There are two words which refer to the accumulation of holiness on a spatial level: Mishkan and Mikdash. Although the Talmud (Eruvin 2a) admits that these two words can sometimes be used almost interchangeably, they are not truly synonymous. They actually refer to two specific types of holy places and other usages are simply borrowed meanings. The word Mishkan, commonly translated as “Tabernacle”, generally refers to the temporary portable temple which the Jews would erect and disassemble as they travelled through the wilderness. Its root is associated with the words le-shaken and shechinah which refer to the “dwelling” of G-d’s Holy Presence. The term Mikdash or Bet ha-Mikdash, usually translated as “the Holy Temple”, is a reference to the permanent temples built in Jerusalem upon Mount Moriah.
The Mishkan remained mobile for the forty years that the Jews traversed the desert, and then stood stationary at Gilgal for the first fourteen years that the Jews settled in the Holy Land (while they conquered and divided the Land). Afterwards, the Mishkan was transferred to the city of Shiloh where it stood for three-hundred and sixty-nine years. When the Phillistines destroyed the Mishkan at Shiloh, it was relocated to Nov and then Givon for a total of fifty-seven years. By that time, the Davidic dynasty had already begun its reign and King Solomon built the First Temple in Jerusalem. The Babylonian destroyed First Temple about 410 years after its destruction and sent the Jews into a seventy-year exile in Babylon. Upon returning from exile, the Jews came to Jerusalem and built the Second Temple under Persian rule. That temple too lasted some four centuries until it was destroyed by the Roman legionaries in the year 69 CE.
So what is the difference between a Mikdash and Mishkan? In the Mishkan, the Holy of Holies (the chamber that housed the Ark of the Covenant) was marked off with a special curtain. In the First Temple, it was marked off with a wall (although, in the Second Temple, it was demarcated with two curtains). Similarly, the Mishkan was covered with ten cloth curtains, while the Mikdash had a real roof. The Mishkan used cloth and curtains where the Mikdash used more concrete materials because by its very nature the Mishkan was merely temporary, while the Mikdash was meant to be permanent. The dimensions of the Mikdash were obviously greater than those of the Mishkan precisely because the latter was meant to be a permanent structure, not a movable temporary one.
Another major differences between the Mishkan-era and Mikdash-era was the halachic permissibility of private altars. That is, when the central place of worship was a Mishkan, then halacha allowed for private altars for the offering certain types of sacrifices (except for the forty years in the desert and the three and a half centuries that the Mishkan stood at Shiloh). However, once the Mikdash was built, all private altars became permanently forbidden.
The Mishna (Zevachim 14:6) explains that the Mishkan that stood at Shiloh had quasi-Mikdash status. At Shiloh, the Mishkan was built differently than at other places: The stone walls of the Mishkan in Shiloh exhibited the properties of a permanent edifice (unlike at the other places where the Mishkan rested), but it was nonetheless covered with a curtain as it was when erected at other places. Moreover, as mentioned above, the Mishkan stood at Shiloh for almost four hundred years, which certainly gave it some sort of permanence. So the Mishkan at Shiloh was not a temporary sanctuary as the Mishkan at other places; it was a semi-permanent stepping-stone between the temporary Mishkan and the permanent Mikdash.
Towards the end of his life, Moshe tells the Jews assembled, “For you have not yet come to the resting place or to the inheritance that Hashem, your G-d, gives you” (Deut. 12:9). The Talmud (Zevachim 119a) expounds this verse as a reference to the two stages of Temple-building: “the resting place” refers to the Mishkan at Shiloh, while “the inheritance” refers to the Temple in Jerusalem. Rabbi Avraham Wittenstein (of Yeshivat Mir in Jerusalem) explains that the Mishkan-paradigm had an advantage because it reflected the continuous manifestation of G-d’s presence from the time of His revelation at Mount Sinai. When the Phillistines destroyed the Mishkan at Shiloh, they caused a sort of disconnection from Sinai, so that when the Mishkan would later be reconstructed (at Nov and Givon) and the Mikdash would eventually be built, the Holy Presence there would not be the direct continuation of the divine revelation at Sinai. Instead, it would represent a new sort of revelation which could only be achieved through the hard work of the prophet Samuel and King David.
