Ezekiel 40:14 - Exposition

He made also posts . In using the verb "made" the prophet either went back in thought to the time when the man who then explained the building had fashioned it (Hengstenberg); or he employed the term in the sense of constituit , i.e. fixed or estimated, "inasmuch as such a height could not be measured from the bottom to the top with the measuring-red" (Keil). The "posts," the אֵילִים of Ezekiel 40:9 , were sixty cubits high, and corresponded to the towers in modern churches. To the objection sometimes urged against what is called the "exaggerated" height of these columns, Kliefoth replies, "If it had been considered that our church towers have grown up out of gate-pillars, that one can see, not merely in Egyptian obelisks and Turkish minarets, but also in our own hollow factory chimneys, how upon a base of two cubits, square pillars of sixty cubits high can be erected, and that finally the talk is of a colossal building seen in vision, no critical difficulties would have been discovered in this statement as to height." The last clause, even unto the post of the court round about the gate , should read, and the court reached unto the post ( אַיִל being used collectively), the gate being round about (Revised Version); or, the court round about the gate reached to the pillars (Keil); or, at the pillar the court was round about the gate (Kliefoth). The sense is, that the court lay round about the inner egress from the gate. The Authorized Version, with which Dr. Currey, in the 'Speaker's Commentary,' agrees, thinks of an inner hall between the porch of the gate and the two most western guard-chambers, round the sides of which the sixty-cubit columns stood. Ewald, following the corrupt text of the LXX ; translates, "And the threshold of the outer vestibule twenty cubits, the gate court abutting on the chambers round about."