Ezekiel 42

The Rooms for the Priests

42Then the man led me northward into the outer court and brought me to the rooms^j opposite the temple courtyard^k and opposite the outer wall on the north side.^{l 2}The building whose door faced north was a hundred cubits long and fifty cubits wide.^{a 3}Both in the section twenty cubits^b from the inner court and in the section opposite the pavement of the outer court, gallery^m faced gallery at the three levels.^{n 4}In front of the rooms was an inner passageway ten cubits wide and a hundred cubits^c long.^d Their doors were on the north.^{o 5}Now the upper rooms were narrower, for the galleries took more space from them than from the rooms on the lower and middle floors of the building. ⁶The rooms on the top floor had no pillars, as the courts had; so they were smaller in floor space than those on the lower and middle floors. ⁷There was an outer wall parallel to the rooms and the outer court; it extended in front of the rooms for fifty cubits. ⁸While the row of rooms on the side next to the outer court was fifty cubits long, the row on the side nearest the sanctuary was a hundred cubits long. ⁹The lower rooms had an entrance^p on the east side as one enters them from the outer court.

¹⁰On the south side^e along the length of the wall of the outer court, adjoining the temple courtyard^q and opposite the outer wall, were rooms^{r 11}with a passageway in front of them. These were like the rooms on the north; they had the same length and width, with similar exits and dimensions. Similar to the doorways on the north ¹²were the doorways of the rooms on the south. There was a doorway at the beginning of the passageway that was parallel to the corresponding wall extending eastward, by which one enters the rooms.

¹³Then he said to me, “The north^s and south rooms^t facing the temple courtyard^u are the priests’ rooms, where the priests who approach the Lord will eat the most holy offerings. There they will put the most holy offerings—the grain offerings,^v the sin offerings^fw and the guilt offerings^x—for the place is holy.^{y 14}Once the priests enter the holy precincts, they are not to go into the outer court until they leave behind the garments^z in which they minister, for these are holy. They are to put on other clothes before they go near the places that are for the people.^a”

¹⁵When he had finished measuring what was inside the temple area, he led me out by the east gate^b and measured the area all around: ¹⁶He measured the east side with the measuring rod; it was five hundred cubits.^{gh 17}He measured the north side; it was five hundred cubitsⁱ by the measuring rod. ¹⁸He measured the south side; it was five hundred cubits by the measuring rod. ¹⁹Then he turned to the west side and measured; it was five hundred cubits by the measuring rod. ²⁰So he measured^c the area^d on all four sides. It had a wall around it,^e five hundred cubits long and five hundred cubits wide,^f to separate the holy from the common.^g