2 Chronicles2chapter 2

2 Chronicles 2:1-2

Solomon determined to build an house for the name of the LORD, and an house for his kingdom names both projects in one sentence before either begins, and Chronicles keeps that order through the whole account, temple named first though the palace took longer to raise in Kings' fuller telling. The labor force is numbered here at the very outset, seventy thousand bearers, eighty thousand hewers and thirty six hundred overseers, a count the parallel exposition at 1 Kings 5:15-16 already carries with its small variance. Chronicles states the double purpose and the workforce in the same breath, as one royal act rather than two.

2 Chronicles 2:3-6

Solomon's letter to Huram opens on precedent, as thou didst deal with David my father, then states what the house is for: incense, shewbread, the morning and evening burnt offerings, sabbaths, new moons and the solemn feasts, an ordinance for ever to Israel. Then comes v6, the confession that the heaven and heaven of heavens cannot contain him, so the house is only a place to burn sacrifice before him and not a residence in the pagan sense. Kings keeps that theology for Solomon's dedication prayer at the temple's completion (1 Ki 8:27); Chronicles moves it forward into the building request itself, so the king writing for cedar already says plainly what the cedar cannot hold.

2 Chronicles 2:7-10

Solomon asks for one man skilled in gold, silver, brass, iron, purple, crimson and blue, and able to grave, set alongside the craftsmen David had already provided in Judah and Jerusalem, named again at 1 Chr 22:15. The timber order for cedar, fir and algum trees is paid in kind, wheat, barley, wine and oil for the hewers, a wage list fuller than Kings' parallel account, which gives wheat and oil alone. Solomon's own word for the scale of the work, wonderful great in v9, sets the measure the Chronicler holds through the rest of the building chapters.

2 Chronicles 2:11-12

Huram's reply opens with a confession before it names any timber, because the LORD hath loved his people, he hath made thee king over them, and v12 carries it further, blessed be the LORD God of Israel, that made heaven and earth. Kings gives Hiram's blessing in one shorter clause; Chronicles lets the Tyrian king name Israel's God at greater length as maker of heaven and earth. Whether Huram speaks as a convert to Israel's faith or as a king honoring a neighbor's god by that god's own name is read differently among the commentators, and the letter itself does not settle which.

2 Chronicles 2:13-16

Huram sends a craftsman called Huram my father's, an honorific title rather than kinship, whose mother is of the daughters of Dan and whose father was a man of Tyre. The pairing recalls Bezaleel of Judah given the tabernacle's chief gift and Aholiab of Dan set beside him at Exodus 31:6, so that a craftsman of Dan's line again stands at the side of Judah's king for the greater house. Kings names the same man's mother of the tribe of Naphtali, a variance the commentators read as a mother married into Naphtali from a Danite family, and neither text is set aside for the other. The letter closes with the wheat, barley, oil and wine confirmed and the timber promised by raft to Joppa, some forty miles short of Jerusalem by land.

2 Chronicles 2:17-18

Solomon numbers all the strangers in the land, the non-Israelite population left from the peoples Israel had not driven out, matching a count David had already taken of the same group. Kings' parallel account does not name this labor force strangers; Chronicles states it directly, a hundred fifty three thousand six hundred of them set to bear burdens, hew stone in the mountain and oversee the work. Gill reads the number as a picture of Gentiles built into the spiritual temple the church would become, an application he draws from Zechariah 6:15 rather than a claim the text makes for itself.