A Technician Looks at the Two Pillars of the Temple, Jachin and Boaz

1 Kings 6:2 says the height of the temple was 30 cubits. According to 1 Kings 7 the pillars were 18 cubits in height and 69 inches in diameter, and the chapiters 5, making a total of 23 cubits or 32 feet – about half the height of the temple itself. The height of the chapiter is given in 2 Kings 25 as three cubits, but when the Babylonians later removed the pillars Jeremiah gives it as the original 5. I am not sure why the discrepancy, but it doesn’t make much technical difference.

Jeremiah also states that the pillars were hollow, the brass being about 4 fingers thick (3 to 4 inches). As they were not weight bearing this is most certainly the way they were cast, and would make them similar to the two columns of Hiram’s temple of Melqart in Tyre, though Hiram’s were fancier in appearance. Those were one of gold (probably hollow wood or bronze plated with gold) and one of backlit emerald (probably wood or bronze framed and covered with green glass) with a lamp inside, and were known as “the pillars of Heracles”. (Hercules and Melqart were considered the same). The two pillars of Phoenician temples represented Astarte and Baal.

Whether Solomon’s columns were one long 60 ft piece and had to be raised and set in place, or cast in sections and stacked like doric columns is not stated or known, but if in one piece each would have weighed about 27 tons! Kind of hard to set one of those on end in Israel at that time, much less move it to the Temple site. If cast in sections, each section could have been as little as 2.7 tons in weight. Although many scholars say round pillars were unknown at the time, Phoenician pillars were round and since King Hiram’s workmen helped build Solomon’s temple, the pillars of that were likely round also.

Hiram (the bronze-caster, not the king), who was half Phoenician and whose mother came from Dan, cast the pillars in the plain of the Jordan. Clay molds have been found in other places from casting bronze, and this would have been a good place where clay was abundant. The bronze had been captured by King David when he defeated King Hadadezer and was supposedly stockpiled in the Syrian cities of Tibath and Cun, north of Damascusⁱ. At least Solomon didn’t have to mine the copper, obtain the tin, and alloy it into bronze! The bronze would have had to be hauled south, while at the same time large quantities of charcoal from Lebanon were hauled southeast to meet it. Unless they used an established casting site, they would have had to haul quantities of brick, probably northwest from Rabboth Ammon, to build furnaces. My point is that this wasn’t just some guy coming down from Tyre and going out alone into the Jordan valley to cast bronze, it was a major effort with a huge number of people involved and a great deal of logistics to work out. Then the finished bronze castings had to be polished and hauled down the Jordan Valley and up to Jerusalem – no minor task! The roads of the time were mostly “cowpaths”. Maybe archaeologists will be able to pinpoint the casting site someday.

The Temple was patterned after the Tabernacle, but there were no such pillars in the Tabernacle. They were more a standard feature of pagan temples around the Mediterranean, and probably suggested by the Phoenicians. Like Phoenician pillars, they were named, (Yahcin and Boaz), but in this case not after pagan gods! They weren’t really necessary, except to please King Hiram, so were probably added just for political reasons. However, they were a major engineering project for the time. It is too bad the Babylonians removed them (and undoubtedly melted them down for the bronze).

Neither the Second Temple nor Herod’s Temple seem to have incorporated any such pillars. Perhaps this was because their pagan origins were apparent.

ihttps://bibleatlas.org/tibhath.htm