the porch of a gateway: the roofed entrance space at one end of a temple gate passage
This word appears in exactly one stretch of the Bible: the long, measured tour of a visionary temple in Ezekiel 40. A guide carrying a measuring rod walks the prophet through gatehouse after gatehouse, calling out dimensions, and each time this word names the covered entrance space at one end of the passage a person walked through to reach the courtyard.
It never stands alone. It always turns up inside a running list of a gate's parts, and the same list repeats at the east, north and south gates alike, so the reader is meant to picture one layout copied on every side of the temple:
- the small guard rooms set along the passage
- the heavy posts framing the opening (אַיִל)
- the narrow windows cut round about
- the palm trees carved on the stonework
- the covered entrance space this word names
The ordinary Hebrew word for such a porch (אוּלָם) turns up in the very same chapter, and this rarer word looks and sounds almost identical to it. Whether the two are one word spelled two ways, or whether this form names something slightly different, has never been settled. Ancient readers were already unsure: the old Greek translation of Ezekiel gave up on the gate vocabulary and simply spelled these Hebrew words out in Greek letters instead of translating them.
So the outline is clear and the detail is not. Every gate of the visionary temple had a covered entrance space, measured and counted like everything else in the vision. Exactly how that space was built, and why the word always shows up in a plural form even where a single space seems to be in view, the text does not say.