King Solomon had not yet attained middle age--forty-five; yet the fame
of his wisdom and comeliness, of the grandeur of his life and the pomp
of his court, had spread far beyond the limits of Palestine. In Assyria
and Phoenicia; in Lower and Upper Ægypt; from ancient Tabriz to Yemen
and from Ismar unto Persepolis; on the coast of the Black Sea and upon
the islands of the Mediterranean,--all uttered his name in wonder, for
there was none among the kings like unto him in all his days.
In the four hundred and eightieth year after the children of Israel were
come out of Ægypt, in the fourth year of Solomon’s reign over Israel, in
the month of Zif,[2] did the king undertake the erection of the great
temple of the Lord in Mount Moriah, and the building of his palace in
Jerusalem. Fourscore thousand stonesquarers and threescore and ten
thousand that bare burthens wrought without cease in the mountains, and
in the outskirts of the city; while ten thousand hewers that cut timber,
out of a number of eight and thirty thousand, were sent each month, by
courses, to Lebanon, where they spent a month in labour so arduous that
they rested for two months thereafter. Thousands of men tied the cut
trees into flotes, and hundreds of seamen brought them by sea to Jaffa,
where they were fashioned by Tyrians, skilled to work at turning and
carpentry. Only at the rearing of the pyramids of Khephren, Khufu, and
Mencheres, at Ghizeh, had such an infinite multitude of labourers been
used.
Three thousand and six hundred officers oversaw the works; while
Azariah, the son of Nathan, was over the officers,--a cruel man and an
active, concerning whom had sprung up a rumour that he never slept,
devoured by the fire of an internal, incurable disease. As for the
plans of the palace and the temple; the drawings of the columns, the
fore-court, and the brasen sea; the designs for the windows; the
ornaments of the walls and the thrones,--they had all been created by
the master builder Hiram-Abiah of Sidon, the son of a worker in brass
of the tribe of Naphtali.
After seven years, in the month of Bul,[3] the temple of the Lord was
completed; and after thirteen years, the palace of the king also. For
cedar logs out of Lebanon, for cypress and olive boards, for almug,
shittim, and tarshish woods, for great stones, costly stones, and hewed
and polished stones; for purple, scarlet, and for byssin broidered in
gold; for stuffs of blue wool; for ivory and red-dyed rams’ skins; for
iron, onyx, and the vast quantity of marble; for precious stones; for
the chains, the wreaths, the cords, the tongs, the nets, the lavers,
and the flowers and the lamps and the candlesticks,--all, all of gold;
for the hinges of gold for the doors, and the nails of gold, weighing
sixty shekels each; for the basons and platters of beaten gold; for
ornaments,--graven and in mosaic; for the images of lions, cherubim,
oxen, palms and pineapples, both hewn in stone and molten,--for all
these did Solomon give Hiram, King of Tyre, who bore the same name as
the master builder, twenty cities and hamlets in the land of Galilee,
and Hiram found the gift insignificant, with such splendour had been
built the temple of the Lord, and the palace of Solomon, and the little
palace at Millo for the king’s wife, the beautiful Queen Astis, daughter
to Shishak, Pharaoh of Ægypt; while the redwood which later went for the
balustrades and stairs of the galleries, for the musical instruments and
for the bindings of the sacred books, had been brought as a gift to
Solomon by the Queen of Sheba, the wise and beautiful Balkis, together
with such a quantity of aromatic incense, sweet smelling oils, and
precious perfumes, as had never been seen before in the land of Israel.
With each year did the riches of the king increase. Thrice a year
did his ships return to harbour: the _Tarshish_, that sailed the
Mediterranean, and the _Hiram_, that sailed the Black Sea. They brought
out of Africa ivory and apes and peacocks and antelopes; richly adorned
chariots out of Ægypt; live tigers and lions, as well as animal pelts
and furs, out of Mesopotamia; snow-white steeds out of Cuth; gold dust
out of Parvaam that came to six hundred and threescore talents in one
year; redwood, ebony and sandalwood out of the land of Ophir; gay rugs
of Asshur and Calah, of marvelous designs,--the friendly gifts of King
Tiglath-Pileser; artistic mosaic out of Nineveh, Nimroud, and Sargon;
wondrous figured stuffs out of Khatuar; goblets of beaten gold out
of Tyre; stained glass out of Sidon; and out of Punt, which is near
Bab-el-Medebu, those rare perfumes,--nard, aloes, calamus, cinnamon,
saffron, amber, musk, stacte, galbanum, Smyrna myrrh, and
frankincense,--for the possession of which the Ægyptian pharaohs had
more than once embarked upon bloody wars.
As for silver, it was accounted of as common stone in the days of
Solomon, and redwood was of no more value than the common sycamores that
grow in the low plains in abundance.
Pools of stone, lined with porphyry, and marble cisterns and cool
fountains did the king build, commanding the water to be conveyed from
mountain springs that plunged down into the Kidron’s torrent; while
around the palace he planted gardens and groves, and cultivated a
vineyard in Baal-hamon.
And Solomon had forty thousand stalls for mules and for the horses for
his chariots, and twelve thousand for his cavalry; barley also and straw
for the horses were brought daily from the provinces. Thirty measures of
fine flour, and threescore measures of other meal; an hundred baths of
different wines; ten fat oxen, and twenty oxen out of the pastures, and
three hundred sheep, not counting harts and roebucks, and fallowdeer,
and fatted fowl,--all this, passing through the hands of twelve officers,
went daily for the table of Solomon, as well as for his court, his
retinue, and his guard. Threescore warriors, out of a number of five
hundred of the most stalwart and most valiant in all his army, held
watch by turns in the inner chambers of the palace. Five hundred
bucklers, covered with plates of gold, did the king command to be made
for his bodyguards.