1 Kings 7:23

THE MOLTEN SEA UPON IMAGES OF TWELVE BULLS

"And he made the molten sea of ten cubits from brim to brim, round in compass, and the height thereof was five cubits; and a line of thirty cubits compassed it round about. And under the brim of it round about were knops which did compass it, for ten cubits, compassing the sea round about: the knops were in two rows, cast when it was cast. It stood upon twelve oxen, three looking toward the north, and three looking toward the west, and three looking toward the south, and three looking toward the east; and the sea was set upon them above, and all their hinder parts were inward. And it was a handbreadth thick; and the brim thereof was wrought like the brim of a cup, like the flower of a lily: it held two thousand baths."

Here again, we find Solomon's utter disregard of God's commandment that, "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image" (Exodus 2:4,5). Even the Jewish historian Josephus agreed that in the images mentioned here, "Solomon sinned, and fell into an error about the observation of the laws, when he made the images of the brazen oxen that supported the brazen sea, and the images of lions about his own throne."[10] Of course, we should not be surprised that some allegedly Christian scholar quickly leaps into the breach in order to justify what Solomon did. Whiston wrote: "Josephus is certainly too severe on Solomon, who in making the cherubim and the twelve brazen oxen seems to have done no more than imitate the patterns left him by David, which were all given David by Divine inspiration!"[11]

Indeed! Indeed! And just where does one find all of those Divine instructions that God allegedly gave David for building a temple, which God never wanted in the first place? This writer has never discovered any such instructions in the Bible, and the Jewish historian Josephus also never heard of them. Furthermore, that God's prohibition against such images stood clearly before all Israel also appears in the condemnation of Jeroboam for the bull images that he installed at Dan and in Bethel (1 Kings 12:28,29).

"Ten cubits ... brim to brim ... thirty cubits compassed it round about" (1 Kings 7:23). Of course, the exact ratio of the diameter and the circumference of a circle Isaiah 3.1416 to ten; but only a nit-picker could criticize the round numbers of 3 to 10 (or 10 to 30) which we find here.

"It held two thousand baths" (1 Kings 7:26). Nobody knows for sure just what a bath was in terms of gallons, so the scholars guess the contents of the sea anywhere between 10,000 gallons and 17,000 gallons. There is no practical value whatever in knowing what the exact capacity of it really was.