Exodus 39:34

Summary

Exodus 39:34 lists three components among the finished tabernacle materials: the covering made from ram skins dyed red, the covering made from techashim skins, and the curtain of the screen. The verse is part of an inventory list, using construct chains to specify each item's material.

Key words

• mikhSeh ("covering of", H4372) — masculine singular construct, appearing twice to introduce each skin-covering by naming what it is a covering of.
• orot ("skins of", H5785) — feminine plural construct, linking the covering to the animal skins that compose it.
• me'addamim ("dyed red", H119) — pual (intensive passive) participle, masculine plural, agreeing grammatically with eilim ("rams") rather than with the feminine orot ("skins"), even though semantically it is the skins that are colored.
• techashim ("dolphins"/uncertain animal, H8476) — masculine plural noun with definite article; its precise referent (an animal or a type of hide) is not fixed by the Hebrew form alone.
• parokhet ("curtain of", H6532) — feminine singular construct, joined to ha-masakh ("the screen", H4539) to name a specific curtain distinct from the skin coverings.

What the text says

The verse is built from three parallel noun phrases, each governed by the object marker 'et (H0853), marking three items as direct objects of an implied verb of bringing or presenting (supplied by the wider context of the chapter's list). Each phrase uses a construct chain: "covering of skins of [animal]," a common Hebrew way to indicate material composition without a separate adjective for "made of." The participle ha-me'addamim ("the ones dyed red") sits after ha-eilim ("the rams") and matches it in gender and number, illustrating how Hebrew participles agree with the noun they immediately follow, even when the practical sense (skins being red) points to a different word in the chain. The final phrase, parokhet ha-masakh, itself a construct pairing, names a curtain associated with a screen, distinguished here from the two skin coverings by the shift from mikhSeh to parokhet as the head noun.

Differences between versions

The identity of the techashim (H8476) skins is rendered variously: BSB and SBLIBRE use "fine leather"/"cueros finos," while RV1909 uses "tejones" ("badgers"), reflecting differing interpretive choices for this uncertain term rather than a difference in the Hebrew consonants themselves. The Vulgate text supplied ("velum; arcam, vectes, propitiatorium" — veil, ark, poles, mercy seat) does not correspond to the items named in the Hebrew of this verse (ram skins, techashim skins, curtain of the screen), showing a divergence in content between the Hebrew list given here and the Vulgate wording provided.