1And it happened in the four hundred and eightieth year after the Israelites came out of Egypt, in King Solomon’s fourth year in the month of Ziv, which is the second month, that he set out to build a house to the LORD. 2And the house that King Solomon built was sixty cubits in length and twenty in width and thirty cubits in height. 3And the outer court that was in front of the great hall of the house was twenty cubits in length along the width of the house, ten cubits in width along the house. 4And he made inset and latticed windows for the house. 5And he built on the wall of the house a balcony all around the walls of the house in the great hall and in the sanctuary, and he made supports all around. 6And the lowest balcony was five cubits in width and the middle one six cubits in width and the third one seven cubits in width, for he set recesses in the house all around on the outside so as to fasten nothing to the walls of the house. 7And the house when it was built, of whole stones brought from the quarry it was built, and no hammers nor axes nor any iron tools were heard in the house when it was built. 8The entrance at the middle support was on the right side of the house, and on spiral stairs they would go up to the middle chamber and from the middle to the third. 9And he built the house and finished it, and he paneled the house with cedar beams and boards. 10And he built the balcony over all the house, five cubits in height, and it held the house fast in cedarwood. 11And the word of the LORD came to Solomon, saying: 12“This house that you build—if you walk by My statutes and do My laws and keep all My commands to walk by them, I shall fulfill My word with you that I spoke to David your father, 13and I shall dwell in the midst of the Israelites, and I shall not forsake My people Israel.” 14And Solomon built the house and finished it. 15And he built the walls of the house from within with cedar supports from the floor of the house to the ceiling, overlaid it with wood within, and he overlaid the floor of the house with cypress supports. 16And he built the twenty cubits from the corners of the house with cedar supports from the floor to the walls, and he built it from within the sanctuary, the Holy of Holies. 17And the house was forty cubits, which was the great hall. 18And cedar was the house inside, a weave of birds and blossoms. Everything was cedar, no stone was seen. 19And the sanctuary in the innermost part of the house he readied to place there the Ark of the Covenant of the LORD. 20And before the sanctuary twenty cubits in length and twenty cubits in width and twenty cubits in height he overlaid with pure gold, and he overlaid the altar with cedar. 21And Solomon overlaid the house from within with pure gold, and he fastened gold chains in front of the sanctuary and overlaid it with gold. 22And the house he overlaid with gold till the whole house was finished, and the whole altar which was in the inner sanctum he overlaid with gold. 23And in the sanctuary he made two cherubim of olivewood, 24one cherub with a five-cubit wing and the other wing five cubits, ten cubits from one edge of its wings to the other. 25And the second cherub was ten cubits, a single measure and shape for both cherubim. 26The height of the one cherub was ten cubits, and the same for the second cherub. 27And he placed the cherubim within the inner chamber. And the wings of the cherubim were spread, and the wing of the one touched the wall and that of the second cherub touched the other wall, and their inner wings touched wing to wing. 28And he overlaid the cherubim with gold. 29And all the walls of the house all round he wove in carvings of intertwined cherubim and palms and birds, within and without. 30And the floor of the house he overlaid with gold, within and without. 31And the entrance of the sanctuary he made of olivewood doors, five-sided capitals and doorposts, 32and two olivewood doors. And he wove on them a weave of cherubim and buds and overlaid them with gold, and he worked the gold down over the cherubim and the palms. 33And the same he did for the entrance of the great hall, four-sided olivewood doorposts. 34And the two doors were cypresswood, the two supports of the one door cylindrical and the two supports of the other door cylindrical. 35And he wove cherubim and palms and buds and overlaid them with gold directly over the incising. 36And he built the inner court in three rows of hewn stone and a row of cut cedars. 37In the fourth year did he lay the foundations of the LORD’s house, in the month of Ziv. 38And in the eleventh year, in the month of Bul, which is the eighth month, he finished the house in all its details and in all its designs, and he was seven years building it.
CHAPTER 6 NOTES
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1. the four hundred and eightieth year. This is a manifestly schematic figure, produced by multiplying two formulaic numbers, forty and twelve. In fact, the number of years from the Exodus to the building of the Temple would be not much more than half of 480.
in the month of Ziv. This name for the second month, which would roughly correspond to May, is borrowed from the Phoenician, and that may be why an explanatory gloss is added, “which is the second month.” The term for month is also not the standard term, ḥodesh, but rather yareaḥ (literally, “moon”). Ziv means “brilliance,” “bright light.”
2. sixty cubits. This would be less than 120 feet, perhaps as little as 100 feet, which makes Solomon’s temple a relatively intimate structure—the Chartres cathedral is three times as long, and the great mosque at Cordova, before its conversion into a church, still larger. These dimensions may be historically accurate.
4. he made inset and latticed windows for the house. The reader should be warned that the precise meaning of these and other architectural terms here is uncertain. Because of the perennial fascination with Solomon’s temple, many elaborate attempts to reconstruct its exact configuration have been made, in analytic descriptions, drawings, and scale models, but all of these remain highly conjectural. What is clear is that, like the sanctuary in Exodus, it had a tripartite structure: an outer court (’ulam), a great hall (heikhal), and an inner sanctuary (devir) in which the Ark of the Covenant was placed.
5. balcony . . . supports. The meaning of both these Hebrew terms, yatsiaʿ and tselaʿot, is much disputed.
7. of whole stones . . . it was built, and no hammers nor axes nor any iron tools were heard in the house. The stones were dressed at the site of the quarry and then set in place in Jerusalem. This procedure in part picks up the instructions for building the altar in Exodus 20:25: “you shall not build them of hewn stones, for your sword you would brandish over it and profane it.”
9. And he built the house and finished it. This report of completion marks the finishing of the stone structure. What follows is an account of the paneling, carving, and finishing of the structure.
12. if you walk by My statutes and do My laws. The language in God’s speech is preeminently Deuteronomistic.
14. And Solomon built the house and finished it. These words are what scholars call a “resumptive repetition” of verse 9. That is, when the continuity of a narrative is interrupted—here, by God’s address to Solomon—phrases or sentences from just before the break are repeated as the narrative resumes its forward momentum.
16. and he built it from within the sanctuary, the Holy of Holies. This is the first of several places in this chapter where the Hebrew syntax seems a little doubtful.
18. a weave. The “weave” of course is a carving of interlaced ornamental figures.
Everything was cedar, no stone was seen. The cedarwood paneling entirely covered the stone surfaces. The pervasive use of wooden elements made the stone structure thoroughly flammable, as the Babylonian army would demonstrate when it destroyed the temple in 586 B.C.E.
23. two cherubim. In a borrowing from Canaanite mythology, the cherubim were imagined, at least in poetry, as God’s mounts. (The word keruv means either “mount” or “hybrid.”) They were fierce-looking winged beasts, probably with leonine bodies and heads, perhaps resembling the Egyptian sphinx and other bas-relief figures that have been found across the Near East.
30. the floor of the house he overlaid with gold. From what can be made out from the preceding description, the gold would have been overlaid on the cedar paneling.
31. five-sided capitals and doorposts. The translation of the three Hebrew words here is conjectural, and the text looks suspect. It may well be that the ancient scribes were as confused as we moderns by the architectural details and thus scrambled words at some points.
33. four-sided. The Hebrew term is problematic in the same way that “five-sided” is in verse 31.
35. directly over the incising. This is still another architectural indication of uncertain meaning.
38. in the eleventh year. Thus the years of the building of the Temple are reported to conform to the sacred number seven, as the end of this verse confirms with a flourish.
in the month of Bul. This is still another Phoenician month name, accompanied by an explanatory gloss, as is Ziv in verse 1, and again the unusual term yareaḥ is used for “month.” As the eighth month, it would come in the late fall, and the name Bul may derive from a word that means “harvest.”