“He made the cast metal ‘Sea’ circular, seventeen-and-a-half feet from rim to rim, eight-and-three quarter feet high and fifty-two-and-a-half feet in circumference.” – 1 Kings 7:24
There’s one area where gentile Christian scholars are way the heck off the mark, and have truly smoked more marijuana than they should have.
I’m talking about their depictions and descriptions of what’s called the Bronze or Molten Sea.
They teach that this huge circular basin was used for bathing, and apparently, there are even paintings that show this.
Anyone who possesses even a rudimentary understanding of Torah knows how wrong that is.
The Bronze Sea was basically a huge water tank where the priests would wash their hands and feet before performing ritual animal sacrifices.
It was the equivalent of the laver used at the Wilderness Tabernacle.
And this basin was a BEAST in terms of how big the mamma was!
That’s why it was called the “Sea,” or MARE in Hebrew.
Like the two pillars we discussed yesterday, it was cast out of bronze.
This giant metal pot was made by pouring hot melted metal into molds shaped in sand or clay.
Where was the work done?
Probably one of two spots.
Possibly down in the Timna desert, since that’s where all the copper mines were.
Or maybe over in Succoth, because the dirt there was perfect for shaping molds.
Now let’s talk size.
This tank was HUGE!
We’re talking about 18 feet across and 9 feet tall.
And it didn’t just sit on the ground.
Twelve bronze bulls held the whole thing up on their backs, with the pot resting on their rear ends.
The bulls were split into four teams of three, and each team looked out toward a different compass direction…north, south, east, and west.
All of them faced away from the center, like they were standing guard.
Sound familiar?
It should.
Back when Israel wandered out of Egypt, the 12 tribes traveled and camped the exact same way.
Recall the tribes of Israel marched in four clusters of three tribes, one cluster on each side of the camp.
Anyways, ya getting the picture of just how heavy this monstrosity was?
The walls of the pot were about four inches thick of solid metal all the way around.
And it held somewhere around 12,000 gallons of water.
It was basically a swimming pool, homies.
So how’d they fill the dang thing up?
Well, probably not by hauling buckets back and forth all day.
That’s for sure.
Most likely, water flowed in through a pipe.
And no, pipes weren’t some futuristic invention back then.
Homies in the Biblical era already knew how to do plumbing.
I read about how one Torah scholar describes being in Israel right after archaeologists dug up a chunk of baked clay pipe near the Pool of Siloam, down the hill from the City of David.
The thing was around five inches wide, completely unbroken, and came from a layer of ground going back to King David’s time…maybe even earlier.
Now here’s the thing about the water itself that I gotta make you homies privy to.
You couldn’t just dump any old water in there.
Since this pot was used for holy washing, the water had to meet a special standard the Bible calls MAYIM CHAYIM.
You do remember what MAYIM CHAYIM means, don’t you?
What?!
You freakin’ forgot already?
Alright, I’ll tell ya before I pop a blood vessel.
It refers to “living water.”
What counts as living water?
It was water from a moving source.
So think rivers and streams.
Water from wells or ponds didn’t count.
The only exception would be what’s called an artesian spring.
That’s when water shoots up out of the ground on its own because it’s under pressure down below.
So that could be considered living water.
Springs like that are still bubbling away underneath the Temple Mount right now.
Old Jewish writings even say the bronze bulls had openings in their feet where pipes could be hooked up, connecting the pot straight to those underground springs.
That’s how they kept refilling this massive tank day after day.
Alrighty, normally I’d switch over to a takeaway at this juncture.
But I’ve already written enough to fill an article for The New Yorker.
So let’s park it for today.
But stay tuned.
We’re gonna be checking out more of the instruments used in and around the Temple.
After that, we’re gonna walk through what happened to Solomon’s Temple all the way up to the day it got destroyed.
I told you this series should’ve been titled, “Everything you ever wanted to know about Solomon’s Temple but never in a million years thought to ask.”
Later!
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