1 Reyes 9

The LORD appears to Solomon again

¹After Solomon had completed the house of the LORD and the royal palace, and everything else he had set his heart on making,

²the LORD appeared to Solomon a second time, as he had appeared to him at Gibeon. ³The LORD said to him, “I have heard your prayer and the plea for mercy you made to me. I have set apart as holy this house you have built, and I have put my name there forever. My eyes and my heart will always be there. ⁴As for you, if you live before me as your father David did, with a whole heart and with uprightness, doing everything I have commanded you and keeping my statutes and my rulings, ⁵then I will make the throne of your kingdom over Israel secure forever, as I promised your father David when I said, ‘There will always be a man of your line on the throne of Israel.’ ⁶But if you or your descendants turn away from following me, and do not keep my commandments and my statutes that I have set before you, and instead go off to serve other gods and bow down to them, ⁷then I will cut Israel off from the land I have given them, and I will cast this house that I have made holy for my name out of my sight. Israel will become a proverb and a byword among all the peoples. ⁸And this house, high as it stands, will leave everyone who passes by it appalled. They will hiss and ask, ‘Why has the LORD dealt like this with this land and this house?’^{a 9}And people will answer, ‘Because they abandoned the LORD their God, who brought their ancestors out of the land of Egypt, and they embraced other gods and worshiped and served them. That is why the LORD has brought all this disaster on them.’”

Solomon’s other works

¹⁰At the end of the twenty years it took Solomon to build the two houses, the LORD’s house and the royal palace, ¹¹since Hiram king of Tyre had supplied Solomon with all the cedar and cypress timber and gold he wanted, King Solomon gave Hiram twenty towns in the region of Galilee. ¹²But when Hiram came from Tyre to see the towns Solomon had given him, they did not please him. ¹³He said, “What kind of towns are these you have given me, my brother?” So they have been called the land of Cabul to this day.^b

¹⁴Hiram had sent the king about 9,000 pounds of gold. ¹⁵This is the account of the forced labor that King Solomon conscripted to build the house of the LORD, his own palace, the Millo, Jerusalem’s wall, and the cities of Hazor, Megiddo and Gezer. ¹⁶Pharaoh king of Egypt had come up and captured Gezer. He burned it down, killed the Canaanites who lived in the city, and gave it as a dowry to his daughter, Solomon’s wife. ¹⁷So Solomon rebuilt Gezer, and Lower Beth-horon, ¹⁸Baalath, and Tamar in the wilderness, within the land,^{c 19}and all the store cities that Solomon had, the towns for his chariots and for his horsemen, and whatever Solomon desired to build in Jerusalem, in Lebanon, and throughout all the land he ruled. ²⁰As for all the people who were left of the Amorites, Hittites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites, who were not Israelites, ²¹their descendants who were still left in the land, whom the Israelites had not been able to devote to destruction, Solomon conscripted as forced labor, as slaves, to this day. ²²But Solomon did not make slaves of any of the Israelites. They were his soldiers, his officials, his commanders, his officers, and the commanders of his chariots and his horsemen.

²³These were the chief officers in charge of Solomon’s work: 550 of them, who directed the people doing the work. ²⁴Once Pharaoh’s daughter had moved up from the city of David to the house Solomon had built for her, he built the Millo. ²⁵Three times a year Solomon would present burnt offerings and peace offerings on the altar that he himself had built for the LORD, and with them he burned incense before the LORD. And so he finished the house.^{d 26}King Solomon also built a fleet of ships at Ezion-geber, near Eloth in the land of Edom, on the shore of the Red Sea. ²⁷Hiram sent his own servants with the fleet, sailors who knew the sea, to serve alongside Solomon’s servants. ²⁸They went to Ophir and brought back from there about 31,500 pounds of gold, which they delivered to King Solomon.