The dedication of the Great Tabernacle

The Ark brought to the Great Tabernacle

At the beginning of autumn 960 the Great Tabernacle was practically built. There were still minor details to be completed, but it was hoped that the last remnants of scaffolding would be taken down during Bul, the eighth month of the year, mid-October to mid-November.

But the spiritual authorities in Yerusalem believed that it was impossible to wait so long. The main feast of Tabernacle was celebrated in Ethanim, the seventh month, mid-September to mid-October. It was therefore decided that before the teams of masons and decorators had departed the Great Tabernacle should be dedicated to YAHWEH.

Solomon wanted deputies from Yisrael and Yahudah to take part in this ceremony, so he summoned the elders of the tribes, the heads of the various encampments and the leading sheiks. In addition, a host of pilgrims from all parts added to the throng who shared in the events of this memorable day.

For some years the Ark had rested near the source of the Gihon, close to the hill of Zion. The simplicity of the abode prepared for it by David in the goat-skin tent has probably been exaggerated, but now at any rate it was to be housed in a shrine of stone, rare wood and gold.

With its shafts on their shoulders the Levites carried the Ark on its journey to the Great Tabernacle. They were preceded by Solomon, the kohens, the court dignitaries and the people. There was a long pause on the threshold, and countless, innumerable victims were sacrificed. Rivers of blood must have flowed.

Then the Ark was carried into the Ulam, through the Qadash (place) and into the Qadash of Qadash where it was laid beneath the wings of the great cherubs, their shapes of gold glittering mysteriously in the twilight of the chamber.

Meanwhile the kohens had assembled in the vast Hekal. The cantors, on the east of the altar of incense, clashed their cymbals to mark the rhythm of the melodies played on the lyres and harps. A hundred and twenty kohens sounded their trumpets, and the singers with one voice gave praise to YAHWEH with the words: 'for HE is good, for HIS love is everlasting'.

Then suddenly the three parts of the Great Tabernacle were filled with a cloud. We may summarize the scribe's account of it as being the honour of YAHWEH; those present became vividly aware that someone was there, and with one accord the king and the officiants, the singers and musicians, fled to the threshold and took refuge between the pillars of Jachin and Boaz.

Solomon expressed himself poetically, but in conformity with the facts, when he improvised a psalm. Unfortunately only its first lines remain:
YAHWEH has chosen to dwell in the thick cloud. Yes, I have built YOU a dwelling, a place for YOU to live in for ever. (1 Melechim 8:10-12) 29

29 Both the language and the syntax of this fragment suggest that the poem belongs to the period of Solomon.

The dedication of the Great Tabernacle

The splendour of the ceremony of the dedication of the Great Tabernacle began with a blessing from the king upon the people still assembled in the vestibule. Then in 1 Melechim and 2 Divre Hayamim Solomon's discourse is summarized; his prayers for himself and the petitions uttered in the people's name. As it now stands, the text is divided into three well-defined sections; an account of the origins of the Great Tabernacle; an insight into its future spiritual prospect for both Yisraelites and foreigners; and an appeal to YAHWEH's protection as Yisrael's shield, provided, of course, that Yisrael kept true to the Law.

In the long account of the various liturgical phases of the consecration of the Great Tabernacle some verses give expression to the spiritual issues of the period. But these are comparatively rare. Many scholars, in fact, consider that the speeches of Solomon were 'edited' at a later period. With the best intentions, the scribe endowed them with a meaning ahead of their period, and a historian would be guilty of serious anachronisms if he took them literally. The most prudent course, therefore, appears to be to restrict oneself to a general portrayal of the ceremony and its setting.

This reserve, however, does not prevent us from sharing in these moving functions, colourfully and no doubt accurately described. Yisrael's soul is here intensely alive. Its belief was still primitive and yet it contained rich potentialities that were to bear fruit in the future.

There were still seven days of unceasing sacrifice on the altar of holocausts. But that altar soon became so overloaded that the king had to consecrate the middle of the court in order to cope with the countless animals brought up for sacrifice. The people of Yisrael and Yahudah, stirred by a common faith, prayed unceasingly to YAHWEH with great joy.

The Great Tabernacle of Yerusalem had begun to play its part in the nation's life.

SOLOM0N'S PALACE:960-947

As soon as the Great Tabernacle was completed the building of the palace began. It had taken Solomon seven years (967-960) to finish the Great Tabernacle; it was to take him thirteen (960-947) to erect his palace. The two buildings covered twenty years, a half of his reign.

Difficulties of construction compelled him to spend the years of waiting in the palace built by David. The old king's habits were simple and his dwelling was in accordance with them. Solomon's mentality was very different; his aim was to be established as soon as possible, together with his distinguished courtiers, in a building that bore witness to his power, wealth and honour. Louis XIV was not content with the old, sombre and chilly Louvre, which had suited his father Louis XIII very well: his pride demanded the sumptuousness of Versailles. In the same way, Solomon found David's residence unsatisfactory: it was small and had certainly not been constructed with a view to gorgeous receptions and spectacular celebrations. So, immediately the Great Tabernacle was finished work began on the new royal palace.

When it was completed it was a structure in which the gilding, the pillars and the rare woods combined to proclaim the ruling king. It contained the king's own apartments, the quarters for the harem, offices where the administration of the kingdom was settled, enclosures in which judicial decisions were announced, banqueting halls, corridors where visitors waited, and accommodation for the royal bodyguard.

It was to the honour of YAHWEH that the Great Tabernacle, a set apart building, simple in plan and of small dimensions, was erected. It was to the honour of Solomon that the palace, a secular construction, bigger, more luxurious, more impressive than the house of YAHWEH, was built. The implied criticism was overtly and sometimes sharply made by the opponents of the regime, and indeed by many devout adherents of the YAHWEH of Yisrael.

The Scriptural authors do not describe the palace at length. Their main concern was to provide the details of the house of YAHWEH. Their information about Solomon's secular building is often incomplete, badly recorded, and, on account of the technical terms employed, difficult to translate.

This being the case, only an incomplete description can be made, especially with regard to the precise situation of the various parts and their relationship to each other.

We make our way outside the city of David and enter the great enclosure of the palace through the south gate (see below). It had to be carefully guarded. From it we ascend to the Hall of Pillars with its lofty outline in front of the main building.

The Hall of Pillars

The building was given this name because of the colonnade which adorned its entrance. It seems to have formed a quadrangle, 80 feet square. It may be considered as the forecourt, or the waiting room where the visitors gathered, where their appointments were examined and their persons were identified.

The Hall of the Forest of Lebanon

North of the Hall of Pillars and in line with it, was the impressive Hall of the Forest of Lebanon, 160 feet long, 80 feet wide and 48 feet high.

Its interior was surprising -a room of columns made of carefully measured trunks of cedar, 26-30 feet high, arranged in a perfect and imposing order. On their tops were wooden capitals carved with leaves giving the impression of walking under foliage. From each of these capitals there sprang the ridges of vaults connected with the adjacent columns, and together they formed the ceiling.

84

ATTEMPTED RECONSTRUCTION OF THE PALACE OF SOLOMON

Despite the fact that the Scriptural text concerning the exact placing of the various elements of the palace is obscure, we have here attempted a reconstruction which, in the lack of documentation, must remain hypothetical for the time being in some details, and only tentative in its entirety.

In fact, these Phoenician architects had exported a typically Lebanese woodland style and arranged four rows of cedar within the Hall, each consisting of fifteen trunks, and making sixty pillars in all. Light gently penetrated into this 'forest'. At both ends of the shorter sides of the rectangle, there were doors opening on to the upper gallery, and high in the wall there were three ranks of small square windows.

Above this hall was a story that contained the State treasury and also three hundred shields of beaten gold (six hundred shekels of it, that is, about fifteen pounds), and three hundred smaller ones, with a quarter the amount of gold.

Every fitting in the Hall, on the ground floor and in the first story was of fine gold, because the author emphatically comments silver was thought little of in the time of Solomon (1 Melechim 10:16-17, 21). No doubt it would be more accurate to say that it was thought little of in Solomon's court, for among the peasants ingots of silver would certainly not have been despised.

The golden shields were used by Solomon's body guard when they had to escort him on his expeditions, his visits to the Great Tabernacle, or at an official reception within the palace.

The Hall had only a short time to pride itself on its wealth. Five years after Solomon's death, the pharaoh Sheshonk, of the twenty-second dynasty, conducted a campaign in Palestine. Rehoboam, Solomon's son and successor, was compelled to hand over the golden shields as reparation for the war, and to replace them by shields in bronze (1 Melechim 14:25-27).

This upper part of the building was also used as a storehouse for weapons then in use; at a later period (between 740 and 700), the prophet YeshaYahu, thundering against the king of Yahudah's preparations for war, mentions the armoury of the House of the Forest (YeshaYahu 22:8).

The forecourt of the throne or of the judgment-seat

After this Hall of the Forest came the Throne or Judgment room, faced with a kind of portico. Its measurements are unknown, but its function is obvious. It was a reception room where Solomon gave audience to foreign ambassadors or princes from neighbouring states, and where occasionally he administered justice.

Against the wall stood the throne approached by six steps. On the side of each of them was a lion rampart. The back of the throne seems to have been decorated with bulls' heads, though the text is far from clear on this point. Its arms were flanked by lions. The author comments with satisfaction: No throne like this was ever made in any other kingdom. (He had obviously not visited Egypt or Mesopotamia). The walls were entirely covered with cedar wood.

The king's own dwelling

Practically nothing is known about this, and we are left with mere conjectures. It was probably on the west of the group of buildings just described, and it must have been south of the Great Tabernacle and on a level stretch of ground a little below it.

In the nature of things, it must have comprised a considerable number of apartments; the king's own rooms; a large suite for the harem, with a special set for Solomon's principal wife, the daughter of the pharaoh Siamon; rooms for attendants and slaves of all kinds; guard-rooms where soldiers kept watch.

The author, always eager to dazzle us with the king's wealth, speaks of 700 wives and 300 concubines. He is no doubt right when he says that Solomon loved  many foreign women, but the number he records seems excessive. 3O

30 In the Shir Hashirim there is a passage that may be taken as referring to Solomon, which mentions sixty wives of full status, eighty concubines and countless maidens (Shir Hashirim 6:8). The last group may have been girls not yet admitted into the harem (cf. Hadasah 2 3-14). For an exact appreciation of the factors involved in this matter, it should be noted that among the women attached de facto to the royal harem, were some who functioned simply as musicians, singers and dancers. The king summoned them either to take his mind off his cares or to amuse his guests.

The labour force

The Scriptural writers are unsparing in their eulogy of the wonders and wealth of Solomon's palace. The Phoenician builders and decorators undoubtedly surpassed them selves. But in the records that have been handed down there is no sign that either the king or his courtiers or the annalists of the time were in the least disturbed by the inhuman burden which the king had imposed on the Hebrew people for twenty years. To begin with, no doubt, only Canaanites, pagan idolaters, had been requisitioned, but the turn of the Yisraelites came very soon. They were formed into permanent and closely supervised bodies of labourers, set to constructing embankments, transporting stone and wood, quarrying, etc. Families were split up, and yet the farms still had to pay the heavy taxes, scrupulously collected by the officials of the twelve administrative areas. For the  luxurious mode of life of the court had to go on and the yearly Phoenician bill had to be paid. The Hebrew peasant was at hand both to work and to pay. It was all of no account to the upper class, lacking any real contact with the people, and, in any case, with small inclination to attend to the complaints that began to arise. Solomon had in fact become the typical oriental despot, one of the long line of similar monarchs to be found in Egypt or Mesopotamia.

But the Yisraelites did not share the mentality of Egyptian fellahin, cowed by centuries of passive obedience; nor did they resemble the Babylonian peasants, stupefied by theocratic rule. In their souls there still survived the ideal of independence and freedom, the pride that would not humble itself before the dictatorship beloved by the great empires of the East, that failed to recognize human dignity or the respect due to a man. But now they were subjected to the foreman's whip, and it looked as though the days of the Egyptian captivity had come again.

Such was the position, described in Scripture, in the twenty-fourth year of Solomon's reign; just at the time when work on the palace was completed (about 947).

But many other building sites were being prepared, this time for national defense. It looked as if the hateful forced labour would never end. They were free men, being dragged into the worst form of slavery and, not surprisingly, there were murmurs of revolt that became threatening. The leader of the rebellion was Jeroboam, a man hitherto unknown.

He was young, a native of Yisrael, but he had started his career in Yahudah as an administrator. Solomon had noted his ability and had made him overseer of the workers engaged in repairing the ramparts of the capital. But among these men from Yisrael, made to work so harshly in the Judaean territory of Yerusalem, resentment steadily increased, and it was not long before political  issues intruded. Agitators stirred up the ancestral hatred which had always set north and south, Yahudah and Yisrael, against each other.

A prophet, Ahijah of Shiloh in Yisrael, took it upon himself to restore the prestige of his country which he considered to be so shamefully oppressed. In his official capacity, he started an insidious campaign against Solomon. What did the building of the Great Tabernacle matter if the king was abandoning the ancient teaching of YAHWEH? What was the real significance of these luxurious palaces which enthroned a proud monarch remote from his subjects? None of this was in conformity with the Law of Mosheh. The Twelve tribes had never submitted to any leader other than YAHWEH; they must be freed from this despot who put himself between them and YAHWEH. YAHWEH alone was king.

These were age-old ideas that sprang from the experience of the shepherds of the desert, traveling freely and living under the rule of the head of the family. They became slogans enthusiastically echoed by the work gangs, controlled by the whip, and compelled to exhausting labour for purposes which they did not understand.

In his new post, Jeroboam soon became deeply moved by the fearful plight of his countrymen, working far from home, crushed by their daily burden, thoroughly demoralized by conditions they had been obliged to endure for so long. He took up the cause of the oppressed. The king's official, employed to secure strict discipline, encouraged those who complained. Soon he did not fear to raise his voice in favour of his ill-treated 'brethren'. He became a marked man, and the opposition party was not slow to claim him.

The prophet Ahijah met him in the countryside a meeting which Ahijah had certainly contrived. He told him at once that YAHWEH could no longer tolerate the present state of things; David's son could no longer continue his despotic rule over the chosen people. A split between Yahudah and Yisrael seemed essential. A liberator could be raised up by YAHWEH; Yisrael would regain its political freedom, proclaim its independence and break away from the tribe of Yahudah, with whom an understanding had become impossible. And the head of this new kingdom of Yisrael was, of course, to be Jeroboam. To express his prophecy in a visible symbol  Ahijah tore his cloak - it was a new one - into twelve pieces (symbolizing the Twelve tribes) and gave ten of them to Jeroboam. The latter was thus designated as the head of the ten tribes of Yisrael; the two others, those of the south, would continue to live under the command of David's descendants.

Naturally, it was not long before Solomon heard of these discussions, and no doubt also of the agreements that followed them. We have already seen that he could act promptly when it came to dealing with opposition. He ordered Jeroboam to be seized and executed. But the latter doubtless had his own watchdogs. Before Solomon's assassins had set out, he had fled to Egypt where he was welcomed, not by Siamon, Solomon's father-in-law, but by a pharaoh of a new dynasty. Sheshonk, who was a declared enemy of Yerusalem.

Solomon had played his hand badly. From Egypt, Jeroboam continued to exercise remote control over the anti-Judaean conspiracy. Solomon's heedless policy of forced labour had stirred up a popular revolt that gathered impetus from day to day. He scarcely seemed to care; perhaps he lacked the strength to cope with it. At all events it augured ill for the future.

Solomon's public works

While between the Great Tabernacle and the hill of Zion the royal palace was going up, in many parts of the territory the, king, an indefatigable builder, started on fresh projects, what in modern times would be called public works.

Some of them were intended as improvements to the country. Thus, there was the laying out of the 'gardens of Yerusalem in the valley of the Kidron, the planting of orchards in the neighbourhood of Bethlehem, the hydraulic installations intended to provide water for the principal cities, the digging of tanks to store the rain water in winter which could be used to irrigate the crops during the period of drought. In addition there were the aqueducts which channeled the mountain springs or diverted the water of the wadis to the countryside where it was needed for irrigation.

Other building projects were of a specifically military nature. The ancient Canaanite citadels, from which the Hebrews suffered cruelly at the time of their settling in the country, the formidable fortresses against which David's troops fought so stubbornly, all this network was now in the hands of the Yisraelites. If now they were to be protected from rebellion within the country and attacks from outside it, the walls, which had suffered so many assaults, had to be built up again and the fortresses endowed with the very latest military improvements. Thus Solomon repaired these strongholds with the obvious intention of protecting the country, and ensuring the free movement over the highways of the international caravans whose tolls brought large revenues to the State. So the central government established or re-established defensive points judiciously distributed over the whole territory: in the north near lake Huleh, the fortress of Hazor which controlled the entry to Canaan; further to the south, the citadel of Megiddo, a first-class strategic centre, whose function was to defend the access to the fertile plain of Jezreel; between the rock of Yerusalem and the sea the fortified places of Gezer, Beth-horon and Baalath; lastly in the southern part of the country, Tamar, as a bastion against the Edomite invasion. 31

In each of these centres Solomon posted not only a garrison but also contingents of chariots ready to go into action at the first alarm. Some historians have remarked that according to the topographical arrangement of the fortresses many frontier zones, especially those towards Yarden, seem to have been neglected.

But it must be remembered that the Scripture only mentions the names of the principal citadels. We can be sure that Solomon must have sited fortresses almost everywhere and especially in the regions threatened by invasion; they were intended to delay the attacker while the arrival of massive reinforcements was awaited.

In short, during the first twenty-five years of the reign of Solomon (970-945) the land of the Hebrews appeared to be like an enormous building enterprise under the direction of architects, and Phoenician foremen.

A beginning was made with the Great Tabernacle, the house of prayer put up to the honour of YAHWEH.

The work continued with the palace, an immense monument built to the human honour of the king.

Meanwhile numerous military posts were established to ensure the peace of the country.

As a whole, Solomon's plan was well thought out. There was only one shadow over the picture; this was the forced labour whose pitiless character the population could not be brought to accept.

31 For a long time geographers and historians of Palestine thought that this place was Palmira (Tadmor) between Damascus and the Euphrates. Then this opinion was challenged and the conclusion was reached that Tamar was better reading (the opinion adopted in this book). Nowadays some scholars have reopened the question, but they have not arrived at any certain conclusions.

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Solomon The Magnificent Index   Solomon Sitemap  Scripture History Through the Ages  Solomon The Historian  RADIANT DAWN  Solomon's Wisdom  SOLOMON IN ALL HIS HONOR  David's role in building the Temple  Dates of the building of the Temple  Division of the Temple  The Ark of the Covenant  The most Kodesh Place  Dedication of the Temple  SOLOMON Prince of Peace  SOLOMON THE TRADER   Solomon's Ophir expedition  The queen of Sheba  LITERARY ACHIEVEMENTS OF SOLOMON  First historical works of the Hebrews  What did Solomon write  THE SHADES OF NIGHT  Political and social failure  Solomon's spiritual failure  The moral failure of Solomon  CONCLUSION of Solomon