1 Kings 7:2

2. He built also Rather, and he built, for the house here mentioned is not a building entirely distinct from all his house, (1 Kings 7:1,) but an important part of it.

House of the forest of Lebanon So called from the vast amount of Lebanon cedar used in building it. This part of the palace was the great hall of state, and was large enough, Josephus says, “to contain a multitude for hearing causes and taking cognizance of suits.” In it also were deposited the king’s wondrous targets and shields of beaten gold. 1 Kings 10:16-17. It was one hundred and fifty feet long by seventy-five wide. (Marked A in plan.)

Upon four rows of cedar pillars Interpreters have been puzzled to determine the position of these four rows of pillars. Fergusson, following the English version, tries to reconcile the manifest inconsistency of “forty-five pillars, fifteen in a row,” (mentioned in next verse,) with the four rows here mentioned, by supposing that three rows of columns stood free, and the fourth was built into the outer wall. But this is altogether unsatisfactory, and rests upon an erroneous interpretation of 1 Kings 7:3. Thenius supposes the pillars to have run round the entire hall on the inside, thus affording, as the Vulgate suggests, promenading places ( deambulacra) between the rows of pillars, but his plan supposes four hundred pillars, far too great a number to crowd into a building of one hundred cubits by fifty. The great hall of the palace at Shushan, three hundred and forty-three by two hundred and forty-four feet, had, in all, but seventy-two columns, and its great central hall but thirty-six, and all standing nearly twenty feet apart. (Loftus, Chaldea, p. 367.) The central hall of the great palace of Xerxes at Persepolis, about two hundred feet square, also had thirty-six columns, standing the same distance apart, and also in six rows. W.L. Alexander, who follows mainly the plans of Thenius, (in Kitto’s Cyclopaedia of Bib. Lit.,) objects to his arrangement of the pillars, and “ventures to suggest that the four courses of pillars were not on the same area, but one above the other, corresponding to the four floors of the building.” But this would interfere with the side-chambers mentioned in the next verse. It is better to understand them as all resting upon the first floor, and supporting the chambers above, the four rows running lengthwise through the great hall. If, now, we suppose four rows of nine pillars in each row, placed equidistant, and enclosed by walls on the four sides, we meet all the necessary conditions of the case, and have a great hall of precisely the same number of columns as the central halls of the great palaces of Susa and Persepolis. According to this arrangement, the rows would be ten cubits apart, allowing ten cubits between the outer row and the wall on each side.

Beams upon the pillars On which the floor of the first row of upper chambers might rest.