Ezekiel 41

Chapter 41 takes the prophet and the reader into the inner temple structure. The man brought Ezekiel to the outer sanctuary — the nave — and measured its jambs: six cubits wide on each side. The breadth of the entrance was ten cubits. He measured the length of the nave — forty cubits — and its breadth — twenty cubits. Then he went into the inner room — the holy of holies, the most holy place — and measured the doorpost of that entrance: two cubits. The entrance was six cubits wide, and the breadth of the entrance was seven cubits. He measured the inner room: twenty cubits long and twenty cubits wide. The man enters the holy of holies while the prophet remains outside. The chapter then describes the side rooms built against the outer wall of the temple: three stories of thirty chambers each, with corbels in the wall of the temple so that nothing is inserted into the temple wall. The side rooms are five cubits wide on the lowest story, six on the middle, and seven on the upper.

The interior decoration is described at the end of the chapter. The whole interior — walls on all sides — is covered with carved figures: cherubim and palm trees alternating all around. Each cherub has two faces: a human face turned toward the palm tree on one side, a young lion's face turned toward the palm tree on the other. This is a simplified version of the Solomonic description in 1 Kings 6 (where the cherubim have one face each but the palm-tree and open-flower pattern runs throughout). The two-faced cherubim — human and lion — connect the interior decoration to the four-faced living creatures of chapter 1, though simplified. The effect of the description is a sacred interior that is simultaneously a throne room (cherubim) and a garden (palm trees), combining the motifs that the tradition associates with the divine presence in its most concentrated form.