1 Kings 9

¹ When Solomon had finished building the house of the LORD and the royal palace, and everything else that Solomon had desired to do,

² the LORD appeared to Solomon a second time, just as he had appeared to him at Gibeon.

³ And the LORD said to him, "I have heard your prayer and your plea that you made before me. I have set apart this house that you have built, to put my name there forever; my eyes and my heart will be there for all time.

⁴ As for you, if you walk before me as David your father walked, with a whole heart and in uprightness, doing all that I have commanded you, and you keep my statutes and my just rulings,

⁵ then I will establish your royal throne over Israel forever, as I promised David your father, saying, 'You will never lack a man on the throne of Israel.'

⁶ But if you and your children ever turn away from following me and do not keep my commandments and my statutes that I have set before you, and you go and serve other gods and bow down to them,

⁷ then I will cut Israel off from the land that I gave them, and the house I set apart for my name I will cast out of my sight; and Israel will become a byword and an object of scorn among all the peoples.

⁸ And this house will become a heap of ruins; everyone who passes by it will be appalled and will hiss, and they will say, 'Why has the LORD done this to this land and to this house?'

⁹ And they will answer, 'Because they abandoned the LORD their God, who brought their ancestors out of the land of Egypt, and they took hold of other gods and bowed down to them and served them. That is why the LORD has brought all this disaster on them.'"

¹⁰ At the end of twenty years, during which Solomon had built the two houses, the house of the LORD and the royal palace,

¹¹ Hiram king of Tyre having supplied Solomon with cedar and cypress timber and gold, as much as he wanted, King Solomon then gave Hiram twenty towns in the land of Galilee.

¹² But when Hiram came out from Tyre to see the towns that Solomon had given him, they did not please him.

¹³ He said, "What kind of towns are these you have given me, my brother?" So they are called the land of Cabul to this day.

¹⁴ And Hiram had sent the king a hundred and twenty talents of gold.

¹⁵ This is the account of the forced labor that King Solomon conscripted to build the house of the LORD, his own palace, the Millo, the wall of Jerusalem, Hazor, Megiddo, and Gezer:

¹⁶ Pharaoh king of Egypt had marched up, captured Gezer, burned it down, killed the Canaanites living in the city, and given it as a dowry to his daughter, Solomon's wife.

¹⁷ So Solomon rebuilt Gezer, Lower Beth Horon,

¹⁸ Baalath, and Tamar in the wilderness, in the land,

¹⁹ as well as all the storage towns that belonged to Solomon, the towns for his chariots and the towns for his horsemen, and whatever Solomon desired to build in Jerusalem, in Lebanon, and throughout the land of his dominion.

²⁰ All the people who were left from the Amorites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, who were not Israelites—

²¹ their descendants who remained in the land after them, whom the Israelites had not been able to devote to destruction—these Solomon conscripted as slave labor, and so they remain to this day.

²² But Solomon did not make slaves of any of the Israelites; they were his soldiers, his officials, his commanders, his officers, and the commanders of his chariots and his horsemen.

²³ These were the chief officers in charge of Solomon's work: five hundred and fifty of them, supervising the people who did the work.

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

²⁵ Three times a year Solomon offered burnt offerings and fellowship offerings on the altar he had built for the LORD, burning incense with them before the LORD. So he completed the temple.

²⁶ King Solomon also built a fleet of ships at Ezion Geber, which is near Eloth on the shore of the Red Sea, in the land of Edom.

²⁷ And Hiram sent his servants with the fleet, sailors who knew the sea, along with Solomon's servants.

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