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Money and measures
Cubit
elbow to fingertip · about 44.5 cm · the long cubit about 52 cm
The cubit was the length of the forearm, from the elbow to the tip of the middle finger. Israel, Egypt and Mesopotamia all used it, in a common and a longer “royal” form; Ezekiel’s long cubit is “a cubit and a handbreadth” (40:5). The best measurement comes from Jerusalem: the inscription in King Hezekiah’s water tunnel says it is 1,200 cubits long, and the tunnel measures about 533 meters — some 44.5 centimeters to the cubit.
With that cubit, Noah’s ark (300 × 50 × 30 cubits) was about 134 meters long, 22 wide and 13 high, and Solomon’s temple (60 × 20 × 30 cubits) about 27 × 9 × 13 meters. Goliath’s height in the standard Hebrew text, six cubits and a span, comes close to 3 meters; the Greek Septuagint and a Dead Sea scroll of Samuel give four cubits and a span, about 2 meters.
Key verses
And this is how you are to build it: The ark is to be 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide, and 30 cubits high.The house that King Solomon built for the LORD was sixty cubits long, twenty cubits wide, and thirty cubits high.Then a champion named Goliath, who was from Gath, came out from the Philistine camp. He was six cubits and a span in height,And I saw a wall surrounding the temple area. Now the length of the measuring rod in the man’s hand was six long cubits (each measuring a cubit and a handbreadth), and he measured the wall to be one rod thick and one rod high.The other disciples came ashore in the boat. They dragged in the net full of fish, for they were not far from land, only about a hundred yards.Sources
Adapted and shortened from the Tyndale Open Bible Dictionary · CC BY-SA 4.0
Tyndale Open Bible Dictionary © 2023 Tyndale House Publishers · CC BY-SA 4.0 — Cubit*; Weights and Measures: Cubit
Adapted from Tyndale Open Bible Dictionary: articles chosen, shortened and retold in our own words (history, nature and daily life only) and, in languages other than English, machine-translated. The original work by Tyndale House Publishers is available for free at tyndaleopenresources.com.
