Our worship needs to help grant us the transcendence, and the immanence, of what we’re doing. It needs to be heavenly and earthy. We can be too chummy sometimes when we’re entering the presence of God, and we can make everything very spiritual when God in the Bible is concerned with very ordinary (and sometimes very graphic) scenes from everyday life.

We turn to the altar for incense in Exodus 30. This slightly complicates the flow I’d described from inside to outside, as we step back from the courtyard—perhaps with the high priest we’ve just met—into the holy place to a new, third, item.

They are instructed to make a small wooden box of the ubiquitous acacia wood. It should be the same rough shape as the altar out in the courtyard, with ‘horns’ on the top corners of the cuboid. The whole thing is then overlaid with gold and fitted with the rings to fit the poles for carrying it. This box goes right in front of the embroidered veil that sits outside the holy of holies in front of the ark. In essence it will be straight in front of you when you enter, with the lampstand on one side throwing light across to the table of loaves on the other side.

It’s for burning incense on. Every morning and evening when he attends to the oil in the lampstand, Aaron is to burn incense to God as an offering. It’s specific that this altar is only for this purpose, the text stipulating that neither burned, grain, or drink offerings are to be offered on it.

It is to be made atonement for annually, cleansing it with the blood of a sacrifice. Cleansing the tabernacle furniture is an important part of the sacrificial system. Finally, no ‘strange incense’ is to be offered on it. This is exactly what Aaron’s sons Nadab and Abihu do not that long after, and as a result fire from the Lord devours them.

The correct recipe for the incense is given a little later in this chapter. It should be a blend of four spices in equal parts: frankincense, galbanum, onycha—which are all things you can still buy under that name—and stacte, which is probably a kind of myrrh. Three products from plants and one from a mollusc shell. Yes, that is frankincense and myrrh on a gold altar, it is worth noting that all three gifts Jesus is given by the Magi are articles of the tabernacle, but the other spices mess with that symbolism so I don’t think that parallel is as direct as it first looks.

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