s twenty cubits,
and their height six cubits. This was the work of king Solomon, [27] who
first of all built the entire temple. But king Agrippa, who had the care
of the temple committed to him by Claudius Caesar, considering that it
is easy to demolish any building, but hard to build it up again, and
that it was particularly hard to do it to these cloisters, which would
require a considerable time, and great sums of money, he denied the
petitioners their request about that matter; but he did not obstruct
them when they desired the city might be paved with white stone. He also
deprived Jesus, the son of Gamaliel, of the high priesthood, and gave
it to Matthias, the son of Theophilus, under whom the Jews' war with the
Romans took its beginning.

CHAPTER 10. An Enumeration Of The High Priests.

1. And now I think it proper and agreeable to this history to give an
account of our high priests; how they began, who those are which are
capable of that dignity, and how many of them there had been at the
end of the war. In the first place, therefore, history informs us that
Aaron, the brother of Moses, officiated to God as a high priest, and
that, after his death, his sons succeeded him immediately; and that
this dignity hath been continued down from them all to their posterity.
Whence it is a custom of our country, that no one should take the high
priesthood of God but he who is of the blood of Aaron, while every one
that is of another stock, though he were a king, can never obtain that
high priesthood. Accordingly, the number of all the high priests from
Aaron, of whom we have spoken already, as of the first of them, until
Phanas, who was made high priest during the war by the seditious,
was eighty-three; of whom thirteen officiated as high priests in the
wilderness, from the days of Moses, while the tabernacle was standing,
until the people came into Judea, when king Solomon erected the temple
to God; for at the first they held the high priesthood till the end
of their life, although afterward they had successors while they were
alive. Now these thirteen, who were the descendants of two of the sons
of Aaron, received this dignity by succession, one after another; for
their form of government was an aristocracy, and after that a monarchy,
and in the third place the government was regal Now the number of
years during the rule of these thirteen, from the day when our fathers
departed out of Egypt, under Moses their lead