PIL
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and the brea Ith eleven c-u..bits; and he brought me by the ~tHPE whereby they went up to it, and there were pillars by the posts, one on this side, and another on that side." These pillars, \ve are told, were of brass, as well as the chapi. "ers that surIllounted then), and were cast hollow. Th'e thickness of the brass of each pillar was "four fingers, or no hanu~~ breadth," which is equal to three inches. According to the ac~ counts in 1 I{ings viii. 15, and in ,Jererlliah lii. 21, the circuluference of each pillar was twelve cubits. Now, according to the J"ewish computation, the cubit used in the measurement of the temple buildings was six hands' breadth, or eighteen inches. According to the tables of Bishop Cumberland, the cubit was rather more, he making it about twent.y-two inches; but I adhere to the measure laid down by the Jewish writers, as probably more correct, and ,certainly more sin1ple for calculation. The circumference of each pillar, reduced by this scale to English measure, would be eighteen feet, and its diameter about six. The reader of the Scriptural accounts of these pillars will be not a little puzzled with the apparol1 t, discrepancies that are found in the estimates of their height tiS giyen in the ]~ooks of !{ings dud Chronicles. In the forrner book, it is said tha.t their height was eighteen cubits, and in the latter it was thirty-five. t But the discrepancy is easily reconciled by supposing, which, indeed, must have been the case, that in the Book of I{ings the pillars
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are spoken of separately, and that, in Chroni~les, their aggregate height is calculated; and the reason why, in this latter book, their uuit"ed height is placed at thirtJ-five cubits instead of thirty-six, which would be the double of eighteen, is because they are there measured as they appeared with the chapiter~ upon them. Now halfaeubit of each pillar was concealed in, what Lightfoot calls" the hole of the chapiter," that is, half a • Ezekiel, xi. 49. t Whiston observes that the latter height would be oontrary to aU the rulea If architeoture...