The Magnificent Temple of Solomon

Solomon's Temple was a magnificent structure.

The Bible tells us that Solomon employed 30,000 people to build the temple in 3 shifts of 10,000 at a time. There was a staggering 80,000 people quarrying stone to build the temple. Yet another 70,000 people were employed just to transport the stone from the quarry to the building site. Solomon employed another 3,300 supervisors to oversee the work. That's a total of 183,300 people working for 7 years.. yes 7 years to build the magnificent temple of Solomon.


The temple was about 9 meters wide (10 yards).... Just a minute... that's smaller than my house. It was 27 meters long (30 yards) ... Err... That's a little bigger than my house, but smaller if I include the garage. 

The rooms in the ground floor of the surrounding annexe building were 2.2 meters wide, that's barely enough room to lie down. You could fit a king sized bed in there but there would be no room to get out of the side of the bed.

The front porch was only about 4.5 meters long, so its not quite long enough to keep my BMW in the shade.



So, it took 183,000 men 7 years to build a temple less than half the size of your average McDonalds. Exactly what were 80,000 people doing in the quarry for 7 years? Perhaps they had really bad union problems. Perhaps Solomon, his project managers and the supervisors (all 3,300 of them) were just utterly incompetent. Perhaps it's not true. Perhaps the Bible writers just made the whole thing up without paying any attention to the practical reality of what they were writing?


The Bible tells us of the supplies used by this massive workforce. The total volume of all the olive oil consumed by the workers is more than twice the total volume of the temple they were building.

If you assume the olive oil was stored in rounded pots and the pots were piled up in one place, They would be over 4 times the size of the temple.

Perhaps, if they had built the Temple from the empty olive oil pots it would have been a far more impressive building and taken 20 men about a week to build?

If we assume the 30,000 construction workers on the actual construction site were split into 3 shifts of 10,000. If we then assume that we squash all those workers onto the site shoulder to shoulder with only enough room to sit touching another worker on all 4 sides with no spaces for paths to move stone or go to the toilet, that gives us a square of about 2 ft for each of the 10,000 workers on each shift. The workers would have to be placed in 100 rows of 100 workers which occupies a square of 200 ft by 200 ft.

We know that the inner temple was only about 35ft wide. Even if you include all the side chambers, the 10,000 workers could not physically fit onto the site while sitting side by side with no spaces. If you then start to account for the space for the 70,000 men transporting stone, all the supervisors and of course the space for the building they were constructing for 7 years, the absurdity becomes apparent.

Now to go on to the shift workers cutting wood in Lebanon:-
10,000 men working for 313 days a year (Sabbath off). Lets suppose one man cuts down and prepares only one tree a day. that's 3,130,000 trees a year for 7 years which is about 22 million trees to build something the size of a McDonnalds????

It gets more absurd. If you get four 6x6 beams 20 feet long from a single cedar tree. The total number of beams laid end to end would stretch for 333 thousand miles. that's 14 times around the earth.
If you used only the Cedar beams to build the temple as per the stated dimensions it would be 700 miles high.


The bible states exactly how small the Temple was. The magnificent Solomon's Temple was smaller that the smallest church I have ever been in.


Most of you ladies here will know what was going on here. When a self absorbed guy claims it's huge, When you get to see it, the reality is that its usually disappointingly small.