This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
View text chunked by:
[71]
Now when the king had divided the temple into two parts, he made
the inner house of twenty cubits [every way], to be the most secret chamber,
but he appointed that of forty cubits to be the sanctuary; and when he
had cut a door-place out of the wall, he put therein doors of Cedar, and
overlaid them with a great deal of gold, that had sculptures upon it. He
also had veils of blue, and purple, and scarlet, and the brightest and
softest linen, with the most curious flowers wrought upon them, which were
to be drawn before those doors. He also dedicated for the most secret place,
whose breadth was twenty cubits, and length the same, two cherubims of
solid gold; the height of each of them was five cubits 1
they had each of them two wings stretched out as far as five cubits; wherefore
Solomon set them up not far from each other, that with one wing they might
touch the southern wall of the secret place, and with another the northern:
their other wings, which joined to each other, were a covering to the ark,
which was set between them; but nobody can tell, or even conjecture, what
was the shape of these cherubims. He also laid the floor of the temple
with plates of gold; and he added doors to the gate of the temple, agreeable
to the measure of the height of the wall, but in breadth twenty cubits,
and on them he glued gold plates. And, to say all in one word, he left
no part of the temple, neither internal nor external, but what was covered
with gold. He also had curtains drawn over these doors in like manner as
they were drawn over the inner doors of the most holy place; but the porch
of the temple had nothing of that sort.
1 Josephus says here that the cherubims were of solid gold, and only five cubits high, while our Hebrew copies (1 Kings 6;23, 28) say they were of the olive tree, and the LXXX. of the cypress tree, and only overlaid with gold; and both agree they were ten cubits high. I suppose the number here is falsely transcribed, and that Josephus wrote ten cubits also.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.