The old palace of David, in the lower town or ‘City of David,’ was deserted; as soon as the new buildings were completed on Moriah, the king moved to them with his harîm and court. The palace which had satisfied the simple tastes of the father was no longer sufficient for the luxury and display of the more cultured son. The ‘City of David’ was left to the Jews and Benjamites; the court and the priesthood settled above them by the side of the old Jebusite population, which had been reduced to serfdom (1 Kings ix. 20). None but slaves and serfs might dwell where the monarch lived surrounded by his armed bodyguard; the free Israelite was confined to another quarter of the town.

The palace was protected by a huge fortress called the Millo, which was connected with the new walls of Jerusalem, and begun as soon as the palace of the Egyptian princess had been finished. Whether it stood on the eastern or western side of the city is doubtful; the topography of pre-exilic Jerusalem is unfortunately still involved in obscurity. The pool of Siloam, and the identification of the Upper Gihon or ‘Spring’ with the Virgin’s Fountain, the only natural spring of water in the immediate neighbourhood of the city, are almost the only two points which can be fixed with certainty. If the subterranean tunnel which conveys the water of the Virgin’s Fountain to the pool of Siloam is the conduit made by Hezekiah when he ‘stopped the upper water-course of Gihon, and brought it straight down to the west side of the city of David’ (2 Chron. xxxii. 30), the west side will be that which overlooks the Tyropœon valley, where the tunnel ends. In this case the city of David, which is stated in 2 Sam. v. 7 to have been on Mount Zion, will be the so-called southern hill or ‘Ophel,’ which lies south of the Mosque of Omar, and the Tyropœon valley will be the Valley of the Sons of Hinnom so often referred to in the Old Testament. The Jerusalem of the kings will thus have been, like most of the cities of the ancient Oriental world, of no great size according to our modern conceptions; its population will have been as closely packed together as it is to-day in the native quarters of Cairo, and the fortifications which surrounded it would not have occupied too wide a circumference for a Jewish army to defend. The Tyropœon valley is choked with the rubbish of ancient Jerusalem to a depth of more than seventy feet; but under it must lie the tombs of the kings of Judah. The recent excavations of Dr. Bliss have thrown but little light on the question, since the walls he has found seem mostly of a late date; but if the rock-cut steps he has discovered north of the pool of Siloam are really ‘the stairs that go down from the city of David’ (Neh. iii. 16), a striking verification will have been given of the theory which sees in the southern hill the Zion of Scripture, and in the valley of ‘the Cheesemakers’ the gorge of the sons of Hinnom.[[531]]

The crown of all the building activity of Solomon was the temple, even though it did not take so long to construct as his own palace. Materials for it had already been accumulated by David, and the architects and workmen came from Tyre. It was built of large blocks of square stone, the edges of which were probably bevelled as in early Phœnician work, and the walls inside were covered with panels of cedar. Walls and doors alike were profusely decorated with the designs of Phœnician art. Cherubs and palms, lotus flowers and pomegranates were depicted on them in the forms that have been made familiar to us by the relics of ancient Phœnician workmanship. The temple itself was of rectangular shape, not unlike the chapel of King’s College at Cambridge, and in front of it were two large courts, one of which—the ‘inner’ or ‘upper’ court—stood on a higher level than the other. The whole design, in fact, was purely Phœnician; in form and ornamentation the building exactly resembled the temples of Phœnicia. Like them, it must have looked externally like a huge rectangular box, which was further disfigured by chambers, in sets of three, being built one over the other against the walls. The great temple of Melkarth, which Hiram had just completed at Tyre, probably served as the model for the temple of Jerusalem.

The entrance was approached by steps, and consisted of a porch, on either side of which were two lofty columns of bronze, called Jachin and Boaz.[[532]] Similar columns were planted before the entrance of a Phœnician temple where they symbolised the fertilising power of the Sun-god, and Herodotos (ii. 44) states that the two which stood in front of the temple at Tyre were made of gold and emerald glass. Two similar columns of stone, though of small size, have been found in the Temple of the Giants in the island of Gozo, one of which still remains in its original place. In the outer court was a bronze ‘sea’ or basin, thirty cubits in circumference, and supported on twelve oxen. The ‘sea’ had been imported into the West from Babylonia, where it similarly stood in the court of a temple, and represented the apsu or ‘watery abyss,’ out of which Chaldæan philosophy taught that all things had been evolved. A Babylonian hymn which describes the casting of a copper ‘sea’ for the temple of Chaos tells us that, like the ‘sea’ at Jerusalem, it rested on the heads of twelve bulls.[[533]] Along with the ‘sea’ bronze lavers and basins were provided for the ablutions of the priests and the vessels of the sanctuary.

The temple was but a shell for enclosing the innermost shrine or Holy of Holies where, as in a casket, the ark of the covenant was placed under the protecting wings of two gilded cherubim. What they were like we may gather from the Assyrian sculptures, in which the two winged cherubs are depicted on either side of the sacred tree.[[534]] The over-shadowing wings formed a ‘mercy-seat,’ the parakku of the Babylonian texts, whereon, according to Nebuchadrezzar, Bel seated himself on the festival of the new year, while the other gods humbly ranged themselves around him bowing to the ground.[[535]] At Babylon, moreover, the table of shewbread which stood before Bel was of solid gold, like the table which Solomon made for the service of Yahveh.[[536]] Indeed, the description of the lavish use of gold in the temple of Jerusalem finds its echo in the description given by Nebuchadrezzar of the temples he reared in Babylon. The altar of Yahveh, it is said, was of gold, so too were the candlesticks and lamps and vessels; even the hinges of the doors that opened into the Holy of Holies were of the same precious metal, while the cedar work was richly gilded, and the floor itself was overlaid with golden plates. In similar terms Nebuchadrezzar describes his decoration of Ê-Sagila, the temple of Bel, at Babylon. Here too, the beams and panels of cedar were overlaid with gold, the gates were gilded, and the vessels for the service of the sanctuary were of solid gold.[[537]] There was one point, however, in which the temples of Jerusalem and Babylon differed from one another; in the shrine of Ê-Sagila was the image of Bel: the Hebrew shrine contained no likeness of a god. The only graven figures within it were the cherubim whose wings overshadowed the ark.

The temple was finished in seven (or more exactly seven and a half) years. Perhaps an effort was made to restrict the years of building to the sacred number. At all events, it was in the seventh month of the Hebrew year, the Ethanim of the Phœnicians, that the feast of the dedication was kept.[[538]] It coincided with the ancient festival of the Ingathering of the Harvest, a fitting season for commemorating the completion of the work.

The dedication of Solomon’s temple is the beginning of a new chapter in the history of the Jewish state and of Hebrew religion. It became the visible centre round which the elements of the Israelitish faith gathered and cohered together until the terrible day came when the enemy stormed the walls of the capital and laid its temple in the dust. But it had already exercised a profound influence upon the history of Judah. It had helped to unify the kingdom; to bind the population of southern Palestine, mixed in blood though it were, into a single whole. Unlike the northern tribes with their two great sanctuaries at Dan and Bethel, Judah and Benjamin had a common centre in the one sanctuary of Jerusalem. Around it, moreover, were grouped all the traditions and memories of a venerable past. It alone was connected with the traditions of the Mosaic Law and the priesthood of Shiloh, with the rites and ceremonies that had come down from the primeval days of the Israelitish people, and with the foundation of the monarchy itself. It was the dwelling-place on earth of Yahveh of Israel; here was the sacred ark of the covenant which had once been carried before the invaders of Canaan, and was still the outward sign and symbol of God’s presence among His people. With the preservation of the temple the preservation of the Jewish religion itself seemed to be bound up, as well as of the Jewish state.

But the temple did something more than help to unify the southern monarchy and preserve the traditions of the Mosaic law. It served also to strengthen and perpetuate the Davidic dynasty, and to keep alive in the hearts of the people their allegiance to the line of Solomon. The temple, as we have seen, was not only a national sanctuary, it was also a royal chapel. It formed, as it were, part of the royal palace, in which the king overshadowed the high priest himself. The halo of veneration which surrounded the temple was thus communicated to the royal line. The temple and the descendants of David became parts of the same national conception; the one necessarily implied the other. When the throne of David fell, the temple also fell with it. While the temple lasted, Judah remained a homogeneous state, yielding willing obedience to its theocratic monarchy, and gradually gaining a clearer idea of the meaning and practice of the Mosaic Law. The temple of Solomon made Jewish religion conservative, but it was a conservatism which, as time went on, evolved the consequences of its own principles, and sought how best to carry them out in ritual and practice.

Jerusalem had become one of the great capitals of the world. Its public buildings were worthy of the empire which had been created by David, of the wealth that had poured into the coffers of Solomon from the trade of the whole Orient, of the culture and art which the young king had done his best to introduce. But the necessities of defence were not forgotten. The fortifications of the city were pushed on—though, it would seem, not with sufficient rapidity to allow them to be finished before the king’s death—and horses and chariots were imported from Egypt and the land of the Hittites in the north. With these Solomon equipped a standing force of 1400 chariots and 12,000 horsemen, who served as garrisons in Jerusalem and the other fortresses of the country.

Nor were the other cities of the empire neglected in favour of Jerusalem. Gezer was rebuilt and fortified; so too were ‘Beth-horon the nether and Baalath’ in Judah, and ‘Tadmor in the wilderness,’ the Palmyra of later days.[[539]] It is true that modern criticism would see in Tadmor the Tamar of the southern desert of Judah which is referred to by Ezekiel (xlvii. 19, xlviii. 28) as a future border of the Holy Land. But, though the Kethîbh or text of the Hebrew Scriptures has Tamar, the reading is corrupt, and has been corrected by the Massoretic scribes themselves.[[540]] The Chronicler (2 Chron. viii. 4) shows that Tadmor was the reading of the text in his time, and he shows further that it was known to be the desert-city which afterwards became the seat of empire of the merchant prince Odenathus and his queen, Zenobia. We learn from him that Solomon had put down a rising in that part of Zobah which adjoined Hamath, that he had founded ‘store-cities’ in Hamath, and had built Tadmor in the wilderness beyond. It is strange only that no allusion is made to building operations in Israel: perhaps Solomon was disinclined to establish fortresses among the northern tribes which might be used against his own authority, perhaps David had already put the cities of northern Israel in a thorough state of defence. At all events, little danger from abroad was to be apprehended in this part of the Israelitish dominions; Solomon was in alliance with Tyre, and presumably also with Hamath, and Zobah was included in his empire.