The Building of the First Temple Begins

The book of Kings dates the start of construction with unusual precision: "In the four hundred and eightieth year after the children of Israel came out of Egypt, in the fourth year of Solomon's reign, in the month of Ziv, he began to build the house of the Lord." The site had long been prepared: Araunah's threshing floor on Mount Moriah, bought by David.

Materials came from the north. Hiram king of Tyre supplied cedar and cypress in exchange for wheat and oil, floated down the coast by sea. Solomon imposed a labour levy: thirty thousand men served in shifts in Lebanon, tens of thousands more in the quarries.

One detail is spelled out in the text: the stones were finished at the quarry, "so that no hammer or axe or any iron tool was heard in the house while it was being built." Behind this stands the Torah's law that iron must not be lifted over the stones of the altar, because iron shortens life while the altar lengthens it.

The house itself was not large: sixty cubits by twenty by thirty, with three storeys of side chambers around it. Inside, cedar panelling carved with flowers and overlaid with gold; in the Holy of Holies two olive-wood cherubim ten cubits high, their wings touching the walls and each other. The work took seven years.