2/9 Torah Readings! Exodus 25:1-27:19, 1 Kings 5:26-6:13, 2Cor 9:1-15; Matt 5:33

God gave King Solomon wisdom, and Solomon made a peace treaty with King Hiram I of Tyre. Solomon directed his tax collector Adoniram to draft 30,000 men and send them to Lebanon in shifts of 10,000, with one month in Lebanon and two months at home. Solomon also had 70,000 men who bore burdens, 80,000 men who hewed stone in the mountains, and 3,300 chief officers who supervised the work Solomon ordered great and costly stones cut to lay the foundation of the Temple in Jerusalem, and Solomon's builders, Hiram's builders, and the Gebalites fashioned them and prepared the timber and the stones to build the Temple.

Solomon began to build the Temple in the 480th year after the Israelites came out of Egypt, in the fourth year of his reign, in the month Ziv. The Temple measured 60 cubits long, 20 cubits wide, and 30 cubits high, and had a portico 20 cubits long and 10 cubits deep. Its windows were broad within and narrow without. Along the Temple's wall all around were side-structures and side-chambers, with the lowest story of the side-structure 5 cubits broad, the middle 6 cubits broad, and the third story 7 cubits broad, and recesses ringed the outside wall. The Temple was built from stone made ready at the quarry, and no hammer, ax, or other iron tool was heard at the building site. The door for the lowest story of side-chambers was on the right side of the Temple, and winding stairs went into the middle story and out into the third. So Solomon built the Temple and finished it with planks of cedar over beams, with all the Temple resting on cedar timbers.