Or HaChaim on Exodus 25:21/אור החיים על שמות כ״ה:כ״א

1 ונתת את הכפרת על הארון מלמעלה, "And you shall put the lid on top of the ark, from above;" Why did the Torah have to repeat that the "testimony" (Tablets with the Ten Commandments) should be placed inside the ark? We have already been told of this in 25,16! Rashi answers this problem saying that Moses was to first put the Tablets inside and subsequently to put the lid on the ark. He quotes 40,20 where the Torah describes Moses carrying out the instructions given here. Rashi's commentary suggests that unless the Torah had repeated itself one could have erred and thought that the Tablets were to be placed on top of the lid of the ark. I am not satisfied with this. First of all, there was no room on top of the lid for the Tablets as the whole top of the lid was taken up by the cherubs. Besides, if the Torah was concerned about the reader making such an error, it only had to add the word בתוך, "inside," in verse 16 instead of writing אל! There are other objections that could be raised against Rashi's commentary. The comments by Rabbi Eliyah Mizrachi on this duplication are not compatible with his usually profound insights. He wanted to defend Rashi by using the fact that Rabbi Avraham ibn Ezra did not see any need to comment as proof that there is no difficulty at all. With all due respect, I feel that Rabbi Mizrachi succeeded in defending Rabbi Ibn Ezra's words rather than those of Rashi. The instructions in verse 16 had to precede those in verse 21 as otherwise the Torah would have commanded placing the lid on an empty ark, seeing that the instruction to put the Tablets inside it would have been issued after the directive to put the lid on top of the ark!

2I believe that the correct interpretation of our verse is to underline that not only are the Tablets to be placed inside the ark but they are not to be taken out again forever, similar to the original Torah scroll which Moses was commanded to place next to the Tablets. Our sages in Devarim Rabbah 9,9 say that if ever there is a discrepancy between the Torah scrolls of one tribe and that of another tribe [the 13 original ones were all written by Moses personally, Ed.], the Torah scroll to be used as the one to compare to is the one which was kept inside the ark. [One could compare what was written in that scroll without removing the scroll from the ark. Ed.] This also helps us to understand why the Torah in our verse mentions the placing of the lid on the ark before mentioning the fact that the Tablets were to be placed in it. All the verse came to tell us is that once the Tablets had been placed inside the ark and the lid had been placed on top they were to stay there forever.

3Another meaning of the verse, i.e. the repetition of what was mentioned in verse 16, is that Moses was to wait with placing the Tablets inside until all three parts of the ark had been completed together with the lid and the cherubs on it. This would appear to be so, based on the sequence of the words: ונתת את הכפרת…followed by אל הארון תתן את העדות.

4A third possibility is, as our sages stated in Baba Batra 14, that the ark contained both the second set of Tablets and the broken pieces of the first Tablets. The two instructions to place the Tablets inside the ark would then refer to the two sets of Tablets, respectively.

5There may also be a moral-ethical lesson in the wording of these instructions. The Torah first describes the lid as being on top of, i.e. spiritually higher than the Tablets which are inside the ark. At the same time the wording of the subsequent verse gives the impression that the Tablets are on top of the lid, i.e. that the Tablets represent spiritually higher values than those inside the ark. The Torah therefore succeeds in conveying to its readers that it is on a spiritually higher level than even the lid with its cherubs, the source of G'd's voice speaking with Moses. If the Torah had used the words ונתת את הכפרת על הארון מלמעלה in verse 16, we would have concluded that the כפרת represented the symbol of supreme spirituality.