1 Kings 7 - Introduction

VII.

The first section of this chapter (1 Kings 7:1) describes briefly, but with some technical details (not always easy of interpretation), the building of the royal palace, including in this the hall of state, or “the house of the forest of Lebanon,” with its porch (1 Kings 7:2), the hall (or porch) of judgment (1 Kings 7:7), the royal residence, and the residence of the queen (1 Kings 7:8). These must have constituted a large group of buildings enclosed in a great court, situate on the Western Hill (“the city of David”), which is opposite the Temple on Mount Moriah, with a viaduct crossing the intervening valley (ordinarily called the Tyropæon), by which the king went up to the House of the Lord (see 1 Kings 10:5; 1 Chronicles 26:16; 2 Chronicles 9:4). Josephus (Antt. viii., 1 Kings 5) supplies a few additional details, but his account is rather vague and rhetorical.

The house of the forest of Lebanon — evidently so called from the forest of cedar pillars which supported it — was apparently a great hall of audience, 150 feet long, 75 feet wide, and 45 feet high; along it ran longitudinally rows of pillars, supporting cedar beams and walls over them, and cedar roofs. In 1 Kings 7:2 it is said that there were “four rows of pillars,” and yet in 1 Kings 7:3 that the cedar beams rested on “forty-five pillars, fifteen in a row.” The difficulty thus created, of course vanishes if we are content to accept the LXX. reading, which has in 1 Kings 7:2 “three rows” instead of “four.” But this is probably a correction made to avoid the apparent contradiction, and gives no explanation of the origin of the curious reading of the Hebrew text. It is, perhaps, a better explanation of the passage to suppose that one row of pillars was built into the side wall, so that only three would bear the cedar beams. Josephus says that the hall was built after “the Corinthian manner,” that is (see Dict. of the Bible, PALACE), with a clerestory. In this case it would be not unlike a Basilica, having a higher central aisle between two rows of pillars, with a wall and windows above each, and two lower sides, or aisles, in one of which the side row of pillars was built into the wall, in the other standing clear of the wall. It is clear from 1 Kings 7:4, that there were three rows of windows, one, perhaps, in the clerestory, and two in the side walls.