Exodus 27 Summary and Study Guide

Two chapters of gold, linen and cherubim have described a room almost nobody would ever see. Exodus 27 turns around and describes what everybody saw first. This Exodus 27 summary and study guide walks the chapter in order, gives the sizes in feet as well as cubits, and takes up the question the chapter’s last two verses have always raised.

Setting the Stage

God had told Moses, “let them make me a sanctuary; that I may dwell among them” (Exodus 25:8), and then began at the middle. Exodus 25 gave the ark of the testimony, the table and the lampstand. Exodus 26 gave the curtains, the boards and the veil that would enclose them.

Every one of those things stood inside a tent that ordinary Israelites never entered. So the instructions so far had described a house from the inside out, and had not yet said anything about the ground a worshipper would actually stand on. Exodus 27 is where God comes outside. For where this sits in the wider story, see our Book of Exodus summary by chapter.

Comprehensive Exodus 27 Summary

God begins outside with an altar, at the spot where a worshipper’s own approach began. It is a square box of shittim wood five cubits each way and three cubits high, plated in brass so the fire will not burn through it, with a horn rising from each of the four corners in one piece with the altar itself.

Its tools are all brass too, and they are working tools: pans for ashes, shovels, basins, fleshhooks, firepans. A brass grating sits inside it, halfway down, and four rings on that grating take the staves the altar is carried by. Verse 8 says it is hollow, made of boards, and made the way Moses was shown on the mountain.

From the altar God moves outward to the fence around it. Fine twined linen runs a hundred cubits down the south side and a hundred down the north, fifty across the west end, and fifty across the east. It hangs five cubits high on pillars standing in brass sockets, and the pillars are banded and hooked with silver.

On the east side the linen stops fifteen cubits in from each corner, and what fills the twenty cubits between is a curtain of blue, purple, scarlet and fine twined linen, worked with a needle. That is the gate, and the chapter gives no other.

Then, having described a court and the thing that stands in it, God turns back inside the tent, to the lamp and to the men who will serve there. Israel is to bring pure beaten olive oil for the light, and Aaron and his sons are to tend the lamp from evening to morning before the LORD. The chapter that started with a fire nobody could miss ends with a flame nobody outside would ever see, and it names the family who will keep it going, which is where Exodus 28 picks up.

One Word Summary

• Approach: the chapter lays out the route a worshipper takes to get near God.
• Altar: the place of sacrifice stands first, in the open, and cannot be walked past.
• Boundary: a linen wall marks off the court and leaves one way through it.
• Supply: the people keep bringing the oil that keeps the light alive.

In One Sentence

God tells Moses to build a brass altar five cubits square, to fence a courtyard a hundred cubits by fifty around it with one gate on the east, and to have Israel supply beaten olive oil so Aaron and his sons can keep the lamp burning every night.

Theme of Exodus 27

Exodus 27 is about the way in. Having described where He would live, God now describes how anyone was to reach Him, and the answer is a single gate opening onto an altar. Two ideas travel with that.

Everything out here is brass rather than gold, so the sanctuary grows plainer the further it gets from the ark of the testimony. And the last two verses hand part of the work to the camp: the light inside depended on oil the people outside kept bringing.

Exodus 27 Outline

• Exodus 27:1-2: God commands the altar of burnt offering, five cubits square and three high, foursquare, with a horn at each corner and the whole plated in brass.
• Exodus 27:3-5: Its brass tools are listed, and a brass grating with four rings is set inside it, reaching halfway up.
• Exodus 27:6-8: Staves of brass-covered wood are made to carry it, and God says to build it hollow, according to the pattern shown on the mountain.
• Exodus 27:9-13: The court is enclosed with linen hangings on pillars in brass sockets, a hundred cubits along the south and the north and fifty across each end.
• Exodus 27:14-16: Fifteen cubits of hanging stand on either side of the east entrance, and the gate between them is a twenty-cubit curtain of blue, purple, scarlet and fine twined linen.
• Exodus 27:17-19: Every pillar is banded with silver, the court is fixed at a hundred by fifty by five cubits, and every vessel and tent pin is to be brass.
• Exodus 27:20-21: Israel is to supply pure beaten olive oil, and Aaron and his sons are to keep the lamp burning from evening to morning as a statute for ever.

The Measurements of Exodus 27

The chapter gives every size in cubits, and Scripture never states how long a cubit was. Eighteen inches is the common estimate and the one used below, but Adam Clarke reckoned twenty-one, which makes everything here about one sixth larger. Take the cubits as the measurement and the feet as an approximation.

Two things follow from the numbers. The fence stood at five cubits, and the boards of the tabernacle stood at ten (Exodus 26:16), so the tent inside stood twice the height of the wall around it and its roof showed above the linen. And the pillars can be counted: twenty on the south, twenty on the north, ten on the west, and ten across the east side, which is sixty in all.

Observations from Exodus 27

The Chapter Runs Backwards From the Way Anyone Walked It (Exodus 27:1, 27:9)

Exodus 25 began at the ark, in the room behind the veil, and the instructions have been moving outward ever since. Exodus 27 reaches the outside at last, naming the altar first and only then the fence around it.

An Israelite met all of this in exactly the opposite order: the white wall first, then the gate, then the altar, and the ark not at all. God described His house starting from where He was. The worshipper approached it starting from where he was. The same building, given in one direction and walked in the other.

Brass Where the Fire Is, Gold Where the Glory Is (Exodus 27:2-6, 27:19)

The word “brass” appears nine times in this chapter, “brasen” once more, and gold does not appear at all. Inside the veil everything was gold: the ark, the mercy seat, the table, the lampstand. Out here, where the fire burned and the bodies of the offerings were consumed, the metal changes, and it changes for every single item, down to the tent pegs (27:19).

The chapter never explains the change. What can be said from the text is that the material tracks the location, growing plainer the further out it goes, and that brass is the metal that could take that kind of heat and keep its shape.

One Gate, and It Faces the Sunrise (Exodus 27:13-16)

Three sides of the court are solid linen. The fourth has an opening twenty cubits wide, and the chapter gives no second entrance anywhere. Whatever an Israelite wanted at the tabernacle, he came in at the same place as everyone else, and the first thing in front of him when he did was the altar.

The gate is on the east, the same side as the door of the tent itself (Exodus 26:36), so a worshipper walked west as he drew nearer. Exodus 27 does not say why, and commentators have gone in opposite directions on it, some reading it as turning worshippers away from the rising sun that the nations bowed to, others finding meaning in the direction itself. The chapter states the side and leaves the reason alone.

Difficult Verses Explained

Does “Burn Always” in Exodus 27:20 Mean the Lamp Never Went Out?

The chapter appears to say two things one verse apart. Verse 20 says the oil is “to cause the lamp to burn always.” Verse 21 says Aaron and his sons “shall order it from evening to morning.”

Read plainly, verse 21 sets the hours, and the rest of Scripture reads the same way: the lamps are lit at evening (Exodus 30:8), tended “from the evening unto the morning” (Leviticus 24:3), and 1 Samuel 3:3 marks a moment “ere the lamp of God went out in the temple of the LORD,” which assumes it did go out. On this reading “always” means without fail rather than without pause, the same way the “continual burnt offering” of Exodus 29:42 was in fact offered twice a day.

Against that, Josephus, who served as a priest, wrote that three of the lamps were kept burning through the day as well, and the holy place had no windows, so a priest at the incense altar or the shewbread table would have been working in the dark. Others answer that daylight came through the linen door hanging (Exodus 26:36). The chapter itself gives the hours in verse 21 and does not resolve the rest.

What Does “Pure Oil Olive Beaten” Mean, and Why Specify It?

“Beaten” describes how the oil was got out, and it rules out the ordinary method. Olives bruised in a mortar release a first oil that runs out clear; crushing them in a mill breaks the stones as well and clouds what comes off; heat was not used at all. So the oil named here is the first and cleanest yield, and the chapter asks for it by production method rather than by quality.

So the light in God’s house ran on the part of the harvest that was hardest to get and easiest to keep for yourself.

Did Grabbing the Horns of the Altar Actually Save a Man?

The horns are named in verse 2 and the chapter says nothing about refuge, but two men in Scripture ran to them, and they did not both survive. Adonijah “caught hold on the horns of the altar” and Solomon spared him on condition (1 Kings 1:50-53). Joab did the same thing and was killed where he stood, holding on (1 Kings 2:28-34).

So the altar was a recognised place to flee to, and reaching it settled nothing by itself. What the law attached to the horns was blood: the blood of the sin offering was put on them at the consecration of the priests (Exodus 29:12) and on the Day of Atonement (Leviticus 16:18). The refuge was real, and on the evidence of those two men it rested on the sacrifice the horns carried rather than on the act of holding them.

Common Misunderstandings

• That this is the altar of incense. It is not. Exodus 27 gives the altar of burnt offering, brass, five cubits square, standing outside in the court. The altar of incense is a separate and much smaller thing, gold, one cubit square, standing inside the holy place, and God does not describe it until Exodus 30:1-6.
• That the court described here is complete. The laver stood in this same courtyard, between the altar and the door of the tent, and Exodus 27 never mentions it. God holds it back until Exodus 30:17-21, so a picture of the court drawn from this chapter alone is missing a piece.
• That a wooden, brass-plated altar contradicts Exodus 20:24. God had said earlier to make Him “an altar of earth,” or else of unhewn stone (Exodus 20:24-25). Many commentators reconcile the two by pointing at verse 8, “hollow with boards,” and reading this as a case that was filled with earth when the camp settled. That reading is old and reasonable, and it is a reconstruction. The chapter says the altar was hollow; it does not say what went inside it.
• That the altar stayed as it is described here. Numbers 16:36-40 records that after Korah’s rebellion the brass censers of the men who died were hammered flat and made into a covering for this altar, expressly as a sign to Israel. Whatever the altar looked like on the day it was built, that is not what it looked like afterwards.

Christ Connection

The layout of this chapter is an order of approach, and the New Testament takes up each part of it by name.

• The altar at the entrance. The tent could not be reached without passing the place where blood was shed, and Hebrews states the principle behind it: “without shedding of blood is no remission” (Hebrews 9:22). Hebrews then claims the fulfilment directly, “We have an altar” (Hebrews 13:10), and says the offering there was made once, not daily: “we are sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all” (Hebrews 10:10).
• The single gate. One opening, twenty cubits of it, in a fence with no other way through. Jesus said, “I am the door: by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved” (John 10:9), and, “no man cometh unto the Father, but by me” (John 14:6).
• The fence that said not yet. A wall of white linen higher than a man kept the camp out of the court, and Hebrews reads the whole arrangement as a signal: “the way into the holiest of all was not yet made manifest” (Hebrews 9:8). What replaced it is stated just as plainly, “boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus” (Hebrews 10:19).
• The lamp that was not allowed to fail. The one light in the house burned on oil the people themselves had to keep bringing. Jesus said, “I am the light of the world” (John 8:12), and Revelation 1:20 gives the lampstands to the churches.
• The brass that took the fire. Older commentators, Matthew Henry among them, read the wood and its brass casing together: the wood would have burned had the metal not stood between it and the fire. It is an analogy drawn by readers rather than a claim the chapter makes, and it is offered here as that.

When, Where, and Why

• When: During Moses’ time on Mount Sinai (Exodus 24:18), roughly three months after Israel left Egypt (Exodus 19:1). Nothing is built in this chapter. The altar and the court are actually made later, in Exodus 38:1-20, and the altar is set in place when the tabernacle is raised (Exodus 40:29).
• Where: On the mountain, with the camp below. It matters that Israel had no land yet: the altar is given rings and staves in verses 6 and 7 because the place of sacrifice had to travel with a people who were still moving.
• Why: Because a holy God moving into the middle of a camp raises an obvious question about how anyone is to come near without dying. Exodus 27 answers the practical half of it. There is a way in, there is one of it, and it starts at the altar.

Key Verses

“And thou shalt make an altar of shittim wood, five cubits long, and five cubits broad; the altar shall be foursquare: and the height thereof shall be three cubits.”

Exodus 27:1

Build a square altar of acacia wood, about seven and a half feet each way and four and a half feet high. Its size is worth holding onto: this was the largest of the tabernacle’s furnishings, and it stood in the open where everyone could see it, which is the opposite of how the holiest things were treated.

“Hollow with boards shalt thou make it: as it was shewed thee in the mount, so shall they make it.”

Exodus 27:8

Make it as a hollow frame of boards, exactly as you were shown on the mountain. God has now said some version of “as it was shewed thee” four times since Exodus 25:9, and it is the nearest thing these chapters have to a stated reason: Moses is copying, not designing.

“And for the gate of the court shall be an hanging of twenty cubits, of blue, and purple, and scarlet, and fine twined linen, wrought with needlework.”

Exodus 27:16

The entrance is a thirty-foot curtain in the same four materials used inside the tent. The wall around the court is plain white; the way in is the one part of the boundary with colour in it.

Key Lessons from Exodus 27

• God gave His people a way in, and it started at the altar (Exodus 27:1).
• The court had one gate and no other way through it (Exodus 27:16).
• The instructions reach as far down as the tent pegs (Exodus 27:19).
• The light inside the sanctuary burned on oil the people outside had to keep supplying (Exodus 27:20).
• What was asked of Aaron and his sons was not a single act but a nightly one, “from evening to morning,” for generations (Exodus 27:21).

To go deeper into the lessons from this chapter, read our full study: Lessons from Exodus 27.

Bible Study Questions

1. The chapter names brass for everything in the court and gold for nothing. Compare this with Exodus 25:10-40. What pattern do you see, and what does the text itself say about why?
2. Verse 8 ends with “as it was shewed thee in the mount,” and God has said something like it three times already (Exodus 25:9, 25:40, 26:30). Why might He insist on it so often?
3. Exodus 27 gives the court one gate. Read John 10:9 alongside it. What does the single entrance say about access to God, both then and now?
4. Verses 20 and 21 give the people a task and the priests a task. What is each, and why might God have divided it that way?
5. Where is the ordinary, repeated, unglamorous work in your own walk with God, the sort of thing that matters because it is done every evening rather than once?

To test what you remember of the chapter, try our Exodus 27 quiz with answers.

Frequently Asked Questions

Exodus 27, The Full Text (KJV)

Read the full chapter below for reference.

1 And thou shalt make an altar of shittim wood, five cubits long, and five cubits broad; the altar shall be foursquare: and the height thereof shall be three cubits.

2 And thou shalt make the horns of it upon the four corners thereof: his horns shall be of the same: and thou shalt overlay it with brass.

3 And thou shalt make his pans to receive his ashes, and his shovels, and his basons, and his fleshhooks, and his firepans: all the vessels thereof thou shalt make of brass.

4 And thou shalt make for it a grate of network of brass; and upon the net shalt thou make four brasen rings in the four corners thereof.

5 And thou shalt put it under the compass of the altar beneath, that the net may be even to the midst of the altar.

6 And thou shalt make staves for the altar, staves of shittim wood, and overlay them with brass.

7 And the staves shall be put into the rings, and the staves shall be upon the two sides of the altar, to bear it.

8 Hollow with boards shalt thou make it: as it was shewed thee in the mount, so shall they make it.

9 And thou shalt make the court of the tabernacle: for the south side southward there shall be hangings for the court of fine twined linen of an hundred cubits long for one side:

10 And the twenty pillars thereof and their twenty sockets shall be of brass; the hooks of the pillars and their fillets shall be of silver.

11 And likewise for the north side in length there shall be hangings of an hundred cubits long, and his twenty pillars and their twenty sockets of brass; the hooks of the pillars and their fillets of silver.

12 And for the breadth of the court on the west side shall be hangings of fifty cubits: their pillars ten, and their sockets ten.

13 And the breadth of the court on the east side eastward shall be fifty cubits.

14 The hangings of one side of the gate shall be fifteen cubits: their pillars three, and their sockets three.

15 And on the other side shall be hangings fifteen cubits: their pillars three, and their sockets three.

16 And for the gate of the court shall be an hanging of twenty cubits, of blue, and purple, and scarlet, and fine twined linen, wrought with needlework: and their pillars shall be four, and their sockets four.

17 All the pillars round about the court shall be filleted with silver; their hooks shall be of silver, and their sockets of brass.

18 The length of the court shall be an hundred cubits, and the breadth fifty every where, and the height five cubits of fine twined linen, and their sockets of brass.

19 All the vessels of the tabernacle in all the service thereof, and all the pins thereof, and all the pins of the court, shall be of brass.

20 And thou shalt command the children of Israel, that they bring thee pure oil olive beaten for the light, to cause the lamp to burn always.

21 In the tabernacle of the congregation without the vail, which is before the testimony, Aaron and his sons shall order it from evening to morning before the LORD: it shall be a statute for ever unto their generations on the behalf of the children of Israel.