1 Chronicles22chapter 22

The materials list is a construction schedule. Masons are set to cut dressed stone — squared blocks, worked at the quarry so they could be laid without tools on site. Iron is stockpiled for the nails and the clamps that held stonework together. Bronze is gathered 'beyond weighing,' and cedar logs come in from Sidon and Tyre by sea because the timber of Lebanon had no substitute.

The workforce is drawn from the resident foreigners in the land, set as stonecutters. Labor policy in the region ran that way, and Israel's own law protected the foreigner while still assigning him the heavy work; the later record is careful to say that Israelites were not made slaves.

The reason David is disqualified is stated twice and plainly: he has shed much blood on the earth in God's sight. It is not called a sin here. It is a matter of fitness — the house of rest is to be built by a man of rest, which is what Solomon's name means.

The gold and silver quantities are staggering — a hundred thousand talents of gold — and honesty requires saying that scholars differ on how to read them. Some argue the word rendered 'talent' covered a smaller unit in older records; others take the figures as the accumulated tribute of a generation of empire, stated in round numbers as ancient royal inscriptions regularly did.