A Measuring Reed Where the Ruins Had Been

“The beginning of the year” is rosh hashanah, the only place the phrase occurs in the Bible. The tenth day was when the Passover lamb was chosen (Exodus 12:3), or, if the year began in autumn, the Day of Atonement. The twenty-fifth year is half of fifty, the jubilee, when land returned to its owners.

“Visions of God” is the phrase of 1:1 and 8:3, and appears nowhere else in the book. In chapter 8 the visions took Ezekiel to Jerusalem to see its abominations; now they take him back to the land to see an ordered house. Isaiah 2:2 also sets the LORD’s house “in the top of the mountains”.

The man’s bronze look recalls the living creatures, whose feet “sparkled like the colour of burnished brass” (1:7). He carries two tools: a flax line for long distances and a reed for short ones. Zechariah 2:1 has a similar figure with a measuring line in his hand.

The command is repeated almost word for word in 44:5, framing the vision. In 43:10–11 Ezekiel is told to “shew the house to the house of Israel” and “write it in their sight”. The prophet who once acted out signs is now a surveyor’s witness who must report exact figures.

The long cubit, a cubit plus a handbreadth, is the standard defined again in 43:13; 2 Chronicles 3:3 speaks of Solomon building by “the first measure”. If it was about fifty-two centimetres, the reed was about three metres. The wall is as thick as it is high: a boundary line, not a fortress.

The east gate comes first. It faces the direction in which the glory departed in 11:23 and from which it will return in 43:1–2. The Hebrew repeats “the other threshold... one reed broad”, which many take as a copyist’s doubling of the phrase before it.

The “little chambers” were guardrooms. Gates with three rooms on each side of the passage, six in all, have been excavated at Megiddo, Hazor and Gezer, the three cities 1 Kings 9:15 says Solomon fortified. Ezekiel’s gate follows a known Israelite design.

Several Hebrew manuscripts and the Greek lack this verse, which repeats the end of verse 7 almost word for word. A copyist’s eye probably slipped between two similar lines. The measuring guide did not need to measure the same porch twice.

At eight cubits the porch is deeper than the one-reed figure just given, which suggests two different dimensions of the same structure. “The porch of the gate was inward”: the vestibule projects into the court rather than facing the approaching visitor.

“They three were of one measure” is the point of the verse. Every guardroom matches its neighbour, and each side mirrors the other. Chapter 44:11 puts Levites “having charge at the gates of the house”, the natural occupants of such rooms.

Ten cubits of entry and thirteen of gate length do not fit easily with the fifty-cubit gate of verse 15, and interpreters have proposed several ways to reconcile them. One suggestion is that thirteen is the full width of the passage measured between the facing walls.

The “space” before each chamber is gevul, a border or barrier, probably a low ledge one cubit deep. A guard could stand on it, out of the passage, without blocking the traffic moving through the gate.

Twenty-five cubits across the whole gatehouse, door facing door. Multiples of twenty-five run through chapters 40 to 48: gates fifty by twenty-five, courts of a hundred, a sacred district of twenty-five thousand. The number is the chapter’s working unit.

“Posts of threescore cubits” has baffled translators. Sixty cubits cannot be a width here and seems excessive as a height. The Greek reads “twenty cubits”, and this is generally reckoned one of the most damaged verses in the Hebrew of the vision.

Fifty cubits from front to back against twenty-five across: the gatehouse is exactly twice as long as it is wide. That two-to-one rectangle will be repeated at the other five gates, so that every entrance to the complex has the same footprint.

“Narrow windows” translates a word meaning closed or framed, probably latticed or splayed openings. Solomon’s house had “windows of narrow lights” (1 Kings 6:4). Light reached the guardrooms without making the gatehouse an easy way in.

The outer court is the first open space Ezekiel enters. Thirty chambers stand on a stone pavement around it. Jeremiah 35:4 mentions rooms in the old temple used by named families and officials, and the Rechabites were brought into one of them.

The “lower pavement” ran along the outer wall as far into the court as the gates reached. The word lower implies what the steps will confirm: the courts rise in stages, the outer lower than the inner.

A hundred cubits separates the outer gate from the inner gate. “Eastward and northward” applies the same distance on two sides at once, sparing the reader a repeat of the figure. A hundred cubits is perhaps fifty metres of open court.

After the east gate comes the north gate, then the south. There is no west gate in the outer wall; behind the temple stands the separate building of 41:12, and the complex offers no entrance from the rear.

“Arches” is the King James rendering of ‘elam, which is better understood as a porch or vestibule, the same element as in verse 9. The north gate matches the east one in every part, fifty cubits by twenty-five.

Seven steps: the “stairs” of verse 6 are counted for the first time. The porch stood at the inner end of the passage, beyond the chambers, so the visitor climbed, walked through between the guardrooms, and only then met the vestibule.

The inner gate lines up with the outer gate across the court. A worshipper entering from the north saw straight through one gateway to the next, a hundred cubits on. The design is axial: every route inward is a straight line.

Chapter 46:9 later sets a rule for these gates: whoever enters by the north gate must leave by the south, and whoever enters by the south must leave by the north, so that no one turns back. The south gate is one half of that one-way flow.

“Like those windows” is the text abbreviating itself; the pattern is established and needs only to be pointed to. Fifty by twenty-five cubits, on the long cubit, would be a gatehouse of perhaps twenty-six by thirteen metres.

Palm trees were carved in Solomon’s house together with cherubim and flowers (1 Kings 6:29). In Ezekiel’s complex the gates carry palms alone; the cherubim will appear only inside the house (41:18), reserving the heavenly figures for the holiest space.

The third hundred-cubit measurement completes the pattern on the south side. With the gates at equal distances on three sides, the inner court sits exactly within the outer, a square within a square. In 42:20 the whole measures five hundred each way; the King James reads reeds, though the court figures add up to five hundred cubits.

Ezekiel enters the inner court from the south simply because that is where the tour has brought him. The inner gates repeat the outer gates’ measurements but face the other way, with their vestibules toward the outer court, as verse 31 says.

Solomon’s temple had an inner court, built with “three rows of hewed stone, and a row of cedar beams” (1 Kings 6:36), but no gatehouses like these are described. Ezekiel’s inner court is walled and gated like a second city wall inside the first.

Absent from the Greek and from some Hebrew manuscripts, this verse gives figures, twenty-five by five, that match no other part of the gate. It is often taken as an early marginal note, or a duplication that found its way into the text.

Eight steps rise to the inner gate against seven for the outer. The vestibules face outward, so the porches of the inner and outer gates face each other across the court. A worshipper crossing from one to the other walked between two matching entrances.

Ezekiel now stands in the inner court, moving to its east gate. Chapter 46:1 will rule that this gate stays shut on the six working days and is opened only on the sabbath and the new moon.

According to 46:2 the prince will stand “by the post of the gate” while the priests make his offerings. The posts measured here are the ones he will stand beside. He may watch the altar from the threshold, but not pass into the priests’ space.

Seven steps to the outer gates and eight to the inner make fifteen. The Mishnah (Middot 2:5) records fifteen steps in the later temple between the Court of the Women and the Court of Israel, matching the fifteen Songs of Degrees, Psalms 120 to 134, which the Levites were said to sing upon them.

The north gate is last. Leviticus 1:11 commanded that the burnt offering be killed “on the side of the altar northward before the LORD”, and it is at this north gate that the tables for slaughter will be listed in verses 38 to 43.

With this gate all six have been measured: three in the outer wall and three in the inner, identical in length, width and layout. No other part of the complex is described so many times, and the sixth description is the shortest.

Where the Hebrew has “posts”, the Greek reads “porch”, which matches verses 31 and 34 and is the likelier reading. The two Hebrew words differ by a letter. The eight steps are named for the third time.

Leviticus 1:9 required the inwards and legs of a burnt offering to be washed in water. Solomon provided ten lavers “to wash in them: such things as they offered for the burnt offering they washed in them” (2 Chronicles 4:6). Here the washing has its own room by the gate.

The three offerings named are the burnt offering, the sin offering and the trespass offering: ‘olah, chatta’t and asham, the offerings of Leviticus 1, 4 and 5. It is the first time in the vision that sacrifice for sin is mentioned.

Four more tables stand outside the porch, two on each side of the ascent. The first four were within the porch (verse 39). The worshipper coming up the steps would pass the tables before entering the gate.

The text does its own arithmetic: four and four make eight. Leaving nothing for the reader to work out is part of the vision’s method; the tables for slaughter are counted as carefully as the gate chambers.

A cubit and a half square and a cubit high is small, perhaps seventy-eight centimetres across, too small for slaughtering and suited to holding knives and tools. Exodus 20:25 forbade hewn stone for the altar, but these are tables, not an altar.

“Hooks” renders a rare word, shefattayim, which may mean double hooks, pegs or ledges; the ancient translators were plainly unsure of it. Either way, something a handbreadth wide ran round the wall to hang or rest the carcasses on, keeping the flesh off the floor.

“Singers” may be a misreading: the Greek has “two chambers”, and the Hebrew words for “singers” and “two” are close. Verses 45 and 46 describe exactly two chambers, both for priests, and singers are otherwise absent from Ezekiel’s temple.

“Keepers of the charge of the house” is the phrase used of the Levites in Numbers 3:28 and 32. The house is the building itself: its doors, its maintenance, its security. Their chamber looks south, so it stands by the north gate.

Zadok was the priest who anointed Solomon and replaced Abiathar (1 Kings 1:39; 2:35). “Come near” is the technical term for priestly approach, as in Leviticus 10:3: “I will be sanctified in them that come nigh me.” This is the first mention of Zadok in the book.

The inner court is a perfect square, a hundred cubits each way. Many reconstructions place the altar at its centre, which would put it near the geometric centre of the whole walled square. The altar’s own measurements are held back until 43:13–17.

Ezekiel is brought to the porch of the house itself. The posts are five cubits thick on each side and the entrance three cubits on each side. The Greek adds a doorway fourteen cubits wide, a figure the Hebrew lacks.

Solomon’s porch was twenty cubits by ten (1 Kings 6:3); Ezekiel’s is twenty by eleven, and twenty by twelve in the Greek. The two pillars recall Jachin and Boaz, which Solomon set up at his porch (1 Kings 7:21), but here they are left unnamed and unornamented.