By Water & Blood

Questions on Exodus 44: Altar of uncut stones

What is the meaning of “If you make me an altar of stones, you shall not build them cut; for you have put your tool upon it and it is defiled”?

That they used iron—both those who fashioned the wood of the tabernacle and those who worked the gold and the silver and the bronze—I think no one will dispute. That the priests also slaughtered the sacrifices with knives and flayed and cut them, I think this too is beyond dispute. One must ask, then, how iron did not defile these things, yet defiled the cut stones. It is clear, therefore, that he constructs one thing through another. For since they spent forty years in the wilderness, continually departing and changing places, he forbids altars to be built of worked stones, so that when they had received the promised land these altars might not be used by the neighboring peoples for sacrifices to demons. For this reason he commanded that they be made either of earth or of stones as they grow of themselves; for either is easily dissolved. That after the construction of the temple it was not permitted to sacrifice elsewhere, the law itself teaches. And if the law forbade sacrificing outside the temple, it likewise prevented building an altar. Thus at once, to convict the impious, the great Elijah, compelled to offer a sacrifice on Carmel, piled up as many stones as there were tribes, stones as they grow of themselves, and offered the sacrifice upon them, so that the building might at once be dissolved and no one else offer a sacrifice in that place.