Menorah and Showbread

(Leviticus 24:1 - 24:9)
Jehovah instructed Moses, "Command the Israelites to bring you pure oil from pressed olives for the lamps of the menorah so that an eternal flame may always burn.  Aaron should set up the menorah in the Tabernacle just outside the curtain of the Inner Sanctum, where the Chest of Sacred Records is housed, and he must tend it so that from dusk till dawn a flame will always burn there.  This is to be an established custom observed through the generations: the lamps on the pure gold menorah standing before the Inner Sanctum must be continually tended.

"Using the finest flour, bake twelve loaves of bread made of two-tenths of an ephah of flour for each loaf.  They should be arranged in two rows, six loaves in each row, on the table of pure gold standing before the Inner Sanctum.  Place some pure frankincense next to each row as a token offering for the bread, a burnt offering for Jehovah.  Every Sabbath this showbread must be laid out before the Inner Sanctum as a condition of my everlasting contract with the people of Israel.  These loaves will belong to Aaron and his successors, but since they are sacred, they must be eaten within the confines of the Tabernacle.  (It is the privilege of the priests to claim this divinely sanctioned portion of the food offerings made to Jehovah.)"

Notes
1. Aaron and his priests must tend the lamps of the menorah so that they will always burn in the Sanctum.  You wonder if this required someone to be up all night on watch, adding oil and trimming the wicks when necessary.  If so, it must have been a lonely vigil.  How would someone living at that time occupy his solitary hours?  Obviously, no internet to surf, no cat videos to look at, no video games to play, no ipod or talk radio or baseball games to listen to.  There were no cards to play solitaire with.  He could not read, not even the Bible, since it hadn't been written yet.  (In fact, for many centuries there would not really be such a thing as a book.  Alphabets had yet to be invented and there were only inscriptions and records in Sumerian cuneiform or Egyptian hieroglyphics.)   Could a priest bring his knitting into the Sanctum, or engage in whittling?  Playing a musical instrument -- what did they have beside the ram's horn and maybe some sort of harp or lyre? -- would have disturbed the sleeping flocks of sheep, and Jehovah might not have like it anyway.  It is hard to imagine how the priest would have spent his time, save in meditation.

2. Again we have the huge two-tenth-of-an-ephah loaves of bread, from four quarts of flour -- a gallon!  One hopes that the Jehovan priests, fattening up on a diet of such bread and all those choice burnt offerings of beef and mutton (and no healthy pork), had opportunities to work out.  Some authorities, though, credibly assert that the omer, rather than the ephah should be used here.  Two-tenths of an omer, being about three-quarters of pint, would make the bread conveniently small to fit on the table and not impossibly large. 

3.  We continually see that Jehovah is placated by various offerings of food.   That, one supposes, was all that primitive man could think of.  Later, the gods would regularly have things built for them, as does, in fact, Jehovah -- the Tabernacle.  In more sophisticated times, men would also make other offerings and promises to their gods, good deeds, quests or crusades, devotional service, acts of self-denial, or abstention from bad behavior.   For some reason, the modern worshiper no longer seems to think his god would appreciate a well-cooked fillet.