[237] For “Bethso,” see Josephus, Wars of the Jews, V, iv, 2.
[238] See J. E. Hanauer, Walks about Jerusalem, London, 1910, 88, 89.
[239] The writer is well aware that the name Moriah for this part of the hill rests on slender evidence, but he employs it nevertheless as a convenient term, since it is well understood by readers of the Bible.
[240] Warren and Conder, Jerusalem, pp. 148-158.
[241] See Chapter XI, [p. 168].
[242] Wars of the Jews, V, v, 1.
[243] So Stade, Geschichte des Volkes Israels, Berlin, 1889, I, 314, and G. A. Smith, Jerusalem, II, 60.
[244] In giving the dimensions of the various temples, the writer has followed the calculations of George Adam Smith in his Jerusalem. W. Shaw Caldecott has published four volumes, one on the Tabernacle, one on Solomon’s Temple, one on the Second Temple, and one on Herod’s Temple, in which he claims to have discovered a key that harmonizes all the Biblical statements as to the measurements of these structures. His supposed key is his belief that the Babylonians had three different cubits which they used side by side, that these cubits were known to Moses, and that their use was perpetuated in the temple. Should these pages be read by one who has accepted that claim as true, it is but fair that he be informed that Caldecott’s whole system is based upon a misinterpretation of a Babylonian tablet that was published in Rawlinson’s Cuneiform Inscriptions of Western Asia, Vol. IV, p. 37. (See Tabernacle, pp. 107-139, and Solomon’s Temple, pp. 215, 216.) This tablet contains a table of time and of distances. The unit of time in Babylonia was a kaskal-gid. An astronomical tablet published thirty years ago in the book most widely used by beginners in Assyrian says that at the equinox “six kaskal-gid was the day, six kaskal-gid the night.” The kaskal-gid was, then, a period of two hours’ duration. Just as in many countries the word for “hour” is used for distance, and a place is said to be so many “hours” away, so in Babylonia and Assyria kaskal-gid was used as a measure of distance. The tablet referred to gives a table of the ways of writing fractions of kaskal-gid and its other divisions in the simplest of the two Babylonian numerical systems. The Assyriologist learns from this tablet that 1 kaskal-gid (the distance of two hours) equalled 30 ush, that 1 ush equalled 60 gar, that 1 gar equalled 12 u or cubits, and that 1 u equalled 60 shu or “fingers.” Caldecott, however, mistook the sign gid for a numeral five, the sign kaskal for a word meaning “ell,” and the word u meaning “cubit” for a sign signifying “plus”! He accordingly makes gar a “palm”; shu, a “three-palm ell”; ush, a “four-palm ell,” and kaskal-gid, a “five-palm ell”! His whole system is without foundation.
Tables similar to the one published by Rawlinson were compiled in the scribal school at Nippur. One was published without translation by Hilprecht in 1906 in the Babylonian Expedition of the University of Pennsylvania, Vol. XX, and interpreted by the present writer in 1909 in The Haverford Library Collection of Cuneiform Tablets, Part II, pp. 13-18. The writer has examined other similar tablets in the University Museum, Philadelphia.
[245] See Chapter IX, [p. 151]. According to I Kings 7:48, there was a “golden altar” here also, but as this is not mentioned in chapter 6 many scholars think that it is a post-exilic gloss, introducing a feature from the second temple.