Ephod

The ephod was the vestment of the High Priest of ancient Israel, described in the Book of Exodus in unusually precise detail, gold thread twisted together with blue, purple and scarlet yarn worked into fine linen, worn over the priest's other garments and held in place by two shoulder pieces. Each shoulder piece bore a single onyx stone engraved with the names of six of the twelve tribes of Israel, so that the High Priest carried the whole people symbolically on his shoulders whenever he entered the sanctuary to serve. A woven band of the same materials, attached at the waist, secured the garment to the body.

The specificity of the biblical description, naming exact materials and construction rather than describing the garment only in general terms, is unusual among ancient Near Eastern ritual dress as it survives in text, and it is this description in the Hebrew Bible itself that is the primary source for everything known about the ephod's appearance, since no example survives archaeologically. Later Jewish and Christian commentators debated at length exactly how the ephod was cut and fastened, since the biblical text, though detailed by ancient standards, still leaves some construction questions open to interpretation, and no two historical reconstructions agree on every point.

The ephod did not stand alone; it was the base to which the priestly breastplate, the hoshen, was fastened by gold chains and rings so the two garments moved as one assembly rather than as separate items loosely worn together. Exodus specifies this attachment in as much mechanical detail as it gives the weaving, describing rings at each corner and cords running between them, which has the effect of describing the ephod and breastplate almost as a single engineered object built in two parts.

The ephod was worn exclusively by the High Priest and only for service in the Tabernacle and later the Temple, not as everyday dress even for priests of lesser rank, marking it as vestment in the strictest sense, reserved to one office and one setting. Its use is described as continuous from the wilderness Tabernacle through the First and Second Temple periods, and Jewish textual tradition holds that the garment, along with the Temple service it belonged to, ceased with the Temple's destruction, so the ephod today is known only through text and through later artistic and scholarly reconstruction rather than through any continuing practice. Artistic reconstructions of the ephod, from medieval manuscript illumination to modern scholarly diagrams, differ from each other more than a casual reader might expect, precisely because the text specifies materials and general arrangement without giving a pattern a tailor could follow exactly.