2 Chronicles 3:16

These three verses close the account of the house itself in 2 Chronicles 3. The chapter begins on Mount Moriah, the place where Abraham was sent to offer Isaac (Genesis 22:2), and works through the measurements, the gold, the most holy place, the cherubim and the veil. It ends at the front of the building with the two pillars that stood at its entrance. The same pillars are described at greater length in 1 Kings 7:15–22.

Building the temple was the great work of Solomon’s reign, about 970 to 931 BC, a time of peace and wealth for Israel. It carried out what David had longed to do, to build a settled house for the LORD and the ark of the covenant, and God had answered David that his son would build it (2 Samuel 7:1–17). Until then the ark had been kept in a tabernacle that could be carried from place to place. The Chronicler wrote for Israel after the exile, for people who had lived through the loss of this temple, and he set down its details so that they would remember what God had done among them and what he had promised.

“Also he made” uses ‘âsâh, the everyday verb for doing or making anything at all. Solomon is named as the maker because the work was his, though the bronze itself was cast by skilled hands, among them Huram-abi, the master craftsman from Tyre whom Solomon employed (2 Chronicles 2:13–14).

The word for pillar, ‘ammûwd, comes from the root for standing and means a pillar or column. It is also the word for the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night in which the LORD went before Israel in the wilderness. These two stood “before the house”, out in front at the entrance, where every worshipper would see them first.

Verse 16 turns to the tops of the pillars. Solomon made chains, sharshᵉrâh, the ordinary word for a chain, the same word used for the chains of the high priest’s breastplate. He put them on “the heads of the pillars”, the capitals of verse 15. Then he made a hundred pomegranates, rimmôwn, and put them on the chains, so that each pillar was crowned with chains on its capital and fruit on its chains.

“And he reared up the pillars” uses qûwm in its causative sense, to raise, erect or set up. Solomon placed one on the right hand and one on the left, Jachin on the right, which is the south side, and Boaz on the left, the north. The pair framed the entrance, and a worshipper going in passed between them.

Then Solomon named them, and in Israel a name gave a thing its identity and purpose. Yâkîyn, Jachin, means “he will establish” or “he shall establish”. Bôʻaz, Boaz, is given as “in him is strength”, “in it is strength” or “by strength”, and it is the same name borne by Boaz, an ancestor of David. Read together, the two names make one message: God will establish, and he does it by his own strength. The message of the pillars is carried by these names, since ‘ammûwd itself simply means a column.

Jachin points to God’s promise to David that he would establish his son’s throne and kingdom for ever (2 Samuel 7:12–16), the covenant a psalm celebrates when it sings of God’s faithfulness and of David’s seed established for ever (Psalm 89:2–4). Boaz told Israel that their safety and their worship rested on the LORD’s might, and that the house, the dynasty and the nation stood because he upheld them. Solomon’s prayer at the dedication of the temple (2 Chronicles 6, and in Kings at 1 Kings 8) rests on the same faithfulness and power. For the Chronicler’s readers, who had come through the exile, the names were a word of assurance that God’s promises still held.

Long before, Jacob had set up a stone for a pillar and named the place Bethel, the house of God. Here Solomon sets up two pillars at the house of God and names the pillars themselves. Scripture speaks of pillars in this way elsewhere. God says that he bears up the pillars of the earth (Psalm 75:3), and Paul calls the leaders of the church at Jerusalem pillars (Galatians 2:9).

The temple with its pillars was a shadow of something greater. When Jesus said, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up”, John explains that “he spake of the temple of his body” (John 2:19–21). In him “dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily” (Colossians 2:9), so he is the true dwelling place of God with us.

What Jachin declared, God has done in Christ. All the promises of God are “yea” and “Amen” in him (2 Corinthians 1:20). By him all things consist (Colossians 1:17). He is the chief corner stone, rejected by men and precious to God (1 Peter 2:6–7), and he says that he will build his church (Matthew 16:18). What Boaz declared is found in him too, for Christ is “the power of God, and the wisdom of God” (1 Corinthians 1:24), and Paul could say, “I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me” (Philippians 4:13).

The pomegranates of plenty find their fulfilment in the one who said, “I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly” (John 10:10). And the oracle, the room behind the veil that only the high priest entered, is now open to all who believe, because Jesus has opened a new and living way into the holiest by his blood (Hebrews 10:19–20). He is the way, the truth and the life (John 14:6), the true entrance into God’s presence that the pillars only marked.

God’s house is now built of his people. Believers are lively stones built up into a spiritual house (1 Peter 2:5), fellowcitizens with the saints who grow together into a habitation of God through the Spirit (Ephesians 2:19–22). Each believer’s body is a temple of the Holy Ghost (1 Corinthians 6:19), and Paul calls the church of the living God “the pillar and ground of the truth” (1 Timothy 3:15).

Solomon could cast bronze and raise it thirty-five cubits high, but he wrote on its face that the house would stand by God’s establishing and God’s strength. Those names were true when the temple was new, they were true for the people who came back from exile to a ruined city, and they are true in Christ, who establishes his church and is himself the power of God.

The care lavished on these pillars, down to the chains and the hundredth pomegranate, shows that God is worthy of the best that his people can give. The names on them show where the real strength lay. The God who set his name over that doorway is the same God who builds us together as his house today, and what he establishes, he upholds by his own hand.