Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to 2 Chronicles · About this commentary
The Furnishings of Bronze and Gold
2 Chronicles 4:1-22
1 Then he made an altar of bronze, twenty cubits long, twenty cubits wide, and ten cubits high. · WEB
Almost everything made for the house is for washing, burning or lighting, and the inventory is an inventory of work.
The chapter is a list, and what the list is made of is the point. An altar. A great basin. Ten smaller basins. Ten lampstands, ten tables, a hundred bowls, pots, shovels, forks, snuffers, fire pans.
Read it for function rather than for value and the house changes character. This is not a treasury and it is not a hall of audience. It is equipment. Almost every object is for washing something, burning something, carrying something away, or holding light.
The washing is specified with unusual care. Ten basins stand five to a side for rinsing what is offered, but the sea was for the priests to wash in 2 Chronicles 4:6. Two systems, kept separate: one for the sacrifice, one for the men handling it. Neither substitutes for the other.
The great basin itself is described at length — round, a handbreadth thick, its rim shaped like the flower of a lily, standing on twelve bronze oxen facing outward three to each compass point 2 Chronicles 4:2–5. A vessel of water sits on the backs of animals looking outward in every direction, in a court where every visitor would pass it.
The lampstands and tables are made according to the ordinance concerning them 2 Chronicles 4:7, which is the second time in three chapters that a specification is credited to an older instruction rather than to the builder.
Two notes about the making are worth keeping. The bronze was cast far from the city, in the clay ground of the Jordan plain 2 Chronicles 4:17 — the heavy industrial work done where the clay was, and the finished pieces hauled up. And the quantity defeated the accounting: the weight of the bronze could not be determined 2 Chronicles 4:18.
That is a strange admission in a book that counts everything, and it is the second time the writer has declined a total 1 Chronicles 27:24. Here the reason is practical rather than theological, but the effect is the same. A record obsessed with numbers marks the places where the numbers ran out.
The gold objects close the chapter, and they are the small ones — flowers, lamps, tongs, spoons, snuffers 2 Chronicles 4:21–22. The purest metal in the building went into the tools for trimming wicks.
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