After this war one work remains for us,

O leaders, that which Solomon achieved,

The peaceful scion and the unarmed heir

Of a warlike realm, whose father’s weary hand

Was sullied by the ardent blood of kings.

The blood effaced, a temple is upraised

And golden altar, house sublime of Christ.

Jerusalem then by its temple crowned,

Received its God, now that the wandering ark

On the marble altar found repose.

In our camp let a sacred temple rise,

that God may in its sanctuary dwell.

What profits it to have repelled the hosts

Of earth-born vices, if the Son of man

From heaven descending, enter the body cleansed,

But unadorned and not a temple fair?

Thus far we have engaged in fierce conflict:

Now let white-vestured Peace perform its tasks,

And youth unarmed build up a sacred house. THE

For the servants of Hiram who cut down cedars from Lebanon for Solomon are the teachers chosen from among the Gentiles whose task is to fell those who enjoy the goods and glory of this world by correcting their pride and arrogance and convert their ambition into obedience to their Redeemer. Now with these servants were also the servants of Solomon, and together they set about the work referred to because the first teachers from among the Gentiles needed the apostles, who had received training by being instructed in the word of faith, lest, were they to begin to teach without masters, they might turn out to be teachers of error. For the reason why Solomon wanted the servants of Hiram to hew timber from Lebanon for him was that they were more experienced than his own servants in felling, but the reason why he also wanted his own servants to be there with them was that they might show the lumbermen what length the planks ought to be. What this symbolizes is plain, namely, that the apostles had a surer knowledge of how to preach to others the word of the gospel that they were privileged to hear from the Lord, but the Gentiles, converted from error and brought into conformity with the truth of the gospel, had a better knowledge of the actual errors of the Gentiles, and the surer their knowledge the more skillfully they learned to counteract and refute them. Paul indeed had a better knowledge of the mystery of the gospel, which he had learned through revelation, but Dionysus was better able to refute the false teachings of Athens, whose syllogisms as well as errors and all of whose arguments he knew since a boy. With this explanation the statement that follows is fully in keeping: For you know that there is not a man among my people who has the skill to hew wood like the Sidonians. For when the Lord was bodily present teaching, there was not one among the Jewish people who knew so well how to refute the errors of the Gentiles as the actual Gentile converts to the faith and those of the Gentiles who had become Christians. For the Sidonians and Tyrians are rightly taken as a type of the Gentiles because they were Gentile peoples. ^[1] HIRAM HAD BEEN CONVERTED BY DAVID. ISHO‘DAD OF MERV: This Hiram had been converted to [the worship of] God through his relationships with David, and he rejoiced greatly, when he heard that a house would be built for the Lord. He asks to be supplied with bread and oil in exchange for the wood that he delivers because the Tyrians and the Sidonians, as it appears, did not sow or harvest since their commerce was exclusively maritime. ^[1]

Here we do not need to work around any concealed meaning; indeed, in this event there is a clear analogy with Christ and the actions he undertook for the building of the church. As Solomon ordered timbers to be cut from the mountains of Lebanon and stones to be shipped by sea, and employed them after they had been brought to the builder’s yard of the temple, so Christ, after receiving the Jews and the Gentiles from the timbers of infidelity, transported them to the builder’s yard of the temple which is not made by human hands.

The first thing to note here is that it was not for nothing that Sol-omon chose workmen from all Israel, nor was there any section of the people from which men fit for such a great task were not taken, because, of course, priests nowadays are not to be chosen from the stock of Aaron alone; rather, people are to be sought from the whole church who, whether by example or word, are competent to build the house of the Lord, and wherever they are found they are to be promoted to the office of teachers without any exception of persons. And when such people are ordained to instruct the infidel and those who are to be called into the joint pastorate of the church, they are sent as energetic and picked men, as it were, to hew in Lebanon the materials for the temple. And indeed the number of thirty thousand, which was the tally of the hewers of wood, can be aptly applied figuratively to those who are perfect in the faith of the holy Trinity, because it is most appropriate for teachers.

These thousands of men employed in the cutting and transportation of the wooden beams and the stones signify the thousands of thousands of assistant spirits sent for our salvation. In the first place, [we see that] God ordered his angels to cut from the rock of the world and to polish and direct accurately the souls of the saints. . . . Second, in this same symbol, we can observe the toils of the saints for the conversion and salvation of souls, either when they endeavor to drive human beings away from the love of the world or when, after they have accomplished that, they begin to polish the stones cut from the rock until they provide them with luster by a thorough polishing and make them worthy of the heavenly building. Then they are taken and employed by the supreme builder. . . . Finally we can interpret the workers of Solomon to be the angels sent to accomplish their ministry, as well as the prophets and the apostles chosen from the old people to build the church. . . . The builders sent by the king of Tyre symbolize those strong in doctrine and holiness, whom the nation of the Gentiles abundantly supplied for the same purpose.

Listen to even greater mysteries. At the time when Solomon built the temple, it was our peacemaker who says, Peace I leave with you, my peace I give to you,^[1] for he himself is our peace,^[2] the peace of God that surpasses all understanding,^[3] who himself built the temple for God. Observe what Scripture says about the building of the temple by Solomon: And there were seventy thousand quarrymen and eighty thousand carriers. Mark the number. The masons who were cutting stones, who were preparing, as it were, the foundations of the buildings, who were taking up stones from the ground to build the temple of God, are reckoned in the number seven, in the prophets, in the patriarchs, for while they seemingly were driving the human race from off the earth, they were making preparations for the temple of the Lord. The latter, the eighty thousand, symbolize the apostolic preaching and the Gospels; these are they who with the Lord Savior and Solomon were carrying the heavy burden of the nations. This surely is the height of mystery, but hear of even deeper mysteries! And the overseers over the works and the temple were three thousand. They cannot be greater, not even the overseers in charge of the work, except that they proclaim the Trinity.

But it seems to be in accord with the solemn celebration that we are observing to recall something about the building of the temple and to search out how appropriately its adornment suits the significance of the church. Scripture tells how Solomon ordered that they should take very great costly stones for the foundation of the temple and should square them off. These great and costly stones that were laid as a foundation and that supported the entire bulk of the temple built on them suggest the extraordinary teachers of the holy church: great because of the outstanding quality of their merits; costly because of the splendor of the signs that those who heard the word from the Lord himself produced by their preaching as the fabric of the growing church.

Furthermore the men of Biblos [i.e., the Giblites] prepared wood and stones to build the house. Biblos is a city in Phoenicia^[1] that Ezekiel mentions: Your skilled men, Tyre, were your pilots. The elders of Biblos and its skilled men,^[2] for which [city] in Hebrew is written Gobel or Gebal, which means defining or limiting. This word is very appropriate to those who prepare people’s hearts for the spiritual edifice that is built of the virtues of the soul. For they are only equal to the task of teaching their hearers faith and the works of righteousness when they themselves have first been instructed by the sacred page and thoroughly learned from a clear definition of the truth what belief one must hold and on what path of virtue one must walk. For one who does not know what is definitely catholic faith is wasting his time assuming the office of teacher, and those who try to teach others the norm that they themselves have not learned do not build a sanctuary for the Lord but ruin for themselves.