King Shlomo Dedicates the Temple in Jerusalem; Fire Descends on the Altar

For more than four centuries after crossing the Jordan, the Ark of the Covenant had rested in tents — first at Gilgal, then at Shiloh for almost four hundred years, then at Nov and at Givon after the Philistines briefly captured it. King David had wanted to build a permanent House and was told he could not. Too much of his life had been spent at war. What a father could not do himself, he prepared for his son. David bought the land on Mount Moriah, gathered the cedar and gold and copper, drew the plans, and handed the project to Shlomo.

Construction ran for seven years. Thirty thousand Israelite workers rotated through Lebanon in shifts of ten thousand a month. King Chiram of Tyre floated the great cedars down the coast on rafts. Every stone was dressed at the quarry before it arrived, so that no hammer, chisel, or iron tool was ever heard on the mountain while the House was being built.

The dedication filled fourteen days of feasting. The priests carried the Ark up the mountain and the entire nation followed. Standing on a copper platform in the courtyard, Shlomo prayed seven prayers aloud. Fire came down from heaven onto the altar the moment he finished. A cloud filled the room so completely that the priests could no longer stand to serve. The first Yom Kippur ever kept inside a Temple followed. Only then did the people return home, the text says, joyful and content for all the good God had done.

This House would stand for four hundred and ten years. Every dispatch that follows will concern what was done to it, what was done to the people who lived under it, or what those people did to themselves. To mourn what fell on the ninth of Av, one has to first picture what was raised here — a room with wings of gold over an ark of wood, and a fire that fell from the sky when a young king finished speaking.