The three large tapestries that Marc Chagall designed for the Israeli Knesset - the parliament of the State of Israel - in Jerusalem, installed in 1966, represent the fullest and most monumental statement of his lifelong engagement with the biblical narrative of Jewish history and identity. The commission was itself unprecedented: a secular democratic parliament requesting from a Jewish artist a visual statement of the national covenant story for its most public and ceremonial space.
The central fabric depicts the Exodus from Egypt - the foundational narrative of Israelite identity - as a continuous panorama that moves from bondage through liberation to covenant. Exodus 3:2, the burning bush through which God speaks to Moses ('Moses saw that though the bush was on fire it did not burn up'), appears in the lower left as the inaugural vision of Moses's prophetic calling. Exodus 14:21, the parting of the Red Sea ('Moses stretched out his hand over the sea, and all that night the Lord drove the sea back with a strong east wind'), appears in the central field as the decisive miracle of liberation. Exodus 20, the giving of the Ten Commandments at Sinai, appears in the upper register as the culminating moment of covenant: liberation completed in law, freedom given its defining form.
Chagall's visual language in the tapestries is the fully developed idiom of his late work: large, floating figures in intense color that refuse realistic spatial relationships in favor of dreamlike simultaneity, animals and symbols integrated into the narrative field, the compositional rhythm driven by color and emotional temperature rather than narrative sequence. The Exodus fabric moves through a gamut of blues, greens, and yellows that respond to the emotional arc of the story - the dark anxiety of bondage, the brilliant clarity of liberation, the overwhelming golden presence of the divine encounter at Sinai.
The side tapestries - depicting the entry into Jerusalem and the prophetic vision of national renewal - complement the central Exodus narrative to create a complete theological statement of Israel's covenant history. Together the three tapestries present Jewish history as a divine drama of calling, liberation, and covenant whose telos is the establishment of a people and a land capable of bearing divine witness to the nations. Ezekiel 37's vision of the valley of dry bones and Amos 9:14's promise of restoration ('I will restore the fortunes of my people Israel') are among the prophetic texts that reverberate through the side panels.
The Knesset commission placed Chagall in a complex relationship with Israeli secular Zionism. The founders of the Israeli state were largely secular Jews for whom the biblical narrative was a cultural and historical heritage rather than an active religious claim. Chagall's own relationship to Jewish religious observance was similarly complex - he was deeply formed by his Hasidic childhood in Vitebsk but had lived as an artist in secular European contexts for most of his adult life. The tapestries navigate this complexity by presenting the biblical narrative as both history and vision: events that happened and meanings that continue to generate.
The State of Israel had been established in 1948, eighteen years before the tapestries were installed. For Chagall, who had spent the Nazi years in exile in America, whose first wife Bella had died in 1944, and who had seen the decimation of the European Jewish world from which he came, the creation of the State of Israel was not primarily a political event but an eschatological one - a fulfillment, however imperfect, of the promise that echoes through the Exodus narrative and the prophets. The tapestries are, among other things, a thank-offering: beauty made in response to survival.