Solomon’s Temple

Construction of the first Temple began in the fourth year of Solomon’s reign — about 966 BC by the chronology of 1 Kings 6:1 — on the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite, which David had bought for the altar (2 Sam 24, 1 Chr 21). The site is Mount Moriah, where Abraham had been ready to sacrifice Isaac (Gen 22; 2 Chr 3:1). Solomon employed thirty thousand Israelite labourers in shifts and over a hundred and fifty thousand foreign workmen; Hiram of Tyre supplied the great cedars of Lebanon and a skilled bronzeworker. The Temple itself was modest — sixty cubits long, twenty wide, thirty high (about thirty by ten by fifteen metres) — but its fittings were sumptuous: gold-overlaid cherubim ten cubits high in the Most Holy Place, two great bronze pillars Jachin and Boaz at the porch, the bronze sea on twelve oxen, the lavers, the altar of incense, the lampstands, the table of the bread of the Presence. After seven years (c. 959 BC) the work was finished, and at the Feast of Tabernacles the ark was brought in and "the cloud filled the house of the LORD, so that the priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud" (1 Kgs 8:11). The Temple stood for 380 years until Nebuchadnezzar burned it in 586 BC.