He measured the east side with the measuring reed, five hundred cubits by the measuring reed: Once they were outside the Temple compound, the man measured the east side, that is, the outer wall on the eastern side. He used the measuring reed that he had in his hand (see 40.3, 5). The eastern wall was five hundred cubits, that is, 250 meters (840 feet), long. The repetitious phrase by the measuring reed is typical of Ezekiel’s style, but most translations omit this phrase as unnecessary (so Good News Translation). We recommend that translators omit it if such repetition is awkward in their language.

Although this verse is apparently simple in Revised Standard Version, it is not so straightforward in the Hebrew text. Three items require comment:

1. Instead of five hundred, the Hebrew text reads “five cubits,” but the Masoretic scholars who edited the text included a note that the word for “cubits” should be read as “hundred.” There is very little difference between the Hebrew word for “cubits” (ʾemoth) and the word for “hundred” (meʾoth), so these words could easily have been confused. All translations follow the recommendation to read five hundred, the same as the comparable expressions in the next three verses.
2. After the expression for “five cubits [or, hundred],” the Hebrew text has the word meaning “reeds.” So the written Hebrew text has the meaningless phrase “five cubits of reeds,” and the text that is read has “five hundred reeds” (King James Version, New American Standard Bible). If these “reeds” were the same as the reed in the man’s hand in 40.5 (which was six cubits in length), the eastern wall would be 3000 cubits long. But other measurements show that the Temple compound was only 500 cubits square (see verse 20 and 45.2). Hebrew Old Testament Text Project argues that the “reeds” here were different from the reed that the man held, and were only one cubit long, but there is absolutely no evidence for this. New Jewish Publication Society’s Tanakh interprets “five hundred reeds” as “500 [cubits]—in rods” to show that the man used his measuring rod/reed to measure the wall. Most translations have followed the Septuagint by omitting the word “reeds” to make sense of the verse. We recommend that translators follow their example.
3. The last Hebrew word in this verse is the same as the last word in verse 15. King James Version renders each one “round about,” and New King James Version has “all around.” In this context it focuses attention on the fact that the man was measuring the outside of the wall, that is, around the outside of the wall. But some translations follow the Septuagint by changing this word to read “he turned” and placing it at the beginning of verse 17 (so Revised Standard Version/New Revised Standard Version; similarly Revised English Bible, New American Bible, New Jewish Publication Society’s Tanakh, Moffatt). This reading involves changing the Hebrew word sabiyb (“all around”) to sabab (“he turned”). Although this is not a big change, it is not necessary because the original text makes good sense. Most translations render the verse in a way that makes it unnecessary to decide which of these is right (so Good News Translation).

A model for this verse is:

• He measured the [wall on the] eastern side with the measuring rod. It was 250 meters long [measured by the measuring rod] around the outside.

Quoted with permission from Gross, Carl & Stine, Philip C. A Handbook on Ezekiel. (UBS Helps for Translators). Miami: UBS, 2016. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .