2 Chronicles4chapter 4

2 Chronicles 4:1

Chronicles supplies the altar's dimensions that Kings never gives, twenty cubits square and ten cubits high, four times the length and breadth of the five-cubit altar Moses built for the tabernacle. The larger house takes a larger altar for the same office: every sacrifice still crosses brass before anything reaches gold. Barnes reads the addition as the book's habit of filling in what Kings left blank, and Henry sets the altar first in a procession of vessels he reads as pointing toward Christ.

2 Chronicles 4:2-5

The molten sea repeats 1 Kings 7 with two small differences the commentators note rather than resolve. Its capacity is given as three thousand baths against Kings' two thousand, and the oxen encircling it under the brim stand where Kings reads knops, likely gourds, a reading Barnes traces to an early copyist expecting oxen once the sea was named. Ten cubits across and five high, it stood for the priests' washing alone, apart from the ten lavers that follow it.

2 Chronicles 4:6-9

Where the tabernacle held one candlestick and one table of shewbread, the temple holds ten of each, five on the right hand and five on the left, and ten lavers beside the one great sea. The division of labor is exact: the sea washed the priests, the lavers washed what was offered, one vessel for persons and ten for sacrifices multiplying with the larger house. Henry reads the ten candlesticks against the New Testament's seven, the one lampstand of Moses' day becoming the churches of Revelation, a use he draws rather than the text states.

2 Chronicles 4:10-18

Huram, sent by the king of Tyre, finishes the whole of Solomon's bronze work: the sea set toward the southeast, the lavers, and the pillars with their pomegranates already named in chapter three, all cast in the clay ground of the Jordan plain between Succoth and Zeredathah. Verse sixteen calls him Huram his father, an honorific for a master craftsman rather than a claim of kinship, the same title the king of Tyre used of him. The metal inventory closes at verse eighteen with brass beyond any count, an abundance the book keeps stating rather than assuming.

2 Chronicles 4:19-22

The record narrows from brass to gold for the house itself: the golden altar, the tables for the shewbread again multiplied beyond the tabernacle's one, the candlesticks and their lamps, and down to the tongs, snuffers, basons, spoons and censers, all of pure gold. Even the doors of the most holy place and of the temple are overlaid in gold, so that nothing between the brass altar in the court and the innermost door is left unadorned. Barnes notes that Kings names only a single table while Chronicles' plural implies as many as ten, matching the ten candlesticks of verse seven.