These “chambers” (compare Ezekiel 46:19) did not reach to the western wall; between it and them lay a court for cooking (M), probably forty cubits by thirty; such court with its approaches filled up the corner of fifty cubits square, as in the case of the kitchen-courts for the people. In these chambers were dining-rooms for the priests (see Ezekiel 42:13), and baths, for no priest could enter upon his daily ministry without having first bathed. “The chambers” extended beyond “the separate place” to the wall of the temple-court, on the other side of which wall was the twenty cubits space. The “pavement” (H) was no doubt continued along the temple-wall, so that these priests’ chambers, like the thirty chambers, stood upon “a pavement,” and were, on the east side, “over against this pavement.”
Translate Ezekiel 42:1-3, “Then he brought me forth into the outward court, the way toward the north, and he brought me to the chambers which were over against the separate place, and which were over against the building, toward the north along the front of the length of an hundred cubits, with the door by the north, and the breadth fifty cubits over against the twenty cubits which were in the inner court, and over against the pavement which was in the outward court, gallery upon gallery in three stories.”