false interpretation of the passage referred to.
Verse 19
1Ki 6:19 “And (= namely) he prepared a hinder room in the house within, to place the ark of the covenant of Jehovah there.” תתּן, as 1Ki 17:14 shows, is not a future (ut reponeres), but the infinitive תּת with a repeated syllable תן (see Ewald, §238, c.).
Verse 20
1Ki 6:20 “And the interior of the hinder room was twenty cubits the length, twenty cubits the breadth, and twenty cubits its height.” The word לפני I agree with Kimchi in regarding as the construct state of the noun לפנים, which occurs again in 1Ki 6:29 in the sense of the inner part or interior, as is evident from the antithesis לחיצום (on the outside). “And he overlaid it with fine gold.” סגוּר זהב (= סגור =( ז in Job 28:15) unquestionably signifies fine or costly gold, although the derivation of this meaning is still questionable; viz., whether it is derived from סגר in the sense of to shut up, i.e., gold shut up or carefully preserved, after the analogy of כּתם; or is used in the sense of taking out or selecting, i.e., gold selected or pure; or in the sense of closed, i.e., gold selected or pure; or in the sense of closed, i.e., gold condensed or unadulterated (Fürst and Delitzsch on Job 28:15).
The Most Holy Place had therefore the form of a perfect cube in the temple as well as in the tabernacle, only on an enlarged scale. Now, as the internal elevation of the house, i.e., of the whole of the temple-house, the hinder portion of which formed the Most Holy Place, was thirty cubits, there was a space of about ten cubits in height above the Most Holy Place and below the roof of the temple-house for the upper rooms mentioned in 2Ch 3:9, on the nature and purpose of which nothing is said in the two accounts.[1] “And he overlaid (clothed) the altar with cedar wood.” There is something very striking in the allusion to the altar in this passage, since the verse itself treats simply of the Most Holy Place; and still more striking is the expression לדּביר אשׁר המּזבּח, “the altar belonging to the Debir,” in 1Ki 6:22, since there was no altar in the Most Holy
- ↑ This upper room does not presuppose, however, that the party wall, which follows as a matter of course from 1Ki 6:16, was not merely a cedar wall, but a wall two cubits thick. The supposed difficulty of setting up a cedar wall thirty cubits high is not so great as to necessitate assumptions opposed to the text. For we cannot possibly see why it could not have been made secure “without injuring the temple wall.” The wood panelling must have been nailed firmly to the wall without injuring the wall itself; and therefore this could be done just as well in the case of the cedar beams or boards of the party wall.
