4:1 He made a bronze altar, 30 feet 1 long, 30 feet 2 wide, and 15 feet 3 high.
4:1 He made a bronze altar, 30 feet 4 long, 30 feet 5 wide, and 15 feet 6 high.
8:16 Then he brought me to the inner court of the Lord’s house. Right there 7 at the entrance to the Lord’s temple, between the porch and the altar, 8 were about twenty-five 9 men with their backs to the Lord’s temple, 10 facing east – they were worshiping the sun 11 toward the east!
2:17 Let the priests, those who serve the Lord, weep
from the vestibule all the way back to the altar. 12
Let them say, “Have pity, O Lord, on your people;
please do not turn over your inheritance to be mocked,
to become a proverb 13 among the nations.
Why should it be said 14 among the peoples,
“Where is their God?”
1 tn Heb “twenty cubits.” Assuming a cubit of 18 inches (45 cm), the length would have been 30 feet (9 m).
2 tn Heb “twenty cubits.”
3 tn Heb “ten cubits.” Assuming a cubit of 18 inches (45 cm), the height would have been 15 feet (4.5 m).
4 tn Heb “twenty cubits.” Assuming a cubit of 18 inches (45 cm), the length would have been 30 feet (9 m).
5 tn Heb “twenty cubits.”
6 tn Heb “ten cubits.” Assuming a cubit of 18 inches (45 cm), the height would have been 15 feet (4.5 m).
7 tn The word הִנֵּה (hinneh, traditionally “behold”) indicates becoming aware of something.
8 sn The priests prayed to God between the porch and the altar on fast days (Joel 2:17). This is the location where Zechariah was murdered (Matt 23:35).
9 tc The LXX reads “twenty” instead of twenty-five, perhaps because of the association of the number twenty with the Mesopotamian sun god Shamash.
10 sn The temple faced east.
11 tn Or “the sun god.”
12 tn Heb “between the vestibule and the altar.” The vestibule was located at the entrance of the temple and the altar was located at the other end of the building. So “between the vestibule and the altar” is a merism referring to the entire structure. The priestly lament permeates the entire house of worship.
13 tn For the MT reading לִמְשָׁל (limshol, an infinitive, “to rule”), one should instead read לְמָשָׁל (lÿmashal, a noun, “to a byword”). While the consonantal Hebrew text permits either, the context suggests that the concern here is more one of not wanting to appear abandoned by God to ongoing economic depression rather than one of concern over potential political subjection of Israel (cf. v. 19). The possibility that the form in the MT is an infinitive construct of the denominative verb II מָשַׁל (mashal, “to utter a proverb”) does not seem likely because of the following preposition (Hebrew בְּ [bÿ], rather than עַל [’al]).
14 tn Heb “Why will they say?”