The Commentary by John Norton Loughborough

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Mar 26, 1867

The Commentary.

By John Norton Loughborough

Tell me the meaning of Scriptures. One gem from that ocean is worth all the pebbles of earthly streams.—M'Cheyne.

The Bible Cubits.

“I saw also the height of the house round about: the foundations of the side-chambers were a full reed of six great cubits.” Ezek. xli, 8.

WHILE a mass of teachers at the present day, through modern Spiritualism, are teaching that mankind are constantly progressing in stature, strength and intellect, facts are constantly brought to light showing that the race is gradually decreasing in stature and strength. Man’s stature formerly must have been much greater than at the present day. Bones are frequently exhumed from the earth which must have belonged to persons twice as large as the present race.

In this short article I propose to present a Bible fact on ancient and modern measurement, which will tend to prove that men were once much larger than at present.

All our readers have read of the cubit, and may be aware of the fact that there are two kinds of cubits mentioned in the Bible. One of these cubits was twenty-two inches, and the other was eighteen inches. With some, perhaps, the query has arisen, when reading of the measure of a cubit in the Bible, whether it is the greater or lesser cubit which is meant, and why it is that two cubits are thus introduced. With a little care, we think, it can all be made plain, so that there will be no more difficulty in telling which cubit is referred to in certain texts, than there would be with one reading in history of an event which happened on a certain day of the month whether it was to be reckoned Old Style or New.

The careful reader would say, “If the event happened in any place previous to 1582 it must be reckoned by the Old Style. If in any Catholic country this side that date, it must be according to the New Style. In any country, this side of that date, which had not adopted the New Style, events, happening before they adopted the New Style must be reckoned by the Old Style; but if after those countries had adopted the New Style, those dates must be according to the New Style. In the time when the transition was being made from the Old Style to the New, we find events recorded in both Old and New Style.”

So in the measure of a cubit. In early times the cubit was twenty-two inches, but the more modern cubit is only eighteen inches, and in the transition from one to the other, which seems to be in the days of Ezekiel’s prophecy, both cubits are mentioned in recording measurement. In Chap. xli, 8, he says, “The foundations of the side-chambers were a full reed of six great cubits.” A great cubit would of course imply a small one, and the manner in which it is mentioned here, would also imply that they were becoming more familiar with the lesser than the greater cubit. In Ezekiel xliii, 13, we read, “And these are the measures of the altar after the cubit; the cubit is a cubit and a hand-breadth.”

What is a cubit? It is the measure from the point of the elbow to the end of the second finger. Before the days of Ezekiel, even when man’s stature must have been greatly reduced from what it anciently was, a cubit was twenty-two inches. But in the days of Ezekiel, the stature of man had so decreased that it became necessary to make a change in this measure, and the latter cubit was a hand-breadth (four inches) less than the former. If the same mode of measurement was now adopted and the average of mankind taken as the measure of a cubit, it would fall much short of eighteen inches. In this then we see Bible evidence that man’s stature in ancient times was greater than in later times, and, as it seems to us, we get a clue to what kind of cubit we are to reckon by in early, and in later, Bible times.

J. N. LOUGHBOROUGH.