How big was Solomon’s Temple?

Sixty by twenty by thirty

The house which King Solomon built for Yahweh had a length of sixty cubits, and its width twenty, and its height thirty cubits.

A cubit was the length of a forearm, about 45 centimeters (18 inches). That makes the building roughly 27 meters long, 9 wide and 13.5 high. Chronicles says the cubits were “after the first measure” (2 Chronicles 3:3), probably an older, longer cubit like Ezekiel’s “cubit and a hand width” (Ezekiel 40:5), about 52 centimeters. On that reckoning it was nearer 31 by 10.5 by 15.5 meters. Either way, many parish churches are bigger.

Size was not the point. The Temple was not a hall for congregations but the house of God’s name. Worshipers gathered in the courtyards outside, and only priests went in.

Three rooms in a row

• The porch. As wide as the building and ten cubits deep (1 Kings 6:3). 2 Chronicles 3:4 makes it 120 cubits high, a tower of some 54 meters; many scholars suspect a copying slip.
• The main hall. Forty cubits long, about 18 meters (6:17), paneled in cedar carved with buds and open flowers, so that “No stone was visible” (6:18), floored with cypress and overlaid with gold.
• The inner sanctuary. The Holy of Holies, a cube of twenty cubits, about 9 meters each way, where the Ark stood under two olive-wood cherubim (what was inside the Ark). The building was thirty cubits high, so the cube leaves ten cubits unexplained: a raised floor, or a room above. The text doesn’t say.

Along three sides ran storerooms on three floors, stepped so that no beam had to be cut into the Temple wall (6:5–6). Light came through windows of fixed lattice (6:4).

Jachin and Boaz

In front of the porch stood two bronze pillars cast by a craftsman from Tyre, also named Hiram. Each was eighteen cubits high and twelve around, about 8 meters tall and 5.4 meters in circumference, with a capital of five more cubits (7:15–16). Jeremiah adds that they were hollow, the bronze four fingers thick (Jeremiah 52:21). Chronicles gives thirty-five cubits (2 Chronicles 3:15), perhaps for the pair.

He set up the right pillar and called its name Jachin; and he set up the left pillar and called its name Boaz.

Jachin probably means “he will establish,” and Boaz perhaps “in strength.” Most scholars think the pillars stood free and held up nothing. Freemasons still set two pillars with these names in their lodges.

The bronze sea, and a famous puzzle

Hiram also cast a round basin ten cubits across and five deep, about 4.5 by 2.25 meters, with “a line of thirty cubits” around it (7:23). It rested on twelve bronze oxen, three facing each direction, and held two thousand baths (7:26), three thousand in 2 Chronicles 4:5. At a common estimate of 22 liters to the bath, that is some 44,000 liters. Readers have long done the math: ten across and thirty around makes pi equal three. The usual answers are that the figures are rounded, or that the line ran under a rim that flared “like the flower of a lily,” a hand width thick (7:26).

How it compares

No trace of the building has been identified, and the Temple Mount cannot be excavated. But archaeologists know its cousins. Temples at Ain Dara in northern Syria and Tell Tayinat in southern Turkey, from the same broad era, share its three-part plan: a porch, a long hall, a small inner shrine. Later builders went far bigger. The Mishnah says Herod’s sanctuary measured a hundred cubits each way (Middot 4:6), on a platform of about 14 hectares whose retaining wall survives as the Western Wall.