Solomon's Temple, also called the First Temple, was the sanctuary that the Hebrew Bible says King Solomon built in Jerusalem in the 10th century BCE to house the Ark of the Covenant. According to 1 Kings 6–8 and 2 Chronicles 3–5, it was a stone-and-cedar building 60 cubits long, 20 wide and 30 high (roughly 27 × 9 × 13.5 metres), and it stood until the Babylonian army of Nebuchadnezzar II burned it in 587/586 BCE. No remains of it have ever been excavated, so what is known comes from the texts, from comparison with temples of the same era, and from legend.
The temple matters because three religions and many esoteric traditions meet at it. For Judaism it is the first of two Temples whose loss still shapes prayer and the calendar; for Islam the site is the Noble Sanctuary and Solomon, Sulayman, is a prophet. Freemasonry built its central allegory around it, the Knights Templar took their name from it, and researchers such as Billy Carson read its proportions as deliberate design. Separating what the texts say, what the ground shows and what the legends add is the only way to discuss it clearly.
What the Bible says about Solomon's Temple
The Bible describes the temple in two parallel accounts: 1 Kings 5–8 and the later, slightly different version in 2 Chronicles 2–7. Both present a building planned by David and completed by his son Solomon, with timber and skilled labour supplied by Hiram, king of Tyre.
Where and when it was built
1 Kings 6:1 dates the start of construction to the fourth year of Solomon's reign, and 1 Kings 6:38 says the work took seven years. 2 Chronicles 3:1 places the temple on Mount Moriah, on the threshing floor of Ornan the Jebusite, the same place 2 Samuel 24 calls the threshing floor of Araunah, which David bought to build an altar. The traditional dates for Solomon's reign, about 970–931 BCE, come from reconstructing the biblical chronology of the kings, not from any inscription.
In 1 Kings 5, Solomon pays Hiram of Tyre in wheat and olive oil for cedar and cypress from Lebanon, with Phoenician craftsmen working alongside Solomon's own. 1 Kings 6:7 adds a detail later traditions treasured: the stone was dressed at the quarry, so no hammer, axe or iron tool was heard at the site.
The layout: porch, main hall and Holy of Holies
The building had three rooms in a line, a plan scholars call tripartite. At the front was the Ulam, a porch 20 cubits wide and 10 deep. Behind it was the Hekal, the main hall, 40 cubits long, panelled in carved cedar overlaid with gold. At the back was the Debir, the Holy of Holies, a cube of 20 cubits on every side, where two olive-wood cherubim 10 cubits high spread their wings from wall to wall (1 Kings 6:23–28).
At the dedication in 1 Kings 8, the priests set the Ark of the Covenant beneath the cherubim's wings and a cloud filled the house; the chapter says the Ark held only the two stone tablets of Moses. For what may have happened to the Ark afterwards, see [the Ark of the Covenant explained](/the-ark-of-the-covenant-explained-what-the-bible-says-where-it-went-and-the-theories).
The bronze work: Jachin, Boaz and the molten sea
The bronze furnishings were cast by a craftsman also named Hiram, called Huram-abi in 2 Chronicles, the son of a Tyrian father and a widow of the tribe of Naphtali (1 Kings 7:14) or a woman of Dan (2 Chronicles 2:14). He made two freestanding bronze pillars for the porch and named them Jachin and Boaz (1 Kings 7:21). 1 Kings 7:15 gives them a height of 18 cubits, while 2 Chronicles 3:15 says 35, one of several small discrepancies between the two accounts.
He also cast the molten sea, a vast bronze basin on twelve bronze oxen, three facing each compass direction. 1 Kings 7:23 gives it a diameter of 10 cubits and a circumference of 30, a ratio long debated as rounding or as inner and outer measurements. Ten bronze lavers on wheeled stands completed the set.
What happened to the First Temple
The First Temple was destroyed by the Babylonians. 2 Kings 25 records that in the nineteenth year of Nebuchadnezzar II, his commander Nebuzaradan burned the house of the Lord, and that the bronze pillars, the stands and the molten sea were broken up and carried to Babylon. That places the destruction in 587 or 586 BCE; scholars still debate which. An earlier siege is confirmed outside the Bible: the Babylonian Chronicle records Nebuchadnezzar's capture of Jerusalem in 597 BCE. Nebuchadnezzar was also the ruler who rebuilt Babylon's great ziggurat, the Etemenanki often linked with [the Tower of Babel](/the-tower-of-babel-explained-genesis-11-etemenanki-and-what-archaeology-shows).
The Second Temple replaced it. Returning exiles under Zerubbabel completed a more modest building around 516 BCE. Herod the Great rebuilt it on a massive scale from around 20 BCE, and the Romans destroyed it in 70 CE. The Western Wall is part of Herod's retaining wall around the Temple Mount platform, not a piece of Solomon's building. The Second Temple era is also the world of [the Dead Sea Scrolls](/the-dead-sea-scrolls-explained-discovery-contents-and-why-they-matter), which include the Temple Scroll, a long text laying out an idealised temple and its rules.
What archaeology shows
Archaeology has never uncovered a stone that can be securely attributed to Solomon's Temple. The reason is practical: the site is the Temple Mount, the Haram al-Sharif, home to the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and excavation there is not permitted. Anything left would also lie beneath Herod's rebuild.
Since 2004 the Temple Mount Sifting Project has sifted soil removed from the Mount during construction work in 1999. It has recovered pottery, coins, seals and other small finds from many periods, including the First Temple era, but because none of it comes from an excavated layer in place, it says nothing direct about the building.
Parallels: Ain Dara and Tell Tayinat
The strongest support for the biblical description is comparative. Iron Age temples across the northern Levant used the same long-room, three-part plan. The temple at Ain Dara in northern Syria, in use from about 1300 to 740 BCE, had a porch, main hall and inner shrine, with lion and sphinx reliefs and giant carved footprints; it was badly damaged by an airstrike in 2018. At Tell Tayinat in southern Turkey, excavators found a similar tripartite temple beside a royal palace, much as the Bible places Solomon's temple next to his. These parallels do not prove Solomon built anything, but they show the biblical plan describes a real building type from the right region and era.
How big was Solomon's kingdom?
The wider historical question is genuinely debated. The Tel Dan stele, an Aramaic inscription found in northern Israel in 1993, refers to the House of David, the first mention of David's dynasty outside the Bible. Beyond that, scholars divide. Minimalists doubt that a united monarchy existed in anything like the biblical form, and Israel Finkelstein's low chronology treats 10th-century Jerusalem as a modest highland settlement. Scholars such as Amihai Mazar and William Dever see a real if smaller early state behind the biblical picture. The evidence does not yet settle it.
King Solomon's Mines
The phrase King Solomon's Mines now attaches mainly to the copper districts of Timna in southern Israel and Faynan in Jordan. In the 2010s, radiocarbon dating led by Erez Ben-Yosef of Tel Aviv University placed peak copper production there in the 10th century BCE, the era the Bible assigns to Solomon. Ben-Yosef's team associates the industry with a local, largely nomadic society usually identified with early Edom, so whether Solomon controlled the mines remains an open question. [A report on the wood used to fuel Solomon's mines](/wood-was-used-to-fuel-king-solomon-s-ancient-mines-which-led-to-environmental-devastation) looks at the smelting's environmental cost. The gold of Ophir (1 Kings 9:28) is a separate puzzle; Ophir has never been located.
Legends that grew from the temple
Most of the temple's fame outside scripture comes from legend, each strand with a traceable origin.
Freemasonry and Hiram Abiff
Masonic ritual centres on Hiram Abiff, a master builder murdered by three workmen for refusing to reveal the master's word. The name echoes the biblical bronze-worker, but the murder story is not in the Bible; it comes from 18th-century Masonic ritual, first appearing in print in Samuel Prichard's 1730 exposure Masonry Dissected. The pillars Jachin and Boaz became standard lodge symbols.
The Knights Templar
The order founded around 1119 by Hugues de Payens was quartered in the Al-Aqsa Mosque, which the crusaders called the Temple of Solomon, hence the name. Claims that the knights found treasure or the Ark there have no documentary support.
Ethiopia and the Ark
The Kebra Nagast, a 14th-century epic in Ge'ez, tells how Menelik, son of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, brought the Ark from Jerusalem to Ethiopia. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church holds that it rests in Aksum.
Solomon and the spirits
The Qur'an (Surah Saba 34:12–13) says jinn laboured for Solomon, making sanctuaries, statues and great basins. The pseudepigraphal Testament of Solomon describes a ring from the archangel Michael that let him bind demons and set them to work on the Temple, a tradition that fed the later grimoires carrying his name.
The Third Temple
Today some groups, including the Jerusalem-based Temple Institute, have reconstructed priestly garments and vessels in anticipation of a Third Temple, one of the most sensitive questions in Jerusalem.
The temple as a model of the cosmos
The idea that the temple encodes the universe is ancient, not modern. Philo of Alexandria and Josephus, both writing in the 1st century CE, read the sanctuary, the Tabernacle and the temples that followed it, as a model of the cosmos, treating its divisions, colours and the high priest's vestments as symbols of earth, sea and heaven. Between 1596 and 1604 the Jesuits Juan Bautista Villalpando and Jerónimo de Prado published a monumental reconstruction arguing that the temple's proportions were divinely given and lay behind classical architecture itself.
This is where the temple meets [sacred geometry](/sacred-geometry-explained-the-shapes-the-history-and-what-is-actually-mathematical). Some of the geometry is plainly in the text: the Holy of Holies is a cube and the main hall a double square in plan. What those shapes signify is interpretation, and there the traditions diverge.
Billy Carson's reading
Billy Carson approaches the temple less as a lost building than as a teaching. In his [Bible Study series on 4BK TV](/watch/bible-study), he reads the temple's layout as an encoding of sacred geometry and of the human body and consciousness: the movement from porch to hall to the cube of the Holy of Holies becomes a map of the path inward, with the innermost chamber standing for the inner sanctum of the self. On that reading the measurements are deliberate, and the temple is as much about the person as about a place.
This is an interpretive position, not an archaeological claim, and readers can weigh it against the evidence above. It does sit in a long line: Philo and Josephus also read the sanctuary as a map of something larger than itself, and readers of Carson's work on the Emerald Tablets will recognise the same theme of correspondence between cosmos and person that runs back through [Thoth and the Hermetic tradition](/who-was-thoth-egyptian-god-of-wisdom-hermes-trismegistus).
Watch, read and go deeper
Carson's temple teaching runs through the Bible Study series on 4BK TV, and [Mystery School of Truth](/watch/mystery-school-of-truth) explores the esoteric traditions around figures like Solomon. The Ark article linked above follows the trail from Jerusalem to Aksum. For the wider background of ancient Near Eastern temples and kingship, start at [the Anunnaki and Sumer topic hub](/topics/anunnaki).
Frequently asked questions
Where was Solomon's Temple located?
Solomon's Temple stood in Jerusalem on the hill the Bible calls Mount Moriah, today the Temple Mount or Haram al-Sharif. 2 Chronicles 3:1 identifies the spot as the threshing floor David bought from Ornan (Araunah) the Jebusite.
Is the Western Wall part of Solomon's Temple?
No. The Western Wall is part of the retaining wall Herod the Great built around the enlarged Temple Mount platform from about 20 BCE. Solomon's Temple was destroyed in 587/586 BCE, centuries before Herod's work began.
Has any evidence of Solomon's Temple been found?
No remains of the building have been excavated, because digging on the Temple Mount is not permitted. Indirect support comes from similar Iron Age temples such as Ain Dara and Tell Tayinat and from the Tel Dan stele's reference to the House of David.
What was kept in the Holy of Holies?
According to 1 Kings 8, the Holy of Holies held the Ark of the Covenant, placed beneath the wings of two olive-wood cherubim. The same chapter says the Ark contained only the two stone tablets of the law.
Who destroyed Solomon's Temple?
The Babylonian army of Nebuchadnezzar II destroyed it in 587 or 586 BCE, under the command of Nebuzaradan, as recorded in 2 Kings 25. Its bronze pillars and molten sea were broken up and carried to Babylon.
Sources and further reading
- The Hebrew Bible: 1 Kings 5–8, 2 Chronicles 2–7 and 2 Kings 25 (JPS Tanakh or NRSV).
- Flavius Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, book 8.
- A. K. Grayson, Assyrian and Babylonian Chronicles (1975), for the Babylonian Chronicle's record of the 597 BCE siege.
- Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, David and Solomon: In Search of the Bible's Sacred Kings and the Roots of the Western Tradition (2006).
- William G. Dever, What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It? (2001).
- John Monson, The New 'Ain Dara Temple: Closest Solomonic Parallel, Biblical Archaeology Review (2000).
- The Kebra Nagast, translated by E. A. Wallis Budge as The Queen of Sheba and Her Only Son Menyelek (1922).
