{"id":75373,"date":"2020-05-31T08:36:01","date_gmt":"2020-05-31T05:36:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/?p=75373"},"modified":"2020-05-31T08:36:01","modified_gmt":"2020-05-31T05:36:01","slug":"ezekiels-temple","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/ezekiels-temple\/","title":{"rendered":"Ezekiel\u2019s Temple"},"content":{"rendered":"
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40:5 \u201cAnd, look, there was a wall outside the house all around, and in the man\u2019s hand a measuring rod six cubits and a handsbreath in length, and he measured the depth of the building\u2019s wall to be one rod and the height one rod.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Throughout, \u201cthe house\u201d is the house of God–that is, the Temple. To the modern reader, it is certainly odd that Ezekiel\u2019s book should end with nine chapters devoted to an intricate account of the architecture of the Temple and the procedures of the sacrificial cult. There is nothing quite like this in any of the other Prophets. There is no reason, however, to question the status of these chapters as an authentic production by Ezekiel. One should remember that he was a Jerusalem priest deported from the city where the Temple stood in the early, partial exile of 597 B.C.E. Now, a quarter of a century later, and fourteen years after the Temple was demolished in the conquest of Jerusalem by the Babylonians, he undertakes a kind of imaginative reconstruction of the Temple, and then of the cult, painstakingly laying out its sundry structures, gate by gate, hall by hall, recess to recess. For him, this amounts to a prophecy of consolation. All this, it must be said, is rather bewildering to follow, although various commentators have sought to provide charts and floor plans based on Ezekiel\u2019s notations. There is, to begin with, a problem of architectural terms, many of which are uncertain in meaning. (The same is true of the account of Solomon\u2019s temple in Kings.) At least a few terms actually fluctuate in meaning. The two Hebrew words that usually mean \u201cwidth\u201d and \u201clength\u201d at first appear to indicate \u201cdepth\u201d and \u201cheight,\u201d but later in the chapter they revert to their original meaning. But even if we could be certain of all the architectural terms, the lineaments of the Temple are hard to make out. This commentary therefore will not attempt to elucidate the picture of the Temple. It should also be noted that Ezekiel\u2019s description of the Temple does not altogether jibe with the one in the Book of Kings, nor does his account of the cult entirely match other biblical formulations. One must assume that he either was writing from imperfect memory of the Jerusalem scene he had left two and a half decades earlier or was projecting what he conceived as an ideal image of the Temple and the worship within it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

From: Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible<\/em>, vol. 2: Prophets, W. W. Norton & Co., 2019, ad loc. 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