Men, We Labor

Then King Solomon raised up a labor force out of all Israel; and the labor force was thirty thousand men. And he sent them to Lebanon, ten thousand a month in shifts: they were one month in Lebanon and two months at home; Adoniram was in charge of the labor force. 1 Kings 5:13-14

One of the great works of the Bible is the Temple of God that Solomon built in Jerusalem. We have descriptions and measurements, but it is hard for us to imagine what this building looked like. We do have some idea of what it took to build the Temple with the tens of thousands of laborers called to the work from Israel. 70,000 bore burdens and another 80,000 quarried stone in the mountains (v15). That is 180,000 persons on the project just in these three verses. Labor was the order of the day and a lot of men turned out to labor away a month at a time on this huge project. It is interesting to note the shifts organized by month in the first group. The organizers of this huge effort were 3,300 of King Solomon's chiefs of deputies. They also likely worked 1,100 at a time by monthly shifts. Do we get the impression yet of an enormous project?

As God has put the spirit of creation in us, I wonder how many methods and machines of construction were invented during this time. The local Caterpillar dealer probably hadn't been born in Solomon's time and I saw great stones in the western wall that would have called for some cooperation and leverage to place. By the accounts in the Bible, the completed Temple was really something to behold. And then, God's presence entered in...

The works of man, even the greatest of them, lack something. Men, we labor, but God is that something our works need.

In Christ, I am a work in progress,
Bucky