It's crazy how quickly the escape from slavery happens compared to how much space/detail is given over to the tabernacle design/construction... this is no airport paperback novel.

"God hardened Pharaoh's heart" - perhaps not as problematic as it's made out to be. It's a special historical circumstance, and Pharaoh is exceedingly cruel, having hardened his own heart several times prior to God's hardening it. If it were said of Hitler when his project of systematically exterminating the Jews was already well underway that God hardened his heart, we wouldn't make much of it - that heart was already pretty damn hard. So it's hard to pull a soteriology out of it, or make any broad statements about free will or lack thereof. The point, I think, is more to say that the farther you go down a path the harder it will be for you to turn back - and that God uses it to his advantage either way whether you're for or against him.

Also interesting to me is that God winds up in a position where he must choose the lesser of two evils - wiping out an unfaithful Israel who has broken covenant to worship the golden calf, or keeping his promise and curtailing his retributive justice - and that Moses arguing with him on this point is how God's character really comes to the fore.

And I suppose the length and detail of the tabernacle passages emphasizes for me that God's desire and ultimate design is to dwell with his people in the here-and-now - and the other things that "salvation" is typically reduced to miss this point. Nothing so far in the OT suggests a sort of spiritual/Platonic afterlife, or far-future paradise, that might typically come to mind. It's not about "going to heaven" or "being saved", or even "having faith" per se. Nor is it about an individual's spiritual well-being, being atoned for and having peace of mind or whatever. It's about being together again, reconciled right here, right now, even if the incompleteness of this reconciliation suggests there will be something more total later on.