DESPITE THE ABSENCE OF MATERIAL REMAINS, THE FAMOUS STRUCTURE WHICH the Bible attributes to Shelomo, known traditionally as Solomon’s Temple or the First Temple, is of central importance in the book of Kings and in Israelite thought, both before and after the destruction of Jerusalem in 587 B.C.E. As encountered in I Kings 6–8 and elsewhere, the Temple had three main functions: religious, as a means for obtaining forgiveness and atonement from YHWH; political, as a visible symbol of Shelomo’s grandeur; and ideological, as a locus for the important triad of God, king, and city.
The purely religious aspect of the Temple is an echo of the extended description of the Dwelling (or Tabernacle) and its attendant sacrificial cult in the central sections of the Torah, Exod. 25–Num. 10 and beyond. (See “On Animal Sacrifice” in my The Five Books of Moses.) As was the case with the earlier sanctuary, the symmetry of the Temple structure is significant, pointing to the perfection of God through its use of balanced measurements. The basic scheme of the Temple is also identical to that of the Dwelling: a large rectangle divided into two squares, with the innermost one being the “Holiest Holy-Place” or Shrine, housing either the Coffer (Ark) or later, apparently, nothing at all, in contrast to the divine statuary of surrounding cultures. The Temple’s sacrificial system and priestly hierarchy also mirror the symbolism and function of the wilderness shrine. Our text contains a long prayer uttered by the king (I Kings 8), in which the rationale for the Temple’s existence is spelled out. Even though much of this chapter may have been written considerably later, it does function to set the Temple apart from the Dwelling on a rhetorical level.
The key element in the Temple’s religious function is Israel’s relationship to its God through animal and grain sacrifice, with accompanying prayers. If not offered properly, or in their absence, the immediate result is understood to be the critical loss of communication between the human and divine. One can thus grasp the terrible despair experienced by the Israelites in the sixth-century B.C.E. Babylonian Exile, well expressed in books such as Lamentations, in which the community bewailed the loss of the Temple, seen as a chief means of contact with God.
The reader of these chapters in Kings will not fail to note the very large dimensions and sizes of the objects described. The two great columns flanking the entrance to the Temple, for instance, are portrayed as being over thirty feet tall; the winged-sphinx throne in the inner sanctum would have been fifteen feet in height. This reflects a well-known tendency in ancient societies to construct the earthly abode of the gods as befitting their power; famously, a pagan temple unearthed in 1976 at ’Ain Dara in Syria has a giant footprint, presumably belonging to the goddess Ishtar, in front of the portal.
Politically, Kings sets both the initial description of the building process and the Temple structure itself in the context of Shelomo’s wealth and accomplishments. Just as his table is sumptuous, his provisions massive, his borders expansive, his bureaucrats numerous, his wisdom world-famous, and his overall building plans ambitious, so too his Temple is portrayed as memorable on all counts. Prized cedar wood has to be imported in great quantities from Lebanon; the structure is inlaid with gold throughout; and all Israel is impressed into building service, with crucial agricultural manpower being depleted in order to fuel the building project. Thus, as with kings in all societies, ancient and medieval, the expense and magnificence of a religious building also function as a symbol of royal power.
Perhaps most important in the larger ancient Near Eastern context is the Temple’s anchoring function as a great ideological symbol of the bond among deity, dynasty, and capital city. The Temple makes the royal house and Jerusalem inseparable in their confirmation by YHWH. As Levenson (1987) has shown, the Temple Mount (Tziyyon/Zion) comes to substitute totally for Mount Sinai, where YHWH had come down in fire to speak to the Israelites and give them his laws. In other words, the city on a hill now takes the place of the sacred mountain of revelation, and the king in some sense takes the place of Moshe (alternatively, he serves as the earthly representative of the divine king). In smiling upon David’s dynasty, located in Jerusalem, the city of the “House of YHWH,” God re-creates the idealized situation portrayed at Sinai. There, receiving and keeping the covenant was to protect the Israelites in their wanderings; here, the existence and functioning of the Temple is to preserve them in their land, betokening divine protection from hostile neighbors and assurance of material prosperity.
Physically, the Temple as described in Kings would have been larger than any other contemporary building in the ancient Near East. Its size, combined with its central and elevated location in Jerusalem, must have given strong support to the idea that YHWH was overseeing the king and the people and allowing his presence to dwell among them. This certainly would have strengthened the existing institutions of monarchy and priesthood, both of which were understood to uphold the stability of society, and assured their own power in the political realm. A similar arrangement prevailed all over the ancient Near East.
With all the emphasis Kings, On the Temple as a potent, multifaceted symbol, some caution should be exercised as to its place in the hearts of average Israelites in the monarchic period. Some scholars have theorized that the Temple may have been quite secondary to these folk, focused as they were on the hardships of everyday existence on the not always fertile soil of Israel. Its version of the sacrificial cult may also not have been exactly what was done at local shrines, which, as the book of Kings and prophetic texts demonstrate, played an equally if not more significant role in daily life. Kings does not portray a centralized cult until the days of Hizkiyyahu’s reform in the late eighth century, and the Northern Kingdom’s appropriation of the Temple’s function in new sanctuaries at Dan and Bet-El, after Shelomo’s death, gives strong evidence of varied local traditions, identified in the Bible as pagan or at the very least syncretistic (combining gods from different systems). A stronger sense of common purpose probably obtained after the exiles returned from Babylonian Exile and rebuilt the Temple on a more modest scale, at the end of the sixth century. It was subsequently expanded into its more renowned form by Herod the Great in the late first century B.C.E. It is this “Second” Temple to which later, nascent Judaism and Christianity most readily related, especially after its destruction by the Romans in 70 C.E.
The detailed description of the construction of the Temple in I Kings 6–7 has proved somewhat of a puzzle to interpreters, including modern scholars. For traditionalists, it is an exact blueprint, with final details to be filled in by ancient and medieval authorities. However, many of the technical terms used in the text are no longer clear, and it is difficult to come up with any kind of exact rendering. Over the centuries, artists have striven to portray the Temple, but more often than not they have created it in the architectural image of their own era. More fruitfully, other interpreters have focused on what are taken to be symbolic aspects of the structure and its appurtenances, noting, for instance, that the molten “sea” of I Kings 7:23–26 is not only a giant basin for the priests’ washing but may also be a representation of primeval cosmic waters, appropriate in a House of God. Others have connected such varied information as the conspicuous floral decorations, the winged-sphinxes on the Coffer (Ark), and the Gihon spring near Jerusalem to the appearance of these in the Garden of Eden story of Gen. 2–3, thus suggesting that the Temple recalls the “perfect” world before the expulsion of the First Parents.
Recent help in conceptualizing the Temple physically comes from archaeology. Several sites excavated in Syria have uncovered structures which, while considerably smaller, conform to the basic features of the biblical Temple. Dever (2001) has listed the similarities, which include a three-part, successive floor plan, socalled dressed stones, alternating courses of stone and wood (to provide extra earthquake protection), decorations such as lions, “cherubs,” and pomegranates, and decorated braziers for providing light. These are but a few of the common features. Dever thus understands the Solomonic structure as strongly akin to regional Bronze and Iron Age temples, making it highly unlikely that it was “invented” in the fantasy of much later (i.e., Hellenistic) writers who, some have asserted, were seeking to restore Israel’s lost glory.
But the Temple and its builder, as presented in the opening section of Kings, transcend whatever mundane realities may have existed in tenth-century Israel. The book has fixed them forever as potent symbols of a Golden Age, and, as such, they have fired the imagination of Jews and Christians for millennia.