Ezekiel 42:1-20

Then the shining man brought me northward into the outer court and brought me to the rooms opposite the temple courtyard and opposite the outer wall on the north side. Along the front, the building was one hundred cubits long on the north side and fifty cubits wide. On one side of the building was the twenty-cubit-wide plaza of the inner courtyard. On the other side was the paved walkway of the outer courtyard. The building itself was three stories high and had balconies. And in front of the rooms was an inner passageway, ten cubits wide and one hundred cubits long, and all their doors faced north. The top-floor rooms were narrower than those on the middle and bottom stories of the building because the balconies took up some of the space of the lower stories. The rooms on the third floor had no columns like the pillars of the outer courtyard. That is why the top story was narrower than the middle and bottom stories. The rooms became smaller the higher they went. There was a wall in the outer courtyard, parallel to the rooms, that was fifty cubits long. The wall was like this because the row of rooms along the outer courtyard was fifty cubits long, while the row of rooms that faced the temple was one hundred cubits long. Beneath the rooms there was an entrance facing east so that a person could enter them from the outer court. On the south side of the temple, along the broad wall of the outer court, adjoining the temple courtyard, facing the outer wall there was a building containing rooms, with a passageway in front of them. These south side rooms were like those rooms on the north side, with the same entry and exit doors and the same dimensions. There was also an entrance to the rooms at the beginning of the walkway—the walkway before the corresponding wall that faced east. The shining man said to me, “The northern and southern rooms facing the courtyard are holy chambers, the place where the priests who approach YAHWEH will eat the most holy offerings. Because this is a holy place, the most holy offerings will be stored there: the grain offering, the sacrifice for sin, and the guilt offering. When the priests have served inside the temple, they must first take off their priestly garments and leave them in the rooms before going out into the courtyard. Their priestly garments are holy, so they must change their clothes before going near other people.” When the shining man had finished measuring the inner temple area, he took me out through the east gate and measured the outside wall of the temple compound. Using his measuring rod, he measured all the east side as five hundred cubits total. He measured all the north side as five hundred cubits by the measuring rod. He measured all the south side as five hundred cubits by the measuring rod. Then he turned to the west side and measured it as five hundred cubits by the measuring rod. And so he measured the temple compound on all four sides. The wall of the temple compound was five hundred cubits square, to mark the boundary between what was holy and what was common.