Study Desk

Solomon had forty thousand stalls of horses for his chariots, and twelve thousand horsemen.

Each of those deputies for a month in turn provided food for King Solomon and for everyone who came to King Solomon’s table. They neglected nothing.

Each man brought the barley and the straw for the chariot teams and the other horses to the required place according to his assignment.

King Hiram of Tyre sent his emissaries to Solomon when he heard that he had been anointed king in his father’s place, for Hiram had always been friends with David.

“You know my father David was not able to build a temple for the name of the Lord his God. This was because of the warfare all around him until the Lord put his enemies under his feet.

So I plan to build a temple for the name of the Lord my God, according to what the Lord promised my father David: ‘I will put your son on your throne in your place, and he will build the temple for my name.’

“Therefore, command that cedars from Lebanon be cut down for me. My servants will be with your servants, and I will pay your servants’ wages according to whatever you say, for you know that not a man among us knows how to cut timber like the Sidonians.”

and Solomon provided Hiram with one hundred thousand bushels of wheat as food for his household and one hundred ten thousand gallons of oil from crushed olives. Solomon did this for Hiram year after year.

So Solomon’s builders and Hiram’s builders, along with the Gebalites, quarried the stone and prepared the timber and stone for the temple’s construction.

Solomon began to build the temple for the Lord in the four hundred eightieth year after the Israelites came out of the land of Egypt, in the fourth year of his reign over Israel, in the month of Ziv, which is the second month.

The temple that King Solomon built for the Lord was ninety feet long, thirty feet wide, and forty-five feet high.

He also made windows with beveled frames for the temple.

The lowest chamber was 7½ feet wide, the middle was 9 feet wide, and the third was 10½ feet wide. He also provided offset ledges for the temple all around the outside so that nothing would be inserted into the temple walls.

The door for the lowest side chamber was on the right side of the temple. They went up a stairway to the middle chamber, and from the middle to the third.

“As for this temple you are building—if you walk in my statutes, observe my ordinances, and keep all my commands by walking in them, I will fulfill my promise to you, which I made to your father David.

For the entrance of the inner sanctuary, he made olive wood doors. The pillars of the doorposts were five-sided.

In the same way, he made four-sided olive wood doorposts for the sanctuary entrance.

Solomon’s own palace where he would live, in the other courtyard behind the hall, was of similar construction. And he made a house like this hall for Pharaoh’s daughter, his wife.

The capitals on top of the pillars had gratings of latticework, wreaths made of chainwork—seven for the first capital and seven for the second.

He made the pillars with two encircling rows of pomegranates on the one grating to cover the capital on top; he did the same for the second capital.