I finally woke up early for 9 a.m. Torah study! The student rabbi sent out such cool texts for Parashat Vayikra and I was excited!

What I have learned from this is that waking up early sucks, trying to interact with people and be emotionally and intellectually present after waking up early sucks even more, Zoom is the worst possible way to do Torah study, and I should not attempt this again.

Oh well.

(I didn't mean for this Shabbat's parsha post to turn into shitposting just in time for Faffing February or whatever it is. It just, uh, happened.)

I finally caught up on my Torah reading. This week's parsha is Terumah, which explains how to build the tabernacle, the portable temple intended to be carried around the desert until the proper permanent one could be built.

Exodus 26:14: "And make for the tent a covering of tanned ram skins, and a covering of dolphin skins above."

me: o.O I was not expecting that.

So I did some digging. I learned that there are dolphins in the Mediterranean, which I had not known, so the idea of dolphin skins being among the treasures the Israelites "borrowed" from their Egyptian neighbors is not actually all that weird, despite my immediate reaction of "they're in a desert!". I also learned that the original word there is tachashim, plural of tachash, and no one has any idea what the fuck it means.

Some other proposed translations:

* leather that's dyed blue
* leather adorned with faience beads
* badger
* ermine
* unicorn

The only thing most people can agree on is that it came from a clean animal, because the idea of putting skins of an unclean animal on the Tabernacle is abhorrent (though I will note that dolphins are not kosher, so whoever picked that translation seems to have discarded this qualification), and it was probably either blue or multicolored. (This piece goes into great detail about the various arguments in favor of one reading or another, and comes down in favor of the beaded leather interpretation.)

The dolphin idea apparently comes from a 19th-century scholar who noticed that Arabic for porpoise is tuchash, and suggested the two words were cognates. That's not a bad theory, as theories go. Probably more likely than the unicorn.

While reading various writings on this, I found this commentary in Midrash Tanchuma:

R. Nehemiah contended that it was a miraculous creature [Hashem] created for that precise moment, and that it disappeared immediately thereafter from earth. Why is it called orot tahashim ("sealskins," lit. "skins of tahashim")? Because the verse states: The length of each curtain shall be thirty cubits (Exod. 26:8). What known animal could supply enough skin for a curtain of thirty cubits?

Thirty cubits is 45 feet long. That is pretty big! Especially for a porpoise-like, blue-skinned, possibly one-horned or long-necked animal...

At that point I started researching what fossils have been found in that region. After all, like most deserts, it was once an ocean.

My conclusion is that Hashem, whose presence extends throughout spacetime and to whom billions of years are as a day, dragged a poor confused plesiosaur out of the Cretaceous and dropped it at the foot of Mount Sinai, where it was turned into curtains.

I'm glad I could solve this 3,000-year-old mystery for everyone.