THE magnificent Temple built and furnished by King Solomon at stupendous cost of thought, labour, and of treasure was not blessed with long life. Solomon was surrounded by pagan peoples, and the Jews themselves tended from time to time to fall away into idolatry; indeed, ten of the twelve tribes broke away soon after Solomon’s death to form an independent kingdom, which later made the fortified city of Samaria its capital. The two faithful tribes, Judah and Benjamin, held the mountain stronghold of Jerusalem, which, commanding the great trade route between Syria and Egypt, had brought Solomon both wealth and power; but for some hundreds of years to come the position was a difficult one, for in the long wars between the Assyrians and the Egyptians Palestine was often ravaged from many different points. In the fifth‑year of Rehoboam’s reign the Egyptians sacked Jerusalem and carried away the gold from the Temple. Then, in the year 722 B.C., the Kingdom of Samaria fell, Israel bekame an Assyrian province, and the Ten Tribes were taken captive. But ,in Jerusalem itself Hezekiah paid tribute to his conquerors, and was able, to some extent, to restore the Temple worship. Eighty years later Josiah repaired the Temple, refurnished it, and it was at this time that Hilkiah found the Book of the Law in the House of the Lord, an event which will be dealt with when discussing the Irish ritual. (Our narrative embodies an account, probably by Lionel Vibert, in Miscellanea Latomorum, vol. xvi.)
What appeared to be the end both of Jerusalem and of its Temple came in 586 s.c.’ when, under the orders of Nebuchadnezzar, who was founding his Babylonian empire, Jerusalem was sacked, the Temple treasures were stolen, and the two faithful tribes, Judah and Benjamin, were carried off to Babylon, the only people left in the country of Judea being peasants and others whose enforced duty was to till the land.
In Babylon the Jewish exiles lived in small colonies, and, although they had no temples, they were able to form worshipping congregations which served to keep alive in at least a section of the people their love of Judea and their faith in their God. Their lament is set forth in emotional language in Psalm 137:
By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How shall we sing the LORD’S song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.
The empire that Nebuchadnezzar had brought together had short shrift when the Medes and Persians came against it. About seventy years after the Jews went into exile Cyrus the Persian conquered Babylon and extended an empire which covered the countries of West Asia for the next two centuries. Only a few months after Cyrus had reached Babylon he issued an edict permitting the Jewish exiles to return to Palestine and inviting the two faithful tribes to rebuild the city and the Temple of Jerusalem. His motives in doing so are unknown, but what matters is that he gave the two tribes his protection, supplied them with treasure and materials for carrying out their work, and promised to restore the riches carried off from the Temple some seventy years before.
The invitation was not at first warmly or widely accepted, for most of the Jews, having been born in exile, had never seen Palestine, and it was only a small group that at first availed itself of the permission and made the journey to Palestine. A band of Jewish pioneers under Sheshbazzar returned to Jerusalem in 537 B.C. and started the work. Seventeen years later came a much stronger contingent under Zerubbabel, but the returned exiles were mortified to find that they could occupy only the ruins and immediate vicinity of Jerusalem, for tribes of mixed blood had moved into Judea during the years of exile.
Under Zerubbabel the Governor, Joshua the High Priest, and the Prophets Haggai and Zechariah the Second Temple was built, and dedicated, in 516 B.C., to the worship of God. Priests among the returned exiles regulated the ritual of the new Temple in accordance with the Book of the Law discovered by Hilkiah rather more than a century before. Cyrus had been succeeded by Cambyses, who, influenced by the hostility of the tribes dwelling near Jerusalem, stopped the work, but he in turn was succeeded by Darius Hystaspes, who gave the Jews badly needed assistance, for all through the period of the rebuilding they were harassed by the neighbouring tribes, in whom was more than a tinge of Jewish blood. The Samaritans, appealing to Darius, tried again to hinder the work, which, however, continued under the encouragement of Haggai the Prophet.
Darius permitted the stolen treasures to be returned to Jerusalem under armed escort, and it is this difficult and dangerous journey which is thought by some writers (and only some) to be symbolized by the early Royal Arch ceremony known as the ‘Passing of the veils’.
Haggai the Prophet deserves a great place in the narrative of the returned exiles. He had been born in Babylon, and is believed to have travelled to Judea with Zerubbabel, and to him fell the immediate task of exhorting the Jews to finish the rebuilding of the Temple, work in which there had been a break of about fourteen years owing to the hostile action of the neighbouring tribes. He assured the Jews that “the glory of this latter house shall be greater than of the former” ‑ a difficult prophecy, inasmuch as the second Temple could not compare in its richness with the first one, but a prophecy claimed to have been fulfilled many years later when Christ entered it. The history of the period is to be found in the Book of Ezra, part of which book some scholars believe to have been written by Haggai. Not only with the Jews does the memory of Haggai stand in great regard, for both the Greeks and the Latins keep his festival, the former on December 16 and the latter on July 4.
As the years passed the Jewish priests, becoming careless and corrupt, neglected the Temple services. Fifty‑eight years after the completion of the Temple Ezra arrived in Jerusalem, and at once set about reforming and purifying the priesthood; fourteen years later still Artaxerxes of Persia allowed Nehemiah (his aristocratic Jewish courtier and cupbearer) to go to Jerusalem with the status of Governor. Under Nehemiah the Jews rebuilt the broken walls of the city, in face of the fierce hostility of the Samaritans, who were suffering under a grievance, for they had professed themselves as willing to assist the returned exiles to rebuild the Temple, but had been spurned by the two faithful tribes, who regarded them, in spite of their (largely) Jewish blood, as foreigners. All through the rebuilding of the Temple and of the walls of the city the Jews had to reckon with the hostile Samaritans, but they rebuilt the city walls in fifty‑two days in spite of opposition. Their valour is recorded in the Book of Nehemiah iv, 17‑18:
They which builded on the wall, and they that bare burdens, with those that laded, every one with one of his hands wrought in the work, and with the other hand held a weapon. For the builders, every one had his sword girded by his side, and so builded.
It is this text that the ritual renders “with trowel in hand and sword at side.” Here, for a moment, we digress from the main narrative to remark that freemasons are not alone in having adopted as a symbol the sword and trowel. They were anticipated by the Order of the Templars, the aristocratic, rich Crusading order that arose in the year 1119, and which is said to have made of the trowel a fourfold device taking the form of the Cross of the East, the Temple Cross, known to us as the Maltese Cross or Cross of the Knights of St John. In this device, it is claimed, four trowels meet at their points. We learn from A. E. Waite that this same cross was an Assyrian emblem before Christian times, a curious coincidence. It is possibly a matter for slight wonder that Royal Arch masonry did not adopt the four‑trowel cross as its symbol instead of the tau cross, which, although of great philosophical significance, has no obvious relation to the traditional history of the Order. But it is well worth noting that in the hexalpha jewel worn by the First Principal of the First Grand Chapter, as depicted in the margin of the Charter of Compact, the internal delta is actually a triangular trowel.
Among quite a number of books containing religious symbols and emblems published in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is the wellknown Choice of Emblemes (reprinted in facsimile in 1866), by Geoffrey Whitney, who died in 1603‑4. As in most of such works, there is a succession of engravings, each with descriptive verses, and one of these engravings (reproduced in Plate II of the present volume) depicts two hands extending from a cloud, the right one holding a sword, and the left a delta‑shaped trowel. Here is the first of the verses accompanying the engraving:
When Sanabal Hierusalem distrest,
With sharp assaultes, in Nehemias tyme,
To warre, and worke, the Jews them selves addrest
And did repaire theire walls, with stone, and lime:
One hand the swode, against the foe did shake,
The other hand, the trowel, up did take.
During much of the time occupied by the rebuilding at Jerusalem a group of priests who had remained in the land of exile were putting into writing the ritual laws which had regulated the Temple worship in earlier days. Greville Lewis’s excellent book1 tells the story in simple terms. The priests were compiling something more elaborate than the Deuteronomy laws, for they were providing instruction on Temple services, Sabbathkeeping, and such like, and the result of their work is the priestly code given in parts of Exodus, Numbers, and especially Leviticus. Ezra, with fellow‑priests, took the priestly code to Jerusalem and set out to create a Jewish nation. This was a turning‑point in Jewish history, for the Jews accepted the code, and henceforth became known as “the People of the Book.” In this we see the birth of Judaism ‑ that is, the religion of the Jews when it became a religion of obedience to the Law, so elaborate and complicated that it required the skill of specialists to teach it to the people. These teachers were the Scribes, mostly priests, of whom we hear so much in the Gospels of the New Testament.
The history of the Second Temple was as troublous as that of the First: Again plundered and again profaned, the Temple was dedicated to Jupiter but a few years later, in 168 B.C., Judas Maccabeus, the deliverer, rededicated it, an event which the Jews commemorate to this day, but on the death of the deliverer the Romans under Pompey entered the Temple and the Holy of Holies, and in 54 B.C. a successor, Crassus, finally carried off everything of value. But again the Temple was dedicated, some sort of worship maintained, and High Priests continued to be appointed. Herod the Great besieged Jerusalem, and eventually pulled down the Temple, although he allowed the priests to rebuild the Holy of Holies, while he himself built the great Court of the Gentiles. So, ultimately, every vestige of the Temple of Zerubbabel disappeared, and Herod erected on its site a temple with which he associated his own name.
That is a reasonable but highly condensed story of the Temple history, and provides much of the background for the Royal Arch ritual, but a few inconsistencies & anachronisms ‑ may be mentioned. In the ritual; story three great men ‑ Zerubbabel, Joshua, and Haggai ‑ are closely associated with the rebuilding of the Temple during the reign of Cyrus but actually it was Zerubbabel who travelled from Babylon to Jerusalem; and when the three did collaborate it must have been in a later day, that of Darius. With Haggai was Zachariah, who is not mentioned in the ritual, but these two were co‑workers with Zerubbabel. Then, in the ritual, Ezra and Nehemiah are associated, but this is quite a serious anachronism, for, although Ezra came to Jerusalem probably seventy years later than Zerubbabel, Nehemiah did not arrive in the city for yet thirteen more years. A period of roughly eighty years, therefore, separated Zerubbabel on the one hand and Ezra and Nehemiah on the other, and their work was the rebuild ing, of the walls of the city, not the walls of the Temple ‑ although this last point is of small moment, because, from the Masonic point of view, the Temple and city of Jerusalem are one. The Sojourners, who travelled’, by permission of Cyrus, apparently did not arrive until Darius was on the, throne, and in the ritual they make their report to the Sanhedrin, which is unlikely to have been in existence in Zerubbabel’s day.
Other inconsistencies in the Royal Arch ritual have been pointed. out from time to time, and we may instance those mentioned in Lionel Vibert’s address to the Essex First Principal’s Chapter, reprinted in the 1934‑35f Transactions of that chapter, and in the address by A. G. Duncan in the 1938‑46 Transactions of the same chapter. Vibert holds that in the Royal Arch;
the sojourners make an independent discovery of the sacred word already known to the Principals and to E. and N.; they report it and their discovery is, acknowledged to be‑correct…. We appear here to have a. reminiscence of some other philosophy . . . the lesson that the truly humble workman, though engaged on unskilled and uninteresting work, may nevertheless find in it or by it a great reward … entitling him to a place among the wisest of men and in the council of rulers.
A. G. Duncan says that by no stretch of imagination could the names and symbols revealed in the vault be the secret which enabled Hiram to function as a Master Mason, but that the Royal Arch mason “realises that below the surface aspect of our rites and ceremonies is the substance … which each must grasp for himself.” W. W. Covey Crump says that to us the: Temple of Zerubbabel is a ‘prototype and its erection is a parable of our own.Masonic work.
The dimensions of the Temple have many times been investigated. Roderick H. Baxter, having studied the comparative dimensions of the various temples built by the Jews at Jerusalem, concludes that Zerubbabel’s Temple’ was more or less the same size as Solomon’s, except that the total width was one‑third more, the chambers and gallery roughly half again as wide; and the outer courts more than three times as long. He gives the total length of Solomon’s Temple as ninety cubits, and its total width as forty‑five cubits, and its height (which is subject to question) as sixty cubits.
Between the women’s court and the men’s, says a seventeenth-century work, Moses and Aaron, written by a divine, Thomas Godwyn, “there was an. ascent ‘of fifteen steps or stairs . . . upon these steps the Levites sung those fifteen Psalms immediately following the one hundredth and – nineteenth; upon every step one Psalm, whence those Psalms are entitled Psalmi Gradualtes, Songs of Degrees.” (Many of the Psalmsare described in the Bible as “Songs of Degrees:” It will be noted that a flight of three, five, and seven steps gives a total of fifteen.)
The Sanhedrin or Sanhedrim
The supreme judicial council of the Jews was the Sanhedrin (a, word commonly spelled. ‘Sanhedrim’). The word comes from the Greek through the Hebrew and means ‘council,’ ‘sitting together.’ Traditionally the Sanhedrin existed from the time of Moses, but historically, especially in view of the derivation of the word, it is safer to regard the great Sanhedrin as having existed from the days of Judas Maccabeus (second century B.C.) till somewhere about A.D. 425. It was the supreme place of judgment, and was sometimes called Beth Din, the House of Judgment. Constituted of chief priests and other learned men engaged in sacred duties, it had as its chief officer a prince (nasi or president), who is believed in the later days to have enjoyed a hereditary office. The Sanhedrin was a State council, a legislature that interpreted tradition and religious laws and regulations, a parliament with responsibility for military decisions, a high court of justice, and it met daily except on sabbaths and feast‑days.
The New Testament calls the members of the Sanhedrin “elders – obviously they were men of acknowledged position and standing ‑ and there were seventy of them, in accordance with Numbers xi, 16: “And the Lord said unto Moses, Gather unto me seventy men of the elders of Israel, whom thou knowest to be the elders of the people, and officers over them; and bring them unto the tabernacle of the congregation, that they may stand there with thee.” The President was in addition to this number. (When Napoleon attempted by edict to erect a Jewish Sanhedrin in France in 1806 he fixed the number at seventy‑one.) The assembly sat usually in a hall near the great gate of the Temple, and in the form of a semicircle, the President’s raised seat being in the centre. In a two‑volume Latin book by Jehan Faure (Toulouse, France, 1517) is a full‑page wood engraving entitled “Arbor Judaica,” representing three judges occupying the presidential raised seat, the whole bearing a strong resemblance to the principal officers of a Royal Arch chapter. (Reference has already been made to the frontispiece of Samuel Lee’s Orbis Miraculum and to alchemical illustrations depicting a somewhat similar arrangement.) How the Royal Arch ritual came to emphasize that the august Sanhedrin had seventy‑two members and to use the phrase “unless seventy‑two of the elders be present” has been much debated. It is barely possible that it is merely a literal mistake, but quite definitely the number seventy‑two is everywhere accepted in Royal Arch practice.
It is very difficult to believe that, in arriving at this number, its cabbalistic significance was any consideration, but a French author has shown that the equilateral triangle containing the Tetragrammaton could be calculated to give the mystical number of seventy‑two. The present writer, however, is sceptical of any ‘evidence’ founded on the mystical value of alphabetical letters.
It is impossible to rule out, nevertheless, the influence of the number seventy‑two. For example, the name Jehovah is said to comprehend the seventy‑two names of God; then, too, the Greek translation of the Old Testament scriptures, the oldest translation known, was alleged at one time to have been made by six translators from each Jewish tribe, seventytwo in all, who completed their work in seventy‑two days, thus giving the name “Septuagint” to the translation!
The number of Companions additional to the Principals and Scribes in a Royal Arch chapter is in theory limited to seventy‑two, and if in practice this number is exceeded the Companions in excess of the number may not bear the staff of office. As one version of the ritual says: “this staff you will be always entitled to bear, unless seventy‑two of your elders be present”; in that case, the full number of the Sanhedrin being completed, the younger members must be excluded,” the “exclusion” being from office.
We know that the limitation of the number to seventy‑two goes back at least as far as 1778, when in the Antients’ chapters there were the Three Principals, Two Scribes, Three Sojourners, and Seventy‑two others as council; we know also that the premier Grand Chapter observed that same number. J. Heron Lepper has suggested that the number cannot now be taken literally, but is to be regarded as a relic of the past, bearing in mind, for example, that at Grand Chapter meetings far more than seventy-two Companions are always present, each with a right to speak and vote.
The Irish Tradition: Repairing the Temple
Much is made of the difference between the English and the Irish traditional histories. They appear to be so different, but in essentials the two ceremonies are much the same. Although the details do not agree and in the Irish ceremony the Candidates themselves take a more active part in the working out of the drama, in both the English and the Irish versions a part of the whole of the early Sacred Law is among the traditional discoveries, and it is not too much to say that the two rituals are identical in philosophy and teaching. The qualifications of the Candidates are not the same, and it is impossible for the Royal Arch mason of one jurisdiction to effect an entrance into a chapter held under the other unless supported by independent credentials. As already made quite clear, the English legend refers to the rebuilding of the Second Temple by Zerubbabel and the Irish to the repairing of Solomon’s Temple by Josiah.
The Biblical history upon which the Irish narrative is partly based is to be found in i Kings xxii. Josiah, a good King, but only eight years old when he began his reign, was on the throne in Jerusalem for thirty‑one years. He sent Shaphan (a Scribe and of a family of Scribes), son of Azaliah, to the House of the Lord, and there he ordered Hilkiah, the High Priest, to make over the silver contributed by the people to those engaged in the repairing of the Temple ‑ “unto carpenters, and builders, and masons, and to buy timber and hewn stone to repair the house.” Hilkiah, probably acting as overseer, brought back to Shaphan the report: “I have found the book of the law in the house of the Lord. And Hilkiah gave the Book to Shaphan, and he read it.” Further, Shaphan read it before King Josiah,’ who greatly feared when he heard of the wrath of God. Huldah, a prophetess, “a wise woman,” reassured the King, and told him that because of his tenderness and humility, he would be gathered to his fathers in peace and would not see all the evil that would come. The people having been called to the Temple, the King read to them the Book of the Covenant that had been found during the repairing of the Temple, and he made a new covenant ‑ namely, to keep the commandments and to perform the words of the Covenant that were written in the Book. (In Carpenters’ Hall, London, are to be seen paintings of Henry VIII’s day, discovered only in 1845, illustrating Josiah’s repairing of the Temple.) The discovery of what are known as the Dead Sea Scrolls within a few miles of the site of Solomon’s Temple is a remarkable parallel in modern times to the finding of the scroll of the Book of the Law. Very ancient Hebrew scrolls were discovered that had been preserved in quite natural conditions certainly for many hundreds and possibly for a few thousands of years. Seven scrolls came to light in 1947, and later the fragments of four hundred others. They are chiefly of papyrus and leather preserved by the natural action of the very hot, dry climate at a depth of many hundreds of feet below sea‑level. (The surface of the Dead Sea itself is more than twelve hundred feet below sea‑level.) Scholars have already spent years in the task of deciphering the scrolls, and say that some contain variations of stories told in the Book of Genesis, while others are copies of the Book of Isaiah and about a thousand years older than any comparable Hebrew writings in the Old Testament.
An impression commonly prevailing at one time was that the Book of the Law mentioned in both Irish and English ceremonies was the Bible. A moment’s thought will show that to be impossible. The discovery was made at a time when even the history of King Solomon’s reign had not been committed to writing. It has been traditionally thought that the book was the Torah, now known as the Pentateuch, literally “five tools” or “five books” comprising the first five books of the Old Testament (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, and perhaps part of Joshua), known as the Law of Moses or the Book of Moses. A Pictorial History of the Jewish People suggests that this traditional belief is at fault, and that the discovery is nothing more than the Book of Deuteronomy, and that until its discovery there had been no written Torah or law for the guidance and teaching of the people, who therefore relied on oral tradition, into which it was easy for heathen beliefs to creep. The authority quoted says that “the discovery of the Fifth Book of Moses, therefore, was epoch‑making in its effect on the future course of the Jewish religion and on the development of the Jews as a people.” This view is supported by Dr A. G. Aglen, who says that the book discovered was either Deuteronomy or the central part of that book, this book codifying what both prophets and priests had always taught.
Josiah’s work of reformation included the uprooting of pagan worship. A great religious movement was concluded by the observance of “such a passover” as had not been kept “from the days of the judges … nor in all the days of the kings of Israel, nor of the kings of Judah.”
Learned archaeologists who have studied the discovery made under Hilkiah believe that the writings in the foundation chamber were etched not in Hebrew (which was not the original or universal language of mankind, and, indeed, at that date was little more than an obscure dialect), but in cuneiform script that in those days was current through all the land between the River of the East and the River of the South.
The Irish legend superimposes upon the Biblical story the discovery of certain “foundation deposits,” including the squares of the three Grand Masters, ancient coins, an engraved golden plate, and a cubic stone on which had been sculptured certain initial letters.
There has been argument as to whether, at one time, in the early days of the Royal Arch, there were two distinct traditional histories in use in the Irish lodges or chapters. W. J. Chetwode Crawley speaks of an illadvised and unsuccessful attempt, lasting intermittently from 1829 to early in the 1860s, to introduce the English version into the Irish chapters. He is referring to the Irish Grand Chapter at its constitution in 1829, when it attempted to follow the Zerubbabel story, but, owing apparently to the custom of conferring certain step degrees to qualify the Candidate, met formidable difficulties. Thus, at times in the nineteenth century, in some parts of Ireland, one version was worked, and in another the other version. A special committee appointed in 1856 to inquire into the confusion completed its labours in 1863, and as a result it was decided to insist upon the story of the repair of the Temple as the motif of the traditional history, the principal officers being designated J., H., and’ S. instead of, as in England and elsewhere, Z., H., and J.