Solomon & The Temple

The LORD appeared to Solomon by night, and said to him, “I have heard your prayer, and have chosen this place for myself for a house of sacrifice.

“If I shut up the sky so that there is no rain, or if I command the locust to devour the land, or if I send pestilence among my people;

if my people, who are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.

Now my eyes shall be open, and my ears attentive, to the prayer that is made in this place.

For now have I chosen and made this house holy, that my name may be there forever; and my eyes and my heart shall be there perpetually.

“As for you, if you will walk before me as David your father walked, and do according to all that I have commanded you, and will keep my statutes and my ordinances;

then I will establish the throne of your kingdom, according as I covenanted with David your father, saying, ‘There shall not fail you a man to be ruler in Israel.’

But if you turn away, and forsake my statutes and my commandments which I have set before you, and shall go and serve other gods, and worship them;

then I will pluck them up by the roots out of my land which I have given them; and this house, which I have made holy for my name, I will cast out of my sight, and I will make it a proverb and a byword among all peoples.

This house, which is so high, everyone who passes by it shall be astonished, and shall say, ‘Why has the LORD done thus to this land, and to this house?’

They shall answer, ‘Because they abandoned the LORD, the God of their fathers, who brought them out of the land of Egypt, and took other gods, worshiped them, and served them. Therefore he has brought all this evil on them.’”

At the end of twenty years, in which Solomon had built the LORD’s house, and his own house,

the cities which Huram had given to Solomon, Solomon built them, and caused the children of Israel to dwell there.

Solomon went to Hamath Zobah, and prevailed against it.

He built Tadmor in the wilderness, and all the storage cities, which he built in Hamath.

Also he built Beth Horon the upper, and Beth Horon the lower, fortified cities, with walls, gates, and bars;

and Baalath, and all the storage cities that Solomon had, and all the cities for his chariots, and the cities for his horsemen, and all that Solomon desired to build for his pleasure in Jerusalem, and in Lebanon, and in all the land of his dominion.

As for all the people who were left of the Hittites, and the Amorites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites, who were not of Israel;

of their children who were left after them in the land, whom the children of Israel didn’t consume, of them Solomon conscripted forced labor to this day.

But of the children of Israel, Solomon made no servants for his work; but they were men of war, and chief of his captains, and rulers of his chariots and of his horsemen.

These were the chief officers of king Solomon, even two-hundred fifty, who ruled over the people.

Solomon brought up the daughter of Pharaoh out of the city of David to the house that he had built for her; for he said, “My wife shall not dwell in the house of David king of Israel, because the places where the LORD’s ark has come are holy.”

Then Solomon offered burnt offerings to the LORD on the altar of the LORD, which he had built before the porch,

even as the duty of every day required, offering according to the commandment of Moses, on the Sabbaths, and on the new moons, and on the set feasts, three times in the year, in the feast of unleavened bread, and in the feast of weeks, and in the feast of booths.

He appointed, according to the ordinance of David his father, the divisions of the priests to their service, and the Levites to their offices, to praise, and to minister before the priests, as the duty of every day required; the doorkeepers also by their divisions at every gate: for so had David the man of God commanded.