Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Ezekiel · About this commentary
The Man With the Measuring Reed
Ezekiel 40:1-27
1 In the twenty-fifth year of our captivity, in the beginning of the year, in the tenth day of the month, in the fourteenth year after the city was struck, in the same day, Yahweh’s hand was on me, and he brought me there. · WEB
Fourteen years after the temple burned, a priest is set on a mountain and walked through a building with a surveyor who measures everything.
The date is given with unusual care, and one clause in it explains the whole vision: in the fourteenth year after the city was struck. Fourteen years is long enough for grief to settle into permanence. The men who had served in the temple were old or dead, the plan of the building was passing out of living memory, and Ezekiel is a priest who never served in the house he is about to be shown.
He is set down on a very high mountain with something like the frame of a city to the south, and a man is standing in the gate whose appearance is like the appearance of bronze, with a line of flax and a measuring reed. Two instruments: a long cord for distances and a rod for details. The instruction he receives governs how the next nine chapters should be read: see with your eyes, and hear with your ears, and set your heart on all that I will show you... Declare all that you see to the house of Israel.
What follows is a survey, and modern readers find it tedious for a reason worth naming. Nothing is interpreted. The reed is applied to walls, thresholds, gate chambers, posts, arches, windows and steps, and the numbers are recorded. But the tedium is the message to its first audience. A people who had watched a building burn are given its successor in dimensions, and dimensions are what you give somebody who is going to build. Nothing about the description is dreamlike.
The measurements themselves make one point repeatedly. The gates are enormously deep — a series of guard chambers with posts between them, so that entering the courts means passing through a controlled sequence rather than walking in. Steps go up at each stage: seven to the outer court, eight to the inner. The building rises as it is penetrated, and access narrows. After eight chapters in which idolaters had reached the inner court and set an image at the north gate Ezekiel 8:5, the architecture itself is the correction.
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