Tamid Photo Essay in Lego® #23

The Shot

The Spice of Life

The Memuneh consults with the head of the Avtinas family in his chamber.

The Story

One of the highlights of the morning Tamid service is the offering of the ketores [spices]. The ketores was a special blend of spices whose identities were revealed to Moshe at Mount Sinai and subsequently recorded in the Gemara (Kereisos 6a). The Avtinas family was in charge of the ketores preparation because their members were especially talented at blending spices, and they also knew the secret identity of the spice called maaleh ashan ["smoke riser"]. They carried out all their work in the chamber that bears their name. 

The Avtinas Chamber was an elevated room located on the southern side of the Azarah directly above the Mayim Gate. This chamber possessed Azarah sanctity because ketores preparation must be carried out within the Azarah. Each day, the Kohanim would enter this chamber to take a portion of ketores for the daily service.

Due to the nature of their work, it is commonly assumed that the members of the Avtinas family were Kohanim, although I have not yet found this written explicitly in the sources. I have adopted this position until I can find more evidence to the contrary, and this is why the two Avtinas men in the picture are shown wearing traditional Kohen garb (even though, technically, since making ketores is not part of the sacrificial service they would likely not have worn their bigdei kehunah while they worked).

The Setup

This shot is modeled and rendered in Bricklink Studio with depth of field added in Photoshop (read more about this process in my introduction). We have no dimensions or full descriptions of the Chamber of Avtinas and so the design is purely my own. It had to hold enough equipment and storage to process hundreds of pounds of spice at a time, and I outfitted the room accordingly. For an added touch of style, I curved the outer walls, which in Lego I accomplished by making them out of 1x2 bricks and bending them. The image below shows the curve from the top, and it also shows an interesting hiccup in Bricklink Studio if you look at the two Kohen minifigs. I must have done an update right before loading this scene and it (temporarily BH) didn't recognize my custom hat and torso, which got replaced with the default Unknown Part piece.

I wanted the countertop below the windows to match the curve of the wall. It is made of 1x2 tiles supported on 1x1 plates with light attachment which are spaced along a piece of flex tube. The countertop is built in two halves, and each half is only attached to the outer wall at one point using a 1x2 plate, which is easier to see in the Studio screenshot below. It is true that the far ends of the assembly are flimsy and may not stay up by themselves, but a well-placed piece of scene dressing (a small barrel, in this case) under the ends will add extra support.

Bending bricks works smoothly in real life but takes a concerted effort to pull off in Studio. Here you can see the wall from the outside, and the places where the angles don't quite match are pretty apparent. To attach the curved walls to the straight ones, I used 1x2 rounded plates. I haven't actually built the southern Azarah wall yet, so to hold this elevated chamber at the right height it is sitting on top of a simple tower for now.

The wooden floorboards are made from stacks of plates and tiles built to fit inside the curved walls like a mosaic floor.

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