Free To the Death by Peter R. Hall Page B

the High Priest making an appeal to prominent and influential Jews, to meet and discuss how law and order could be restored.
    Samuel stared in open-mouthed wonder, first at the Corinthian gates themselves. Made of bronze, each door was forty-five feet high and twenty-two and a half feet wide that required teams of Temple priests to perform the opening and closing rituals. On each side of the gates, massive stone pillars supported twin sixty foot high fortified towers.
    Samuel strolled through the gates which opened out onto a vast court, where the city’s dignitaries where assembling. On the other side of the terrace he could see the walls and gates of the court of the women where a large crowd of women had gathered to hear what the High Priest had to say. Among them was Queen Berenice, frustrated at not being allowed to participate in the meeting.
    With time in hand, Samuel turned east and made his way to the Sanctuary, to stare dry mouthed at its magnificence. Plated all over with sheets of gold and silver, its fifty feet wide doors soared seventy feet high.
    In front of the sanctuary stood the altar, cut from a single block of basalt seventy five feet square, twenty-two and a half feet high, its four square corners jutting out and shaped like horns. Samuel also noticed that the altar was positioned on a gentle slope leading up to it from the south. Priests, who had decreed this, had also laid down the rules for its construction and had supervised the work, for it had been fashioned without the use of iron and once in position, no iron was ever allowed to come into contact with it. Round the sanctuary and the altar ran a thirty six inch high parapet of beautiful rose marble that separated the laity from the priests.
    Samuel stood outside this barrier, his fingers resting lightly on the sun warmed stone. Before him was the Holiest building on earth. Thoughtfully he studied the one hundred and five feet high walls that protected it. These were pierced by a single arch that opened into a vast roofless chamber, its walls sheathed in gold. From where he stood, Samuel could see the gates set in the opposite wall which led to the second chamber. Above them were grapevines from which, fashioned in gold, hung bunches of grapes as big as a man.
    The Sanctuary itself, the Holy Temple, was situated behind these massive gates and walls. Reached by a flight of fifteen steps, each tread was cut from an individual marble block. Seen from the front, the Sanctuary was the same height and width - a hundred and fifty feet each way. Some of the stones used in its construction were sixty eight feet long, nine feet wide, and eight and a half feet deep. The whole building was overlaid with gold.
    In the sun’s first light, it was like a second sun, its light so bright it was impossible to look at it directly. Samuel knew from his brother-in-law, who was a priest, that a fabulous Babylonian tapestry hung across the doors of the Sanctuary’s second chamber. One hundred feet high, fifty feet wide and richly embroidered, this priceless curtain depicted the whole vista of creation.
    Through the gates lay the ground floor of the Sanctuary, a windowless chamber ninety feet high made entirely from white marble. Positioned around the walls of the outer chamber were three fabled lamps of solid gold. World famous as works of art, each lamp had seven arms, branching from a twenty foot tall central column. The seven arms with their perpetually burning lamps symbolised the seven planets.
    The innermost chamber measured thirty feet square and was separated by a cloth of gold. This inner sanctum was the Holy of Holies. It contained absolutely nothing. It had held the Ark of the Covenant that had disappeared six hundred years ago when Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, destroyed Jerusalem, burnt the Temple and enslaved the surviving Jews. Re-sanctified, the Holy of Holies had been rededicated to God. Inviolable, unapproachable, this is where the God of