David the king... prepared for the holy house, even three thousand talents * of gold, of the gold of Ophir, and seven thousand talents of refined silver, to overlay the walls of the houses withal... Then the chief of the fathers and princes of the tribe of Israel... offered willingly, and gave for the service of the house of God of gold five thousand talents and ten thousand drams, and of silver ten thousand talents, and of brass eighteen thousand talents, and one hundred thousand talents of iron. **

* Cruden makes a talent of gold about
35,000, and a talent of silver about
2,000.
** Chronicles xxix, 1-7.

Here then was a sum which in our money would run up to about three hundred millions of dollars. We are not going to ask how the chief of a petty tribe, in one of the poorest and most barren parts of Asia, could, at so remote a time, raise so enormous a fund; our desire is only to show the elaborate preparations undertaken for the erection of Solomon's temple. But this is not the only reference to the big sums of money and other precious things which David collected for the temple, which was to be the glory of Jerusalem. Elsewhere in the bible we read:

Now, behold, in my trouble I have prepared for the house of the Lord an hundred thousand talents of gold, and a thousand thousand talents of silver; and of brass and iron without weight. *

This was fabulous wealth. David must have had a gold mine of miraculous proportions. Mongredien, as quoted by G. W. Foote, of England, estimates that the total value of all the gold and silver of every sort in the British Isles barely amounts to seven hundred millions of dollars, and David, the bible says, raised, "in my trouble," when times were not very prosperous, three thousand and six hundred millions in gold, and nearly two thousand and two hundred millions in silver. For no other building were such preparations ever made.

But money alone was not all that was needed. A wise king, indeed the wisest that ever sat on a throne, if the bible is to be believed, appeared just at this time to take charge of the building of the temple. The Lord asked Solomon to draw upon him for whatever he wanted. "Ask what I shall give thee," ** he said. Solomon asked for wisdom, and got very much more.

And God said to him... I have done according to thy words: lo, I have given thee a wise and an understanding heart; so that there was none like thee before thee, neither after thee shall any rise like unto thee. And I have also given thee... both riches and honour. ***

* I Chronicles xxii, 14.
** I Kings iii, 5.
*** I Kings iii, 11-14.

Thus equipped Solomon took up the work of preparation for the building of a suitable monument to Jehovah, which his father, David, had begun. One of the first things Solomon did was to put thirty thousand men to the task of gathering material for the construction of the temple. For the space of four years this crowd of men traveled into foreign countries in search of timber, as well as of skilled men for the temple:

So Hiram gave Solomon cedar trees and fir trees according to all his desire. And Solomon gave Hiram twenty thousand measures of wheat for food to his household, and twenty measures of pure oil: thus gave Solomon to Hiram year by year.... And King Solomon raised a levy out of all Israel; and the levy was thirty thousand men. And he sent them to Lebanon, ten thousand a month by courses. *