to describe structural sockets — a common Hebrew idiom applying domestic architectural vocabulary to tabernacle construction terminology.

Differences between versions

The Septuagint text supplied (LXXSWETE) does not correspond to this Hebrew content at all — it describes golden bells and pomegranates on the hem of a robe, a wholly different subject, indicating a different placement or numbering of material at this point in the Greek tradition compared to the Hebrew verse given here.

The Vulgate adds "fusis basibus earum argenteis" ("their bases cast in silver"), a phrase with no corresponding word in the Hebrew text provided, where no silver bases or sockets are mentioned in this verse.