Wednesday Bible Study: Construction Contract

The next couple of chapters describe the construction of the first temple. Most scholars think it probably existed, one reason being that it ' s destruction, which is described later, happened within perhaps a generation of whoever wrote this. However, as I have noted earlier, archaeological excavation on the Temple Mount is not possible, so it can ' t be confirmed by physical evidence. (Archaeological finds which some have claimed to be evidence for the temple have either turned out to be fakes, or are of dubious meaning.) In any case, it was highly unlikely to have been as grand as is described here, and we don ' t know who built it and when. It was almost certainly later than is claimed here because, as I have also noted before, the kingdom at this time, if it really could be called a kingdom at all, did not have the resources for such an undertaking. Nevertheless we are getting to an era where there tend to be more and more grains of truth in the tales. Everything about Solomon ' s reign is wildly exaggerated if he existed at all, but it ' s important to the national mythology in a way that earlier stories are not, because it ' s so tied to a specific place. Note that this continues the Biblical tradition of multiplying numbers by 10 or 100 beyond what is plausible. Note verse 15et seq. Seventy thousand burden bearers, 80,000 stone cutters and 3,000 construction supervisors for a building of about 250 square meters (see next chapter) would seem to indicate a lot of f...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs