1 Kings 9

1 After Solomon finished building the temple of the LORD, the royal palace, and everything else that he had planned,

2 the LORD appeared to him a second time, as he had appeared to him in Gibeon.

3 The LORD said to him: "I have heard the prayer of petition which you offered in my presence. I have consecrated this temple which you have built; I confer my name upon it forever, and my eyes and my heart shall be there always.

4 As for you, if you live in my presence as your father David lived, sincerely and uprightly, doing just as I have commanded you, keeping my statutes and decrees,

5 I will establish your throne of sovereignty over Israel forever, as I promised your father David when I said, 'You shall always have someone from your line on the throne of Israel.'

6 But if you and your descendants ever withdraw from me, fail to keep the commandments and statutes which I set before you, and proceed to venerate and worship strange gods,

7 I will cut off Israel from the land I gave them and repudiate the temple I have consecrated to my honor. Israel shall become a proverb and a byword among all nations,

8 and this temple shall become a heap of ruins. Every passerby shall catch his breath in amazement, and ask, 'Why has the LORD done this to the land and to this temple?'

9 Men will answer: 'They forsook the LORD, their God, who brought their fathers out of the land of Egypt; they adopted strange gods which they worshiped and served. That is why the LORD has brought down upon them all this evil.'"

10 After the twenty years during which Solomon built the two houses, the temple of the LORD and the palace of the king--

11 Hiram, king of Tyre, supplying Solomon with all the cedar wood, fir wood, and gold he wished-- King Solomon gave Hiram twenty cities in the land of Galilee.

12 Hiram left Tyre to see the cities Solomon had given him, but was not satisfied with them.

13 So he said, "What are these cities you have given me, my brother?" And he called them the land of Cabul, as they are called to this day.

14 Hiram, however, had sent king Solomon one hundred and twenty talents of gold.

15 This is an account of the forced labor which King Solomon levied in order to build the temple of the LORD, his palace, Millo, the wall of Jerusalem, Hazor, Megiddo, Gezer

16 (Pharaoh, king of Egypt, had come up and taken Gezer and, after destroying it by fire and slaying all the Canaanites living in the city, had given it as dowry to his daughter, Solomon's wife;

17 Solomon then rebuilt Gezer), Lower Beth-horon,

18 Baalath, Tamar in the desert of Judah,

19 all his cities for supplies, cities for chariots and for horses, and whatever else Solomon decided should be built in Jerusalem, in Lebanon, and in the entire land under his dominion.

20 All the non-Israelite people who remained in the land, descendants of the Amorites, Hittites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites

21 whose doom the Israelites had been unable to accomplish, Solomon conscripted as forced laborers, as they are to this day.

22 But Solomon enslaved none of the Israelites, for they were his fighting force, his ministers, commanders, adjutants, chariot officers, and charioteers.

23 The supervisors of Solomon's works who policed the people engaged in the work numbered five hundred and fifty.

24 As soon as Pharaoh's daughter went up from the City of David to her palace, which he had built for her, Solomon built Millo.

25 Three times a year Solomon used to offer holocausts and peace offerings on the altar which he had built to the LORD, and to burn incense before the LORD; and he kept the temple in repair.

26 King Solomon also built a fleet at Ezion-geber, which is near Elath on the shore of the Red Sea in the land of Edom.

27 In this fleet Hiram placed his own expert seamen with the servants of Solomon.

28 They went to Ophir, and brought back four hundred and twenty talents of gold to King Solomon.