The Temple

Solomon had decided to build a house for the Lord’s name, and a royal palace. He sent word to Hiram: “You know my father David couldn’t build a house for the Lord his God because of the wars around him, until the Lord put his enemies under the soles of his feet. Now the Lord my God has given me rest on every side, with no enemy and no trouble. So I plan to build it, just as the Lord told my father: ‘Your son, whom I will put on your throne, will build the house for my name.’

“So please order cedars cut for me in Lebanon. My men will join yours, and I will pay your men whatever you ask. You know none of us can cut timber like the Sidonians.”

2 Chronicles, which calls the king Huram, gives a longer letter. Solomon wrote that the house was for burning incense, setting out the show bread and offering burnt offerings. It would be great, he said, “because our God is greater than all gods. But who is able to build him a house, when heaven and the heaven of heavens can’t contain him?” He asked for a master craftsman and for cedar, cypress and algum logs, and promised Huram’s woodcutters twenty thousand cors of wheat, about 120,000 bushels, and twenty thousand baths each of barley, wine and oil, about 110,000 gallons of each.

Hiram was overjoyed. “Praise the Lord today,” he said, “for giving David a wise son to rule this great people!” In 2 Chronicles he answers by letter: “Because the Lord loves his people, he has made you king over them.”

“I’ll do all you want with the cedar and the cypress,” Hiram sent back. “My men will haul the logs down from Lebanon to the sea and float them in rafts to whatever place you name. There I’ll have the rafts taken apart for you. In return, supply food for my household.” 2 Chronicles names the place, Joppa; from there Solomon would carry the timber up to Jerusalem.

So Hiram supplied all the cedar and cypress Solomon wanted. Every year Solomon sent twenty thousand cors of wheat to feed Hiram’s household, and twenty cors of pure oil, about 1,100 gallons. The Lord gave Solomon wisdom, as he had promised. Hiram and Solomon were at peace, and the two made a treaty.

At the king’s command they cut great, costly stones for the foundation. Solomon’s builders, Hiram’s builders and men from Gebal shaped them and got the timber and stone ready.

Solomon began building the Lord’s house in Ziv, the second month of his fourth year as king, 480 years after Israel came out of Egypt. 2 Chronicles says it stood on Mount Moriah in Jerusalem, at the place David had chosen, where the Lord had appeared to him: the threshing floor of Ornan the Jebusite.

The house was about ninety feet long, thirty wide and forty-five high (sixty cubits by twenty by thirty; a cubit, elbow to fingertip, is about a foot and a half). A porch fifteen feet deep ran across the front; 2 Chronicles says it was 120 cubits high, about 180 feet. Three stories of side rooms stood against the outside walls. Each story was wider than the one below, because the wall stepped in at each level, and the beams rested on the ledges instead of going into the wall.

Every stone was shaped at the quarry, and no hammer, ax or iron tool was heard at the house while it was going up. Solomon roofed it with beams and planks of cedar.

Then the Lord gave Solomon this message: “As for this house you are building, if you live by my laws and rulings and keep all my commands, then I will keep my promise to you, the promise I made to David your father. I will live among the Israelites, and I will not abandon my people.”

He made the inner room ready for the ark of the Lord’s covenant. It was thirty feet long, wide and high. He covered it with pure gold, covered its altar with cedar and then gold, hung gold chains across its front, and covered the whole house with gold. 2 Chronicles adds precious stones for beauty, six hundred talents of gold, about eighteen tons, for the Most Holy Place, and gold nails weighing fifty shekels, about a pound.

For the inner room he made two cherubim of olive wood covered with gold, each fifteen feet tall. Their wings, each seven and a half feet long, were spread out: one wing of each touched a side wall, and their other wings met in the middle of the room.

Cherubim, palm trees and open flowers were carved on all the walls, and the floor was covered with gold. The doors to the inner room were olive wood, and the doors to the main hall were folding doors of cypress. They were carved the same way and covered with gold. 2 Chronicles also tells of a veil of blue, purple and crimson and fine linen, decorated with cherubim.

The inner courtyard was built of three rows of cut stone and one of cedar beams. Work on the house had begun in the fourth year. It was finished in every detail, just as planned, in Bul, the eighth month of the eleventh year. It had taken seven years.

He built the Hall of Pillars, seventy-five feet by forty-five, and the cedar-lined Hall of Judgment, where his throne stood and he would judge. His own house, in another courtyard, was built the same way, and so was a house for Pharaoh’s daughter, whom he had married.

Everything was built of costly stone, sawed to size inside and out, on foundations of huge stones fifteen and twelve feet long. A great courtyard of cut stone and cedar beams ran around it all, like the inner courtyard of the Lord’s house.

Hiram cast two bronze pillars. Each was eighteen cubits high, about twenty-seven feet, and eighteen feet around. On each he set a cast-bronze top seven and a half feet high, with lily designs, checkered netting, chains and two rows of pomegranates. He set them up at the temple porch and named the right one Jachin and the left one Boaz. (2 Chronicles says they were thirty-five cubits high, about fifty-two feet.)

He cast the Sea, a huge round bronze tank fifteen feet across, forty-five feet around and seven and a half feet high. Its rim was shaped like the brim of a cup, like a lily flower. It rested on twelve bronze oxen, three facing each direction, with their back ends toward the middle. It held two thousand baths, about eleven thousand gallons, and stood on the southeast side of the house. 2 Chronicles says it held three thousand baths, and tells of a bronze altar thirty feet square and fifteen feet high.

He made ten bronze stands on wheels like chariot wheels. Each was six feet square, with lions, oxen, cherubim and palm trees on its panels. For each stand he made a bronze basin that held forty baths, about 220 gallons. He set five stands on each side of the house. 2 Chronicles says the basins were for washing what was used in the burnt offerings, while the priests washed in the Sea.

Hiram also made the pots, shovels and bowls. So he finished all his work for King Solomon on the Lord’s house. All of it was polished bronze, and the king cast it in the clay ground of the Jordan valley, between Succoth and Zarethan. There was so much that Solomon never weighed it. No one could tell how much the bronze weighed.

Solomon made the gold furnishings inside: the altar, the table for the show bread, and ten lamp stands of pure gold, five on each side in front of the inner room. He even made the cups, snuffers and door hinges of gold. 2 Chronicles adds ten tables and a hundred gold basins, and tells of the courtyards, with their doors covered in bronze.

So all King Solomon’s work on the Lord’s house was finished. Then he brought in the silver, the gold and the utensils his father David had dedicated and put them in the treasuries of the Lord’s house.

The priests set the ark in its place in the Most Holy Place, under the cherubim’s wings, which spread over the ark and its carrying poles. The poles were so long that their ends showed in the holy place but could not be seen outside, and they are there to this day. The only things in the ark were the two stone tablets Moses had put there at Horeb, when the Lord made his covenant with Israel as they came out of Egypt.

Then the priests came out of the holy place. 2 Chronicles tells more. Every priest there had made himself holy. The Levites who were singers stood at the east end of the altar, dressed in fine linen, with cymbals, harps and stringed instruments. They were Asaph, Heman and Jeduthun and their families. With them were a hundred and twenty priests blowing trumpets. The singers and trumpeters made one sound together as they praised the Lord: “He is good; his loving kindness endures forever!”

Then a cloud filled the Lord’s house. The priests could not stand there to do their work because of the cloud. The Lord’s glory filled his house.

Then Solomon said, “The Lord has said he would live in thick darkness. Now I have built you a home, a place to live in forever.”

The king turned and blessed the whole assembly of Israel as they stood. “Praise the Lord, the God of Israel,” he said. “He has done with his hand what he promised my father David with his mouth. Ever since he brought his people out of Egypt, he had not chosen any city where a house for his name would be built. But he chose David to rule them. My father set his heart on building that house, and the Lord told him, ‘You did well to set your heart on it, but you will not build it. Your own son will.’ Now the Lord has kept his word. I have taken my father’s place on Israel’s throne, as the Lord promised. I have built the house, and made a place in it for the ark. The ark holds the covenant the Lord made with our ancestors when he led them out of Egypt.” (2 Chronicles adds the Lord’s words, “But now I have chosen Jerusalem.”)

“Lord, God of Israel,” he prayed, “there is no God like you in heaven above or on earth beneath. You keep your covenant and show loving kindness to your servants who follow you with all their heart. You have kept your word to my father David. Today you have done with your hand what you spoke with your mouth. Now keep your promise to him. You said he would never be without a man from his family to sit on the throne of Israel before you, if only his children were careful how they lived and followed you as he did. God of Israel, let your word come true.

“But will God really live on the earth? Heaven and the heaven of heavens can’t contain you. How much less this house that I have built! Yet hear my cry and my prayer today, Lord my God. Keep your eyes open toward this house night and day, the place you spoke of when you said, ‘My name will be there.’ Listen when I and your people Israel pray toward this place. Hear in heaven, where you live, and when you hear, forgive.”

Then he named the times people would pray toward this house, and each time he asked God to hear in heaven. If someone wronged his neighbor and had to swear an oath at the altar, Solomon asked God to judge, punishing the guilty and clearing the innocent. Israel might lose a battle, or the rain might stop, because they had sinned. If they turned back to God, honored his name and prayed toward this house, Solomon asked God to forgive them. After a defeat, he asked God to bring them back to their land; after a drought, to teach them the good way to live and send rain. There might be famine or plague, blight or locusts, an enemy surrounding their cities, or sickness. Whenever anyone knew the trouble of his own heart and spread out his hands toward this house, Solomon asked God to forgive, and to treat each one as his ways deserved, “because you, and you alone, know every human heart.” Then they would fear God all their lives in the land.

He prayed for foreigners too. “A foreigner may hear of your great name, of your mighty hand and outstretched arm, and come from a faraway land. When he prays toward this house, hear in heaven and do whatever he asks. Then every nation on earth will know your name and fear you, as Israel does. They will know that your name is on this house I have built.”

When God’s people went out to battle wherever he sent them, and prayed toward this city and this house, Solomon asked God to hear them and stand up for them.

Israel might sin against God, “because there is no one who doesn’t sin,” and in his anger God might hand them over to enemies who carried them off to a land far away or near. Solomon prayed for that time too: “There they may come to their senses, turn back and plead with you, saying, ‘We have sinned and done wrong; we have acted wickedly.’ If they return to you with their whole heart and soul and pray toward their land, this city and this house, then hear them in heaven and stand up for them. Forgive your people, and let their captors take pity on them. They are your people and your own, whom you brought out of Egypt, out of the iron furnace.

“Keep your eyes open to my pleas and to your people’s, and listen whenever they call. You set them apart from all the peoples of the earth as your own, as you said through your servant Moses when you led our ancestors out of Egypt, Lord God.”

In 2 Chronicles the prayer ends another way. Solomon asks God to keep his eyes and ears open to the prayers made here, then says, “Now rise up, Lord God, and enter your resting place, you and the ark of your strength. Let your priests be clothed with salvation and your faithful people rejoice in goodness. Lord God, don’t turn your anointed one away. Remember your loving kindness to David your servant.”

“The Lord our God was with our ancestors; may he be with us too, and never leave us or abandon us. May he turn our hearts to him, so that we follow all his ways and keep his commands. May these words of my prayer stay near the Lord our God day and night, so that he will stand up for me and his people as each day needs. Then all the peoples of the earth will know that the Lord himself is God; there is no one else. Be true to the Lord our God with your whole heart, living by his laws and keeping his commands, as you do today.”

2 Chronicles says that when Solomon had finished praying, fire came down from heaven and burned up the burnt offering and the sacrifices. The Lord’s glory filled the house, so that the priests could not go in. When all Israel saw the fire come down and the Lord’s glory on the house, they bowed with their faces to the ground on the pavement, worshiped, and gave thanks to the Lord: “He is good; his loving kindness endures forever!”

Then the king and all Israel offered sacrifices in the Lord’s presence. Solomon offered 22,000 cattle and 120,000 sheep as peace offerings. So the king and the people dedicated the Lord’s house. That day the king also made the middle of the courtyard holy and offered the burnt offerings, meal offerings and fat of the peace offerings there, because the bronze altar was too small for them all. (2 Chronicles adds that the Levites played the instruments David had made for giving thanks, and the priests blew trumpets.)

So Solomon celebrated the feast in the Lord’s presence with all Israel, a vast gathering of people from the entrance of Hamath all the way to the Brook of Egypt. It lasted seven days and seven more, fourteen days in all. On the eighth day he sent the people away, and they blessed the king and went home, happy and glad at heart for all the good the Lord had shown David his servant and Israel his people. (In 2 Chronicles they celebrate the altar’s dedication for seven days and the feast for seven, hold a solemn gathering on the eighth day, and go home on the twenty-third day of the seventh month.)

So Solomon finished the Lord’s house and his own palace, and he succeeded in everything he had set his heart on making in both.

“If I shut the sky so that there is no rain, or if I command locusts to devour the land, or if I send a deadly sickness among my people, if my people who are called by my name will humble themselves, pray, seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.

“Now my eyes will be open and my ears will listen to the prayers made in this place. I have chosen this house and made it holy, so that my name may be there forever, and my eyes and my heart will be there always.

“As for you, if you follow me as David your father did, doing all I have commanded you and keeping my laws and rules, then I will make your royal throne secure, as I promised David your father: ‘You will never be without a man to rule Israel.’

“But if you turn away and abandon the laws and commands I have set before you, and go and serve other gods and worship them, then I will pull the people up by the roots from my land, which I gave them. As for this house I made holy for my name, I will throw it out of my sight and make it something all peoples mock. This house is very high. Everyone who passes it will be shocked and ask, ‘Why has the Lord done this to this land and to this house?’ And people will answer, ‘Because they abandoned the Lord, their ancestors’ God, who brought them out of the land of Egypt, and took up other gods, worshiping and serving them. So he has brought all this harm on them.’”