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| Solomon's Workers Put Their Feet Up |
By my count, this comes to 183,300 persons who worked on this temple. To put this in perspective, it took 1,283,000 man-years to build the temple, or 503 man-years to build each square foot it.
If I apply this rate of construction to my living room, which is 20 feet x 12 feet, it would take over 120,000 man years to build it. To put it yet another way, if a construction team of 100 persons (which is too big to function on such a small job) worked on building my living room, it would take them 1,200 years to build it.
If 183,000 people really worked for seven years to build a 2,552 square foot temple, they must have worked at a snail's pace. Their progress could only be measured at the molecular level.
The Lumber
According to the above quote, 10,000 labourers brought lumber from Lebanon at a time. There were a total of 30,000 labourers rotating on three shifts. Assuming that each labourer brought back 100 pounds of lumber on each trip, that means that one million pounds of lumber arrived at the temple every month. Don't forget that the temple was only 2,552 square feet, and it was already piled with gold, silver, bronze, and iron.That's almost 400 pounds of lumber per square foot, coming in every month. Every year, the equivalent of 240 semi-trailer loads would have arrived. Where did they put it all?
The Staff
When the temple was finished and put into operation, staff were obviously required. King David outlined the staffing requirements:"Twenty four thousand of these, David said, shall have charge of the work in the house of the LORD, six thousand shall be officers and judges, four thousand gatekeepers, and four thousand shall offer praises to the LORD with the instruments which I have made for praise." - 1 Chronicles 23:4,5
Therefore, 24,000 persons were to work in the house of the Lord. This must have been a pretty slack job. Based on the size of the temple and courtyard, and considering that access to certain parts of the temple was restricted to the priests and high priest, there couldn't possibly be room for more than about 100 people at a time. This means that each Levite would have worked for only about one day per year. Where can I apply?
The Total Contents
Wow, this must have been some building. Consider what was inside its walls:- 6,260 cubic feet of gold
- 120,146 cubic feet of silver
- 338,000 cubic feet of iron (minimum estimate)
- 321,000 cubic feet of bronze (minimum estimate)
- 600,000 cubic feet of Lebanese Cedar arrived every year
- Untold quantities of stone, brick, and local timbers
- 24,000 staff (not necessarily simultaneous)
- Assorted fixtures, the Ark of the Covenant, etc.
