1 Kings 6:17
And the main hall in front of this room was forty cubits long.
BSB
ASV
And the house, that is, the temple before the oracle, was forty cubits long.
KJV
And the house, that is, the temple before it, was forty cubits long.
Rare words are the text's own signal of a deliberate thread: the fewer the occurrences, the more the places it appears belong together.
We have said that the temple itself before the doors of the oracle was a type of the present church. Hence it was rightly forty cubits long, for this number is often used to signify the present labor of the faithful, just as the number …
And the house, that is, the temple before it,.... The holy place, which was before the of holies: was forty cubits long; and which, with the most holy place, being twenty cubits, as in the preceding verse, made the length of the whole house sixty cubits, as in 1Ki 6:2.
The cedar-wood was beautifully embellished with figures in relievo, representing clusters of foliage, open flowers, cherubims, and palm trees. The whole interior was overlaid with gold, so that neither wood nor stone was seen; nothing met the eye but pure gold, either plain or richly chased.
