על חיי משה, ספר ב ט״זOn the Life of Moses, Book II 16
א׳
1[76] So the shape of the model was stamped upon the mind of the prophet, a secretly painted or moulded prototype, produced by immaterial and invisible forms; and then the resulting work was built in accordance with that shape by the artist impressing the stampings upon the material substances required in each case.
ב׳
2[77] The actual construction was as follows. Forty-eight pillars of the most durable cedar wood, hewn out of the finest trunks, were encased in a deep layer of gold, and each of these had two silver bases set to support it and a golden capital fixed on the top. For the length of the building,
ג׳
3[78] the craftsman put forty pillars, half of them—that is a row of twenty—on each side, with no interval left between them, but each joined and fitted on to the next, so as to present the appearance of a single wall. For the breadth he set right inside the remaining eight, six in the central space and two in the corners on either side of the centre, one on the right and one on the left; also four others at the entrance, like the rest in everything else, except that they had one base instead of the two of the pillars opposite, and after these, at the very outside, five, differing only in their bases, which were of brass.
ד׳
4[79] Thus the whole number of pillars visible in the tabernacle, leaving out the two in the corners, hidden from view, amounted to fifty-five, that is to the sum of successive numbers from one to the supremely perfect ten.
ה׳
5[80] But if you choose to exclude the five in the propylaeum adjoining the open-air space which he has called the court, there will be left the most sacred number, fifty, the square of the sides of the right-angled triangle, the original source from which the universe springs. This fifty is obtained by adding together the inside pillars, namely the forty made up by the twenties on each side, then the six in the middle, leaving out the two hidden away in the corners, and then the four opposite which support the veil.
ו׳
6[81] I will now give my reason for first counting the five with the fifty and then separately. Five is the number of the senses, and sense in mankind inclines on one side to things external, while on the other its trend is towards mind, whose handmaiden it is by the laws of nature. And therefore he assigned the position on the border to the five pillars, for what lies inside them verges on the inmost sanctuary of the tabernacle, which symbolically represents the realm of mind, while what lies outside them verges on the open-air space and court which represent the realm of sense.
ז׳
7[82] And therefore the five differ from the rest also in their bases which are of brass. Since the mind is head and ruler of the sense-faculty in us, and the world which sense apprehends is the extremity and, as it were, the base of mind, he symbolized the mind by the gold and the sense-objects by the brass.
ח׳
8[83] The dimensions of the pillars were as follows: the height, ten cubits, the breadth, one-and-a-half, so that the tabernacle might appear equal in all its parts.