Canter Bridge

Building God a house is an audacious adventure, as even Solomon the temple-building king recognizes in his dedicatory prayer. Yet the space-time complications of housing a transcendent God are not enough to halt the project.

Solomon’s Temple is known to us only by literary description and is often called Israel’s ‘First Temple’. It was all about keeping ‘God with us’. YHWH’s wish to have such a place built for him is expressed in his determination that …

I will dwell among the children of Israel, and will not forsake my people Israel.

Viability seems to be the operative concept. In the language of dwelling with Israel, as in the careful description of the temple’s measurements and accoutrements, lines are drawn both to the underlying divine habit of covenanting with Israel and to the earlier, non-permanent dwelling known as the tabernacle.

The tabernacle provided a viable means to seek the enduring presence of YHWH during Israel’s wanderings. After the startup phase of monarch that Saul and David represented—bloody-minded and bloody-handed kings, respectively—it seems reasonable within the text’s conceptual horizons for Solomon to build a fixed version of the tabernacle. Israel, after all, has established herself in the land, with peace all about. One can hardly have one’s Warrior God still slouching in a warrior’s tent.

This first epic history of Israel has only a few reservations about such architectural designs. They are not enough to overcome the transparent appropriateness of building a beautiful place for YHWH and will come there to seek him out. How are those pilgrims whom Solomon is capable of imagining trudging to this temple to offer good things to Israel’s deity going to return home impressed with his superiority if his digs are a shambles?

Indeed. Solomon finds it simple to think in such terms. One imagines him scoffing in private moments at the disorganized, rustic state of Israel prior to the improvements his more cosmopolitan vision brought to this little tribe suddenly writ an empire with vassal kings to be called upon for carpentry.

The text’s largest reservation touches the simultaneity of building houses for YHWH and his king. This alignment of governance echoes in the soul of Israel as the most blessed of potentialities and the most lethal of liabilities.

In the long path of the First History, it is the king who time and gain will lead Israel and Judah into destruction, typically by ‘now walking in the ways of his father David’. Bloody, vituperative, passionately pious, a bit rustic around the margins, David—not his temple-building son—would remain the paradigm of how things out to be.

Yet like most intimate alignments, the proximity of king and God would not only occasion Israel’s deepest pain. It would also nourish her most enduring, vivifying hope: the conviction that YHWH would one day raise up from this lump of failed royal DNA a true David who would rule in the way of YHWH himself.

In that day the temple will become, for some biblical custodians of this hope, the glorious destination that Solomon’s blueprints and his prayers designed it to be. Oddly, this hope flourished most when Solomon’s well-measured shrine had become dust and ashes.