Solomon entered into a regular treaty, by which he bound himself to supply the Tyrians with large quantities of corn; receiving in return their timber, which was floated down to Joppa, and a large body of artificers.  The timber was cut by his own subjects, of whom he raised a body of thirty thousand; ten thousand employed at a time, and relieving each other every month; so that to one month of labor they had two of rest.  He raised two other corps, one of seventy thousand porters of burdens, the other of eighty thousand hewers of stone, who were employed in the quarries among the mountains.  All these labors were thrown, not on the Israelites, but on the strangers who, chiefly of Canaanitish descent, had been permitted to inhabit the country.

These preparations, in addition to those of King David, being completed, the work began.  The eminence of Moriah, the Mount of Vision, i.e., the height seen afar from the adjacent country, which tradition pointed out as the spot where Abraham had offered his son (where recently the plague had been stayed, by the altar built in the threshing-floor of Ornan or Araunah, the Jebusite), rose on the east side of the city.  Its rugged top was levelled with immense labor; its sides, which to the east and south were precipitous, were faced with a wall of stone, built up perpendicular from the bottom of the valley, so as to appear to those who looked down of most terrific height; a work of prodigious skill and labor, as the immense stones were strongly mortised together and wedged into the rock.  Around the whole area or esplanade, an irregular quadrangle, was a solid wall of considerable height and strength:  within this was an open court, into which the Gentiles were either from the first, or subsequently, admitted.  A second wall encompassed another quadrangle, called the court of the Israelites.  Along this wall, on the inside, ran a portico or cloister, over which were chambers for different sacred purposes.  Within this again another, probably a lower, wall separated the court of the priests from that of the Israelites.  To each court the ascent was by steps, so that the platform of the inner court was on a higher level than that of the outer.

The Temple itself was rather a monument of the wealth than the architectural skill and science of the people.  It was a wonder of the world from the splendor of its materials, more than the grace, boldness, or majesty of its height and dimensions.  It had neither the colossal magnitude of the Egyptian, the simple dignity and perfect proportional harmony of the Grecian, nor perhaps the fantastic grace and lightness of later Oriental architecture.  Some writers, calling to their assistance the visionary temple of Ezekiel, have erected a most superb edifice; to which there is this fatal objection, that if the dimensions of the prophet are taken as they stand in the text, the area of the Temple and its courts would not only have covered the whole of Mount Moriah, but almost all Jerusalem.  In fact our accounts of the Temple of Solomon are altogether unsatisfactory.  The details, as they now stand in the books of Kings and Chronicles, the only safe authorities, are unscientific, and, what is worse, contradictory.