text, 2Ch 3:1, namely, “Mount Moriah, where the Lord had appeared to David” at the time of the pestilence, and where David had built an altar of burnt-offering by divine command (see at 2Sa 24:25).
Verses 2-4
1Ki 6:2-4Plan and dimensions of the temple-house. - The measure of the temple-house and its several subdivisions are all given in the clear, i.e., as the spaces were seen. The house, i.e., the main building of the temple (lit., as for the house, or shell of the building), its length was sixty cubits, its breadth twenty cubits, and its height thirty cubits, and that, according to 2Ch 3:3, “after the earlier measure,” i.e., after the old Mosaic or sacred cubit, which was a hand-breadth longer, according to Eze 40:5 and Eze 43:13, than the civil cubit of the time of the captivity. The Mosaic cubit, according to the investigations of Thenius, was 214,512 Parisian lines long, i.e., 20 1/2 Dresden inches, or 18 1/2 Rhenish inches (see at Gen 6:10).
Verse 3
The porch (lit., hall) in the face of (על־פּני, i.e., before) the Holy Place of the house was twenty cubits long, before (על־פּני) the breadth of the house, i.e., it was just the same breadth as the house. The longer line, which ran parallel to the breadth of the house, is called here ארך, the length, though from our point of view we should call it the width. And ten cubits was its breadth, i.e., its depth in front of the house. The height of the court is not given in our text; but in 2Ch 3:4 it is said to have been 120 cubits. This is certainly an error, although Ewald (Gesch. iii. p. 300) still joins with Stieglitz (Baukunst, p. 126, and Beitrr. zur Gesch. der Bauk. i. p. 70) in defending its correctness. For an erection of such a height as this could not possibly have been designated as אוּלם (a hall or porch), but would have been called מגדּל, a tower. But even a tower of 120 cubits in height in front of a temple which was only thirty cubits high, would have shown a greater disproportion than our loftiest church towers;[1] and such a funnel-like erection with a base of only ten
- ↑ In the Strasburg cathedral and that at Freiburg in Breisgau the proportion between the height of the tower and that of the church, together with the roof, is about 3 1/4 to 1; it is only in the cathedral at Rouen that the proportion would have been almost 4 to 1 if it had been carried out to the very top. At the same time, in making this comparison it must be borne in mind that these Gothic towers taper off into slender points, whereas in the case of Solomon's temple we must assume that if the porch was carried up to the height supposed, it finished in a flat truncated tower; and it is this which would chiefly occasion the disproportion.
