NOTES for Exo 31:1-18
The concept of wisdom in the Bible is quite multifaceted, but all its facets are united by something common: it is always practice. Wisdom in the Bible is least of all associated with what we quite often associate it with today: theoretical inquiry or detached contemplation. Biblical wisdom always has a practical character; it is inseparable from action, doing, and the way. Those people who are to make everything needed for the Tabernacle are also called wise. It would seem that this is more craft than art, but that only appears so at first glance. In fact, what is involved is precisely art: things made, as people usually say, with soul.
With a sense of beauty. From the biblical point of view, the ability to see beauty in a thing is also wisdom, and it is given through practice, the practice of making these very things with one's own hands. Here heart, soul, and hands must act in indivisible unity, and this unity is called wisdom in the Bible. If it is present, a person sees beauty both in God's creations and in human ones, wherever it is present. To see it, one must give room in one's heart to God's breath, for it is God who makes the world beautiful; He is the source of all beauty.
It is no accident that here, where the work connected with the Tabernacle is described, the Sabbath is also mentioned: not only because workers need regular rest, but also because without the Sabbath there is no wisdom. One cannot remain wise without having time that can be spent with God in inner silence. Without such silence, wisdom simply has nowhere to come from, for it is born precisely in it. Wisdom is born in silence because there, in that silence, God breathes; there one can sense and become aware of His breath.
Without such awareness there is no spiritual life, and therefore no wisdom. Then one will see neither the beauty of God's creation nor the beauty of what human hands have made. The Sabbath may seem to distract from work, but in reality without it there will be no work, no God's work, no God's doing. It is during the Sabbath that a person becomes aware of himself as the image of God, and without such awareness the wisdom spoken of in the Bible is impossible. Visible beauty is born from the invisible, as a word is born from silence: without one, the other will not exist either.