⁴ In it stood the golden altar of incense and the ark of the covenant overlaid on all sides with gold, in which there were a golden urn holding the manna, and Aaron’s rod that budded, and the tablets of the covenant;^(A)

¹⁰ And the Lord said to Moses, “Put back the staff of Aaron before the covenant, to be kept as a warning to rebels, so that you may make an end of their complaints against me, or else they will die.”^(A)

¹⁰ There was nothing in the ark except the two tablets that Moses put there at Horeb, where the Lord made a covenant^[a] with the people of Israel when they came out of Egypt.^(A)

⁵ And the staff of the man whom I choose shall sprout; thus I will put a stop to the complaints of the Israelites that they continually make against you.”^(A)

¹² He shall take a censer full of coals of fire from the altar before the Lord and two handfuls of crushed sweet incense, and he shall bring it inside the curtain^(A)

³ You shall put in it the ark of the covenant, and you shall screen the ark with the curtain.^(A)

³³ You shall hang the curtain under the clasps and bring the ark of the covenant in there, within the curtain, and the curtain shall separate for you the holy place from the most holy place.^(A)

²⁰ He took the covenant and put it into the ark and put the poles on the ark and set the cover above the ark,^{(A) 21} and he brought the ark into the tabernacle and set up the curtain for screening and screened the ark of the covenant as the Lord had commanded Moses.^(B)

The Shining Face of Moses

²⁹ Moses came down from Mount Sinai. As he came down from the mountain with the two tablets of the covenant in his hand, Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone because he had been talking with God.^(A)

³² Moses said, “This is what the Lord has commanded: Let an omer of it be kept throughout your generations in order that they may see the food with which I fed you in the wilderness when I brought you out of the land of Egypt.” ³³ And Moses said to Aaron, “Take a jar, and put an omer of manna in it, and place it before the Lord, to be kept throughout your generations.”^{(A) 34} Just as the Lord commanded Moses, so Aaron placed it before the covenant, for safekeeping.^(B)