Friday, December 29, 2023

Leen Ritmeyer on How the Holy of Holies Was Cleaned

  

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)