1
ST
KINGS
Week 16, chapter 8 and 9

We will finally finish 1
st
Kings Chapter 8 today and we’ll get started in chapter 9; however in
some ways we are exiting it sooner than I would prefer to. Like a few other places in the Bible,
this is one of those chapters where we could camp here for a long time and still not fully
explore the depths of its contents.

We’ll re-read verses 54 to the end of the chapter and discuss those passages shortly, but first
I feel compelled to revisit verses 27 – 30 for a few minutes because within these passages we
have one of the wisest men who ever lived utterly bewildered in trying to understand and
express just who God is, the nature of His substance, how to describe Him, and how to explain
in words and human thought this mysterious reality of God and His presence.

RE-READ 1
ST
KINGS 8:27 - 30

Solomon’s frame of reference is that while the Temple is called Yehoveh’s house (God’s beit
or bayith in Hebrew), and God’s dwelling place, that in fact Solomon inherently knows that
God does not actually live there, but rather He lives in Heaven. And yet…. the idea of God living
in Heaven also isn’t fully satisfactory to Shlomo’s mind because if Heaven is a definable place
it can’t possibly be sufficient to house the limitless Creator.

Despite all this the Lord’s presence at the Temple is undeniable because it was literally visible
in a cloud that suddenly appeared INSIDE the hekal, the sanctuary; even more, Solomon
understood that God didn’t LEAVE Heaven to journey to the Temple in Jerusalem to visit His
people Israel.
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I bring this up because it addresses a challenge for the Church and Judaism that when dealt
with poorly (as I regret that, in my estimation, it has been) often tends towards humanizing
God. Making Him “more human” inevitably tars Him with some of our human flaws and
characteristics, and places upon Him our human expectations as though He was the elected
Prime Minister of Heaven and Earth and not the self-existent God of everything. In doing so we
have come to feel freer to question God’s decisions and reckon that He must think logically
and feel deeply as we do, only at an even greater level. In the end, the truth is that the more
we try to describe God the more we diminish who He is.

The great Jewish Sage and Philosopher Maimonides who lived around 1200 A.D., known
among the Jewish community as the Rambam, thought about this issue long and hard and no
doubt Solomon’s prayer at the Temple dedication ceremony had much to do with his
fascination of the problem of defining the God of Israel. Maimonides suggested one way to
view this matter as what he called “negative theology”. And the idea is that God’s attributes
expressed in the negative are His true attributes. In other words, at the same time that we can
say that God is just we must also say that God is not unjust. While we can say that God is
wise, we must also say that God is not unwise. That may sound like so much double-talk until
we grasp that what Maimonides is saying is that unlike humans, the foundational traits of God
have no opposites in Him.

If you will remember back to Genesis (in chapter 6), we had a lesson that included what I call
the Principle of Opposites that is a fundamental and immutable trait of our Universe. It says
that God created our Universe based on a foundational law that everything in and of our
Universe will have an opposite. If there is an up, there is a down. If there is a near there is a
far. If there is light there is darkness. If there is a male there is a female. If there is good there
is evil. If there is birth there is death. On and on and on. The Rambam tells us that we while we
can define God best by means of expressing His attributes in the negative we cannot do the
same with humans. For instance, while we can say with assurance that God is knowing and
must also say that God is not unknowing we cannot say the same regarding any human trait
about any human. That is while I can say that humans are knowing I cannot say that humans
are not unknowing for in fact humans can be both knowing and unknowing depending on the
individual and on the circumstance.

In other words, God is such a wholly other being than humans that while humans are
essentially a fleshly container of opposites, God is not. A human being’s fundamental nature is
as a creature composed of opposites. A human can exist, and then not exist. A human can be
powerful and then become weak. A human can be good and then be bad. A human can be
here, and then be there. A human can be wise and then be foolish. But none of this is true of
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God and this is because He is not a container of opposites: He is what He is (or as He said in
the Burning Bush to Moses, I am what I am) and therefore He is not a man that He should
change. God has no capacity NOT to exist. God is unable to be weak. God is incapable of
being foolish. God is not here or there; He hovered over the deep at Creation, ruled over His
angels in Heaven, and was present at the outer edges of the Universe for the birth of every
star all at the same time not because He chose to be, but because that is His fundamental
nature.

Therefore Maimonides writes that we cannot know anything about God per se; God’s essential
character is completely incomprehensible to mortal minds. Human beings at best can only
describe what God does in the world but will never be able to discern what God is. And yet
that is precisely what the Church has insisted upon doing for centuries, and it is why the
Doctrine of the Trinity was invented. It’s not that there isn’t some amount of truth contained
within the Trinitarian concept it’s that we have taken something out of its biblical context and
now confidently use it to make ourselves think that we know what God is, when we do not. We
are not satisfied with only observing what God does, or experiencing Him personally; rather we
feel compelled and perfectly able to do the very thing we should not do, because our essential
nature doesn’t have the ability for it: and that is to define and understand what God is.

This is the reason that I teach you to stop asking “why” when you contemplate the Lord or
study God’s Word, and instead ask “what”. And the “what” concerns discerning “what” God-
pattern or which biblically stated God-principle is at work in any given situation. Asking “why”
is a good and reasonable question for trying to discover how our physical temporal Universe of
time and space operates; but it is wholly wrong and self-defeating to try and discern God and
His Holy Scriptures by employing “why” as a method of discovery. Because “why” implies that
we can uncover and comprehend the nature of God’s mind that underlies the “what”. Asking
“why” makes us think that we have the right to examine and debate God’s reasoning for His
establishment of His principles, laws, and commandments. But the Holy Scriptures teach us
that the duty of God’s people is only to obey His principles, laws, and commandments and to
do so in a spirit of trust.

The Rambam argues that it is inappropriate to employ even all the attributes ascribed to God in
the Bible; we may use them in the biblical context when we come across them in the
Scriptures, but it is unbecoming and even perhaps sinful to speak of God as possessing
human?like characteristics. We should not remove a descriptive word from its context and then
employ it as a means to define what God is, the most common of which in our age is to say,
“God is love”. Human language always falls short whenever speaking of God. Words become
devalued and cannot hope to contain the cosmic mystery of God’s Being and Presence.
Human language falters and is utterly impotent although we are often certain that we’ve finally
captured God’s essence in those fine words. If words have difficulty describing the beauty of a
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sunset, or a classic work of art like Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, how much more so will
words be clumsy and ineffectual in describing the reality of God.

Contained within the wisdom that God gave to King Solomon, came Shlomo’s stunning
admission at the Temple dedication ceremony that it is utterly futile to try and understand such
things as God’s omnipresence; that Yehoveh could dwell here and there and everywhere
simultaneously and yet in the earthly human sense of dwelling, not reside anyplace at all but
merely place his “Name” there. So in the end, all Solomon asked for is that no matter where
God’s people might be, that if they direct their prayers towards God’s designated earthly
place of meeting (the Temple on Mt. Moriah) that God will hear and act on those prayers in His
will. The mystery of God was not challenged or solved but rather accepted. That is the true
Scriptural definition of faith.

Let’s re-read the remainder of 1
st
Kings 8 starting at verse 54.

RE-READ 1
ST
KINGS 8:54 – end


Solomon had been in a kneeling position before God, hands outstretched, as he offered his
prayers. But now he stood to address and bless the congregation of Israel. For reasons the
Sages have debated for centuries, an important happening was left out in this narrative in 1
st
Kings that we find recorded in 2
nd
Chronicles.


CJB
2 Chronicles 7:1 When Shlomo had finished praying, fire came down from heaven
and consumed the burnt offering and the sacrifices………….

I began the day asking you to put away your desire to know “why”, as in “why” did God light
the altar fire and burn up these offerings rather than just allowing the fire to be lit by the priests
as usual? Instead our question should always be “what”; what God-pattern or principle is
being employed here? And we find that answer in the Book of Leviticus, at the consecration of
the Wilderness Tabernacle.
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Leviticus 9:22-24 CJB

22
Aharon raised his hands toward the people, blessed them and came down from
offering the sin offering, the burnt offering and the peace offerings.

23
Moshe and Aharon entered the tent of meeting, came out and blessed the people.
Then the glory of ADONAI appeared to all the people!

24
Fire came forth from the presence of ADONAI, consuming the burnt offering and the
fat on the altar. When all the people saw it, they shouted and fell on their faces.

So the unchanging God of course consecrated Solomon’s Temple of stone and wood in
Jerusalem in the same way He did the portable one made of fabric, animal skins, and wood at
the foot of Mt. Sinai. In repeating this pattern the people knew that the Lord pronounced that
this place, this house, was acceptable and now it had been holy-fied.

In fact in verse 56 King Shlomo invokes Moses’ name and reminds the people that what is
happening here is all part of the covenant that Yehoveh had made with Moses 500 years
earlier. “May Yehoveh be with us as He was with our ancestors”, Solomon continues. How,
exactly, was Yehoveh “with” their ancestors? Solomon never addresses that because it is
impossible to put to words. Suffice it to say that God was with Israel because He said He would
be, and Israel’s many victories over their enemies and the fact that they are now at rest in the
Land of Canaan, participating in this dedication celebration of a Temple to Yehoveh, is
experiential proof of God’s promise of His mysterious presence being with them.

But there was another strong implication in the statement about God’s presence with Israel
that the Rabbis have noticed. It is that it was important for the people to understand that now
that the Temple was completed and consecrated, and that all of the Lord’s promises made to
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Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob about arriving and settling in Canaan had been met, that God
would not leave them to themselves. So Solomon prayed aloud in front of the people that God
would not abandon them because He had not abandoned the Patriarchs.

And then finally another strong statement is made in verse 60 and we see that the concept of
there being only 1 God over all the earth and over all mankind has begun to take root in
Israel’s leadership in a much more overt way than ever before. Solomon says that Israel
needs to obey God, and God will in turn bless Israel, and in this way all the people of the earth
will know that Yehoveh is God and there is none else. Two things: we have learned that a
god’s name was everything to ancient people. Knowing a god’s name was the key to knowing
what that god’s attributes were, what functions of nature he or she was in charge of, and
where that god’s territory was. Yehoveh was to be associated not to a territory but to the entire
earth. Why? Because He is the only god in existence. Second is how important this concept is
to us today. We live in a world whereby many Christian denominations and those secular
groups who want all of the world’s religions to get along, have adopted the belief that
assuming there is only one god, then it’s OK to use whatever name your religion might call
Him, from Allah to Buddha. Solomon didn’t say, OK Canaanites, just know that Ba’al is
actually Yehoveh. OK Moabites just apply everything you ascribe to your god Molech to
Yehoveh since Yehoveh is the only god and you are actually worshipping Him. The idea was
not that Yehoveh was some kind of universal melting pot of any and all characteristics of the
gods that men could apply as they wished as long as they called God Yehoveh. Rather it was
that the Holy Scriptures of the Hebrews are the source of defining God’s attributes, and of
expressing His deeds and principles and commands to humans, and His name is YHWH.
There is no other God and therefore there is no other name for God.

The king now leads the nation in more offerings and sacrifices to the tune of 22,000 oxen and
120,000 sheep. Several classifications of offerings are listed: the chief of all offerings, the
‘Olah; the offering that always accompanies the ‘Olah, which is the Minchah; and also the
Zevah Shelamim offering.

All the meat from the ‘Olah is burned up on the altar; none can be used for anything else. The
Minchah is an offering of produce, and some of it is burned up and the rest goes to the priests.
The Zevah Shelamim has a small amount of the animal burned up and the rest goes to the
worshippers and the priests for food. The part of the Shelamim that is burned up is the Helev,
which is the best fat that surrounds the organs. Generally speaking, all the meat of the
Shelamim offering is used for food for the worshipper and for the priests. Thus we see that
because thousands upon thousands of people came for this dedication and they would be
there for 2 full weeks, food was needed. So in a very practical solution, while some of the
animals were completely devoted to God and thus entirely burned up to ashes (the ‘Olah
offering), the far larger portion of the sacrificial animals were sanctified and then used for food
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for the enormous crowd (the Shelamim offering).

However the sheer quantity of animals that had to be processed and offered in whole or in part
on the altar meant that it was physically impossible for the Great Altar of Burnt Offering to
handle it all. Thus another means of accepting these sacrifices had to be arranged and that’s
what is being discussed in verse 64. There is much disagreement over the meaning of this
passage. Some say that the King literally sanctified the courtyard and then a wood fire was
built upon the floor of the courtyard and the animals burned up there. Others say that another
altar was built and thus two altars were in use. In fact some of the Sages say that what was
being used at first for the main altar was the original bronze altar of Moses from the days of the
Wilderness Tabernacle; but now Solomon had an excuse to build a second, much larger altar,
and this larger altar is what was in the courtyard. But after the dedication ceremony,
Solomon’s new and larger one would be used to replace the more ancient and smaller one.
Your guess as to which of these suggestions is accurate is as good as mine.

The final two verses actually give us information that we discussed in the first teaching I gave
to you about this chapter. Verse 65 begins: “So Shlomo celebrated the festival at that time”.
The word translated to festival is in Hebrew chag. A chag is a pilgrimage festival that requires
all the adult males of Israel to travel from wherever they might reside, to the Temple in
Jerusalem. This dedication ceremony is not a chag therefore this “festival” is something else,
and in this case it is referring to one of the three God-established Biblical Feasts in the Torah
Law, among which are Matza, Shavuot, and Sukkot. Let me remind you that it is common in
the New Testament and in modern Jewish conversation to call the first of these pilgrimage
festivals Pesach (Passover) instead of Matza (Unleavened Bread); however that is technically
not correct.

Pesach, Matza, and Bikkurim is a series of springtime feasts that occurs in rapid fire
succession: Passover first, the next day is Unleavened Bread, and the day after that is
Firstfruits. Passover is a one day feast; Unleavened Bread is a 7 day feast, and Firstfruits is a
1 day feast. It is the Feast of Unleavened Bread that is the chag, the Pilgrimage festival, not
Passover or Firstfruits. However, a pilgrim coming to Jerusalem for the festival of Matza (which
for most involved an arduous journey) naturally wanted to come one day early so that he could
have his Passover lamb slaughtered by a priest, cooked in an oven in the holy city, and
celebrate with his brethren coming from all over the Holy Lands (although none of this was
required).

Thus we get next this cryptic comment that the gathering came and celebrated before God
(meaning at the Temple) for 7 days, and then for 7 more days, 14 in all. And then on the 8
th
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day the people dispersed and went home. The first 7 days was the Temple dedication
ceremony; we know that 2
nd
7 days (which was the chag) was Sukkot because there was an
8
th
day spoken of before they could leave, and that is the Torah ordained protocol for Sukkot.
So the throngs of people remained in Jerusalem for 15 days total; that must have been
something to behold. No doubt they camped out for miles around the city.

Let’s get a bit of a start on chapter 9.

READ 1
ST
KINGS 9 all


The events of the opening verses took place at least 13 years after the Temple dedication
ceremony of chapter 8, because we’re told in chapter 7 that it took Solomon 13 years to build
his palace, and he didn’t start counting that time until the Temple was completed. And in like
manner (meaning in a dream) God visited Shlomo as He had near the beginning of the King’s
reign at Gibeon. No doubt Solomon was in his palace when this visitation occurred; the
Tabernacle and priesthood were no longer located in Gibeon so there would be no reason for
Solomon to be there.

In many ways this visitation from Yehoveh is connected with the 1
st
one. In the first visit God
had asked Shlomo what he wanted from Him and Solomon asked for wisdom to rule his
people. God was pleased with this request and so granted it but as a bonus gave to
Shlomo that which he did NOT ask for: great wealth. Thus in verse 1 of chapter 9 we’re told
that after Solomon had not only built the beautifully appropriate Temple, but also a magnificent
palace that was such a wonder that other potentates came just to see it, that Solomon had built
everything else that his heart had desired. The Sages point out that while the Temple and the
Palace were important and necessary, by saying “everything else that his heart desired”
means that Shlomo built these other projects merely to please himself and gain fame. So God
came the 2
nd
time AFTER the realization of Solomon’s great wealth, and in response to
Solomon’s prayerful petition at the Temple dedication ceremony.

Notice again: it was at least 13 years AFTER the Temple dedication ceremony complete with
Solomon’s famous prayer that God came to tell Solomon that He would grant those petitions.
One has to wonder if the King even remembered much about what he had asked of God so
many years earlier. This was an awfully long time of waiting to find out.
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Verse 3 is a bit odd on the surface; Yehoveh says that He has consecrated the Temple and
placed His name there. Why would Solomon need to have this repeated 13 or so years later?
We are not told and I don’t want to get into a guessing game; however likely after all these
years many trials had come and gone for Solomon and the Lord saw the need to reaffirm His
commitment to the Temple as a holy meeting place. And I also think that after all these years
of priestly rituals and ceremonies that perhaps Solomon needed to be gently reminded that it
was Yehoveh who consecrated the Temple, not Solomon and not the priests.

In verses 4 through 9 the Lord conditions His blessing upon Israel and upon Solomon with
obedience to the Torah, and finally threatens Israel with the terrible consequence of exile and
of the Temple being abandoned by Yehoveh and becoming an eyesore and a monument to
Israel’s rebellion and apostasy. If I were to give a sub-title to this short section I would call it:
“Behavior Matters”.

There are 4 “ifs” presented to Solomon in this dream-visitation from Yehoveh. That is these
are the 4 conditions for God’s continued kindness and blessing over Israel, and since this is
concerning how Yehoveh deals with Israel as a nation (as opposed to individual by individual),
then as we have seen it developed in God’s Word, the national condition (from God’s
perspective) is reflected in the national leadership. In this case because Israel is a monarchy,
the national leadership is the king: King Solomon.

And the 4 “ifs” are these:

1.If Solomon lives in Yehoveh’s presence. This means being submissive to God and
following in His ways.
2.If Solomon displays pureness of heart and uprightness. This means integrity and
morality based on God’s definition of these traits.
3.If Solomon DOES what God commands. The idea is that Solomon doesn’t passively
pay lip service to the Torah, or merely say all the right things; it means to actually
perform the deeds and works that the Father instructs.
4.If Solomon keeps the statutes, ordinances, and commands of God. This is speaking of
the written laws and regulations as they are presented in the Torah. The Hebrew terms
are choq, mishpat, and mitzvot. And the idea is that together these form all the rules
of ritual purity, all the do’s and don’ts that define morality, the civil laws that define
social justice and the procedures for bringing about God’s justice faithfully.
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If Solomon is faithful in all these things THEN the Lord will insure that a king will sit on Israel’s
throne that comes through Solomon’s line. Let’s stop and remember here that David had
many sons through many wives and concubines. Thus a number of family branches of David
are now in existence. Much like Yehoveh selected Aaron from the line of Levi to be the High
Priest, and then from among Aaron’s son’s the Father ordained Eleazar to be the line from
which further High Priests would come, so it is for Solomon. But for Solomon’s line to continue
to supply Israel’s king (and not some other descendant of David’s) then Solomon has to keep
those 4 conditions.

We’ll continue with chapter 9 next time.



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