NSB(i)
1 Solomon finished building Jehovah’s Temple, the royal palace, and everything else he wanted to build.
2 Jehovah came to him again in a vision just as he had done at Gibeon.
3 Jehovah said: »I have heard your prayers and your supplication you made. I have made this house holy. I put my name there forever. My eyes and my heart will be there at all times.
4 »As for you, if you will walk before me, as David your father did, uprightly and with a true heart, doing what I have given you orders to do, keeping my laws and my decisions;
5 »I will make the seat of your rule over Israel certain forever. I gave my word to David your father. I said: You will never be without a man to be king in Israel.
6 »But if you turn from my ways, you or your children, and do not keep my orders and my laws which I have put before you, but go and make yourselves servants to other gods and give them worship:
7 »I will have Israel cut off from the land I gave them. I will abandon this house even though I have made it holy for myself. I will put you out of my sight. Israel will be a public example, and a word of shame among all peoples.
8 This house will become a mass of broken walls. Everyone who goes by will be overcome with wonder at it and make whistling sounds. They will say: Why has Jehovah done this to this land and to this house?
9 »‘The answer will be: ‘Because they turned away from Jehovah their God. The one who took their fathers out of the land of Egypt. They took for themselves other gods and gave them worship and became their servants: that is why Jehovah has sent this evil on them.’«
10 It took twenty years for Solomon to build two houses, the Temple of Jehovah and the king's house.
11 Hiram, king of Tyre, had given Solomon cedar-trees and cypress-trees and gold, as much as he needed. King Solomon gave Hiram twenty towns in the land of Galilee.
12 But when Hiram came from Tyre to see the towns that Solomon had given him, he was not pleased with them.
13 He said: »What sort of towns are these you have given me, my brother?« So they were named the land of Cabul, to this day.
14 Hiram sent the king a hundred and twenty talent of gold.
15 King Solomon used forced labor to build the Temple and the palace, to fill in land on the east side of the city, and to build the city wall. He also used it to rebuild the cities of Hazor, Megiddo, and Gezer.
16 The king of Egypt attacked Gezer and captured it. They killed its inhabitants and set fire to the city. He gave it as a wedding present to his daughter when she married Solomon.
17 Solomon rebuilt it. Using his forced labor, Solomon also rebuilt Lower Beth Horon,
18 Baalath, Tamar in the wilderness of Judah,
19 the cities where his supplies were kept, the cities for his horses and chariots, and everything else he wanted to build in Jerusalem, in Lebanon, and elsewhere in his kingdom.
20 Solomon used the descendants of the people of Canaan whom the Israelites had not killed when they took possession of their land as his forced labor. These included Amorites, Hittites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites.
21 Their descendants continue to be slaves down to the present time.
22 Solomon did not make slaves of Israelites. They served as his soldiers, officers, commanders, chariot captains, and cavalry.
23 There were five hundred and fifty officials in charge of the forced labor working on Solomon's various building projects.
24 Solomon filled in the land on the east side of the city, after his wife, the daughter of the king of Egypt, had moved from David's City to the palace Solomon built for her.
25 Three times a year Solomon offered burnt offerings and fellowship offerings on the altar he had built to Jehovah. He also burned incense to Jehovah. He finished building the Temple.
26 King Solomon also built a fleet of ships at Eziongeber. This is near Elath on the shore of the Gulf of Aqaba, in the land of Edom.
27 King Hiram sent experienced sailors from his fleet to serve with Solomon's men.
28 They sailed to the land of Ophir and brought back to Solomon about sixteen tons of gold.