Page:The Journal of Classical and Sacred Philology, Volume 1, 1854.djvu/390

 380 Journal of Philology. The ordinary reckoning of the Hebrews was by cubits. As distinctive expressions, to shew what sort of cubit was meant, we find : The cubit after the cubit of a man: ty^"nD8*2 HDN Deut. iii. 11. The cubit after the first measure: nTONTT JTTD1 HDtf- 2 Chrou. iii. 3. The cubit by the cubit and an handbreadth : HDSl HDtf naiOl or, great cubit rf?^N HDN- Ezek. xl. 5 : xli. 8. xliii. 13. The cubit (so rendered in our English version), by which Ehud's sword was measured : -]fiy. (Judges iii. 16.) The last of these should clearly not be called a cubit ; and, for want of a better term, it will be advisable to retain the Hebrew name gomed. Its probable length will be considered hereafter. The phrase great cubit, in Ezek. xli. 8, appears to be a mistrans- lation from the Hebrew; the term JT^tf referring to the cham- bers, not to the kind of cubit. And with regard to the " cubit after the cubit of a man," which occurs in the account of the size of Og's bedstead, it evidently expresses the average length of a man's arm, and belongs to the primitive method of mea- suring roughly by the ordinary length of some part of the human body, instead of by some definite standard of artificial exactness. From the remaining passages, bearing in mind that the Books of Chronicles were written after the Babylonish captivity, it seems to be the fair conclusion that the cubit which was previously in use, was, at the time of the captivity, replaced by another cubit, which was a handbreadth longer. This conclu- sion is taken as the basis of the following calculation. If it be asked, whether the Jews did, at one and the same time, employ cubits of different lengths for different purposes, it can only be answered, that such a supposition, although pos- sible, has no scripture evidence in its favour : and consequently the Rabbinic distinction of a sacred cubit, used in measuring the temple, and a vulgar cubit, used in measuring vessels, must be set aside. Does now the Bible furnish us with any means of determin- ing the absolute length either of the earlier or later Hebrew cubit ? In 1 Kings vii. 23 26 we have the description of Solo- mon's molten sea, which was " ten cubits from one brim to the other: it was round all about, and his height was five cubits: