1 Kings 7 Bible study: Two pillars and a sea

The last chapter ended with the LORD's house: "So he spent seven years building it" (6:38). This one begins, "Solomon was building his own house thirteen years, and he finished all his house" (7:1). Later the book names the two together: "At the end of twenty years, in which Solomon had built the two houses, the LORD’s house and the king’s house" (9:10). Both were in view from the start: Solomon brought Pharaoh's daughter into David's city "until he had finished building his own house, the LORD’s house, and the wall around Jerusalem" (3:1). The chapter tells Solomon's own buildings in twelve verses (7:1-12), then turns back to the LORD's house for the rest (7:13-51). Between them the two chapters give the two numbers, seven and thirteen, and neither compares them or says why one took longer.

1 Kings 7:21→leads toRevelation 3:12

"He set up the pillars at the porch of the temple. He set up the right pillar and called its name Jachin; and he set up the left pillar and called its name Boaz" (7:21). In Revelation, the one who says, "I was dead, and behold, I am alive forever and ever" (Revelation 1:18), tells the church in Philadelphia, "He who overcomes, I will make him a pillar in the temple of my God, and he will go out from there no more. I will write on him the name of my God and the name of the city of my God, the new Jerusalem, which comes down out of heaven from my God, and my own new name." (Revelation 3:12). Revelation doesn't name Solomon's pillars or cite 1 Kings 7, so setting the two side by side is a reading. It rests on a shared picture, a pillar standing in God's temple, and on names, though the names fall differently: in 7:21 each pillar is given a name of its own, and in Revelation 3:12 names are written on the one who overcomes. Some hear in Jesus' promise the named pillars that stood at the porch of Solomon's temple. Others read Revelation 3:12 on its own terms, a promise of a lasting place with God, "he will go out from there no more", in a book whose city has no temple building: "I saw no temple in it, for the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb are its temple" (Revelation 21:22). They don't look back from it to 1 Kings 7.

מְלָאכָהmela'khahsay me-la-KHAH

Brown-Driver-Briggs: "occupation, work", including "workmanship". Strong's: "employment (never servile) or work". The Hebrew has it five times in this chapter: Hiram was filled with skill "to work all works in bronze" and "performed all his work" (7:14); "So the work of the pillars was finished" (7:22); "So Hiram finished doing all the work" (7:40); and "Thus all the work that King Solomon did in the LORD’s house was finished" (7:51). It is the word for Bezalel's craft: "in all kinds of workmanship" (Exodus 31:3). And the setting up of the tabernacle ended with it: "So Moses finished the work" (Exodus 40:33), the same verb for finished as 7:40. Not every work in the WEB's chapter is this word: "checker work" (7:17) and "lily work" (7:19) are another word.