Biblion Bible Commentary
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The House and Its Chambers
Ezekiel 41:1-42:20
1 He brought me to the nave and measured the posts, six cubits wide on the one side and six cubits wide on the other side, which was the width of the tent. · WEB
The guide measures the innermost room and steps outside it, and the last measurement of the section is a wall dividing holy from common.
The survey now enters the house itself, and the sequence is the one any priest would recognize. First the nave, forty cubits by twenty. Then the guide went inward alone and measured a further room, twenty by twenty, and told Ezekiel what it was: This is the most holy place. The prophet does not enter it. The man with the reed goes in and comes out with a number, and the room is described from the doorway.
What is on the walls is worth noting against chapter 8. There the hidden chamber had been painted around on the wall with creeping things and abominable animals Ezekiel 8:10. Here the whole house is carved with cherubim and palm trees alternating, each cherub with two faces — a man's face toward a palm tree on one side, a young lion's toward a palm tree on the other. The same technique, the same surfaces, and an entirely different subject.
The chambers that follow are storage and vesting rooms in blocks of three stories, and their purpose is given plainly. The priests eat the most holy things there and lay the offerings there. And one rule attached to them explains a great deal about the whole vision: when the priests leave the holy place they must leave their ministering garments behind and put on other garments, before they approach that which is for the people. Holiness is treated here as something that transfers by contact and must not be carried out casually into ordinary space.
Then the guide brings him out by the east gate and measures the perimeter, five hundred by five hundred, and the section ends with a sentence that states what all the numbers have been for. There was a wall around it to make a separation between that which was holy and that which was common. The priests of chapter 22 had failed at exactly this — they made no distinction between the holy and the common Ezekiel 22:26. What they would not teach, the architecture now enforces.
settled What this mark means