I Didn't Play Too Many Text Adventures When Young, Honest..
I wasn't feeling so great yesterday so other than boring daily stuff and going out to the shops and watching Richard Hammond a bit, I mainly read. Current reading is the Bible, the parallel Hebrew-JPS English Tanakh to be precise, and mainly because its also background reading for my current Old Testament textbook... I was raised Catholic, so many of the events are familiar to me but this is the first time I've sat and read large chunks.
Genesis was good fun, and Exodus to start with (the word for frog in Hebrew has way too many letters mind you), and I really am both fascinated and impressed that things written so long ago should have the power to delight and intrigue me so much. Um, and then I got onto the bit about God's instructions for his tabernacle, which go on for pages and pages about the size of the ark and then how many cubits of material should make the curtains, and fifty loops held with clasps, and then gold-covered carrying poles and then another wooden structure and more tent type stuff and all the gold and precious stones. And then its all repeated in similar detail when they actually build the thing! I was a little perplexed by this amount of detailed craftmanship demanded of people stoating around in the wilderness for nigh on 40 years and googled "tabernacle" for some help.
Wiki was quite helpful but the layout seemed somehow familiar, and I felt the sudden need to expand on the italics quoted below...
The tabernacle of the Hebrews, during the Exodus, was a portable worship facility comprised of a tent draped with colorful curtains. It had a rectangular, perimeter fence of fabric, poles and staked cords. This rectangle was always erected when they would camp, oriented to the east. In the center of this enclosure was a rectangular sanctuary draped with goats'-hair curtains, with the roof made from rams' skins. Inside, it was divided into two areas, the Holy Place and the Most Holy Place . These two compartments were separated by a curtain or veil. Entering the first space, one would see 3 pieces of sacred furniture: a seven-branched oil lampstand on the left (south), a table for twelve loaves of show bread on the right (north) and straight ahead before the dividing curtain (west) was an altar for incense-burning. Beyond this curtain was the cube-shaped inner room known as the (Holy of Holies) or (Kodesh Hakodashim). This sacred space contained a single article called the Ark of the Covenant (aron habrit) (see diagram)..
You can go North, South, East or West
>N
There is a table of bread here
>Eat bread
You are not hungry, trust me.
You can go South, East or West
>S
There is a lampstand here
>Examine lampstand
See Exodus 25: 31-40
>Take lampstand
It is very heavy and you drop it. The Lord is displeased. You will be eaten by a grue, restart Y/N?
Ahem.
:-)
Current Mood: 
amused
