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