Tachash

Also Known As: Hebrew תַּחַשׁ, plural teḥashim; Aramaic sasgona in Targum Onkelos; called keresh in the Jerusalem Talmud; rendered “badger” in the King James Version and “dolphin” in the 1985 JPS
Region/Culture: West Asia/Middle East
Mythos: Jewish Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: A ritually clean animal of many colours with a single horn set in its forehead, created for one commission and withdrawn from the world once that commission was complete.
Role in Mythos: Its hide furnished the outermost covering of the Tabernacle and the travelling wrappers for the sanctuary’s holy objects.
Relation to Humans: It came to Moses in the wilderness at the hour the Tabernacle was being built and left nothing behind but its skin. No one is described as hunting it, taming it, or seeing it again.

The tent that housed the presence of God in the Sinai was roofed in four layers, and the outermost of them was cut from an animal nobody has since been able to name. Linen first, then woven goat hair, then rams’ hides dyed red, and over everything the tachash: the layer that took the sun, the grit, and whatever rain the desert threw at it. The Torah names the material more than a dozen times. It never once describes the creature.

You can watch the stuff being handled. When the camp broke, Aaron and his sons took down the screening veil and laid it over the Ark, spread a covering of tachash skin above that, and finished with a cloth of pure blue before the poles went in. The showbread table, the lampstand, the golden altar and the bronze altar were each swaddled the same way, and in every case the tachash hide was the layer that met the weather. Whatever it was, it was the sanctuary’s raincoat. Ezekiel gives it a second life in a marriage parable, where God finds an abandoned child in the open country, raises her, clothes her in embroidery and fine linen, and puts sandals of tachash on her feet. Good enough to roof a holy tent and fine enough to shoe a bride.

The oldest surviving attempt to say what it was comes from Alexandria. The Septuagint translators, working in the third century BCE, rendered teḥashim skins as hyacinth skins, and Josephus followed them, listing among the Tabernacle’s materials goats’ hair and sheepskins dyed blue. On that reading the tachash is not a beast but a colour, the deep violet-blue of the wild eastern Mediterranean hyacinth, produced not from the flower but from a mollusc.

The animal arrived later, and it arrived through a question about ritual purity. In the Jerusalem Talmud, Rabbi Eleazar asks whether a tent made from the hide of an unclean animal transmits corpse impurity to everything beneath it, and the discussion immediately runs into the covering of the Tabernacle. Three answers are offered. Rabbi Judah says the word names a violet dye. Rabbi Nehemiah says it was a fur imported by the traders of the Black Sea, white as ermine. And the rest of the sages say plainly that it was a clean animal, and it lived in the wilderness.

That last answer solved the legal problem by inventing a zoology, and the tradition then did what traditions do with a convenient animal. Rabbi Meir’s teaching, transmitted through Simeon ben Lakish, holds that the Holy One created a clean beast for Moses in the wilderness, and that once the Tabernacle had been made from it, the animal was hidden away. Rabbi Abun supplies a name, keresh. Rabbi Hoshaya supplies the horn, reading a verse in the Psalms where the Hebrew word for horned is written short a letter, and taking the missing letter to mean one horn rather than two.

The Babylonian version is blunter and stranger. The tachash of Moses’ days, it says, was a creature unto itself, and the sages could not settle whether it counted as a wild animal or a domestic one. It had a single horn in its forehead. It happened to come to Moses for that hour, while the Tabernacle was being built, and the covering was made from it. Afterwards it was suppressed. There is no chase, no bargain, no divine speech, no name for the man who killed it. An animal walks in out of the desert, is used, and is taken back out of the world. Rashi, reading the same material into Exodus, says only that it was multi-coloured and existed just then.

The colours are where the later imagination went to work. Targum Onkelos translates tachash as sasgona, and the Talmud unpacks that as a boast: it rejoices in its many colours. The midrashim of Tanhuma and Yalkut Shimoni push further, giving the beast six colours in its hide and a body thirty cubits long, big enough that a single skin could be cut into one seamless curtain for the tent. Picture a cloven-hoofed animal the length of a house, banded like nothing else in creation, its horn straight out of the centre of the skull, standing in gravel and glare with its one job ahead of it. Then picture the empty ground afterwards.

Outside the study house, translators went hunting. In 1534 Martin Luther, working in an age convinced that Hebrew was the ancestor of all languages, noticed that the consonants of tachash resembled the German Dachs and gave his readers Dachsfelle, badger skins. English followed him for three hundred years. The 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia dismissed the badger on arithmetic alone, pointing out that the desert could not possibly have supplied enough of them for the acreage Exodus and Numbers require, and preferred Friedrich Delitzsch’s comparison with the Assyrian taḥshu, a wether, whose skins Shalmaneser used to cover boats. Gesenius had already reached for the Arabic tuḥas, a porpoise, and from that single leap came the seals of the 1915 Jewish Publication Society translation, the dolphins of its 1985 revision, and the dugongs that still turn up in study Bibles. Congregations have been asking their rabbis about sea mammals in the wilderness ever since.

The likeliest answer kills the animal off entirely. The Assyriologist Stephanie Dalley, working on Akkadian and Hurrian craft texts, showed that Hebrew tachash is cognate with duhsu, which is neither a creature nor a colour but a technique: sewing blue faience beads onto leather. Craft archives from Isin and Mari list duhsu hides alongside madder-red-dyed hides, precisely the pairing Exodus uses. An Amarna letter records the king of Mitanni sending Akhenaten a pair of duhsu shoes studded with gold, and beaded sandals of exactly that description came out of Tutankhamun’s tomb. William Propp’s Anchor Bible commentary now simply translates the word as beaded leather. On that reading Ezekiel is not describing exotic footwear at all but shoes fit for a pharaoh, and the sanctuary was roofed in the most expensive luxury goods of the late Bronze Age. There is even a bead-maker hiding in Genesis, where Tachash appears as the name of a son of Nahor by his concubine Reumah, brother to a man called Butcher.

Its powers, such as they are, belong to the hide rather than the beast. The skin sheds sun and weather, takes dye and bead work, honours the requirement that only clean animals furnish the work of heaven, and covers holiness in transit so that the tribes can carry a sanctuary through a desert. Its limitations are absolute and were built in from the start. It has no myth cycle, no offspring, no adversary, no cult. It cannot be found, because the whole point of the story is that it was withdrawn the moment the tent was finished, and it cannot be identified, because the tradition that made it an animal was answering a question about ritual purity rather than reporting a sighting. The tachash is the rare monster that exists entirely inside a translation problem, and it has outlasted most of the beasts that were merely seen.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Tachash?

The Tachash is an animal named in the Hebrew Bible whose skins formed the outer covering of the Tabernacle and the travelling wrappers for its sacred objects. The Torah never describes it. Later rabbinic tradition filled the gap with a single-horned, many-coloured creature created specially for Moses.

Was the Tachash a unicorn?

In rabbinic sources, effectively yes. The Babylonian Talmud states that the Tachash had one horn in its forehead, and the Jerusalem Talmud derives the same detail from a defectively spelled word in Psalms, naming the animal keresh. This is a Talmudic development rather than anything found in the biblical text itself.

What was the Tachash used for?

Its hides made the outermost roof covering of the Tabernacle and the protective wrappings placed over the Ark of the Covenant, the showbread table, the lampstand, and the golden and bronze altars when the camp moved. Ezekiel also describes sandals of tachash given to Israel in a marriage parable.

Why did the Tachash disappear?

Rabbinic tradition holds that God created the animal solely so the Tabernacle could be built, and that once the covering was made it was hidden away and never seen again. That explanation neatly answers why no such creature exists and why nobody could agree on whether it was wild or domestic.

Was the Tachash a real animal?

Probably not. Translators have proposed badgers, seals, porpoises, dolphins and dugongs, none convincingly, and the Assyriologist Stephanie Dalley argued that Hebrew tachash is cognate with Akkadian duhsu, a technique of sewing faience beads onto leather. On that reading the Tabernacle was covered in beaded hides, and the animal was invented later to answer a question about ritual purity.