AN ANCIENT SOLUTION TO A CLEANING PROBLEM
With golden
plates on the walls of the Holy of Holies, access was needed for cleaning
purposes. The Holy of Holies, like the rest of the Temple, had to be kept
clean. Yet only the High Priest was allowed entry once a year on Yom Kippur,
the Day of Atonement . . . with so many functions to perform on that day, there
would have been no time to do the cleaning as well.
The problem
was surmounted by having a basket, attached to a rope, descended through the
ceiling of the chamber. Closed on three sides, such baskets were lowered with
the open side facing the wall. The cleaners standing inside the baskets could
only look straight ahead and not into the Holy of Holies. (Leen Ritmeyer, The
Quest: Revealing the Temple Mount in Jerusalem [Jerusalem: Carta Jerusalem
and the LAMB Foundation, 2006, 2015], 394)