1 Chronicles 22:12

DAVID'S FURTHER CHARGE TO SOLOMON

"Only Jehovah give thee discretion and understanding, and give the charge concerning Israel; that so thou mayest keep the law of Jehovah thy God. Then shalt thou prosper, if thou observe to do the statutes and the ordinances which Jehovah charged Moses with concerning Israel: be strong and of good courage; fear not, neither be dismayed. Now, behold, in my affliction I have prepared for the house of Jehovah a hundred thousand talents of gold, and a thousand thousand talents of silver, and of brass and iron without weight; for it is in abundance: amber also and of stone have I prepared; and thou mayest add thereto. Moreover there are workmen with thee in abundance, hewers and workers of stone and timber, and all men that are skillful in every manner of work: of the gold, the silver, and the brass, and the iron, there is no number. Arise and be doing, for Jehovah is with thee."

The significance here is the reference to the Law of God through Moses, a reference to Exodus 20:1, and the direct quotations from Exodus 3:4 and Joshua 1:6-9 and Deuteronomy 31:24, thus providing incontrovertible evidence of the prior existence of the Pentateuch long centuries prior to the discovery of that allegedly `false document' in the reign of Josiah. No wonder the radical critics hate Chronicles. An example of that hatred is the following.

"This chapter is full of general and exaggerated statements. No statement suggests a trustworthy historian. That David contemplated building a temple is likely, and he might have made some preparations for it, but the Chronicler's description must have been drawn by inference ... assisted by a vivid imagination ... a careless list of such things as happened to occur to the writer."[7]

Regarding the tremendous amounts of gold and silver mentioned here, Elmslie referred to the passage as hyperbole,[8] There is also the question of exactly what constituted a talent in the times of Solomon. "Any accurate calculation of the value of the silver and gold mentioned here is a hopeless task, because of the uncertainly of our data, our uncertain knowledge of the Hebrew weights of money, and our total ignorance of the relative value of those precious metals to the commodities of life."[9]

The Roman historian Pliny wrote that Cyrus in his subjugation of Asia took half a million talents of silver and 34,000 pounds of gold,[10] a sum not too very far from the immense amount mentioned here.