Solomon Builds the Temple

David had wished to build a house for the ark and was told that his son would build it (God’s Covenant with David). Kings gives David’s wars as the reason; Chronicles says that he had shed too much blood (1 Kings 5:3) (1 Chronicles 22:7–10). His son Solomon wrote to Hiram of Tyre, who had been David’s ally. Hiram sent cedar and cypress from Lebanon by sea, and Solomon paid him each year in wheat and oil. Solomon also raised a levy of thirty thousand Israelites to work in Lebanon by turns (1 Kings 5:1–14).

Building began in the second month of Solomon’s fourth year (1 Kings 6:1). Chronicles places the temple on Mount Moriah, on the threshing floor of Ornan the Jebusite, which David had bought for an altar (2 Chronicles 3:1) (2 Samuel 24:18–25). The house was sixty cubits long, twenty wide and thirty high. Its stone was dressed at the quarry, it was lined with cedar and overlaid with gold, and at the back was an inner sanctuary of twenty cubits each way, where two cherubim of olive wood stood with their wings touching (1 Kings 6:2–7, 15–28). A bronze-worker from Tyre, also named Hiram, cast the two pillars at the porch (1 Kings 7:13–22). The work was finished in the eighth month of the eleventh year, after seven years (1 Kings 6:37–38).

At the feast of the seventh month the priests carried the ark from the city of David into the inner sanctuary. Kings notes that it held only the two stone tablets of Moses. A cloud filled the house, so that the priests could not stand to minister (1 Kings 8:1–11). Solomon prayed before the altar: “heaven and the heaven of heavens can’t contain you; how much less this house that I have built!” He asked that prayers made toward this place be heard, those of Israel and those of the foreigner from a far country (1 Kings 8:22–30, 41–43). Chronicles adds that fire came down from heaven on the sacrifices (2 Chronicles 7:1–3). Afterwards, Kings says, the Lord appeared to Solomon with a promise and a warning: if Israel turned to other gods, this house would be cast off (1 Kings 9:1–9).

Josephus, near the end of the first century AD, says that the public records of Tyre mentioned the building of the temple. He quotes two earlier authors, Dius and Menander of Ephesus, on the dealings of King Hirom with Solomon, and dates the temple to Hirom’s twelfth year (Josephus, Against Apion 1.106–127). The works of both writers are lost.

The temple stood for nearly four centuries, until the Babylonians burned it (2 Kings 25:8–9) (The Fall of Jerusalem and the Destruction of the Temple). In Acts, Stephen recalls that Solomon built the house and adds that “the Most High doesn’t dwell in temples made with hands” (Acts 7:47–48). John says that Jesus, speaking of a temple destroyed and raised in three days, “spoke of the temple of his body” (John 2:19–21).