The Parochet - פרוכת

The Parochet - פרוכת

– The Veil That separated the Holy of Holies from the Holy Place

Exodus 26:31

You shall make a curtain of blue, purple, and crimson yarns, and fine twisted linen; it shall have a design of cherubim worked into it

In the Tabernacle, and later, in the Temples in Jerusalem, a curtain, called a parochet, separated the “Holy Place” from the “Holy of Holies.” The only person who passed through this curtain was the Kohen Gadol (high priest) on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Like the other entrances to the Tabernacle, the parochet was made of a fine white woven linen with blue (techelet), purple (argaman), and scarlet (tola’at shani) threads running through it. All three dyes were expensive: techelet, a deep blue extracted from murex snails, argaman a unique purple reserved for royalty and the Temple, and tolaat shani, a crimson dye extracted from a tiny worm. Woven into this veil, guarding the entrance to the Holy of Holies, were figures of cherubim, winged figures, like the two figures which adorned the lid of the Ark of the Covenant. Though the Temple does not currently stand in Jerusalem, a symbolic representation of the parochet is still found in synagogues around the world. The ark in the synagogue, representing the Ark of the Covenant, contains the Torah scrolls. The synagogue ark is covered by a curtain referred to as the parochet.

(ps – although this parochet was torn from top to bottom at the moment of Yeshua’s death (Matt 27:21), this is not the ‘dividing wall’ that Rav Sha’ul (the Apostle Paul) referred to in Eph 2:14)

_______________________________________________________