Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to 2 Chronicles · About this commentary
The Letter to Huram
2 Chronicles 2:1-18
1 Now Solomon decided to build a house for Yahweh’s name, and a house for his kingdom. · WEB
The builder tells a foreign king what the house is for, and admits in the same breath that no house can hold the one it is for.
Solomon decided to build a house for Yahweh's name, and a house for his kingdom 2 Chronicles 2:1. Two buildings, and the order in which they are named is kept throughout.
The correspondence with Tyre takes up most of the chapter. What Solomon puts in his letter reads as a statement of purpose. He does not describe the architecture. He describes the schedule: incense, the continual bread, burnt offerings morning and evening, on the Sabbaths, on the new moons, and on the set feasts 2 Chronicles 2:4.
So the house is defined by what will happen in it rather than by what it will look like. And the calendar he lists is old. Every item on it was prescribed in the law generations earlier, and he closes the sentence by saying so: this is an ordinance forever to Israel. The most ambitious building project in the nation's history is presented as a facility for keeping an existing appointment.
Then the qualification, and it is the theological center of the chapter. Who is able to build him a house, since heaven and the heaven of heavens can't contain him? Who am I then, that I should build him a house, except just to burn incense before him? 2 Chronicles 2:6.
The builder undercuts his own project in the letter commissioning it. No structure can house what he is housing. The most that can be claimed is that offerings will be made in it.
That sentence prevents a misreading of everything after it. The gold, the dimensions, the six hundred talents on one room — none of it is an attempt to accommodate God. The house is a place appointed for a transaction, not a residence for a guest.
The practical arrangements are then settled as ordinary business between two heads of state. Timber is cut in the north, rafted down the coast, hauled inland, and paid for in wheat, barley, wine and oil at named quantities 2 Chronicles 2:10 2 Chronicles 2:16.
Huram's reply does something a foreign king was under no obligation to do. He blesses Yahweh, the God of Israel, who made heaven and earth 2 Chronicles 2:12. And he reads Solomon's accession as evidence of God's regard for the people rather than for the man: because Yahweh loves his people, he has made you king over them 2 Chronicles 2:11.
The craftsman he sends is of mixed descent, an Israelite mother from Dan and a father of Tyre 2 Chronicles 2:13–14. He is skilled in every material the work will use. The master workman on the house is a foreigner's subject and half an outsider, chosen for what he can do.
settled What this mark means