The temple Ezekiel measured

The reed in the man’s hand

In the twenty-fifth year of the exile, fourteen years after Jerusalem fell, Ezekiel is set down on a very high mountain and meets a man whose appearance was like bronze, with a linen cord in one hand and a measuring reed in the other (Ezekiel 40:1-3). Almost everything in the nine chapters that follow is that reed being laid against something.

The reed is defined once, and the whole vision’s arithmetic hangs on the definition: six long cubits, each being a cubit and a handbreadth in length (Ezekiel 40:5). A handbreadth is a sixth of an ordinary cubit, so the long cubit is seven handbreadths where the everyday one is six, and the reed is six of those. That much is the text’s, and it is exact.

What the text does not give is the length of a cubit in anything a reader owns. A cubit is a forearm, and forearms vary. The figures on this page use 21 inches for the long cubit, which is the figure in the ESV’s own table of weights and measures. So the cubit and reed columns below are Scripture, and the feet and miles columns are Scripture multiplied by an estimate: move the estimate by an inch and every mile on the page moves by about five percent.

This governs all three drawings below. The tables give every unit at once.

The house, one hundred cubits long

Start at the smallest scale, inside the building itself. The man takes Ezekiel up the steps and through it in order, and the order is the old one: a vestibule, then the nave, then the room beyond it he measures but does not enter, because a priest of Zadok’s line would not have gone in either.

It is the size of the house that burned. Set it beside Solomon’s temple: that house was sixty cubits long and twenty wide (1 Kings 6:2), and here the nave and the Most Holy Place are forty and twenty, which is the same sixty by twenty. The vestibule was ten cubits deep there and is twelve here. Room for room, a grieving exile is shown the house he remembers. What is new is everything around it. And because the cubit here is the long one, the same count of cubits stands about a sixth larger on the ground than it did in Jerusalem.

The compound, five hundred cubits square

The man measures the outside last, and it is the number that makes the rest make sense: 500 cubits on the east side, 500 on the north, 500 on the south, 500 on the west, with a wall around it to make a separation between the holy and the common (Ezekiel 42:15-20).

Everything measured in chapters 40 to 42 fits inside that square, and fits it exactly. Going east to west: a gate 50 deep, a court 100 across, an inner gate 50 deep, the inner court 100 square, the house 100 long, and the yard with its building 100 more. Five hundred. North to south the same parts repeat, mirrored, because those sides carry a gate at either end. Nothing has to be forced to make it close.

Three times the ground rises on the way in: seven steps up to the outer gates (Ezekiel 40:22, 26), eight up to the inner ones (Ezekiel 40:31, 34, 37), and a further flight up to the vestibule of the house (Ezekiel 40:49). A plan cannot show it, but a reader walking the vision is climbing the whole way in.

One honest note on the number itself. The Hebrew of Ezekiel 42:16-19 can be read as 500 reeds rather than 500 cubits, which would make the compound roughly a mile on each side instead of a sixth of one. The ESV reads cubits, and Ezekiel 45:2 agrees with it, a square plot of 500 by 500 cubits for the sanctuary, so the drawing follows the ESV.

The district, twenty five thousand cubits square

Chapters 45 and 48 pull back fifty times. The holy district is 25,000 cubits square (Ezekiel 48:20), a little over eight miles on each side, and the whole compound drawn above is the small solid square near the top of it.

This square closes as well. Ten thousand for the priests, ten thousand for the Levites and five thousand for the city make twenty-five thousand down it; and across the city’s strip, ten thousand of farmland, five thousand for the city with its open land, and ten thousand of farmland again make the same twenty-five thousand (Ezekiel 48:15-18). The city inside it is 4,500 cubits on every side with 250 cubits of open land all round, which is why its whole circuit comes to 18,000 (Ezekiel 48:35), four times 4,500.

These are the same three drawings a reader can travel between rather than turn between: the whole vision drawn once, zoomable, with the house, the compound and the district in one grid at the sizes and in the places the text gives them.

Switching the unit is worth doing here, because it shows something the numbers alone hide. At the scale of the house the reed is exactly the right tool and miles are useless: the wall, and the threshold of every gate, one reed each. At the scale of the district the reed gives up, and the text quietly stops using it: the 25,000 is counted in cubits. The same vision is measured with a builder’s tool and then a surveyor’s, and the tool changes where the subject does.

Four thousand cubits of river

The one measurement taken by walking. Water is coming out from under the threshold of the house, and the man leads Ezekiel east with a measuring line, a thousand cubits at a time. Ankle-deep. A thousand more, knee-deep. A thousand more, waist-deep. A thousand more, and it is a river he cannot pass through (Ezekiel 47:1-5).

Four thousand cubits is about a mile and a third. In the space of a mile and a third, a trickle from under a doorway becomes water too deep to stand up in, and it is running toward the Dead Sea, which it makes fresh, with trees on both banks whose leaves do not wither (Ezekiel 47:8-12). It is the one place in these nine chapters where what is measured is not stone.

Every measurement in the vision

Every number Ezekiel is given, in all four units at once. The cubits and reeds are the text. The feet and miles are the text at 21 inches to the cubit, and carry that estimate’s uncertainty with them.

Why a vision of comfort arrives as a survey

It is worth asking what all this measuring is for. The date is in the first verse: the twenty-fifth year of the exile, the fourteenth year after the city was struck down (Ezekiel 40:1). These are people who had watched the glory of God leave the house (Ezekiel 10:18-19; 11:22-23) and then heard that the house had burned. What God gives them is not a promise in general terms. It is a set of dimensions.

The text says plainly what the measuring is for. The wall is there to make a separation between the holy and the common (Ezekiel 42:20). Holiness is being given an edge, and an edge has to be measured. But the dimensions are the setting, not the point. The point arrives in Ezekiel 43:1-5: the glory of the God of Israel came from the east, and the glory of the LORD filled the temple. The house is measured so carefully because of who is going to fill it, and the book ends by naming the city for that one fact, Ezekiel 48:35: The LORD Is There.

The New Testament picks this house up. Jesus says, destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up, and John tells us He was speaking of the temple of His body (John 2:19-21). Paul says the church is being built into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit (Ephesians 2:19-22), and Peter calls its people living stones (1 Peter 2:5). And when John is shown the last city it is measured with a rod of gold (Revelation 21:15-17), a river runs through it (Revelation 22:1-2), and there is no temple in it, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb (Revelation 21:22). The measuring that begins in Ezekiel 40 finishes there.