What Does Ezekiel 40:36 Mean?
Its chambers, its posts, and its porches, with the windows to it all around. Its length was fifty forearms, and its breadth twenty-five forearms.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
The little chambers thereof, the posts thereof, and the arches thereof, and the windows to it round about: the length was fifty cubits, and the breadth five and twenty cubits.THE KEY
The room’s measured breadth comes from a Hebrew root for becoming spacious, so its exact boundaries hold openness rather than cancel it.
THE MEANING
You see a room held within dimensions, with chambers, supports, porches, and windows gathered into one measured structure. Its Hebrew word for “breadth” belongs to a root meaning “be wide, become spacious,” so openness is present within the structure itself. The verse gives you a picture of space that is both formed and open.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It loosens the assumption that a defined structure must be constricting: this room has measured limits and breadth rooted in spaciousness.
THE ROOT
רֹחַב
roḥav
GROWS FROM
רחב
To become wide; to widen or make spacious.
רֹחַב (roḥav, “breadth”) comes from רחב (raḥab), the root of widening and spaciousness. English presents a measured dimension, while the Hebrew word also carries the sense of open room: here, spaciousness has a definite form.
ALSO GROWS
rāḥāb: Wide, broad, spacious.
רָחָב
This adjective keeps breadth connected to openness as a quality of space, not only a number on a plan.
merḥav: A broad place, an open expanse.
מֶרְחָב
Psalm 118:5 uses this same-root word for the place reached when distress gives way to room.
THE PATTERN
God’s dwelling is given tangible form, from a measured sanctuary to a people named as God’s temple.
And let them make me a set-apart place, that I may pitch my tent among them.And behold, there was a wall outside the house all around, and in the man's hand a measuring reed of six forearms long, by the forearm and a handbreadth. He measured the breadth of the building, one reed, and its rising, one reed.Have you not seen that you are God's temple, and that the breath of God dwells in you?THE THREAD
From the narrow place I call out to the LORD, and the LORD answers me in a wide place.The word translated “breadth” here and מֶרְחָב (merḥav, “broad place”) in the psalm share רחב (raḥab), the root of widening or becoming spacious. The psalm’s “large place” makes the measured width resonate as room reached beyond distress.
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