2 Chronicles 5 in plain modern English. New Ground English Translation.
Time Period
~959 BC, at the autumn festival in Solomon's eleventh year
Location
Jerusalem, moving the ark uphill from the city of David to the new temple on the mount above it
Audience
Returned exiles whose own temple, by their elders' admission, was a modest shadow of this one
Situation
Solomon assembles the elders and tribal leaders, and the priests carry the ark of the covenant into the innermost room of the finished temple. As the singers and one hundred and twenty trumpeters praise God together, a cloud fills the house so the priests cannot continue serving.
Key Background
The ark was a gold-covered wooden chest holding the stone tablets of the covenant, understood as the place where God's presence met Israel, and it had been housed in a tent for centuries. The cloud that fills the building deliberately recalls the cloud that covered the wilderness tent in Exodus, telling the reader that the same presence has moved into the permanent house. Chronicles gives far more attention to the musicians than Kings does, because the writer was likely a Levite connected to the temple choirs and wanted his own community's role in worship on the record.
When all the work Solomon had done for the temple of Yahweh was completed, Solomon brought in the things his father David had to the silver, the gold, and all the equipment, and put them in the treasuries of God's temple.
Then Solomon assembled the elders of Israel and all the heads of the tribes — the leaders of the ancestral families of the Israelites — in Jerusalem, to bring up the of the of Yahweh from the of which is Zion.
All the men of Israel gathered before the king during the in the
When all the elders of Israel arrived, the carried the ark.
They brought up the ark, the of and all the for that was in the The Levitical priests carried them up.
King Solomon and the entire assembly of Israel who had gathered with him were in front of the ark, so many sheep and cattle that they could not be counted or recorded.
The priests brought the ark of the covenant of Yahweh to its place in the inner of the temple, the for beneath the wings of the
The winged guardians spread their wings over the place where the ark rested, covering the ark and its carrying poles from above.
The poles were so long that their ends stuck out from the ark in front of the though they could not be seen from outside. They are still there today.
There was nothing in the ark except the that Moses had placed in it at where Yahweh made a with the Israelites when they came out of Egypt.
When the priests came out of the (all the priests who were there had for regardless of their assigned divisions),
all the Levite musicians — and their sons and relatives — stood on the east side of the altar, dressed in playing cymbals, harps, and lyres, along with a hundred and twenty priests sounding trumpets.
The trumpeters and singers joined together as to praise and thank Yahweh. Accompanied by trumpets, cymbals, and other instruments, they lifted their voices and praised Yahweh: "He is good; Then the temple — the temple of Yahweh — was filled with a
and the priests could not continue to stand and minister because of the cloud, for the of Yahweh the temple of God.