The House Within the Measured Courts

“Temple” here is hekal, the main hall. “The breadth of the tabernacle” uses ‘ohel, the word for a tent, which is strange in a stone building; the Greek reads differently, and many scholars correct it. As it stands, the Hebrew lets the wilderness tent be glimpsed inside the stone house.

Forty cubits by twenty are exactly the measurements of Solomon’s main hall (1 Kings 6:2, 17). The new house keeps the old proportions. The doorway is ten cubits wide, flanked by five-cubit walls on either side.

The openings narrow as the rooms advance: the porch entrance, then a door of ten cubits into the hall, and now a door of six into the inner room. Each step inward is through a smaller gap, and the guide passes through alone.

Twenty by twenty repeats Solomon’s inner room, which was a cube of twenty cubits (1 Kings 6:20); Ezekiel gives no height. No ark is mentioned, and none of Solomon’s great olive-wood cherubim. Jeremiah 3:16 had said the ark would no longer be remembered. The room is named, measured, and left empty.

Six cubits, around three metres, is a massive wall for a building this size. The side chambers against it are only four cubits deep, narrow rooms wrapped around three sides of the house like a sleeve.

Three storeys of thirty rooms make ninety chambers. Solomon’s house had the same arrangement: “he made narrowed rests round about, that the beams should not be fastened in the walls of the house” (1 Kings 6:6). The side rooms rest on ledges but are never bonded into the sanctuary wall.

Because the main wall steps back at each storey, every upper room is a little wider than the one beneath. Solomon’s side chambers were reached “with winding stairs” (1 Kings 6:8), and a stair or ramp seems to be meant by the “winding about” here as well.

“I saw” is Ezekiel’s own observation, not the guide’s measuring. The whole house stood on a raised platform a full reed high, about three metres. “Great cubits” renders a rare word that may mean “to the joint” or the corner, the precise edge of the platform.

The outer wall of the side chambers is five cubits thick. “That which was left” is a single Hebrew word, munach, meaning an open area left free, a strip of platform running along the outside of the chambers.

Twenty cubits of open ground separate the house from the priests’ chamber blocks described in chapter 42. The gap is as wide as the holy place itself: nothing is allowed to crowd the sanctuary.

Ninety side rooms had only two doors between them, one on the north and one on the south. Access to all that storage was limited to two watched points, while the free strip in front of them was five cubits wide.

“Separate place” is gizrah, from gazar, “to cut off”, the verb the exiles used of themselves in 37:11. A cordoned yard lies behind the house, and behind it a large building seventy by ninety cubits. 1 Chronicles 26:18 mentions a structure called Parbar on the west side of the old temple.

The house measures exactly a hundred cubits long, and the yard with the western building another hundred. Commentators have added up the porch, the hall, the inner room and the walls and found that they come to this total.

The eastern frontage of the house and yard is also a hundred cubits. Together with the inner court (40:47), the plan now consists of two hundred-cubit squares, the court in front and the house behind.

“Galleries” renders ‘attiqim, a rare architectural word found only in Ezekiel 41 and 42. It may mean terraces, balconies or stepped storeys. The measuring now returns from the west building to take in the inner temple and the porches together.

“Cieled” is the 1611 spelling of ceiled, meaning lined or panelled, from the Latin caelare, to carve. It does not mean only the overhead surface. The walls were covered with wood from the floor up to the windows, as Solomon lined his house with cedar (1 Kings 6:15).

The panelling reaches “even unto the inner house”: the most holy place is lined as well. “By measure” may mean in measured sections, the wall divided into regular panels, a frame for the carvings the next verse describes.

A frieze of winged figures on either side of a stylised tree was a well-known motif in the ancient Near East; the carved ivories found at Samaria show it. Ezekiel’s walls repeat the pattern endlessly: palm, cherub, palm, cherub, all the way round.

The living creatures of 1:10 had four faces: man, lion, ox and eagle. These carved cherubim have only two, man and young lion, one looking to each neighbouring palm. A carving in low relief on a flat wall can show two faces in profile, and the ox and the eagle are left out.

The carvings run from the floor to above the doorway. The last words, “and on the wall of the temple”, may belong with the next verse; the verse divisions were added long after the text was written, and here they cut awkwardly.

“Posts” is mezuzah, the doorpost, the word of Deuteronomy 6:9, “write them upon the posts of thy house”. The frame of the hall doorway was squared, and the front of the inner room looked the same, one entrance matching the other.

No gold is mentioned anywhere in Ezekiel’s temple, though Solomon overlaid his house and its altar with gold (1 Kings 6:21–22). This altar is plain wood, larger than the incense altar of Exodus 30:2. The Greek adds a width of two cubits, which the Hebrew lacks.

One door leads into the hall and one into the inner room. Solomon’s inner room had doors of olive wood (1 Kings 6:31); the Chronicler also mentions a veil (2 Chronicles 3:14). Ezekiel speaks only of doors.

Each door has two leaves, and each leaf itself folds in two. 1 Kings 6:34 describes Solomon’s doors in almost the same words: “the two leaves of the one door were folding, and the two leaves of the other door were folding.”

The doors carry the same cherubim and palms as the walls, so the pattern is not broken where the doors swing. “Thick planks” renders ‘av, a rare word that may mean a wooden canopy or cornice over the porch, found also in 1 Kings 7:6.

Narrow windows let little light into the interior. The interior was presumably dim, lit by high slits; in 43:2 the earth will shine with the glory itself. The chapter closes where it began, at the porch, having gone in to the most holy place and come back out.