The Hands That Furnish the House

The “But” sets these thirteen years directly against the seven of 6:38, with no chapter break in the Hebrew. Added together they make the twenty years that 9:10 later uses to date everything that follows, so the two building projects are counted as one era of the reign.

A hundred cubits by fifty is roughly 50 by 25 metres, a larger footprint than the temple’s sixty by twenty. The name comes from rows of cedar pillars standing like a grove. The hall later stores Solomon’s golden shields (10:17), and Isaiah 22:8 calls it an armoury.

The Hebrew does not say “pillars” here but tsela‘ot, the same word used for the side chambers of the temple in 6:5. Forty five in rows of fifteen sits awkwardly with the four rows of verse 2, and the Greek reads three rows, so the forty five may be beams or chambers rather than posts.

“Light was against light” means window facing window across the hall, three tiers high on each side. In a building thick with cedar posts, opposed openings would let daylight and air pass straight through a room that could otherwise have been dim.

“Square” describes the frames, rectangular rather than arched, and it is the frames rather than the doors that the Hebrew stresses. The last phrase repeats verse 4 word for word, the kind of builder’s recapitulation that marks this section as drawn from a technical description.

The porch of pillars, fifty cubits by thirty, is a colonnade, probably a waiting hall before the judgment porch. The “thick beam” translates ‘ab, a rare architectural word that may mean a canopy, a cornice or a flight of steps; no one is sure.

Chapter 3 proved Solomon’s wisdom in a case between two harlots; here that office gets its own building. The Hebrew says cedar “from floor to floor”, which some ancient versions read as floor to ceiling. The throne that stood here is described in 10:18–20.

Pharaoh’s daughter was last seen lodged in the city of David until the building work was done (3:1). A separate house like the porch gives her Egyptian rank its due, and 9:24 records the day she moves in.

The palace stones were cut to size with saws on every face, inside and out. The temple’s stones, by contrast, were dressed at the quarry so that no iron tool was heard on site (6:7). The coping is the top course of the wall, from a word meaning handbreadths.

Stones of ten and eight cubits are roughly 4.5 and 3.6 metres long, the kind of blocks that need levers, rollers and many hands. The same “great stones, costly stones” were laid for the temple’s foundation in 5:17, so the two projects share quarries as well as craftsmen.

Above the foundation the walls alternate squared stone and cedar. The verse is short because the method is about to be spelled out in the next line.

Three courses of dressed stone and then a course of cedar beams was a known ancient technique, found at sites such as Ugarit, which let a wall flex rather than crack in an earthquake. The same pattern was used for the temple’s inner court in 6:36, and Ezra 6:4 prescribes it again for the second temple.

This is not the king of 5:1 but a second Hiram, whom Chronicles calls Huram. The Hebrew order is not strictly chronological: his bronze work belongs to the temple’s construction, which the book finished describing in chapter 6, and now circles back to supply.

In 1611 “cunning” meant skill or knowledge, with no hint of slyness. Wisdom, understanding and knowledge is the same triad given to Bezalel for the tabernacle in Exodus 31:3. Second Chronicles 2:14 calls his mother a woman of Dan, a difference commentators reconcile in several ways.

Eighteen cubits is about eight metres, and twelve round gives a diameter near 1.7 metres. Jeremiah 52:21 adds that the pillars were hollow, the metal four fingers thick, which makes them a casting feat rather than solid lumps of bronze.

“Chapiter” is the 1611 word for the capital of a column, from Old French. Each is five cubits, which Jeremiah 52:22 confirms, though 2 Kings 25:17 gives three, perhaps measuring only the ornamented band.

Nets of checker work are lattices; wreaths of chain work are festoons of chain hanging over them. Seven for each capital is the number given, and the Hebrew is so compressed here that translators have long disagreed on how the pieces were arranged.

The Hebrew seems to have exchanged two words, and many translators read “he made the pomegranates” rather than “the pillars”. Pomegranates also hung on the hem of the high priest’s robe (Exodus 28:33), so the fruit already belonged to Israel’s sacred ornament.

Lily work, probably the lotus shape common on Egyptian and Phoenician capitals, crowned the top four cubits. “In the porch” may mean in the style of the porch, or simply locate the pillars; the phrase is unclear in Hebrew.

The “belly” is the rounded, swelling part of the capital, which verse 41 calls a bowl. Two hundred pomegranates per capital, in two rows, gives the total of four hundred that the inventory will count.

Jachin probably means “he will establish” and Boaz “in him is strength”, and the two may be the opening words of longer inscriptions or prayers. With the temple facing east, the right pillar stands on the south. Boaz was also the name of David’s great-grandfather.

The verb for “finished”, tamam, is the one used of the temple itself in 6:22. A craftsman’s work receives the same completion formula as the king’s house.

“Molten” means cast. A bronze bowl ten cubits across and five deep, about 4.5 by 2.3 metres, poured as one piece, was among the largest castings of the ancient world, which is why the next verse insists the ornament was cast at the same time.

A knop in 1611 was a knob or boss. The Hebrew peqa‘im means gourds, the same shape carved in the cedar of 6:18. “When it was cast” means the two rows came out of the one pour, not fixed on afterward.

Twelve oxen suggest the twelve tribes, though the book does not say so. The arrangement did not last: King Ahaz lifted the sea off the oxen and set it on a stone pavement (2 Kings 16:17), and Babylon later carried the oxen away.

A handbreadth is about 7.5 centimetres of bronze wall. A bath was a liquid measure of very roughly twenty two litres, so the sea held something like forty thousand litres. Second Chronicles 4:5 gives three thousand baths, a figure scholars explain as either capacity when brimful or a copyist’s difference.

The word for “bases” is mekonah, a stand. Four cubits square and three high, about 1.8 metres by 1.35, these are large. Miniature bronze wheeled stands of just this type have been found on Cyprus from a few centuries earlier, which helps reconstruct them.

The “borders” are panels and the “ledges” are the crossbars framing them, so each side of the stand was a frame filled with plates. Both Hebrew words are rare technical terms, which is why the description is hard to picture.

Lions and oxen join the cherubim here, animals that will reappear on Solomon’s throne (10:19–20). The “additions made of thin work” are hanging wreaths or garlands, loyot, worked below the figures.

The “undersetters” are literally “shoulders”, braces rising from each corner to carry the basin. “Plates of brass” are probably the bronze axles. The verse moves from decoration to the parts that bear the load.

Few verses in the chapter are harder. The “mouth” seems to be the opening at the top that held the laver, round within, a cubit and a half across, while the engraved panels around it were square. Translations differ widely in reconstructing it.

The wheels sit under the panels rather than beside them, so the stand rolls on its own frame. A cubit and a half is about sixty eight centimetres, a large wheel for a portable object.

Naves are hubs and felloes are the curved rim segments, both 1611 wheelwright’s words. Chariot wheels were wood; these were “all molten”, cast bronze, which makes them far heavier than the vehicle they are compared with.

“Of the very base itself” means the corner braces were cast in one with the stand rather than bolted on, part of why all ten could be made from one mould.

A round collar half a cubit high crowned the square stand, the seat into which the laver fitted. The square frame and round collar echo the square gravings and round mouth of verse 31.

“According to the proportion of every one” is literally “according to the bare space of each”: the engraver filled whatever room each panel offered. Palm trees now join the figures, the same motif carved on the temple’s walls and doors in 6:29–35.

“One measure and one size” is the phrase used of the two cherubim in the holy of holies (6:25). The rare word qetseb, shape or cut, appears only in these two places in the book.

Forty baths is on the order of nine hundred litres, so a full laver on its stand weighed well over a tonne. The four cubits is probably the laver’s diameter, matching the stand’s width, which suggests the wheels moved them when empty.

Facing east from the temple, the right hand is the south. The sea stood at the southeast corner of the building, between the house and the altar, while the stands lined both flanks, five and five.

Shovels cleared ashes from the altar; the “basons” are mizraqot, from a verb meaning to toss, bowls for throwing blood against the altar. Some Hebrew manuscripts and verse 45 read “pots” for the first item.

The inventory starts again from the top, and the pillars’ capitals are now called “bowls”, gullot, the rounded shape verse 20 called the belly.

The arithmetic checks: two networks, two rows each, a hundred to a row, four hundred in all. Jeremiah 52:23 adds that ninety six of each hundred faced outward.

Thirteen verses of engineering in 27–39 shrink to one line of inventory. The list assumes the reader now knows what a base and a laver are.

“One sea” stands against the ten lavers of the previous line. A single great basin served the priests; the ten smaller vessels served the offerings.

“Brass” in the King James means bronze, an alloy of copper and tin; true brass, with zinc, was rare in the period. “Bright” translates a word for polished or burnished, so the pieces shone like gold when new.

The Hebrew says “in the thickness of the ground”, meaning the dense clay that makes good casting moulds. Succoth lay east of the Jordan near the Jabbok; Zarthan is named in Joshua 3:16 near the place where the river stood still.

Bronze went unweighed because there was too much of it. The same phrase comes back at the fall of Jerusalem, when the Babylonians broke these vessels and carried off bronze whose weight was again beyond reckoning (2 Kings 25:16).

The subject shifts from Hiram to Solomon as the metal changes from bronze to gold. The altar of gold is the incense altar of 6:20–22. Shewbread is literally “bread of the face” or “of the presence”, set out before the LORD.

The tabernacle had a single lampstand; the temple has ten, five on each side of the oracle. Flowers, lamps and tongs are the working parts, the tongs for handling wicks and coals.

Snuffers were wick trimmers, from a root meaning to prune. The “spoons” were small pans for incense. Hinges of gold translates pot, which may mean the sockets in which the doors turned on pivots, so the gold reaches the smallest moving parts.

“Ended” translates shalam, which shares its root with Solomon’s own name, Shelomoh. David’s dedicated silver and gold were the spoil of his wars (2 Samuel 8:11), now stored in the house he was not allowed to build.