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Boaz and Jachin

Blake Bowden

Administrator
Staff Member
boaz_jachin_pillars.jpg
 

Lowcarbjc

Registered User
Thanks for posting this.

Can someone please explain to me the difference between 2 Kings 7:15 that says the Pillars were 18 cubits high and 2 Chr 3:15 that says they were 35 cubits high. Jer 52:21 also says 18 cubits high.

It's almost double the hight from 18 to 35? My FC ritual book also refers to 35 - which is it? :)


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Lowcarbjc

Registered User
Oops my bad, I see the picture shows that one is 18 and the other one is 35. It's also 1 Kings 7 not 2 Kings. From the scriptures I do not really see where it's written like that, it says that both were 18 or both were 35 - what am I missing?


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dfreybur

Premium Member
Oops my bad, I see the picture shows that one is 18 and the other one is 35. It's also 1 Kings 7 not 2 Kings. From the scriptures I do not really see where it's written like that, it says that both were 18 or both were 35 - what am I missing?

Scripture has been translated from an ancient language again and again. Numbering systems were not fixed until the introduction of the Hindu-Arabic numerals long after the events depicted in 1/2 Kings. Consider if you ask someone on the street how many is a score, and similar has happened several times over the centuries. Also standards and measures were not set to fixed quantities until SI metric was introduced under Napoleon very recently in history. The size of a cubit may well have varied that much over the millennia.

No matter how hard you try to compare numbers in scripture, it doesn't work if you depend on any one translation. The chain of translation has never been good enough for that approach to work. The chain of standard measures never even existed going back that far.
 

BryanMaloney

Premium Member
The Hebrew doesn't match, either. Are you saying that the Hebrew accounts were all translated from a different language, multiple times? This is one apparent discrepancy that is amenable to a critical solution. The three books overlap in the periods they treat, but they were apparently composed in the order Kings/Jeremiah then Chronicles some centuries later. What is most important is that Kings and Jeremiah's compositions are generally accepted as beginning before the Babylonian Captivity. Chronicles is composed after the captivity. The Temple was damaged/destroyed in the interim and had to be renovated/rebuilt. The Chronicles figure could easily be using the more "modern" height and mistakenly back-attributing it to an earlier time in the past. This is very commonly done by people who are trying to show some kind of historical continuity.

Thus, not so much a "translation error" as an "author error".
 

BroBook

Premium Member
Oops my bad, I see the picture shows that one is 18 and the other one is 35. It's also 1 Kings 7 not 2 Kings. From the scriptures I do not really see where it's written like that, it says that both were 18 or both were 35 - what am I missing?


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Examined the picture again the pillars are the same size the one on the right is measured from a different starting point!!!


Bro Book
M.W.U.G.L. Of Fl: P.H.A.
Excelsior # 43
At pensacola
 

BroBook

Premium Member
Wrong term the one on the right is top to bottom!!


Bro Book
M.W.U.G.L. Of Fl: P.H.A.
Excelsior # 43
At pensacola
 

Brother JC

Moderating Staff
Staff Member
One thing I like about this image is that the pillars seem truer to style than the Corinthian or Composites that we see so often.
 

dfreybur

Premium Member
One thing I like about this image is that the pillars seem truer to style than the Corinthian or Composites that we see so often.

Those styles had not been invented during the bronze age when the Temple was constructed. One of my lodges has a pair of Egyptian looking columns that are more like the ones depicted in the first post in this thread.
 

Brother JC

Moderating Staff
Staff Member
No, they hadn't, and didn't arrive for over a millennium. Their use in my lodges has always been a burr under my saddle.
 

BryanMaloney

Premium Member
The more I study, the less it turns out that Freemasons actually owe to that era, anyway, at least by comparison of the full tradition of Freemasonry. Masons were far more important and influential in their own right in the Middle Ages. That is when they really took off as "masters" with the full privileges, etc., in the eyes of society. It was the medieval Master Mason who was not a mason, an architect, an engineer, a building and bridge inspector, a community leader in HIS OWN RIGHT rather than merely as the flunky of some nobility, etc. Unfortunately, the severe ignorance of the Enlightenment about European history led them to ignore the real contributions of the medieval Master Mason (the first actual free masons in the sense of being their own masters) and leap-frogged past them to more ancient times that had more cheerleaders. This attitude infected Western historical thought for centuries until it started to be questioned was put to bed (unfortunately, only among professional historians and not the wider culture) by the late 20th century.

While the stories of the ancients are always inspiring, we could learn a lot from the reality of the Middle Ages (as opposed to the silly stories we keep telling ourselves of them).
 

Warrior1256

Site Benefactor
No matter how hard you try to compare numbers in scripture, it doesn't work if you depend on any one translation. The chain of translation has never been good enough for that approach to work. The chain of standard measures never even existed going back that far.
Exactly!
 
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