2 Chronicles3chapter 3

2 Chronicles 3:1

Chronicles alone names the ground: mount Moriah, the only Old Testament verse joining the temple site to the mountain of Genesis 22, to David's altar at Ornan's threshingfloor in 1 Chronicles 21, and to the place where the Lord appeared to him. Kings never gives the temple a place name at all, so this verse is this book's own contribution to the geography of worship. The bench reads Abraham's mountain and David's altar as one range prepared across centuries for one house.

2 Chronicles 3:2-7

Chronicles gives the plan its own vocabulary. Where Kings names only the month, verse two adds the exact day, and the porch's height of a hundred and twenty cubits towers well above Kings' figure for the same building, a difference the bench reads as a copied number gone wrong rather than two towers. Gold of Parvaim and precious stones for beauty at verse six have no parallel in Kings, and the greater house of verses five and seven is this book's own name for the main chamber Kings simply calls the house.

2 Chronicles 3:8-9

Chronicles measures the holy of holies twice, in cubits matching the cube-shaped oracle Kings already describes, and then in weight, six hundred talents of gold for the room and fifty shekels for the nails alone. The book that will soon record the freewill offerings of 1 Chr 29 treats cost as testimony rather than excess, and these weights are Chronicles' own addition to the record. The upper chambers of verse nine are named and left unlocated, and the bench differs over whether they sat above the oracle or over the porch.

2 Chronicles 3:10-13

Verse ten's phrase for how the cherubim were made, image work, occurs nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible, and its sense is worked out from an Arabic cognate rather than known usage. Their wings match the twenty cubit span Kings already gives, filling the width of the house wall to wall. Their faces were inward, looking out from the sanctuary into the great chamber rather than bowed toward each other over the mercy seat as Moses' cherubim do in Exodus, so this pair stand less like the ark's own cover and more like two sentinels guarding what is behind them.

2 Chronicles 3:14

The veil hangs only here; Kings' temple account never mentions one, and its four materials, blue, purple, crimson and fine linen, are the tabernacle veil's own materials from Exodus 26:31, carried into Solomon's house with cherubim newly woven on it. Chronicles closes a gap Kings left open rather than adding an invention: the tabernacle had a veil, and the temple, its heir, keeps one too. Henry reads the torn veil of Matthew 27:51 back onto this cloth, the distance it once kept now opened by Christ's death, a link the church has drawn rather than a claim this verse makes on its own.

2 Chronicles 3:15-17

Chronicles tells the same two pillars in three verses against Kings' eight, keeping the names Jachin and Boaz but leaving out the network, the lily work and the garden imagery Kings already carries at the temple door. The pomegranate count differs from Kings as well, a hundred here against Kings' two hundred on each chapiter, a variant the bench treats as textual rather than as two separate accounts. Verse sixteen's phrase as in the oracle is itself uncertain in the Hebrew, read as a probable copying slip rather than evidence of festoons inside the most holy place.