³⁸ And in the eleventh year, in the month of ^[a]Bul, which is the eighth month, the house was finished in all its details and according to all its plans. So he was ^(A)seven years in building it.

Solomon’s Other Buildings

7 But Solomon took ^(A)thirteen years to build his own house; so he finished all his house.

²⁰ Then the Jews said, “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and will You raise it up in three days?”

¹⁴ “Now the ^[b]elaborate crown shall be ^(C)for a memorial in the temple of the Lord ^[c]for Helem, Tobijah, Jedaiah, and Hen the son of Zephaniah. ¹⁵ Even ^(D)those from afar shall come and build the temple of the Lord. Then you shall know that the Lord of hosts has sent Me to you. And this shall come to pass if you diligently obey the voice of the Lord your God.”

^14 (A)So the elders of the Jews built, and they prospered through the prophesying of Haggai the prophet and Zechariah the son of Iddo. And they built and finished it, according to the commandment of the God of Israel, and according to the ^[a]command of ^(B)Cyrus, ^(C)Darius, and ^(D)Artaxerxes king of Persia. ¹⁵ Now the temple was finished on the third day of the month of Adar, which was in the sixth year of the reign of King Darius.

Restoration of the Temple Begins

⁸ Now in the second month of the second year of their coming to the house of God at Jerusalem, ^(A)Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel, Jeshua the son of ^[a]Jozadak, and the rest of their brethren the priests and the Levites, and all those who had come out of the captivity to Jerusalem, began work ^(B)and appointed the Levites from twenty years old and above to oversee the work of the house of the Lord. ⁹ Then Jeshua with his sons and brothers, Kadmiel with his sons, and the sons of ^[b]Judah, arose as one to oversee those working on the house of God: the sons of Henadad with their sons and their brethren the Levites.

¹⁰ When the builders laid the foundation of the temple of the Lord, ^(C)the^[c] priests stood in their apparel with trumpets, and the Levites, the sons of Asaph, with cymbals, to praise the Lord, according to the ^(D)ordinance^[d] of David king of Israel. ^11 (E)And they sang responsively, praising and giving thanks to the Lord:

Then all the people shouted with a great shout, when they praised the Lord, because the foundation of the house of the Lord was laid.

¹² But many of the priests and Levites and ^(H)heads of the fathers’ houses, old men who had seen the first temple, wept with a loud voice when the foundation of this temple was laid before their eyes. Yet many shouted aloud for joy, ¹³ so that the people could not discern the noise of the shout of joy from the noise of the weeping of the people, for the people shouted with a loud shout, and the sound was heard afar off.

^9 (A)So he built the ^[a]temple and finished it, and he paneled the temple with beams and boards of cedar.

Solomon Builds the Temple^(A)

6 And ^(B)it came to pass in the four hundred and ^[a]eightieth year after the children of Israel had come out of the land of Egypt, in the fourth year of Solomon’s reign over Israel, in the month of ^[b]Ziv, which is the second month, ^(C)that he began to build the house of the Lord.