Hey Bible readers, I'm Tara Lee Cobble, and I'm your host for the Bible Recap.

Today we drop in on Solomon as he's preparing to build the temple. He wants the best of the best

material, so he does some negotiating with the king next door in Tyra, which is in Lebanon, just north of Israel. Previously, King Hiram of Tyra had a great

relationship with Solomon's dad, David. And even though Hiram is a Gentile, today he even

recognizes and blesses God and his work on Israel's behalf. So he and Solomon are off to a great start.

Hiram has access to incredible cedar trees in his country. They can grow to be 100 feet tall.

That's a 10-story building. And not only that, but their lumberjacks use some special

logging techniques that have a full five-star rating on Yelp. As Solomon and Hiram are negotiating, Solomon tries to send

some of his guys to, quote-unquote, help out with cutting the cedar trees, but he's probably doing that

as a means of finding out their logging techniques. Hiram seems to pick up on this and maybe assumes

that Solomon is being sneaky, so he plays it cool. He says,

oh, that's so nice of you to offer. What a great idea, but how's about we just bring it to you

and save you the trip? Then you can just give us some food in exchange for it. It's like when

you're selling something on Craigslist and you have to say, yeah, thanks for offering to come

all the way to my apartment, but we can just meet at the midway point instead.

Like, maybe the police department? Do you know where that is?

But then Solomon sends 30,000 Canaanites from among his work crew to Lebanon anyway, and he gets away with it somehow.

On top of that, he has 150,000 Israelites working on things, too.

That's nearly 200,000 people. More than two times the number of people who work at Google. This is a massive project. The end of chapter five mentions that they

lay the foundation with dressed stones. These are stones that have been smoothed over into perfect

cubes or boxes for a seamless fit.

And when you hear the word stones, don't think tiny little rocks.

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