How Much Would the Mishkan Cost Today?


By Rabbi Jonathan Gross

In last week’s parshah, Moshe starts raising money to build the mishkan. I was wondering, if we were to start building a mishkan today, how much would it cost? Here are some calculations I came up with. Please feel free to comment and correct me if either my facts or math are wrong.

Let’s start with the structure of the Mishkan.

The tent itself was made up of 48 gold plated beams that were connected. 20 on each side plus 8 across one wall.

The beams were 10 x 1 x 1.5 amos. That comes to a surface area of 50 x 48 = 2,400 amot squared.

Although there are many opinions, let’s say an ammah is 18 inches. So the perimeter of the Mishkan required 43,200 square inches of gold plating.

The beams were made of gold plated wood. With current technology gold can be hammered into extremely thin sheets called gold leaf. The price of gold leaf depends on the thickness. An ounce of gold hammered into a sheet of 100th the thickness of aluminum oil could cover 100 square inches.

So for 43,200 square inches of gold plate we would need 432 ounces of gold.

Today gold is about $1,235 an ounce. So the gold plating for the perimeter of the Mishkan would cost $533,520.
That doesn’t seem so bad. But that is just the gold plating.

The silver adanim were the sockets that kept the beams together. There were 100 of them. Each one was a solid kikar. A kikar is 3,000 shekels. So they needed 300,000 shekels. They collected 1/2 shekel for the census. There were just over 600,000 people counted, bringing in just over 300,000 shekels of silver. Exactly enough for the adanim. (and some left over for the curtain hooks.)

A shekel is about 1/2 and ounce. 3,000 shekel is 1,500 ounces.

An ounce of silver today costs about $15.75.

300,000 shekel of silver for the adanim would cost $2,362,500.

So we are at about $3 million. The beams were made of lumber, there were some other hooks, poles, and extensions made of precious metals, and then there’s the labor involved.

The Aron was made of gold plated wood.

With dimensions of 2.5 x 1.5 x 1.5 the surface area needed comes out to 15.75 square amos, and it was plated inside and outside so double that is 31.5 square amos x 18 equals 567 square inches.

Gold plating at 1 ounces per 100 square inches comes out 5.67 ounces.

With gold at $1,235 per ounce = $7,002.45

That does not include the cover of the ark, the Kaporet.

It is not clear from the Torah if the kaporet was solid gold, or if it was gold plated wood like the rest of the Aron. We are also not told the height of the Kaporet, The Gemara assumes that it was 1 tefach (there are six tefachim in an amah, making a tefach 3 inches).

If it was a solid slab of gold 2 amot x 1 amah x 1 tefach.

That means that the kaporet was 36 inches x 18 inches x 3 inches = 1,944 inches cubed.

In gold mass 1 inch cubed = .7 pounds.

That means that the kapores weighed 1,360.8 pounds.

At 16 ounces in a pound and gold at $1,235 an ounce that’s $26,889,408 And that does not include the keruvim, the twin statues on the kapores that were made of solid gold and stood 30 inches high. Assuming that they were only 1 inch thick they would cost $778,050 each. $1,556,100 in materials alone, before the artist’s costs.

(I think we can assume that the kapores was either a thin sheet of gold or made of gold plated wood. It doesn’t seem practical otherwise. Can you imagine being called on to open the ark in shul and when you get up there the gabbai tells you that you have to lift something that weighed 1300 pounds? If I am right then the kapores would have been closer to about $600 before the keruvim.)

The menorah was 1 kikar of gold.

At 3,000 shekel per kikar, and 1/5 an ounce per shekel, that’s 1,500 ounces of gold.
At $1,235 an ounce that comes to $1,852,500 in materials, before the artist’s fee.

Leaving out the kapores, we see that the more expensive vessels of the Mishkan cost upwards of $2 million at today’s prices. The price of gold plating, thanks to current technology, is considerably cheaper. The rest is lumber, fabrics, labor, and artistry.
Without doing a final tally, the Mishkan would be expensive but not astronomical.

The Beis Hamikdash was much bigger and way more expensive.

Hashem should bless us and bring about the day where we have to raise funds for projects like these soon.

Rabbi Jonathan Gross

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  1. What’s the problem with the kapores weighing so much no one has to lift it and why are the cherubim only 1 inch thick weren’t they solid gold not hollow
    The Aron carried itself and those who carried it so it could have weighed a ton or two and it wouldn’t make a difference

  2. your logic that the kapores was plated because who could lift it might be mistaken when did they ever open it?
    you statement about the menorah before artist costs is also mistaken wasn’t it thrown into the fire and created by nes?

  3. Of course the Kappores was solid gold. It says clearly that it was made of zahav Tahor with the keruvim chiseled (miksha) out from
    That Same slab. All gold including the

  4. “Mikdash HaS konenu yadecha” it says in Az Yashir. Rashi says this means the 3rd Beis HaMikdash will descend from Shamayim built and furnished all by HaS. No need for us to worry about the material costs or the artistic efforts. “All” we have to do is to rebuild the destroyed Mikdash that is within each of our hearts (destroyed through loshon hara, sinas chinam, etc.) and then HaS will do the rest.

  5. easier calculation:

    just under 30 kikar of gold. kikar is 48,000 grams. at about $41 a gram, that’s $2,000,000 per kikar, or $60,000,000. silver was just over 100 kikar. at about $0.53 per gram, that’s about $25,500 per kikar, or $2,550,000. copper was about 70 kikar. at about $4.50 per kilo, that’s $216 per kikar, or about $15,000.

    quantity of wood, furs,precious stones etc. unknown, but likely less than $1,000,000.

  6. A shekel is .825 ounces of silver so closer to $4 million for the adanim
    The kapores was 2.5 Amos by 1.5 Amos by 1 tefach which is 2551 pounds of gold closer to about $40 million

  7. It clear and open in the Pesukim that the Kapores was made of solid gold. The Kapores and Keruvim together were a solid piece made of one Kikar of gold.

  8. The Keruvim were solid gold and ten Tefachim tall, the Kapores was Tefach think and solid gold. Your calculation is way off, since the Aron was not wood plated with gold, rather it was a solid gold outer box and a solid gold inner box with a wooden box in between. You don’t know this?

  9. Lma’aseh raising funds for the MISHKAN would not be a problem at all, even if the cost were $1 billion.
    However if the criterion were that only donations with “pure” l’shem shamayim intentions would be accepted then it might be a little harder…

  10. This is very confusing. Does he believe that it happened according to tradition, or he does the only believe what it says in the book the way he interpreted it with his personal understanding?

    The Aron according to tradition was three boxes: the outer and inner boxes work pure gold and the middle one was wooden, not one wooden box plated with gold.

    There were gold strands in the clothing and in the cover of the mishkan. They got the gold strands by beating a sheet of gold flat and then cutting off strings from it. This means that they obviously did have the technology of making thin sheets of gold as they do today.

    The Aron was certainly not made to be opened, and based on my little knowledge it in fact was never actually opened.

    The author also dismissed all the other expensive materials and designs and types of wood etc. as if their price was trivial and concluded his article with the “fact” that it was expensive but not astronomical as if he wanted that conclusion in the first place. While I personally am not concerned if that’s the case or not, it sounds like that was what the author wanted to come to conclude with in any case.

  11. This is in fact a very ignorant article, both in the way the author is calculating (there’s a tally later in Torah) and in the comparison of (even gold) standards then and now.


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