The Dedication of the Temple
62 Then the king and all Israel with him offered sacrifices before the LORD. 63 Solomon offered a sacrifice of fellowship offerings to the LORD: twenty-two thousand cattle and a hundred and twenty thousand sheep and goats. So the king and all the Israelites dedicated the temple of the LORD.
The first thing that surprises most people about the vast number of sacrifices is the amount of death involved: A typical cow has around 4.25 gallons of blood. A sheep weighing a little over a hundred pounds has about 1 gallon, and a goat is about the same. So the cost in blood for the dedication of the temple was about 93,500 gallons of cow’s blood and about 120,000 gallons of sheep and goat’s blood, or 213,500 gallons of sacrificial blood. These amounts don’t need to shock us. Solomon’s readers might have gasped in awe, but not disgust. This was a sacrifice made in celebration within a culture that butchered its own meat by hand every day; This was an offering to the Lord and a feast for the people.
Another thing that surprises readers is the question about the amount of time this offering must have taken. In verse 65 we will be told that they took two weeks in all. Since this was a fellowship offering (Hebrew shelem, pl. shalamim), only the fat of entrails (Leviticus 3:14-15) and fatty cow’s tail (Leviticus 3:9) were to be burned up on the Lord’s altar. The rest was a meal to be shared. The people themselves would have done the slaughtering and butchering; the role of the priest was only limited to sprinkling the blood of the animal. We are told that many or most of the people took part in this dedication in verse 63: “The king and all the Israelites dedicated the temple.”
How did it look? WE don’t have the details, but in the congregation I serve, we have five services per weekend, and because of the number of people and the need to end services in about an hour (in part, so that those attending the next service will have a place to park), we distribute the Lord’s Supper in a manner that is respectful of the sacrament but moves the group in such a way that there is continuous movement. It’s possible to imagine something similar here: a well-organized set of eleven lines (one for each tribe apart from the Levites) moving through the grass and stony lanes of the field once belonging to Arauna the Jebusite, up the great half-circle stairs and into the temple courts. From each family’s sacrifice, a handy pouch (perhaps one of the animal’s stomachs) would be carried, containing the small portion to be burned, and a dish containing some of the animal’s blood. The father and his older sons would move up through the line of worshipers, and when their turn came, a Levite would take the pouch of fat and entrails and throw it up onto the huge altar with its roaring fire (the smell of the roasting meat and the sizzle and pop of the fat would stay in the boys’ minds and hearts for the rest of their lives). A priest would dip a branch of hyssop into the dish of blood and walk around the altar, flicking the blood on each side as we went. Perhaps there would be a blessing spoken as the “walk” was taken, and then father and sons would turn away, their eyes now taking in the magnificence of the inner sanctuary as they passed through, and then they hurried back to tell their mother and sisters what it was like.
64 On that same day the king consecrated the middle part of the courtyard in front of the temple of the LORD, and there he offered burnt offerings, grain offerings and the fat of the fellowship offerings, because the bronze altar that stood before the LORD was too small to hold the burnt offerings, the grain offerings and the fat of the fellowship offerings.
This would have gone on while the nation was bringing in their vast lines of sacrifices, on the first day of the dedication. We see that besides the fellowship offerings of the people (which fed them and the priests and Levites), there were also burnt offerings, but the bronze altar was “too small to hold the burnt offerings.”
65 So Solomon observed the festival at that time, and all Israel with him—a vast assembly, people from Lebo Hamath to the Wadi of Egypt. They celebrated it before the LORD our God for seven days and seven days more, fourteen days in all. 66 On the following day he sent the people away. They blessed the king and then went home, joyful and glad in heart for all the good things the LORD had done for his servant David and his people Israel. (NIV)
Lebo Hamath (the “entrance” of Hamath) was a valley in the far north of Israel about seventy miles north of Damascus, and the Wadi of Egypt was a gulch fed by floods and rainwater west of the western Philistine border, more than fifty miles beyond Beersheba (the southern boundary of Judah).
The celebration was over, the temple was dedicated, and the people went home. There was peace on their borders, and the king and his kingdom were blessed by God. If this were the end of the story, it would be a very happy ending. Knowing human nature, we should anticipate that there will be a dark cloud appearing on the horizon very soon—but it’s not the very next thing. In fact, God would bless Solomon and the kingdom of Israel even more than this. It will be just one more example of the Lord blessing his people, just as he had promised David, and just as he promised David’s son.
May God bless you today and always.
Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in New Ulm, Minnesota. His wife, Kathryn, attended Chapel from 1987-1990 while studying Secondary Education (Theater and Math) at UW-Madison. Kathryn’s father, John Meyer, was also the first man to serve as a Vicar at Chapel.
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