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 in Solomon's porch and the Sanhedrin must often have met outside the sacred enclosure for non-Jews might be present.

The "Chamber of hewn stones" where the Sanhedrin did often (but not always) sit, has been conjecturally put by Sanday and Waterhouse in the portico just adjoining the outside archive—a natural enough location in itself, but the analogy of the existing libraries of Rome and the later Roman libraries everywhere give a better based hypothesis and suggest that it may have been in the center of the royal porch, with libraries on either side of it, possibly New Hebrew on one side and Greek on the other.

The clues to this if small are, after all, pretty definite in view of the universal library usage of the time. On the one hand there must have been at least a public Greek library. Josephus uses a great range of Greek books, the Talmud implies that these books were numerous,