With three rows of great stones, and a row of new timber: and let the expenses be given out of the king's house:
All Commentaries on Ezra 6:4 Go To Ezra 6
Bede
AD 735
“And so that they lay foundations that may support a height of cubits and a breadth of cubits, three rows of unfinished stones and in the same way rows of new timber”: we need not comment on it because neither in the building of the first temple nor of the subsequent one are any of these measurements or works of this sort found. It can thus be inferred that Cyrus proposed this from his own ideas and that he noted the measurements and arrangement of the work as seemed appropriate to him. Indeed, as Chronicles relates, in the first measurement (that is, inside the inner walls) the temple was cubits long and cubits wide, but the height, as the history of Kings explains, was cubits to the upper room; from there to the high chamber an additional cubits, which was the level reached by the top of the porticos, as Josephus attests; and from there another to the top of the roof, which is to say, cubits all together, as Chronicles explains. Yet how does it say that three rows of unfinished stones and in the same way rows of new timbers are to be laid, when all inside the temple was lined with cedar, unless perhaps it was a custom of the Persians to make temples with varied work in such a way that there were three rows of stones throughout the walls and a fourth made skillfully from timbers, and Cyrus thought that this should be done too in the same manner in the Jerusalem temple; or perhaps we should understand that he spoke of the courtyard of the priests, which, built in a circle around the temple, had three rows of finished stones and a fourth of cedar wood and was as high as a man’s chest; or else of the portico of the Lord’s house that was in the front of the temple, concerning which Scripture, when King Solomon’s palace was being built, relates thus: “And he made the greater courtyard round with three rows of hewn stones and one row of planks of cedar, and also in the inner courtyard of the Lord’s house and in the portico of the house.”
