Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to 2 Chronicles · About this commentary
The House Begun on Moriah
2 Chronicles 3:1-17
1 Then Solomon began to build Yahweh’s house at Jerusalem on Mount Moriah, where Yahweh appeared to David his father, which he prepared in the place that David had appointed, on the threshing floor of Ornan the Jebusite. · WEB
The site is named before the dimensions, because where the house stands is the argument the measurements cannot make.
The first verse gives the location three times over, and the accumulation is deliberate. The house is built at Jerusalem on Mount Moriah, where Yahweh appeared to David his father, on the ground David had appointed, on the threshing floor of Ornan the Jebusite 2 Chronicles 3:1.
Every clause of that reaches back. The threshing floor is where the plague stopped and where fire fell on an altar David built 1 Chronicles 21:26. The name Moriah appears once before in Scripture, as the district where Abraham was sent to offer his son and where a substitute was provided instead Genesis 22:2 Genesis 22:13.
The site is therefore identified by two occasions on which a life was spared, and by nothing else. Not by height, not by centrality, not by a vision granted to the builder. Solomon inherits a place, and the writer states its history before he states a single measurement.
The date follows, exact to the month 2 Chronicles 3:2, and then the dimensions begin — and they are modest. Sixty cubits by twenty is a building most people could walk around in a minute. This was never a large structure by the standards of the region, and the account does not pretend otherwise.
What it was instead is dense. Gold on the beams, the thresholds, the walls, the doors; six hundred talents on the innermost room alone; the weight of the nails specified 2 Chronicles 3:8–9. The value is concentrated rather than spread, and it increases as the rooms get smaller and less accessible. Most of what was spent, nobody would ever see.
Cherubim run through the decoration — engraved on the walls, worked into the veil, and carved at full size in the most holy place with their wings spanning the whole room 2 Chronicles 3:10–13. One detail about the pair is easy to pass and is not decorative: their faces were toward the house 2 Chronicles 3:13. They face outward, toward the room where people stand, rather than inward toward each other.
The two pillars are set at the entrance and given names 2 Chronicles 3:17. They carry nothing; they stand free in front of the porch. The one thing a visitor met before entering was a pair of columns that held up no roof and bore, as names, two statements about establishment and strength.
held with reason What this mark means