7. I will cut off Israel from the land I gave them and repudiate the house I have consecrated for my name. Israel shall become a proverb and a byword among all nations,
8. and this house shall become a heap of ruins. Every passerby shall gasp in horror and ask, “Why has the Lord done such things to this land and to this house?”
9. And the answer will come: “Because they abandoned the Lord, their God, who brought their ancestors out of the land of Egypt, and they embraced other gods, bowing down to them and serving them. That is why the Lord has brought upon them all this evil.”
10. After the twenty years during which Solomon built the two houses, the house of the Lord and the house of the king—
11. Hiram, king of Tyre, supplying Solomon with all the cedar wood, fir wood, and gold he wished, and King Solomon giving Hiram in return twenty cities in the land of Galilee—
12. Hiram left Tyre to see the cities Solomon had given him, but he was not satisfied with them.
13. So he said, “What are these cities you have given me, my brother?” And he called them the land of Cabul, as they are called to this day.
14. Hiram, however, had sent King Solomon one hundred and twenty talents of gold.
15. This is an account of the conscript labor force King Solomon raised in order to build the house of the Lord, his own house, Millo, the wall of Jerusalem, Hazor, Megiddo, Gezer
16. (Pharaoh, king of Egypt, had come up and taken Gezer and, after destroying it by fire and slaying all the Canaanites living in the city, had given it as a farewell gift to his daughter, Solomon’s wife;
17. Solomon then rebuilt Gezer), Lower Beth-horon,
18. Baalath, Tamar in the desert of Judah,
19. all his cities for supplies, cities for chariots and cities for cavalry, and whatever Solomon desired to build in Jerusalem, in Lebanon, and in the entire land under his dominion.
20. All the people who were left of the Amorites, Hittites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites, who were not Israelites—
21. those of their descendants who were left in the land and whom the Israelites had not been able to destroy under the ban—these Solomon conscripted as forced laborers, as they are to this day.
22. But Solomon made none of the Israelites forced laborers, for they were his fighting force, his ministers, commanders, adjutants, chariot officers, and cavalry.
23. There were five hundred fifty overseers answerable to Solomon’s governors for the work, directing the people engaged in the work.