2 Chronicles 3 in plain modern English. New Ground English Translation.
Time Period
~966 BC, construction beginning in Solomon's fourth year
Location
Mount Moriah in Jerusalem, the rocky rise north of the old city of David, on the threshing floor David had bought from Ornan the Jebusite
Audience
Returned exiles in Judah worshipping at a far plainer second temple built on the same site
Situation
The building of the temple begins, and the chapter gives its dimensions, its gold overlay, the carved cherubim in the inner room, the woven curtain, and the two bronze pillars named Jachin and Boaz set at the entrance.
Key Background
Naming the site Mount Moriah ties the temple to Abraham's near-sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis, a connection Kings never makes, and it links the building to a place already marked as holy long before David. The layout, a porch, a main hall, and a smaller innermost room, follows a temple plan found across Syria and Canaan in this era, so the shape would have looked normal to any neighbouring visitor while the empty inner room, holding no statue, would not. Free-standing pillars flanking a temple entrance were also a regional convention, and the names Jachin and Boaz, roughly he establishes and in strength, functioned as a standing statement about the God worshipped inside.
Then Solomon began building the house of Yahweh in Jerusalem on where Yahweh had appeared to his father David, at the place David had prepared on the of Ornan the
He began building on the second day of the second month, in the fourth year of his reign.
These are the foundations Solomon laid for building the house of God: sixty long by the old standard of measurement, and twenty wide.
The entrance hall at the front of the building was twenty cubits long, matching the width of the house, and its height was a hundred and twenty cubits. He overlaid the inside with pure gold.
He paneled the main hall with cypress wood, overlaid it with fine gold, and decorated it with palm trees and chains.
He adorned the house with precious stones for beauty. The gold was gold from
He overlaid the house — the beams, the thresholds, its walls, and its doors — with gold, and he carved on the walls.
He built the for Its length matched the width of the house, twenty cubits, and its width was twenty cubits as well. He overlaid it with six hundred of fine gold.
The weight of the gold nails came to fifty He also overlaid the upper rooms with gold.
In the Room Reserved for God he made two sculpted winged guardians and overlaid them with gold.
The combined wingspan of the winged guardians was twenty cubits. One wing of the first guardian was five cubits long and touched one wall of the room, and its other wing was five cubits long and touched the wing of the second guardian.
Similarly, one wing of the second guardian was five cubits long and touched the other wall of the room, and its other wing was five cubits long and reached the wing of the first guardian.
The wings of these winged guardians spread out twenty cubits. They stood on their feet, facing the main hall.
He made the of blue, purple, and crimson yarn and fine linen, and he worked winged guardians into it.
In front of the house he made two pillars thirty-five cubits high, with a capital on top of each one that was five cubits tall.
He made chains like necklaces and put them on top of the pillars, and he made a hundred and attached them to the chains.
He set up the pillars in front of the temple, one on the right and one on the left. He named the one on the right and the one on the left