1 Kings5chapter 5

1 Kings 5:1-2

Hiram opens relations the way ancient kings normally did at a succession, sending an embassy of congratulation rather than testing the new king's strength. The clause naming him ever a lover of David explains what follows: the alliance passes to Solomon as a personal loyalty, not merely a treaty renewed by custom. Josephus and the Greek historian Menander both record a Hiram of Tyre corresponding with Solomon and cite documents once held in the Tyrian archives, outside testimony to a friendship the text states in one line.

1 Kings 5:3-5

Solomon gives Hiram the reason 1 Chronicles 22:8 states in full, that David's wars and the blood he shed kept the building for his son, and sets it beside the promise Nathan carried at 2 Samuel 7:12-13, thy son whom I will set upon thy throne, he shall build an house unto my name. The rest on every side is itself Solomon's proof that the promised hour has come; a king who can say the wars are over is a king free to keep his father's unfulfilled vow. The phrase an house unto the name of the Lord, rather than simply unto the Lord, opens the naming theology the chapter after next will carry to its full statement.

1 Kings 5:6-7

Solomon's admission that no one in Israel can skill to hew timber like the Sidonians sends the temple's timber outside the covenant people from the first plank; Wesley reads the Gentile labor as a type of the nations later built into Christ's own temple, a reading he names as his own rather than as the text's claim. Hiram answers with a blessing on the Lord who gave David so wise a son, language Adam Clarke takes as evidence of a genuine worshipper of Israel's God, while Jamieson, Fausset and Brown read it more cautiously, as a foreign king honoring another nation's deity by custom. The text itself gives only the blessing and leaves the man behind it for the reader to weigh.

1 Kings 5:8-9

Hiram's answer is a formal acceptance, I have considered the things which thou sentest to me for, which the commentators read as a written compact rather than a verbal nod, with 2 Chronicles 2:11 preserving the letter's fuller text. The timber travels down the coast lashed into floats to the nearest port, almost certainly Joppa, for the roughly forty mile land haul up to Jerusalem, the same route Ezra 3:7 uses for the second temple's cedar a generation after the exile. A king's desire for food and a nation's need for timber trade cleanly against one another; the arrangement runs on ordinary commerce, not tribute.

1 Kings 5:10-12

The exchange is precisely reciprocal, Hiram's cedar and fir for Solomon's wheat and beaten oil year by year, and the narrator credits the whole favorable arrangement to the wisdom the Lord gave Solomon, as he promised him, the promise of 3:12 already bearing fruit in statecraft and not only in judgment. Gill notes that a league with Tyre broke no command, since the Phoenicians stood outside the seven nations Israel was forbidden to covenant with. Peace between the two kings frames the whole building project: the temple rises inside an alliance with a neighboring people, not apart from them.

1 Kings 5:13-14

Barnes notes what the text does not say outright, that this is apparently the first time Israelites themselves are put under a forced levy, the very thing Samuel warned of at 1 Samuel 8:11-17 when the people asked for a king. Solomon rotates the thirty thousand a month in Lebanon and two months at home under Adoniram, a real mercy in the terms, yet it is Israelite men, not only the conquered peoples of 9:20-22, standing in the muster for the first time. The northern elders will name this same levy by memory at 12:4, asking Rehoboam to lighten the grievous service his father laid on them; the seed is planted here, chapters and a generation before it splits the kingdom.

1 Kings 5:15-16

A second and larger workforce stands behind the thirty thousand: threescore and ten thousand bearers of burdens and fourscore thousand hewers in the mountains, and Barnes reads these as the Amorite, Hittite, Perizzite, Hivite and Jebusite remnant David had already put to permanent tribute service at 1 Chronicles 22:2, the same class of workers 1 Kings 9:20-22 later says Solomon never made bondmen of Israel. The distinction matters: verses 13-14 conscript free Israelites on rotation, verses 15-16 describe a standing labor force drawn from the conquered peoples, and the text keeps the two groups named apart even while counting both. The officer total of three thousand three hundred is given as thirty six hundred at 2 Chronicles 2:18, a variant the commentators leave as a copying difference rather than a contradiction to settle.

1 Kings 5:17-18

The great, costly, hewed stones for a foundation no worshipper will ever see are, Wesley writes, magnificence for its own sake unless meant as a type of Christ, the foundation stone of Isaiah 28:16, a reading he offers and does not press as the text's own statement. Barnes points to stones of comparable size still visible at the southwest corner of Jerusalem's Haram wall in his own century, one measured near thirty nine feet long and near a hundred tons, physical scale that matches what the verse describes. The Giblites of Gebal, Hiram's most skilled masons by Joshua 13:5, close the chapter's roster of nations at work on Israel's house: Sidonian fellers, Tyrian and Israelite builders, and now Phoenician stonesquarers, all named before a single stone is set inside the walls.