1-2. Twenty-five years after King Jehoiachin and the rest of us had been led away as prisoners to Babylonia, and fourteen years after the Babylonians had captured Jerusalem, the Lord's power took control of me on the tenth day of the first month. The Lord showed me some visions in which I was carried to the top of a high mountain in Jerusalem. I looked to the south and saw what looked like a city full of buildings.
3. In my vision the Lord took me closer, and I saw a man who was sparkling like polished bronze. He was standing near one of the gates and was holding a tape measure in one hand and a measuring stick in the other.
4. The man said, “Ezekiel, son of man, pay close attention to everything I'm going to show you—that's why you've been brought here. Listen carefully, because you must tell the people of Israel what you see.”
5. The first thing I saw was an outer wall that completely surrounded the temple area. The man took his measuring stick, which was three metres long, and measured the wall; it was three metres high and three metres thick.
29-30. In fact, everything along the passageway was also the same size, including the guardrooms, the walls separating them, the entrance room at the far end, and the windows. This gate, like the others, was twenty-five metres long and twelve and a half metres wide.
38-39. Inside the entrance room of the north gate, I saw four tables, two on each side of the room, where the animals to be sacrificed were killed. Just outside this room was a small building used for washing the animals before they were offered as sacrifices to please the Lord or sacrifices for sin or sacrifices to make things right.
42-43. and where the meat was placed until it was sacrificed on the altar.Next to the tables in the entrance room were four stone tables fifty centimetres high and seventy-five centimetres square; the equipment used for killing the animals was kept on top of these tables. All around the walls of this room was a seventy-five-millimetre shelf.