Solomon & The Temple

Each stand had four handles, one for each corner, projecting from the stand.

At the top of each stand was a circular band half a cubit high. The supports and panels were cast as a unit with the top of the stand.

He engraved cherubim, lions, and palm trees on the surfaces of the supports and panels, wherever each had space, with wreaths all around.

In this way he made the ten stands, each with the same casting, dimensions, and shape.

He also made ten bronze basins, each holding forty baths and measuring four cubits across, one basin for each of the ten stands.

He set five stands on the south side of the temple and five on the north, and he put the Sea on the south side, at the southeast corner of the temple.

Additionally, Huram made the pots, shovels, and sprinkling bowls. So Huram finished all the work that he had undertaken for King Solomon in the house of the LORD:

the two pillars; the two bowl-shaped capitals atop the pillars; the two sets of network covering both bowls of the capitals atop the pillars;

the four hundred pomegranates for the two sets of network (two rows of pomegranates for each network covering both the bowl-shaped capitals atop the pillars);

the ten stands; the ten basins on the stands;

the Sea; the twelve oxen underneath the Sea;

and the pots, shovels, and sprinkling bowls. All the articles that Huram made for King Solomon in the house of the LORD were made of burnished bronze.

The king had them cast in clay molds in the plain of the Jordan between Succoth and Zarethan.

Solomon left all these articles unweighed, because there were so many. The weight of the bronze could not be determined.

Solomon also made all the furnishings for the house of the LORD: the golden altar; the golden table on which was placed the Bread of the Presence;

the lampstands of pure gold in front of the inner sanctuary, five on the right side and five on the left; the gold flowers, lamps, and tongs;

the pure gold basins, wick trimmers, sprinkling bowls, ladles, and censers; and the gold hinges for the doors of the inner temple (that is, the Most Holy Place) as well as for the doors of the main hall of the temple.

So all the work that King Solomon had performed for the house of the LORD was completed. Then Solomon brought in the items his father David had dedicated—the silver, the gold, and the furnishings—and he placed them in the treasuries of the house of the LORD.

At that time Solomon assembled before him in Jerusalem the elders of Israel—all the tribal heads and family leaders of the Israelites—to bring up the ark of the covenant of the LORD from Zion, the City of David.

And all the men of Israel came together to King Solomon at the feast in the seventh month, the month of Ethanim.

When all the elders of Israel had arrived, the priests took up the ark,

and they brought up the ark of the LORD and the Tent of Meeting with all its sacred furnishings. So the priests and Levites carried them up.

There, before the ark, King Solomon and the whole congregation of Israel who had assembled with him sacrificed so many sheep and oxen that they could not be counted or numbered.

Then the priests brought the ark of the covenant of the LORD to its place in the inner sanctuary of the temple, the Most Holy Place, beneath the wings of the cherubim.

For the cherubim spread their wings over the place of the ark and overshadowed the ark and its poles.