Codus Electi XXVII – Pride is the Key
1 September 2010
The temple that King Solomon built for the Lord was sixty cubits long, twenty wide and thirty high. [That is, about 90 feet (about 27 meters) long and 30 feet (about 9 meters) wide and 45 feet (about 13.5 meters) high.]
By comparison, the Greek Pantheon is 69 meters by 30 meters, so that the temple of Solomon itself was not impressive in any way by size. Compared to the pyramids, the temple itself was but a garden shed.
However, look at the material David had set apart for the temple: “I have taken great pains to provide for the temple of the Lord a hundred thousand talents [That is, about 3,750 tons (about 3,450 metric tons)] of gold, a million talents [That is, about 37,500 tons (about 34,500 metric tons)] of silver, quantities of bronze and iron too great to be weighed, and wood and stone.” With a floor area of 243 square meters, each square meter of that temple had available for it 15.43 tons of gold and 154.3 tons of silver. The temple of God would be impressive not by size, elect, but by the amount of precious metals including bronze and iron it would be made with… quantities that the time of David, about 1,000 years before Christ, had never seen. Though you can calculate the monetary value of the gold and silver – USD150 x 109 and USD22.8 x 109 respectively – do not forget you are speaking of the value of these metals in the world three millenniums ago before we had industrialisation. As such, David amassed a treasure unlike anything the world had ever seen, all just to build a building of 243 square meters.