whose mother was a widow from the tribe of Naphtali and whose father was from Tyre and a skilled craftsman in bronze. Huram was filled with wisdom, with understanding and with knowledge to do all kinds of bronze work. He came to King Solomon and did all the work assigned to him.

He also made the pots and shovels and sprinkling bowls. So Huram finished all the work he had undertaken for King Solomon in the temple of the Lord:

the pots, shovels and sprinkling bowls. All these objects that Huram made for King Solomon for the temple of the Lord were of burnished bronze.

Solomon left all these things unweighed, because there were so many; the weight of the bronze was not determined.

Solomon also made all the furnishings that were in the Lord’s temple: the golden altar; the golden table on which was the bread of the Presence;

When all the work King Solomon had done for the temple of the Lord was finished, he brought in the things his father David had dedicated—the silver and gold and the furnishings—and he placed them in the treasuries of the Lord’s temple.

The Ark Brought to the Temple

Then King Solomon summoned into his presence at Jerusalem the elders of Israel, all the heads of the tribes and the chiefs of the Israelite families, to bring up the ark of the Lord’s covenant from Zion, the City of David.

All the Israelites came together to King Solomon at the time of the festival in the month of Ethanim, the seventh month.

and King Solomon and the entire assembly of Israel that had gathered about him were before the ark, sacrificing so many sheep and cattle that they could not be recorded or counted.

Then Solomon said, “The Lord has said that he would dwell in a dark cloud;

Solomon’s Prayer of Dedication

Then Solomon stood before the altar of the Lord in front of the whole assembly of Israel, spread out his hands toward heaven

When Solomon had finished all these prayers and supplications to the Lord, he rose from before the altar of the Lord, where he had been kneeling with his hands spread out toward heaven.

Solomon offered a sacrifice of fellowship offerings to the Lord: twenty-two thousand cattle and a hundred and twenty thousand sheep and goats. So the king and all the Israelites dedicated the temple of the Lord.

So Solomon observed the festival at that time, and all Israel with him—a vast assembly, people from Lebo Hamath to the Wadi of Egypt. They celebrated it before the Lord our God for seven days and seven days more, fourteen days in all.

The Lord Appears to Solomon

When Solomon had finished building the temple of the Lord and the royal palace, and had achieved all he had desired to do,

Solomon’s Other Activities

At the end of twenty years, during which Solomon built these two buildings—the temple of the Lord and the royal palace—

King Solomon gave twenty towns in Galilee to Hiram king of Tyre, because Hiram had supplied him with all the cedar and juniper and gold he wanted.

But when Hiram went from Tyre to see the towns that Solomon had given him, he was not pleased with them.

Here is the account of the forced labor King Solomon conscripted to build the Lord’s temple, his own palace, the terraces, the wall of Jerusalem, and Hazor, Megiddo and Gezer.

(Pharaoh king of Egypt had attacked and captured Gezer. He had set it on fire. He killed its Canaanite inhabitants and then gave it as a wedding gift to his daughter, Solomon’s wife.

And Solomon rebuilt Gezer.) He built up Lower Beth Horon,

Solomon conscripted the descendants of all these peoples remaining in the land—whom the Israelites could not exterminate—to serve as slave labor, as it is to this day.

But Solomon did not make slaves of any of the Israelites; they were his fighting men, his government officials, his officers, his captains, and the commanders of his chariots and charioteers.

They were also the chief officials in charge of Solomon’s projects—550 officials supervising those who did the work.

After Pharaoh’s daughter had come up from the City of David to the palace Solomon had built for her, he constructed the terraces.