1 Kings 6

What happens in this chapter

The chapter opens with a date: the 480th year after the exodus, Solomon's fourth year, the month Ziv. The house is sixty cubits long, twenty wide and thirty high, with a porch across the front and three storeys of side rooms against its walls, and the stone is dressed at the quarry so that no hammer or iron tool is heard on site. Midway, the word of the LORD comes to Solomon: if he walks in God's statutes, God will live among Israel and not forsake them. Inside, the walls are lined with carved cedar and the floor with cypress, and the inner sanctuary, a cube of twenty cubits, is overlaid with gold and given two olive-wood cherubim ten cubits high and doors of olive wood. Begun in Ziv of the fourth year and finished in Bul of the eleventh, the house took seven years.

What the lab shows, and where to look

Solomon's Temple lab builds the house to this chapter's cubits and lets you switch to the longer royal cubit. Start outside with Solomon's Temple, then go round to The side chambers: three storeys whose rooms widen from five to seven cubits as the wall steps back, as verse 6 describes. Inside, The holy place runs forty cubits, its cedar carved and overlaid with gold, and through the olive-wood doors lies The most holy place, the twenty-cubit cube. The number and spacing of the windows are artistic, and the lab says so. Temples Side by Side stacks this house on the same spot as the Tabernacle and the later temples, which shows the Tabernacle's plan doubled; the verse page for 1 Kings 6:1 goes into the 480 years.

• Solomon's Temple · Solomon's Temple
• The side chambers · Solomon's Temple
• The holy place (hekal) · Solomon's Temple
• The most holy place (debir) · Solomon's Temple
• Stacked on one spot · Temples Side by Side
• 1 Kings 6:1

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