# Boaz and Jachin



## Blake Bowden (May 6, 2014)




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## Lowcarbjc (May 7, 2014)

Thanks for posting this. 

Can someone please explain to me the difference between 2 Kings 7:15 that says the Pillars were 18 cubits high and 2 Chr 3:15 that says they were 35 cubits high. Jer 52:21 also says 18 cubits high.

It's almost double the hight from 18 to 35? My FC ritual book also refers to 35 - which is it?  


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## Lowcarbjc (May 7, 2014)

Oops my bad, I see the picture shows that one is 18 and the other one is 35. It's also 1 Kings 7 not 2 Kings. From the scriptures I do not really see where it's written like that, it says that both were 18 or both were 35 - what am I missing? 


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## vangoedenaam (May 8, 2014)

The scripture may be inaccurate. Consider it. God didnt hold the pen, humans did. ( just my 2 cents )


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## BryanMaloney (May 8, 2014)

What of the other Boaz in Scripture?


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## dfreybur (May 8, 2014)

Lowcarbjc said:


> Oops my bad, I see the picture shows that one is 18 and the other one is 35. It's also 1 Kings 7 not 2 Kings. From the scriptures I do not really see where it's written like that, it says that both were 18 or both were 35 - what am I missing?



Scripture has been translated from an ancient language again and again.  Numbering systems were not fixed until the introduction of the Hindu-Arabic numerals long after the events depicted in 1/2 Kings.  Consider if you ask someone on the street how many is a score, and similar has happened several times over the centuries.  Also standards and measures were not set to fixed quantities until SI metric was introduced under Napoleon very recently in history.  The size of a cubit may well have varied that much over the millennia.

No matter how hard you try to compare numbers in scripture, it doesn't work if you depend on any one translation.  The chain of translation has never been good enough for that approach to work.  The chain of standard measures never even existed going back that far.


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## BryanMaloney (May 8, 2014)

The Hebrew doesn't match, either. Are you saying that the Hebrew accounts were all translated from a different language, multiple times? This is one apparent discrepancy that is amenable to a critical solution. The three books overlap in the periods they treat, but they were apparently composed in the order Kings/Jeremiah then Chronicles some centuries later. What is most important is that Kings and Jeremiah's compositions are generally accepted as beginning before the Babylonian Captivity. Chronicles is composed after the captivity. The Temple was damaged/destroyed in the interim and had to be renovated/rebuilt. The Chronicles figure could easily be using the more "modern" height and mistakenly back-attributing it to an earlier time in the past. This is very commonly done by people who are trying to show some kind of historical continuity.

Thus, not so much a "translation error" as an "author error".


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## vangoedenaam (May 8, 2014)

Human error...


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## BroBook (May 17, 2014)

Lowcarbjc said:


> Oops my bad, I see the picture shows that one is 18 and the other one is 35. It's also 1 Kings 7 not 2 Kings. From the scriptures I do not really see where it's written like that, it says that both were 18 or both were 35 - what am I missing?
> 
> 
> Sent From My Freemasonry Pro App


Examined the picture again the pillars are the same size the one on the right is measured from a different starting point!!!


Bro Book
M.W.U.G.L. Of Fl: P.H.A.
Excelsior # 43
At pensacola


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## BroBook (May 17, 2014)

Wrong term the one on the right is top to bottom!!


Bro Book
M.W.U.G.L. Of Fl: P.H.A.
Excelsior # 43
At pensacola


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## Lowcarbjc (May 17, 2014)

Thank you yes, noticed afterwards 


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## Brother JC (May 18, 2014)

One thing I like about this image is that the pillars seem truer to style than the Corinthian or Composites that we see so often.


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## dfreybur (May 18, 2014)

trysquare said:


> One thing I like about this image is that the pillars seem truer to style than the Corinthian or Composites that we see so often.



Those styles had not been invented during the bronze age when the Temple was constructed.  One of my lodges has a pair of Egyptian looking columns that are more like the ones depicted in the first post in this thread.


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## Brother JC (May 18, 2014)

No, they hadn't, and didn't arrive for over a millennium. Their use in my lodges has always been a burr under my saddle.


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## BryanMaloney (May 19, 2014)

The more I study, the less it turns out that Freemasons actually owe to that era, anyway, at least by comparison of the full tradition of Freemasonry. Masons were far more important and influential in their own right in the Middle Ages. That is when they really took off as "masters" with the full privileges, etc., in the eyes of society. It was the medieval Master Mason who was not a mason, an architect, an engineer, a building and bridge inspector, a community leader in HIS OWN RIGHT rather than merely as the flunky of some nobility, etc. Unfortunately, the severe ignorance of the Enlightenment about European history led them to ignore the real contributions of the medieval Master Mason (the first actual free masons in the sense of being their own masters) and leap-frogged past them to more ancient times that had more cheerleaders. This attitude infected Western historical thought for centuries until it started to be questioned was put to bed (unfortunately, only among professional historians and not the wider culture) by the late 20th century.

While the stories of the ancients are always inspiring, we could learn a lot from the reality of the Middle Ages (as opposed to the silly stories we keep telling ourselves of them).


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## dfreybur (May 19, 2014)

trysquare said:


> No, they hadn't, and didn't arrive for over a millennium. Their use in my lodges has always been a burr under my saddle.



Yet more reason for me to look to the guilds as the actual origin of the craft.


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## Warrior1256 (Dec 13, 2015)

dfreybur said:


> No matter how hard you try to compare numbers in scripture, it doesn't work if you depend on any one translation. The chain of translation has never been good enough for that approach to work. The chain of standard measures never even existed going back that far.


Exactly!


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