1And his own house Solomon was building for thirteen years, and he finished his house. 2And he built the Lebanon Forest House, a hundred cubits in length and fifty cubits in width and thirty cubits in height with four rows of cedar columns and cedar beams on the columns. 3And it was paneled in cedarwood from above on the supports, which were on the columns, forty-five, fifteen in each row. 4And there were windows in three rows, three tiers face-to-face. 5And all the entrances and the doorposts were square-windowed, three tiers face-to-face. 6And the Court of Columns he made fifty cubits in length and thirty cubits in width, and the court was in front of the columns, and the columns with a beam over them. 7And the Court of the Throne, where he meted out justice, the Court of Justice, did he make, and it was paneled in cedarwood from floor to roof-beams. 8And in his house in which he would dwell, there was another court besides the outer court made in the same fashion, and he made a house for Pharaoh’s daughter whom Solomon had married, like this court. 9All these were of costly stones, hewn in measure, smoothed with an adze inside and out, and from the foundation up to the coping and on the outside up to the great court, 10and founded with costly stones, great stones, stones of ten cubits and stones of eight cubits. 11And above were costly stones hewn in measure, and cedarwood. 12And the great court all around had three rows of hewn stone and a row of cedar planks, as for the inner court of the house of the LORD and for the outer court of the house.
13And King Solomon sent and fetched Hiram from Tyre. 14He was the son of a widow-woman from the tribe of Naphtali, and his father was a Tyrean man who was a coppersmith, and he was filled with wisdom and discerning and knowledge to do every task in bronze. And he came to King Solomon and did all his task. 15And he fashioned the two pillars of bronze, eighteen cubits the height of each column, and a twelve-cubit line went round the second pillar. 16And he made two capitals to put on the tops of the pillars, cast in bronze, five cubits the height of the one capital and five cubits the height of the other capital. 17Nets of meshwork, chainwork wreaths for the capitals that were on the top of the pillars, seven for the one capital and seven for the other. 18And he made the pillars, with two rows around over the one net to cover the capitals that were on top of the pomegranates, and so he did for the other capital. 19And the capitals that were on top of the pillars in the outer court were a lily design, four cubits high. 20And the capitals on the two pillars above as well, opposite the curve that was over against the net, and the pomegranates were in two hundred rows around on the second capital. 21And he set up the pillars for the great hall and set up the right pillar and called its name Jachin and set up the left pillar and called its name Boaz. 22And on the top of the pillars was a lily design. And the task of the pillars was finished. 23And he made the cast-metal sea ten cubits from edge to edge, circular all around, and five cubits in height, and a line of thirty cubits going all around. 24And birds beneath its edge going all around it, ten cubits, encompassing the sea all around, two rows cast in its casting. 25It stood on twelve oxen, three facing north and three facing west and three facing south and three facing east. And the sea was on top of them, and their hind parts were inward. 26And its thickness was a hand-span, and its rim like the design of a cup’s rim, blossom and lily, two thousand bats did it hold. 27And he made ten stands of bronze, four cubits in length each stand and four cubits in width and three cubits in height. 28And this was the design of the stands: they had frames, and there were frames between the rungs. 29And on the frames between the rungs were lions, oxen, and cherubim on the bevels, so it was above and below the lions and the oxen, hammered metal spirals. 30And each stand had four bronze wheels and bronze axletrees. And its four legs had brackets beneath the laver. The brackets were cast in spirals opposite each. 31And its spout was within the capital a cubit above it, and its spout was round in the design of a stand, a cubit and a half. And on its spout, too, there was woven-work. And their frames were square, not round. 32And the four wheels were beneath the frames, and the axletrees of the wheels inserted in the stand. And the height of each wheel was a cubit and a half. 33And the design of the wheels was like the design of a chariot’s wheels. Their axletrees and rims and their spokes and their hubs were all of cast metal. 34And the four brackets at the four corners of each stand, of a piece with the stand were its brackets. 35And on top of the stand was a circular form all around, and on top of the stand its brackets and its frames were of a piece with it. 36And he carved on the panels of its brackets and on its frames cherubim, lions, and palms, each laid bare, and a spiral all around. 37Thus did he make the ten stands, each cast the same, a single measure and a single shape they all had. 38And he made ten lavers of bronze, each laver would hold forty bats, four cubits each laver on each stand, for the ten stands. 39And he placed the stands, five on the right side of the house and five on the left side of the house. And the sea he placed on the right side of the house to the east, facing south. 40And Hiram made the lavers and the shovels and the basins. And Hiram completed doing the task that he had done for King Solomon in the house of the LORD: 41two pillars and two globes of the capitals that were on top of the pillars and two nets to cover the two globes of the capitals that were on top of the pillars, 42and four hundred pomegranates for the nets, two rows of pomegranates for every net to cover the globes of the capitals that were on the pillars, 43and the ten stands and the ten lavers on the stands, 44and the one sea and the twelve oxen beneath the sea. 45And the bowls and the shovels and the basins and those vessels that Hiram made for King Solomon in the house of the LORD, burnished bronze. 46In the plain of the Jordan did the king cast them, in the thick of the ground, between Succoth and Zarethan. 47And Solomon left all the vessels unweighed on account of their very great abundance; the measure of the bronze was not taken. 48And Solomon made all the vessels that were in the house of the LORD, the gold altar and the gold table on which was the bread of display, 49and the pure gold lampstands, five on the right and five on the left in front of the sanctuary, and the gold blossoms and lamps and tongs, 50and the pure gold bowls and the snuffers and the basins and the ladles and fire-pans, and the gold sockets for the doors of the inner house, for the Holy of Holies, for the doors of the great hall of the house. 51And the task that King Solomon had done was finished in the house of the LORD, and Solomon brought the dedicated things of David his father, the silver and the gold, and he placed the vessels in the treasury of the house of the LORD.
CHAPTER 7 NOTES
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1. his own house. Solomon’s two main building projects were the Temple and the palace. No date is given for the inception of the palace, but the notation in 9:7 that the building of the two structures together took twenty years would indicate that the palace was begun after the Temple was completed. The palace, the bigger of the two structures, took almost twice as long to build.
2. the Lebanon Forest House. This structure is evidently so called because of the rows of Lebanon cedar it contained. Some think it may have served as an armory.
4. three tiers face-to-face. This is the first of many places in this chapter where the architectural indications are quite obscure in the Hebrew, whether because of scribal scrambling or because we have lost the precise applications of this technical vocabulary. In much of what follows, then, any translation, including this one, is no more than educated guesswork.
6. beam. The Hebrew ʿav usually means “cloud,” leading some to speculate that here it might refer to some sort of canopy or cover.
7. from floor to roof-beams. The Masoretic Text reads “from floor to floor,” but the Septuagint, more plausibly, has “from floor to roof-beams.”
8. he made a house for Pharaoh’s daughter. Although the ground plan of the palace is hard to reconstruct, the fact that a separate residence was built for one of Solomon’s wives reflects the grandeur of the overall construction.
13. And King Solomon sent and fetched Hiram from Tyre. The legendary and schematic character of the narrative at this point is manifest: it is highly unlikely that the Phoenician king himself would come to Jerusalem to perform or even supervise the building work. What this refers to is that Hiram may have sent master artisans from Tyre to participate in the project.
14. He was the son of a widow-woman from the tribe of Naphtali. It is even more unlikely that a Phoenician king would have had an Israelite mother, and a woman previously married, besides. The narrative here may be reaching to establish a genetic connection between Israel and the foreign king who helped to build both the Temple and the palace.
his father was a Tyrean man who was a coppersmith. The notion of an artisan king (both Hiram’s father and Hiram are represented as that) sounds odd, but the idea is that the king is imagined to embody the distinctive skills and expertise of his people.
20. the curve. The Hebrew is literally “belly,” and its architectural meaning is uncertain.
21. Jachin . . . Boaz. The naming of pillars and altars was not uncommon in the ancient Near East. These two names mean “he will firmly found” (yakhin) and “strength in him” (the latter is an attested personal name). Both names appear to refer to the stability of the royal dynasty.
23. the cast-metal sea. This is essentially a metal pool, to be used by the priests to bathe hands and feet before they perform their ritual duties. The Hebrew uses the rather grand term “sea” (yam) perhaps to suggest a cosmic correspondence between the structure of the Temple and of creation at large.
a line. The translation reads, with many Hebrew manuscripts, qaw for the incomprehensible Masoretic qawoh.
26. two thousand bats. The bat is a relatively large unit of liquid measure, but the precise quantity is uncertain.
28. rungs. The meaning of the Hebrew shelabim is conjectural, but a laddered structure may be involved.
30. four bronze wheels. Wheeled ritual vessels have been uncovered across the Near East.
in spirals opposite each. The Hebrew here is particularly obscure.
31. woven-work. As elsewhere, the term refers to carved interlaced figures.
36. each laid bare. The Hebrew kemaʿar ʾish is not intelligible. The translation is based on a tentative guess that the first of these words is a verbal noun derived from the root ʿ-r-h, “lay bare.”
40. And Hiram completed doing the task that he had done. This is an explicit echoing of Genesis 2:2, suggesting that the work of building the Temple is analogous to the work of building the world.
41. two pillars and two globes. What begins here is a summarizing catalogue of all the sacred furniture fashioned for the Temple.
45. those. The translation reads, with many Hebrew manuscripts, haʾeleh for the incomprehensible Masoretic haʾehel (a simple reversal of consonants, which is a common scribal error).
46. in the thick of the ground. The casting was done in earthen molds.
47. unweighed. This term is merely implied in the Hebrew.
50. snuffers. Others, including many Jewish commentators from Late Antiquity on, construe this to mean “musical instruments.”
51. And the task that King Solomon had done was finished. Through both this long chapter and the preceding one, it should be observed that Solomon virtually disappears as an individualized character: the king here functions as an impersonal royal “he” who directs these elaborate building projects.