Boaz and Jachin
Boaz and Jachin were two copper, brass or bronze pillars which stood in the porch of Solomon's Temple, the first Temple in Jerusalem.[1]
Description
Boaz stood on the left and Jachin ('founding', Tiberian Hebrew יָכִין Yāḵîn) stood on the right. The pillars had a size nearly 6 feet (1.8 m) thick and 27 feet (8.2 m) tall. The 8-foot (2.4 m) high brass chapiters or capitals on top of the columns bore decorations of brass lilies.
The original measurement as taken from the Bible was in cubits, which records that the pillars eighteen cubits high and twelve cubits around, and hollow, 4 fingers thick. (Jeremiah 52:21-22). Nets of checkerwork covered the bowl of each chapiter, decorated with rows of two hundred pomegranates, wreathed with seven chains for each chapiter, and topped with lilies. (1 Kings 7:13-22, 41-42)
Replicas
The Romanesque Church of Santa Maria Maggiore at Tuscania has a recessed entrance flanked by a pair of free standing stone columns intended to evoke Boaz and Jachin.[2]
In popular culture
- Some variants of the Tarot card The High Priestess depict Boaz and Jachin. The card appears in the deck of a traveling Mexican showman in Cormac McCarthy's novel, Blood Meridian: "The woman sat like that blind interlocutrix between Boaz and Jachin inscribed upon the one card in the juggler's deck that they would not see come to light, true pillars and true card, false prophetess for all."[3]
- Russell Hoban's novel The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz.
- Jakin, an incorporated town in the southwest of the U.S. state of Georgia, takes its name from the pillar.[4]
- In the anime series Gundam SEED, the approach to a Plant space colony is guarded by two asteroid fortresses named "Boaz" and "Jachin Due".
- In The Lost Symbol (a novel by author Dan Brown), The villain Mal'akh (Zachary Solomon) had tattoed Boaz and Jachin on both of his legs.
See also
References
- ^ See (1 Kings 7:15, 1 Kings 7:21; 2 Kings 11:14; 23:3).
- ^ Hamblin, William J. and Seeely, David Rolph, Solomon's Temple; Myth and History, Thames and Hudson, 2007, p. 109
- ^ McCarthy, Cormac. Blood Meridian. p. 94, Vintage paperback.
- ^ Resolution on Jakin centennial, Georgia House of Representatives.