Let us learn a posuk with Rashi.

"You shall put into the Ark, the edut that I shall give you" (25:16).

Rashi explains that a reference to written Torah, is found in the word edut (testimony): "The Torah which serves to testify between us that I have charged you with the commands written in it."

This seems odd because the written Torah did not yet exist (immediately following Moshe's descent from the mountain after having received the law from Hashem). The written Torah existed only at the completion of the forty year sojourn in the desert. What then, according to Rashi, was it that was placed into the Ark?

Rashi may be taking for granted a position he described in Mishpatim, last week's parasha. In commenting on the verse, "He took the Book of the Covenant and read it to the people… (24:7)", Rashi writes: "The text of the Torah from Bresheit until the giving of the Torah, and the commandments that they were commanded at Marah."

For Rashi, an actual text of the Torah had been begun by this time. This text did not include a description of events that had not yet happened but included the account of creation, the generations before and after the flood, the lives of the avot, and laws such as those given in parashat mishpatim. It may be this Torah text that Rashi identified as the "edut" placed in the Ark in our parasha.

However, at the end of Sefer Shemot, in the actual building of the Ark (tabernacle), the Torah again describes "placing testimony" into the Ark: "He took and placed the testimony into the Ark…(40: 20)." Here Rashi identifies the "edut-testimony" reference with the "luhot-Tablets" of the Ten Commandments and does not mention a written Torah.

Complicating matters further, after Moshe completed writing the entire Torah, he orders that the finished work be placed by the Ark: "Take this Torah scroll; place it beside the Ark of God's Covenant, and let it be there as testament" (Devarim, 31: 26).

Rashi quotes a talmudic controversy about the word "beside", he writes: "Jewish sages dispute this point. In Bava Batra, authorities say, a board protruded from the Ark itself to the outside, there it [the Torah scroll] was placed. But [other] authorities say, beside the Tablets it was placed, within the Ark."

We might explain the talmudic disagreement as follows. According to the first view, a written Torah, the incomplete text, had indeed been placed in the Ark initially. This meant that when the Torah was finished, its scroll (a separate scroll) had to be placed on a shelf outside of the Ark. However, if the finished Torah replaced or completed that first "Book of the Covenant" (Shemot 24:7) then it could be placed inside the Ark next to the tablets. On this second view, the "Covenant scroll"-'s position in the Ark may have been temporary, only the "luhot-Tablets", as Rashi emphasizes at the end of Shemot, rested permanently in the Ark.

Gut Shabbos,
Chaim Brovender