1. Solomon's palace took thirteen years to build.
2-3. Forest Hall was the largest room in the palace. It was forty-four metres long, twenty-two metres wide, and thirteen and a half metres high, and was lined with cedar from Lebanon. It had four rows of cedar pillars, fifteen in a row, and they held up forty-five cedar beams. The ceiling was covered with cedar.
4. Three rows of windows on each side faced each other,
5. and there were three doors on each side near the front of the hall.
6. Pillar Hall was twenty-two metres long and thirteen and a half metres wide. A covered porch supported by pillars went all the way across the front of the hall.
7. Solomon's throne was in Justice Hall, where he judged cases. This hall was completely lined with cedar.
8. The section of the palace where Solomon lived was behind Justice Hall and looked exactly like it. He had a similar place built for his wife, the daughter of the king of Egypt.
9. From the foundation all the way to the top, these buildings and the courtyard were made out of the best stones carefully cut to size, then smoothed on every side with saws.
10. The foundation stones were huge, good stones—some of them four and a half metres long and others three and a half metres long.
11. The cedar beams and other stones that had been cut to size were on top of these foundation stones.
12. The walls around the palace courtyard were made out of three layers of cut stones with one layer of cedar beams, just like the front porch and the inner courtyard of the temple.
13-14. Hiram was a skilled bronze worker from the city of Tyre. His father was now dead, but he also had been a bronze worker from Tyre, and his mother was from the tribe of Naphtali.King Solomon asked Hiram to come to Jerusalem and make the bronze furnishings to use for worship in the Lord's temple, and he agreed to do it.
15. Hiram made two bronze columns eight metres tall and almost two metres across.
16. For the top of each column, he also made a bronze cap just over two metres high.
17. The caps were decorated with seven rows of designs that looked like chains,
18. with two rows of designs that looked like pomegranates.
19. The caps for the columns of the porch were almost two metres high and were shaped like lilies.
20. The chain designs on the caps were just above the rounded tops of the two columns, and there were two hundred pomegranates in rows around each cap.