Wait, the Mishkan Wasn't Covered with Dead Rainbow Unicorn Skin?!

On a far less exciting but far more meaningful translation of an unknown term

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I. The Most Memorable Sermon I Ever Heard (For All the Wrong Reasons)

In our first year of marriage, Ruthy and I spent Shabbat at a community where we heard a sermon that we still talk about every year – but unfortunately not because of how moved we were by its message. It was during this time of the year when the parshiyot are devoted to the construction of the Mishkan, and the rabbi spoke about the material out of which the Mishkan’s covering was made.

And while the details of his derasha are lost to us – and the message he was sharing has long since slipped our minds – we’ve remembered one thing: that time we heard a sermon about the Jewish people carrying their unicorn rainbow Mishkan through the wilderness.

And part of the reason we’ve both remembered it was not so much because we thought rainbow unicorns were a silly topic, but because this was during the early months of 2013 and the rabbi was clearly oblivious to any additional message that could be conveyed by proclaiming that the Jewish people worshipped God in a rainbow Tabernacle. But over lunch, all people could talk about was the unintentional political symbolism the rabbi had proclaimed was part of the fundamental fabric (pun intended) of the Miskhan.

And yet, the idea that the Mishkan was draped in the rainbow skin of unicorns is something that’s taken for granted by many in the Jewish community – even among those who generally prefer more rational understandings of the Torah.

And what I want to do here is trace how the translation of taḥash as “rainbow unicorn” developed – along with some other slightly less outlandish competing translations – before turning to a less magical way of understanding the term.

II. My Little Pony – Let’s Use Your Skin for Our Roof

The whole understanding emerges from a really boring question (and the type of question you may have realized now that I like asking): How do we translate this peculiar word taḥash in the Torah?

Because the Torah stipulates that the Tabernacle’s covering should be made out of a material that’s either just termed ṭahash or, as in the case at the beginning of our parashah this week, ‘orot teḥashim, “taḥash skins” (Ex. 35:7).

And what should be obvious here is that the Torah knows what this word means – and it assumes it’s self-evident to Moshe himself – but it’s not a word with any obvious meaning for us. And this is complicated by the sheer impossibility of using the simplest method for translating difficult words in the Torah. Usually (as I’ve written about before) you look at other instances of the word and use those contexts to figure things out. But here that doesn’t work.

And it’s not because the word taḥash doesn’t occur in other verses – it appears quite a bit. But the problem is that almost all the instances are the same: describing the material of the Mishkan’s covering (Ex. 25:5; 26:14; 35:7, 23; 36:19; 39:34; Num. 4:6, 8, 10–12, 14, 25).

And the only other meaningful use of the word outside of any Miskhan-related context is still unhelpful. Yeḥezkel prophesies a time when God will redeem His people, and in describing the various adornments God will proverbially clothe His people in, Yeḥezkel states that God will va-en‘alēkh taḥash, “I will give you sandals made of taḥash” (Ezek. 16:10).

Ultimately, this means that the only thing we can say with confidence is that the hide of taḥash is a material out of which both coverings and sandals can be made.¹

And at this point, having been forced to abandon the simplest translation method, our instincts are to turn to how Ḥazal understood it. And here there are several sources that all coalesce around the same understanding.

First, the gemara states a tradition in the name of Rabbi Meir that the taḥash was a unique creature that existed solely in the times of the Torah about which nothing is known other than the fact that ve-keren aḥat haytah lo be-mitzḥo, “it had a single horn upon its forehead” – and that when this creature appeared before Moshe he used its skin as the covering for the Mishkan (Shabb. 28b).²

And the Yerushalmi is more explicit, stating the view of R. Hoshaya that the taḥash was a ḥada keren, which literally means “a unicorn” (yShabb. 2:3). But the clearest source on this is a midrash quoting R. Yehudah that, not only was the taḥash a one-horned creature, but that uv‘orah shisha gevanim, “it’s skin was six different colors” (Tanḥuma, Terumah §6).

Though the Torah’s verses themselves offer little, Ḥazal’s statements lead us to conjure the mental image of the prototypical multicolored unicorn – hence the belief that the taḥash was a rainbow unicorn.

III. Fantastic Beasts but Where to Find Them?

But there’s a really important point to make here. Because for all that several different statements of Ḥazal lead us to translate taḥash as a rainbow unicorn, it’s clear from the context of all of these sources that they don’t actually know what taḥash means.

Part of this lies in an obvious point – and one that should come as no surprise: the sources I cited above are all specific stances in debates around the translation of taḥash, where other members of Ḥazal offer different understandings.

But there’s a deeper point to make here that I think warrants dwelling on for a moment. Because we can broadly divide Ḥazal’s translations of non-obvious Biblical words into two buckets: those they had good reason to know the meaning of and those where it was a struggle. Admittedly, this is a complex topic that I don’t want to wade too deeply into – as a major distinction needs to be made between understandings that impact halakhah and those that don’t (with taḥash being an example of the latter).

But a good way to think of this, I think, is for you to try and translate two different French words. The first is the word banane, where you also know from context clues that it’s a fruit. The second is quincaillerie – but all you know here is that it’s something people visit.

I’m assuming no one struggled with the first – it’s banana. But the second is impossible. It’s the French word for “Hardware store.” You’re never getting that unless you know it.

When Ḥazal encountered unusual Biblical words, many of these words had at least enough of a parallel to a language that Ḥazal spoke – along with a clear enough context – that they could take a good stab at figuring out what it meant. But taḥash is very much the Torah’s quincaillerie: there is nothing that can be done to understand it.

Hence all the debates, out of which emerges the most popular conclusion that it’s a rainbow unicorn. And while a lot of other opinions exist, most still assume that taḥash is a somewhat fantastical creature, just one more plausible than a rainbow unicorn. Here seals, dolphins, dugongs, or narwhals are the most popular.

But what all of these translations share is the same central assumption that it must be an animal. And it’s not a crazy assumption – the Torah, after all, stipulates that Moshe use the ‘orot teḥashim, the hides of the taḥash. It seems to be pretty clear that taḥash must be animal.

But this assumption may emerge from a fundamental misunderstanding.

IV. A Boring Subtitle for a Boring Translation

If we go back to the Yerushalmi we find that there’s a much more robust debate over how to translate taḥash, with some opinions never assuming it’s an animal.

R. Yehudah, for example, insists that the word taḥash is not an animal but le-shēm tziv‘o nikra, “the name of its color.” What he means here is that ‘orot teḥashim does not refer to the hides of an unknown animal, the taḥash, but hides dyed with the color taḥash. And while here we get to some translation-challenge-inception as R. Yehudah tells us that the color was ṭiyynon – itself a word that’s tricky to translate – we can just follow an accepted translation that it’s violet.

And the merit of this understanding allows us to see ‘orot teḥashim as a parallel to the other explicitly dyed hide mentioned in the same verse. Because it makes a lot of sense that the Torah would describe in one verse that the people brought both ‘orot ēylim me-oddamim, “ram hides dyed red” ve-‘orot taḥashim, “and hides dyed violet” (Ex. 35:7).

And R. Saadia Gaon reinforces this view in his translation of the Torah into Arabic, known as the Tafsir. He translates taḥash as the old Arabic word darsh, meaning “black” – which is to say that he thought taḥash was simply hide dyed black.

And there’s something that further corroborates this perspective, mentioned in passing in The Koren Tanakh of the Land of Israel: Exodus (p. 195) about which there has been some recent research.

Let’s go back to the starting point for this question about how to translate the word taḥash. Because all of the opinions emerge from the fact that, while it was a challenge even for Ḥazal to translate the word taḥash, the Torah assumes it’s a well-known word to Moshe.

But how could we have a word that the Torah assumes is well known – yet it’s completely obscure even to Ḥazal?

Here the answer lies in asking a different question: What if the reason that this word taḥash is known to Moshe and the Jewish people at the time but no one else is because it comes from a language known to them but not future generations of Jews? What if taḥash is a word that perfectly describes a process known to them at the time?

The only way this would work was if there was an Egyptian word that sounded something like taḥash. But what are the odds of that?

V. Redeeming the Redeemed

Lo and behold, it turns out there is an Egyptian word, transliterated as “tḥs”³ and pronounced something akin to the word “taḥash” (in an ancient Egyptian accent) that has a very specific meaning.

The Egyptians had a specific process of using oil to cure leather so that it could be stretched, which they called tḥs.⁴ Indeed, one use for tḥs attested to was in the process of making sandals – and yes, that was a dramatic gong you heard as the verse from Yeḥezkel that God will va-en‘alēkh taḥash, give the people taḥash sandals, re-entered your mind.

But this is not just a far less fantastical solution to the meaning of taḥash, I think it offers a far more profound understanding.

One of the most powerful ideas I’ve ever read about the Mishkan comes from Rabbi David Silber in his Haggadah. (I thought I had shared this idea before but it may have been several years ago back when I shared Pesaḥ ideas via WhatsApp.) The short version of the argument is this: the goal is not simply for God to redeem the people from slavery to freedom but to also redeem their servitude.⁵

The entire point of the Mishkan’s elaborate construction was for the Jewish people to use the same skills, efforts, and exertions they had used in Egypt for a radically different purpose now that they were free: the service of God through the construction of the Mishkan.

And, when you think about it, it makes perfect sense that not only would the covering of the Mishkan be incredibly practical – made of stretched leather canvas – but also that the cover of the Mishkan would be made using a process already known to the Jewish people that they had previously been required to do as slaves.

And while understanding taḥash to be an Egyptian process by which leather was stretched may not be as magical as the idea of Moshe slaughtering a rainbow unicorn so that its skin could become a roof – the meaning behind the far less exciting explanation results in a far more powerful understanding.

1. There are two other instances of note, though neither are helpful in the slightest. Taḥash appears in Sefer Bereishit simply as the name of one of Naḥor’s sons (Gen. 22:224) – though I could see certain bizarre segments of Jewry finding appeal in the claim that one of Naḥor’s sons was a rainbow unicorn. And it appears in Sefer Iyov – va-taḥash ‘al-mirmah ragli, “Or my feet hurried to deceit?” (Job 31:5) – but it’s a different word with the root ḥ-v-sh (rather than t-ḥ-sh), which conjugates into a word meaning “to make haste” that has obviously nothing to do with a material.

2. I don’t want to dwell on this point, but I’m not sure how I feel about the mental image of Moshe seeing a mythical creature for the first time and his first instinct being “LET’S KILL IT AND USE IT’S SKIN.” (Though, as someone who loves Pokémon, I can’t claim my instincts are much better: “LET’S CAPTURE IT AND FORCE IT TO BATTLE OTHERS OF ITS KIND.”)

3. The transliteration is supposed to have a line under the t but Substack won’t let that happen for some reason.

4. This is explained in detail in Benjamin J. Noonan’s Hide or Hue? Defining Hebrew תַּחַשׁ.

5. The long version will be shared as one of the upcoming Haggadah Ideas.