The House that Solomon Built to Jehovah

King Solomon began building the temple for Jehovah in the fourth year of his reign (1034 B.C.E.), in the second month, Ziv, following the architectural plan that David had received by inspiration. (1Ki 6:1; 1Ch 28:11-19). After the first temple was dedicated in Jerusalem, God said in warning to King Solomon its builder and to his royal successors: “If you yourselves and your sons should definitely turn back from following me and not keep my commandments and my statutes that I have put before you men, and you actually go and serve other gods and bow down to them, I will also cut Israel off from upon the surface of the ground that I have given to them; and the house that I have sanctified to my name I shall throw away from before me, and Israel will indeed become a proverbial saying and a taunt among all the peoples. And this house itself will become heaps of ruins. Everyone passing by it will stare in amazement and will certainly whistle and say, ‘For what reason did Jehovah do like that to this land and this house?’”—1 Ki. 9:6-8.

The thing here warned of actually happened to the temple built by King Solomon. This was because the kings of Israel, with few exceptions, defiled and profaned Jehovah’s house or temple. In the summer of the year 607 B.C.E. it was laid in ruins by the Babylonian armies under King Nebuchadnezzar. Had Israel treated God’s house with due respect, this would not have taken place. But the Israelites did not respect the house on which God had put his name Jehovah, and so his warning proved to be no mere idle threat. For seventy years, from 607 to 537 B.C.E., it lay in ruins while the deported Israelites were exiles in the distant land of Babylonia. Can we of today lightly brush this historical fact aside as if having no meaning for us now? No; for the analytical commentator on Israelite history, the Christian apostle Paul, warns us:

“Now these things became our examples, for us not to be persons desiring injurious things, even as they desired them. Neither become idolaters, as some of them did; . . . Neither let us practice fornication, as some of them committed fornication, . . . Neither let us put Jehovah to the test, as some of them put him to the test, . . . Neither be murmurers, just as some of them murmured, only to perish by the destroyer. Now these things went on befalling them as examples, and they were written for a warning to us upon whom the ends of the systems of things have arrived. Consequently let him that thinks he is standing beware that he does not fall.”—1 Cor. 10:6-12.