Exodus 27 specifies the Tabernacle’s outer-court furnishings — the bronze altar, the surrounding court, and the continual-lamp legislation. The chapter has three movements: the bronze altar (27:1-8), the court enclosure (27:9-19), and the continual lamp (27:20-21).
The bronze altar (27:1-8). The chapter’s primary furnishing: a altar of shittim wood, five cubits square (about 7.5×7.5 feet), three cubits high (about 4.5 feet), overlaid with brass. The chapter’s most distinctive specification is the four horns at the four corners, integral with the altar itself (“his horns shall be of the same”). The horns serve multiple cultic-legal functions: sin-offering blood is applied to them (Leviticus 4:7↗); they are the OT’s distinctive asylum-point — Adonijah grasps them and is spared at 1 Kings 1:50–53↗; Joab grasps them but is executed at 1 Kings 2:28–34↗, his guilt being beyond the asylum’s protection.
The altar’s accessory vessels — pans for ashes, shovels, basins, fleshhooks, firepans — are all bronze. A bronze grate of network sits below the upper compass, with rings for the carrying staves of shittim wood overlaid with brass. The altar is “hollow with boards” (27:8) — light enough to be carried, sturdy enough for the continual sacrificial fire. The portability is the chapter’s concrete acknowledgment that the Tabernacle and all its furniture must travel; the entire cultic apparatus is built for the wilderness journey before it becomes the model for the stationary Solomonic temple.
The court enclosure (27:9-19). The Tabernacle court is 100 cubits long by 50 cubits wide by 5 cubits high (roughly 150×75×7.5 feet) — a 2:1 length-to-width ratio that surrounds the tent itself and contains the bronze altar in front of the entrance and (anticipating Exodus 30:17–21↗) the bronze laver between altar and tent. The hangings are fine twined linen, suspended on bronze pillars set in bronze sockets, with hooks and fillets of silver. Twenty pillars on the south side, twenty on the north, ten on the west; the east side is the entrance, with fifteen-cubit hangings on each side of a twenty-cubit gate-screen of blue, purple, scarlet, and fine twined linen with needlework — the same materials as the inner curtains and the veil, marking the gate-screen visually as a transition into the LORD’s enclosure.
The court installs the chapter’s most theologically important structural feature: the access-gradient. The Tabernacle has three concentric zones — the court (people may enter), the holy place inside the tent (priests enter for daily service), and the most holy place behind the veil (high priest alone, once a year, with sacrificial blood). The court is the people’s access-zone; the bronze altar within it is where the people’s sacrifices are offered through the priestly mediator. The architectural distance between worshipper and ark — from the court’s gate to the mercy seat — measures the access-restriction the entire OT cultic system manages.
The continual lamp (27:20-21). The chapter closes with the inauguration of the priesthood’s first explicit perpetual duty. Pure beaten olive oil is to be brought for the light; Aaron and his sons are to “order it from evening to morning before the LORD: it shall be a statute for ever unto their generations on the behalf of the children of Israel.” The lampstand of Exodus 25:31–40↗ is to burn continually; the maintenance is the priesthood’s standing obligation. The ner tamid tradition is one of Israel’s most enduring cultic constants — a lamp that never goes out — and continues in synagogue worship to the present day as the perpetual lamp above every synagogue’s Torah ark. Leviticus 24:1–4↗ will restate the provision; 1 Samuel 3:3↗ records the lamp still burning in Eli’s day as Samuel sleeps near the ark, the lamp’s near-extinguishing serving as the narrative backdrop for the boy Samuel’s prophetic calling.
Language & Translation Notes
The horns of the altar as asylum-point. The chapter’s verse 2 — the horns of the bronze altar establish the OT’s distinctive asylum-architecture. The Pentateuchal legal tradition that develops from this — particularly the cities-of-refuge legislation of Numbers 35↗ and Deuteronomy 19↗ — institutes a system in which the manslayer who has killed unintentionally may flee to a designated city and find sanctuary. The horns of the altar function as the symbolic asylum-point at the sanctuary itself: grasping the horns is the supplicant’s declaration of refuge. The Adonijah-Joab contrast at 1 Kings 1:50–53↗ and 1 Kings 2:28–34↗ is the OT’s most concentrated single illustration: Adonijah’s failed coup is forgiven when he grasps the altar (Solomon spares him conditionally); Joab’s prior murders of Abner and Amasa are not forgiven (Solomon orders him killed at the altar despite his grasp on the horns). The asylum-protection covers unintended offense; it does not cover capital guilt. The prophetic vocabulary takes up the horns at Amos 3:14↗ (“the horns of the altar shall be cut off, and fall to the ground”) as a sign of the LORD’s judgment on Israel’s apostate Bethel-shrine — the asylum-architecture itself dismantled.
The court’s access-gradient and the OT priesthood-of-believers question. Exodus 27’s court is the chapter’s first explicit installation of the three-zone access-gradient (court / holy place / most holy place). The gradient is the structural-theological signal of the OT’s mediated-access regime: the people may approach the LORD’s enclosure but not enter His tent; the priests may enter the tent but not the most holy; the high priest alone may enter the most holy, and only on a specific day, only with sacrificial blood. The NT-and-Restoration trajectory takes this access-gradient and announces its transformation. Hebrews 10:19–22↗ announces that all believers now have “boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus.” The OT’s mediated-access regime is replaced by direct access. The Latter-day Saint reading retains both elements: the priesthood-of-believers principle (the saving ordinances accessible to all members of the covenant community) AND the priesthood-of-mediation principle (the temple ordinances administered through ordained priesthood holders, the temple itself as the place of graded access). The chapter at hand installs the architectural gradient that the entire OT cultic system presupposes; the NT and the Restoration both work out its transformation.
The ner tamid’s continuity from Tabernacle to synagogue. The chapter’s closing verses 20-21 install a perpetual lamp is one of the OT’s most architecturally-continuous traditions. The lamp burns in the wilderness Tabernacle, in Solomon’s temple, in the post-exilic second temple. 1 Samuel 3:3↗’s reference to the lamp still burning as Samuel sleeps is the OT’s most theologically significant invocation of the perpetual-lamp tradition — the lamp not yet gone out as the boy prophet receives his calling, the narrative implying the lamp’s continued burning as the visible sign of the LORD’s ongoing presence even in the spiritually-dim period of Eli’s old age. After the temple’s destruction in AD 70, the synagogue tradition preserved the perpetual-lamp practice: every synagogue maintains a ner tamid (eternal light) above the ark holding the Torah scrolls. The continuity from Sinai to contemporary synagogue worship is one of Judaism’s most-recognized single architectural-cultic features. Christian church-architecture has analogous practices in some traditions (the sanctuary lamp above the reserved sacrament in Catholic and high-church Anglican churches). The chapter installs a single perpetual flame; three millennia of religious practice carry it forward.