The Altar of Burnt Offering | Solomon's Temple

1. A single verse. “He made a bronze altar twenty cubits long, twenty cubits wide and ten cubits high” (2 Chronicles 4:1) is the only description in all of Scripture that gives us any indication of what Solomon’s Altar looked like. Oddly, it does not appear that the Altar was part of Hiram’s purview. Its minimal description does perhaps suggest that it did not contain any special sculpture or imagery.
2. Size, and a way up. The Altar was 30 feet wide and long (a little over 9 m) and 15 feet high (about 4.5 m). It would not be possible to place wood and offerings on the altar without some way to ascend the height, so many scholars believe there was a ramp, possibly a stairway. I don’t believe Exodus 20:26 is a difficulty here: that commandment was given before the priests had their garments (which included undergarments), and the only steps that would have uncovered their nakedness would have been very steep steps, such as those on a ladder.
3. Not a bronze ramp. Priestly attire did not include footwear (Exodus 28). Imagine walking barefoot up a bronze ramp heated by hours in the sun, all while carrying offerings, wood and tools. It would be excruciating, if it were possible. This is why the Altar is commonly depicted with a stone exterior.
4. “Settles” and an annex. The settles of Ezekiel’s altar are not stairs; the risers are too high to climb and the shelves too narrow to work from. We see a similar pattern on Solomon’s Temple, with its three stories of side rooms (1 Kings 6:5–10). It appears that settles are perhaps a recurring part of temple architecture, allowing annex structures to be built over core elements while remaining distinct. I wonder if the Altar itself was totally bronze, but cast with settles so that an annex walkway could “cap” it, letting priests navigate to the hearth, around it, and back down.
5. Where the bronze showed. At least one section on each side of the bronze Altar would need to be accessed, because some offerings required blood to be splashed on the sides of the Altar, and the censers of Korah’s company were to be visible to the people (Numbers 16:35–40). My view is that many of these sections would have been lower on the altar, with a gutter at the base, as Ezekiel describes.
6. Stones “cut without hands.” Nothing would be offered on the annex; it is only there as a logistics solution. It is not clear to me why such a structure couldn’t be made with the same fine stone used for the Temple, dressed at the quarry so that no iron tool was heard at the site (1 Kings 6:7). Essentially, the stones arrive at the Temple “cut without hands,” though hands certainly cut the stone. Perhaps there are some parallels here to Ephesians 2, where the saints are “builded together for an habitation of God.”
7. The hearth. If dimensions are similar to Ezekiel 43, the hearth would be many times larger than the Tabernacle’s, and its center almost impossible to reach. What if the hearth was broken up into sections that could tilt for maintenance, or be moved like a sort of manual conveyor? What if the center was an opening to a funnel for ash (Leviticus 6:10–11)? This is all pure guesswork, but it’s not hard to see the logistics of a hearth that’s broken into sections instead of one large grate.

“Perhaps none of this works and is all just silly, overblown conceptualization on my end. If so, that’s OK. If this gets your own curiosity up, then this exercise in ideation over logistical details wasn’t for nothing!”

See also my Altar of Burnt Offering for the Tabernacle and the Court of Solomon’s Temple, where I discuss where the altar stood.