1 Kings 9 · a question people ask
The LORD said "forever". How could the house then be cast out of his sight?
Both are in the same speech. "I have made this house holy, which you have built, to put my name there forever" (9:3), and "I will cast this house, which I have made holy for my name, out of my sight" (9:7), "if you turn away from following me, you or your children" (9:6). The throne too is promised "forever" (9:5) after an if (9:4). In Hebrew forever is ad olam in 9:3 and le'olam in 9:5; Brown-Driver-Briggs gives olam as "long duration, antiquity, futurity" (tap forever). The Bible goes on to tell both halves. Generations later, 2 Kings still remembers the promise: "In this house, and in Jerusalem, which I have chosen out of all the tribes of Israel, I will put my name forever" (2 Kings 21:7). And it tells the warning kept: "He burned the LORD’s house" (2 Kings 25:9). After the exile a house was built again: "This house was finished on the third day of the month Adar" (Ezra 6:15). 1 Kings 9 doesn't say how the forever and the if fit together; it speaks them side by side, and these notes leave them there.
The verses
“He set the engraved image of Asherah that he had made in the house of which the LORD said to David and to Solomon his son, “In this house, and in Jerusalem, which I have chosen out of all the tribes of Israel, I will put my name forever;”
“He burned the LORD’s house, the king’s house, and all the houses of Jerusalem. He burned every great house with fire.”
“This house was finished on the third day of the month Adar, which was in the sixth year of the reign of Darius the king.”