Then he took me into the outer court again, the northern part of it, and would have me enter the parlours that lay there, close to the pavilion and to the northern side of the temple.✻

The long side of them, facing the north door, was a hundred cubits, the breadth fifty;

between the twenty-cubit close of the inner court, and the paving of the outer, they rose, gallery upon gallery, three storeys in all.

In front of them was a walk ten cubits wide, encroaching on the inner court by one cubit;✻ all their doors faced the north.

Here, the top rooms were narrower, since they must make room for porticos at the side, built out over the two lower storeys;

these three-storeyed parlours had no columns in front of them, like the parlours in the outer court,✻ but made up for it by porticos that rose from the roof of the first two floors, filling in the width of the fifty cubits.

Inner parlours faced outer only with fifty cubits of their wall’s length;

in the outer court, the parlours were but fifty cubits long, whereas those beside the temple were a hundred.

These inner parlours were entered from below at their eastern end, from the outer court. … in the thickness of the court’s eastern wall

… opposite the pavilion, and here too there were parlours close to the pavilion.✻

Southern parlours, like northern, had a walk in front of them; had the same length and breadth, were entered by doors of the same kind;

the doors of these parlours opened on a walk along their southern side, and the main entrance was approached at the eastern end, from the walk that faced the hall and the close.

These parlours, he told me, built to north and south beside the pavilion, are hallowed precincts, where the priests who sacrifice to the Lord may eat what is set apart for holy uses. All that is set apart, all the offerings made for fault and for wrong done, shall there be laid out, as on holy ground.

Nor, entering it, shall the priests leave it for the inner court all at once; here they must lay aside their vestments, for these, too, are hallowed, and put on other clothes before ever they mingle with the people.

With that, he made an end of measuring the precincts within, and led me through the eastern doorway, to measure them from without.

Along the eastern side his reed measured five hundred cubits;

five hundred cubits along the northern side,

and five hundred cubits along the southern;

westwards, too, the measure of it was five hundred cubits.

All round the four quarters of the wind he would measure it, five hundred cubits in length as in breadth, this boundary between things sacred and things profane.