¹¹ Then Hiram king of Tyre responded in a letter that he sent to Solomon,

“Because the Lord loves His people, He has made you king over them.”

¹² And Hiram said,

“Blessed be the Lord God of Israel who made heaven and earth and has given King David a wise son, having insight and understanding, who is building a temple for the Lord and a royal house for his kingship.

¹³ “And now I have sent a skilled man, endowed with understanding, Huram-Abi, ¹⁴ the son of a woman from the daughters of Dan and the son of a man of Tyre, who knows gold, silver, bronze, iron, stone, wood, and purple, violet, blue, and crimson threads, and who knows how to make all types of engravings and to devise every type of design that is given to him, with your skilled men and the skilled men of my lord David your father.

¹⁵ “Now the wheat, the barley, the oil, and the wine that my lord has declared, may he send these items to his slaves. ¹⁶ And let us cut the timber from Lebanon, whatever you need, and we will bring it to you on rafts on the sea to Joppa, and you will bring it up to Jerusalem.”

¹⁷ Then Solomon numbered all the male foreigners who were in the land of Israel, after the census that David his father had taken. And there were found one hundred and fifty-three thousand six hundred. ¹⁸ And he made seventy thousand of them to carry materials, eighty thousand to cut stone in the hills, and three thousand six hundred supervisors to make the people work.