2 Chronicles2chapter 2

The labor figures describe a public works project: seventy thousand men to carry loads, eighty thousand to cut stone in the hills, and three thousand six hundred overseers. They were drawn from the resident foreigners in the land, counted in a separate census for the purpose.

The correspondence with Huram of Tyre follows the standard form of royal letters between allied kings — greeting, statement of the request, terms of payment, and the reply. What Solomon offers is food: wheat, barley, wine, and oil. Tyre was a merchant city crammed onto the coast with the mountains at its back and almost no farmland, so it bought its bread from inland. Timber for grain was the natural trade, and it ran for centuries in both directions.

The logistics are spelled out. Lebanese cedar and cypress were felled in the mountains, dragged to the shore, lashed into rafts, floated down the coast to Joppa, and hauled up the road to Jerusalem from there.

Huram sends a master craftsman skilled in gold, silver, bronze, iron, stone, wood, dyed yarns, and engraving. Chronicles says his mother was of the daughters of Dan; Kings says of the tribe of Naphtali. The usual reconciliation is that she was Danite by descent and living in Naphtali's territory, or that the two records preserve different sides of her family.