The most measured building in the Bible, and the only one never built.· Ezekiel 40–43 · 47:1-12
Click the model or the library to open its entry: measurements, passages, and what the text does not say.
The most measured building in the Bible, and the only one never built.
A count of every measurement holding this model up, one by one.
Nothing here is stored in metres: everything is in cubits and converted on the fly. Change the standard and the whole building rescales.
Son of man, behold with thine eyes
and declare all that thou seest.
The charge with which the tour begins. Ezekiel is not to build anything: he is to look, measure and report it. This project does the same with his figures.
Figures that contradict each other between books, and gaps no reconstruction fully resolves. Click to go to the piece.
All three are the same division of space: a court, a greater hall and a square inner room at the far end. The scale changes, the material changes, and what stands inside changes. A tent struck whenever the cloud moved; a stone house raised so the ark would stop travelling; and a vision measured to the cubit in which there is no ark at all. Compare the matching pieces from the link at the foot of each entry.
Every reference, with the pieces that depend on it.
There is nothing to excavate here, and for a different reason than with the other two: this building never existed. Ezekiel sees it in a vision fourteen years after the fall of Jerusalem, and no one ever laid a stone. In exchange it is the building with the most explicit figures in the whole Bible: a man with a measuring reed walks through it recording measurements for four chapters. The plan of its gates, with three facing pairs of guardrooms, matches the fortified gates of Megiddo, Hazor and Gezer.
Ezekiel 40–43 · 47:1-12
References open the full text in an external reader. The project cites chapter and verse and summarises what each passage contributes, rather than embedding one particular translation.