Solomon's Temple

A building finished in the month of Bul

The event conventionally placed at 957 BCE is one notice in 1 Kings 6: Solomon's temple in Jerusalem was finished in all its parts and according to plan in Bul, the eighth month of his eleventh regnal year. Work had begun in the second month of his fourth year — seven years, by the text's own summary.

The account then turns from architecture to storage. Solomon put David's votive silver, gold and other objects into the temple treasuries once the work was complete.

1 Kings also says the stones were dressed at the quarry, so that no hammer, axe or iron tool was heard at the temple site.

Why 957 is arithmetic laid over a relative date

1 Kings supplies no BCE year at all. It gives a relative date — Bul, the eighth month of the eleventh year — and every absolute figure is a reconstruction built on a chronology of Solomon's reign.

957 comes from one traditional reconstruction rather than from the text. Other chronologies place Solomon and the project elsewhere in the mid-tenth century BCE.

The presumed site has never been excavated, so no archaeological data identify this building or fix its completion year, and the USCCB commentary warns that the description may reflect the temple as it stood centuries after Solomon.

The cloud and the sacrifices belong to a different month

Completion and dedication are separate episodes in Kings. The Ark's transfer, the cloud, Solomon's prayer and the sacrifices are narrated in the seventh month, and the text never places them on the completion date.

That leaves the calendar unresolved: the building is finished in the eighth month and dedicated in the seventh — either one month earlier in the narrative arrangement, or eleven months later.