The LORD’s Response to Solomon
And it was, when Solomon finished building the house of the LORD and the house of the king, and every desire of Solomon that he delighted to do,
that the LORD appeared to Solomon a second time, as he had appeared to him at Gibeon.
And the LORD said to him: “I have heard your prayer and your plea that you made before me. I have consecrated this house that you built, to set my name there forever; and my eyes and my heart will be there all the days.
And you — if you walk before me as David your father walked, in wholeness of heart and in uprightness, doing according to all that I have commanded you, and you keep my statutes and my judgments,
then I will raise up the throne of your kingdom over Israel forever, as I spoke concerning David your father, saying, ‘There shall not be cut off for you a man from the throne of Israel.’
But if you surely turn back — you and your sons — from following me, and do not keep my commandments and my statutes that I have set before you, and you go and serve other gods and prostrate yourselves to them,
then I will cut off Israel from the face of the ground that I gave them; and the house that I consecrated for my name I will send away from my presence; and Israel will become a proverb and a byword among all the peoples.
And this house will become a heap of ruins; everyone passing by it will be appalled and will hiss, and they will say, ‘Why has the LORD done so to this land and to this house?’
And they will say: ‘Because they abandoned the LORD their God, who brought their fathers out of the land of Egypt, and took hold of other gods, and prostrated themselves to them and served them — therefore the LORD has brought all this evil on them.’”
Solomon’s Additional Achievements
And it was at the end of twenty years, in which Solomon built the two houses — the house of the LORD and the house of the king —
Hiram, king of Tyre, having supplied Solomon with cedar timber and cypress timber and gold, all his desire — then King Solomon gave Hiram twenty cities in the land of Galilee.
And Hiram came out from Tyre to see the cities that Solomon had given him, and they were not right in his eyes.
And he said, “What are these cities you have given me, my brother?” And he called them the land of Cabul, to this day.
And Hiram had sent to the king a hundred and twenty talents of gold.
And this is the account of the forced labor that King Solomon raised, to build the house of the LORD, and his own house, and the Millo, and the wall of Jerusalem, and Hazor, and Megiddo, and Gezer.
Pharaoh, king of Egypt, had come up and captured Gezer and burned it with fire, and killed the Canaanite who lived in the city; and he gave it as a parting gift to his daughter, Solomon’s wife.
And Solomon built Gezer, and Lower Beth-horon,
and Baalath, and Tadmor in the wilderness, in the land,
and all the storage cities that Solomon had, and the cities for chariots, and the cities for horsemen — and the desire of Solomon, whatever he desired to build in Jerusalem, and in Lebanon, and in all the land of his dominion.
All the people who were left of the Amorite, the Hittite, the Perizzite, the Hivite, and the Jebusite — who were not of the sons of Israel —
their sons who were left after them in the land, whom the sons of Israel were not able to devote to destruction: Solomon raised them for slave labor, to this day.
But of the sons of Israel Solomon made no slave; for they were the men of war, and his servants, and his officials, and his officers, and the commanders of his chariots and his horsemen.
These were the chief deputies who were over Solomon’s work: five hundred and fifty, holding sway over the people who did the work.
As soon as Pharaoh’s daughter came up from the city of David to her house that he had built for her, then he built the Millo.
And Solomon would offer up, three times in the year, burnt offerings and peace offerings on the altar that he had built to the LORD, burning incense with them before the LORD. So he completed the house.
And King Solomon made a fleet of ships at Ezion-geber, which is near Eloth, on the shore of the Sea of Reeds, in the land of Edom.
And Hiram sent his servants with the fleet — men of ships, who knew the sea — together with the servants of Solomon.
And they came to Ophir, and took from there gold — four hundred and twenty talents — and brought it to King Solomon.