Midrash Tanchuma relates how Moses didn’t understand God's instructions for how to construct the menorah. This highlights the complexity of the Torah’s instructions, which commentators from antiquity until today struggled to visualize. One approach, taken by Philo and Josephus, was to interpret the menorah symbolically.For many past PaleoJudaica posts on ancient menorahs and representations of menorahs, with considerable attention to Professor Fine's work, see here and links (cf. here, here, here, here, here and links).
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