Where the Ladder to Heaven stood
We
saw above that for the distance between Ark and
Altar, the Temple designer had used a value of pi in the same accuracy
range as that computed by the later Greek mathematician Archimedes (287 to 212
BCE). An even more accurate example of that constant
turns up in another symbolically very important spot
in the Temple layout, a spot that also incorporates the numbers of the heavenly
bodies, or the cycles of the moon before the stars and of the sun in the solar
year.
Let
me explain how to arrive at that spot, beginning with the overall plan of the
Temple precinct and the type of thinking that led to it. We discussed earlier
the ancient practice of building temples to reflect the
cosmos, as described by scholars of comparative religion such as Mircea
Eliade1.
The
mythical thinking behind this “as above, so below” identification often used symbols in a recursive manner on successive levels
that reflected the structure of the society.
For
instance, the archaeologists Philip J. King and Lawrence E.
Stager argue that the ancient Israelite society perceived itself as a
series of households that were nested one inside the
other:
“Just
as a father exerted authority over his household, so the king ruled his
‘children’, the people, -- and God was father over the ‘children of
Israel’.”2
The
same view of the world as a series of ever more central and
ever more concentrated items, nested one inside the other like a set of
Russian dolls, was reflected in this description from the Rabbinic period:
“Just
as the navel is found at the center of a human being,
so the land of Israel is found at the center of the
world (...) and it is the foundation of the world. Jerusalem is at the center of the land of Israel, the Temple is at the center of Jerusalem, the Holy of Holies is at the center of the Temple, the Ark is at the center of the Holy of Holies, and the Foundation Stone is
in front of the Ark, which spot is the foundation of
the world.”3
We
find a comparable recursiveness also in the literary
chiasms, or nested reflections of similar story elements, that appear
most prominently in the biblical story of Jacob and the
ladder to heaven4.
Since
the themes of successive nesting and reflecting
played such a prominent role in the Hebrew traditions, particularly those
connected with the ladder to heaven, it seems reasonable to investigate whether
the architect of the Jerusalem Temple also incorporated these culture- reflecting concepts in the design.
The
most obvious place for doing so would probably have been the spot for the ladder to heaven, the spot where David had
seen the Angel of Pestilence standing between heaven and earth and that thereby
reflected the function of the entire Temple project
which was also meant to connect these two.
Let
us therefore suppose that the square innermost
Sanctum of the Temple may have been meant to reflect the entire square within the outer walls, the way God’s presence in
that Sanctum reflected his presence in the nation and world at large. Continuing
the metaphor, a further reflection of that precinct within
the Sanctum would have produced the spot for that ladder where that
Sanctum wound up in this further reflection nested within itself.
The
drawings here are based on the dimensions from the Rabbinic tradition discussed
on the page about Temple dimensions. The
first view shows the location of the Temple and its rectangular Court within the
original 500 cubit square Temple Mount. The distances from the Court to the
outer walls are those the archaeologist Leen Ritmeyer
cites from a 16th century commentary on the 2nd century CE Middot tractate that
transmitted the other dimensions.
This
source is late and therefore open to question, but its distances match those Ritmeyer scaled from his proposed
ancient locations for the Holy of Holies foundation trenches to the ancient
outer walls of which he located the four corners.
As
to the locations on the drawing of the gates and other structures outside the
outer wall, I scaled these from Ritmeyer’s ground
plan of the Temple Mount during Hezekiah’s time5.
I
further drew a plan view of the Holy of Holies, with
the Ark oriented east- west, as proposed by Ritmeyer, and the two gold- covered
cherubim stretching their wings above it, as in the biblical account. The
outline of the cherubim is based on the proportions of a winged sphinx or cherub
in a Phoenician ivory carving from the eighth or ninth century BCE.
Then
I reduced the Temple Mount drawing so that the area inside its walls would fit inside the Holy of Holies, and I reflected it to line
up the entrances into the same direction.
This
required two assumptions, about the inside length of
the Temple Mount and about which gate was its main entrance.
The
inside dimensions of the Temple Mount square are not
transmitted, but it seems likely that they were 480 x 480
cubit. The scribe of 1 Kings 6:1 clearly associated the number 480 with
the nationhood of Israel when he said that Solomon began the construction of the
Temple in the 480th year after the Exodus. This time
span fits no archaeologically plausible chronology, but its number supplies the
proper symbolic contrast when you compare it with the
500 cubit outside length.
According
to an ancient Hebrew Myth,
“the
earth was so large that it would take a man five hundred
years to walk across from east to west, if he lived to finish it, and a
walk from north to south would take him another five hundred
years”6.
If
the 500 cubit outside length of the Temple Mount represented
those 500 years which corresponded to the entire
earth, then the inside would have symbolized Israel at the center of that
outside world since the Temple was its exclusive emblem. And what number could
have symbolized that nation better in this context than the
480 years since its people were said to have become independent?
The
association between the essence of Israel and that number survives in the Jewish
folklore which counted 480 synagogues in
Jerusalem7.
In
the symbolic world view it did not matter whether the date or number was
fictitious or not. It was more significant that 480 is 8 x
60 as well as 12 x 40, and that all these were holy and symbolically
charged numbers for divinity and/or completeness that are often emphasized in
the Bible. These accumulated holy numbers may here have reinforced each other’s meanings the way multiple magic
spells were often deemed more potent than a single invocation.
The
wall thickness that results from this postulated inside measurement is ten cubits. This is in the right range for such an outer
defense, compared with a Herodian section of the Western retaining wall that
Ritmeyer listed as just under nine cubit thick8.
Having
thus reduced the layout of the 480x480 inside square to fit it into the 20x20
inside of the inner sanctum, I reflected that reduced
projection so that its main entrance into the Temple Mount would face in
the same direction as the entrance into the Holy of Holies.
This
brings us to the second of the above assumptions, that about the main entrance into the Temple Mount.
Fortunately, the choice which entrance was the principal one is easy. The
only entrance to the Temple Mount that has in Ritmeyer’s drawing a special gate
building is the “Prison Gate” to the north.
To
have the main gate in the north may seem counter- intuitive since the people of
Jerusalem lived south of the Temple, but the Temple precinct was the domain of
God, and God was believed to dwell in the north.
North was the direction from which he came in the prophet Ezekiel’s first vision
(1:4) and where Psalm 48:2 located his city, so I took this architecturally emphasized gate to the north as the
symbolically important entrance.
The
Holy of Holies opened to the east from where God
entered the Temple in Ezekiel’s second and third visions (10:4 and 43:2-5). I
reflected therefore the projection of the Temple
Mount across its southeast to northwest diagonal to
match this orientation, as you can see in the detail view here Figure
5.
These
simple mathematical transformations place the reflected
image of the Altar right before the Ark of the Covenant, touching its
front edge, and just over one finger’s width offset from the east- west
centerline, the way the outside Altar is offset by one cubit from the north-
south centerline of the Temple Mount.
This
spot, right before the Throne of God, was surely also the most likely location
for the Altar made of cedar wood which Solomon had
placed into the Inner Sanctum (1 Kings 6:20). The excellence of the fit suggests that the proposed 480 cubit
dimension on which this projection is based as well as the method and
orientation of the projection were indeed part of the
original plan.
The
reflected center of the Holy of Holies becomes in the
reduced projection a spot 4.6667 cubit south of the 20x20 square’s east- west
centerline, and 2.8125 cubit east of its north- south centerline.
As
suggested above, this spot must have been specially important. If the Temple
complex symbolized a connection to heaven, and the actual Holy of Holies in it
concentrated that connection, then the area
corresponding to the reflected Holy of Holies within the actual one must have
focused that contact even more intensely onto an even
smaller spot.
The
Jewish traditions emphasize this particular spot. According to the dimensions
of the cherubim in 1 Kings 6:23-27 and 2 Chronicles 3:10-14, the reflected Holy
of Holies winds up just before the front legs of the
cherub to the south of the Ark. The two cherubim that flanked the Ark
formed the Throne of God, and if its occupant was
thought to face east towards the entrance, those front legs of the southern
cherub were the right leg of the Throne.
In
this privileged place stood “the celestial ladder
whose first edge is on the earth and second edge on the
right leg of the Throne of Glory”, as quoted here from Hekhalot
Rabbati9, a set of Rabbinic texts
tentatively dated from the second to the fourth century CE that guide the reader
on detailed tours of the Hekhalot or “Heavenly
Palace”.
To the right of God’s Throne is also where David, the king chosen by God and ancestor of the Messiah,
was placed in Psalm 110:1. This tradition survives in the Christian image that
David’s descendant Jesus, the embodied link between earth
and heaven and thus symbolic equivalent of the ladder between these,
stands at God’s right hand (Acts 7:56).
The
location of the ladder foot on earth would of course have reflected that of its
top in heaven, so its most likely place was before the right
leg of the Throne replica on earth where the front legs of the right
cherub defined the spot. This is precisely where the
reflected Holy of Holies winds up. Its mathematically projected presence
there makes that spot an excellent candidate for the place where the builders
believed the ladder to heaven to have stood, the
navel of the earth around which the world had been created.
Earlier,
the Patriarch Jacob had seen this ladder at Beth- el, another “House of God”
and gate to heaven. Bethel was an old holy spot where Abraham had sacrificed and
where the Ark of the Covenant was kept in the days of the Judges, but the ladder had to move to Jerusalem when that royal city became
the religious center of Israel and the Temple its sole official contact with heaven.
The
new location of the ladder was probably the place above which David saw the
Angel of Pestilence “standing between earth and
heaven” (1 Chronicles 21:16). As Ritmeyer pointed out10, the place of this link to the upper realm would
have belonged inside the Holy of Holies when David
decreed right after his vision where to build the Altar and where the
Temple.
Figure 6 and the list
below give the distances of this “ladder spot” in relation to the centers of the
Temple Mount and of the Altar:
Ladder
distance north from east- west Temple Mount
centerline:
| |||
Ladder
to north =
|
62.83333
|
cubit
 | |
20 pi
=
|
62.83185
|
D =
0.002356%
| |
Ladder
distance west from north- south Mount centerline, and days in four sidereal
months:
| |||
Ladder
to west =
|
109.1875
|
cubit
| |
4 x
27.3217 =
|
109.2868
|
D = 0.09094%
| |
Direct
distance from Ladder to Altar center, and reciprocal of days in 40 solar
years:
| |||
Ladder
to Altar =
|
109.4893
|
cubit
| |
40,000 / 365.2422 =
|
109.5164
|
D = 0.02477%
| |
Distance from Ladder to Temple Mount center, divided by Mount center to Altar center, both in cubit, and
reciprocal of days in solar year:
| |||
125.9759 / 46.0109 =
|
2.737961
|
| |
1,000 /
365.2422 =
|
2.737909
|
D = 0.001873%
| |
Please note how well that one spot brings down pi the
sun and the moon’s travel before the stars to fasten them mathemagically
to the Rock, together with the biblically important period of 40 years.
The multiplier 20 for pi matches the location of that spot in the Holy of
Holies which was 20 cubits long and 20 each broad and high. The 20 pi distance
thus joins a circle of 20 to the square and cube of this
number. This is one up on those who tried to merely square the circle --
or twenty up since the Temple designer’s solution for combining these
incommensurable quantities worked, at least in symbolical terms.
That
the reciprocal of 40 years was intended seems
confirmed by the inclusion of the reciprocal for a single
year, as if to indicate that this was the unit used for that prominently
biblical group of forty. Forty years was the length
for each of Moses’ three life phases, of the Israelites' stay in the wilderness
after their flight from Egypt, and of both David’s and Solomon’s reigns. These
may well be symbolically determined periods, just
like the 12 x 40 years between the Exodus and the start of building the
Temple.
The
accuracy of the astronomical numbers embedded in
these dimensions corresponds to the reputation of the ancient Israelites for the
excellence of their calendar data. For instance, the
traditional Hebrew value for the synodic lunar month was 29.530594 days,
compared with the modern computation for recorded history over the last 5,000
years which yields an average month length of 29.530596 days. The difference amounts to 0.000006772%, less than one part in ten million.
A
recent reviewer of a book dealing with this topic wondered:
“It
has never been clear just where the extremely accurate
Hebrew value came from.”11
(Just
as it has never been clear how king Hezekiah’s
surveyors solved their extremely tough tunnel measuring task?)
The
value of pi in the north- south coordinate of the ladder spot is more than ten times closer than the much celebrated
approximation of Archimedes.
This
is no reflection on Archimedes who could easily have computed a much narrower
range but may have had better things to do than to continue a tedious,
repetitive, and to him utterly useless calculation.
He may not have striven for a mention in Guinness’ Book of World Records to
which he did not even subscribe.
On
the other hand, if some ancient Near Eastern priests sought divine secrets or magical powers in this mysterious number
so closely associated with the sun, then they and their many well- schooled
assistants could easily have performed a great many such calculations instead of
watching the TV programs from back then.
The
closeness of this symbolically important distance in
the Temple layout to the value of 20 pi suggests that the ancient Hebrews were
able to compute not only astronomical periods with great precision but also mathematical constants, never mind the long- standing
smear campaign against Solomon’s pi.
The
precision of the matches seems to imply that the designer of the Temple plan
established this ladder spot first, with relative
freedom to pick its coordinates. Once it was nailed down, and the ends of the
Ark- to- Altar line, their locations defined the centerlines of the Temple Mount
and their grid.
The
rest of the layout then followed the constraint of using whole or at best half cubits for the various dimensions.
This limits, of course, the accuracy of further matches with target numbers to
expressions with relatively small integers which do
not always cooperate smoothly but require much computing and careful planning to
be so harnessed.
The
close matches which the ladder spot dimensions yield
with 20 pi and with the astronomical as well as specific symbolic periods would
be hard to explain as random coincidences.
Considering
the constraints for arriving at this spot, you are about as likely to encounter
such a constellation of mathematical and astronomical
constants as you are to get hit by lightning, on a calm day, and in your
basement. The Jerusalem Temple precinct was clearly laid out with superb skill
around that ladder spot to produce these heavenly and
holy ratios, particularly since the presence of this purported point of contact with heaven was the reason for building
the Temple there to begin with.
The
construction of those closely interrelated spots within the
grid of the Temple Mount square also seems to imply that Solomon’s
builders knew not only their pi and how to compute it, but that they used an x-y coordinate system of analytical geometry similar to
our modern one which was invented by René Descartes (1596 to 1650) and Pierre de
Fermat (1601 to 1665).
Many
historians of science rank this invention as one of the two milestones that mark
the beginning of modern mathematics12.
The
numerical matches at this ladder spot also validate the
authenticity of the distances from Temple Court to Temple Mount that
Ritmeyer found in the 16th century commentary on the older Middot tractate.
Those distances are such an integral part of the overall numerical theme that
they convey two things:
-
the commentary was based on correctly transmitted data for the same structure as the other Middot dimensions, and
-
the layout of the Temple Mount described in that source had been included in the transmitted design, whether Solomon built any of it, or all, or none.
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