First Book of Kings 9

¹ When Solomon had finished building the Temple of Yahweh and the royal palace and all he had a mind to build,

² Yahweh appeared to Solomon a second time, as he had appeared to him at Gibeon.

³ Yahweh said to him, ‘I grant your prayer and the entreaty you have made before me. I consecrate this house you have built: I place my name there for ever; my eyes and my heart shall be always there.

⁴ For your part, if you walk before me with innocence of heart and in honesty, like David your father, if you do all I order you and keep my laws and my ordinances,

⁵ I will make your royal throne secure over Israel for ever, as I promised David your father when I said: You shall never lack for a man on the throne of Israel.

⁶ But if you turn away from me, you or your sons, and do not keep the commandments and laws I have set before you, and go and serve other gods and worship them,

⁷ then I will cut Israel off from the land I have given them, and I will cast out from my presence this Temple that I have consecrated for my name, and Israel shall become a proverb and a byword among all the nations.

⁸ As for this exalted Temple, all who pass by will be astounded; they will whistle and say, “Why has Yahweh treated this country and this Temple like this?”

⁹ And the answer will be, “Because they deserted Yahweh their God who brought their ancestors out of the land of Egypt, and they adopted other gods and worshipped them and served them; that is why Yahweh has brought all these disasters on them”.’

¹⁰ At the end of the twenty years it took Solomon to erect the two buildings, the Temple of Yahweh and the royal palace

¹¹ (Hiram king of Tyre had provided Solomon with as much cedar wood, juniper wood and gold as he had wanted), King Solomon gave Hiram twenty towns in the land of Galilee.

¹² But when Hiram came from Tyre to view the towns Solomon had given him, he was not pleased with them.

¹³ He said, ‘What kind of towns are these you have given me, my brother?’ And to this day they are called ‘the land of Cabul’.

¹⁴ ‘Hiram sent the king one hundred and twenty talents of gold.

¹⁵ This is an account of the forced labour King Solomon levied for the building of the Temple of Yahweh, his own palace, the Millo[*a] and the wall of Jerusalem, Hazor, Megiddo, Gezer

¹⁶ (Pharaoh king of Egypt went up and captured Gezer, he burnt it down and massacred the Canaanites living there; he then gave the town as a dowry to his daughter, Solomon’s wife,

¹⁷ and Solomon rebuilt Gezer), Lower Beth-horon,

¹⁸ Baalath, Tamar in the wilderness, inside the country,

¹⁹ all the garrison towns owned by Solomon, all the towns for his chariots and horses, and all it pleased Solomon to build in Jerusalem, in Lebanon and in all the countries subject to him.

²⁰ All those who survived of the Amorite, Hittite, Perizzite, Hivite and Jebusite peoples, who were not Israelites,

²¹ their descendants who were left in the country after them, those on whom the Israelites had not been able to enforce the ban, these Solomon conscripted as slave labourers, as they are still.

²² However, Solomon did not impose slave labour on the Israelites;[*b] these served as fighting men: they were his guards, officers, equerries, chariot and cavalry commanders.

²³ These were the administrators’ officials who supervised Solomon’s work: five hundred and fifty of them in charge of the people employed in the work.

²⁴ After Pharaoh’s daughter had moved from the Citadel of David to the house which he had built for her, he then built the Millo.

²⁵ Three times a year Solomon offered holocausts and communion sacrifices on the altar he had built for Yahweh… and he kept the Temple in good repair.

²⁶ King Solomon equipped a fleet at Ezion-geber, which is near Elath on the shores of the Red Sea, in the land of Edom.

²⁷ For this fleet Hiram sent men of his, sailors who knew the sea, to serve with Solomon’s men.

²⁸ They went to Ophir and from there they brought back four hundred and twenty talents of gold, which they delivered to King Solomon.[*c]