1Ki 7:2-5 The house of the forest of Lebanon. - This building - so named because it was built, so to speak, of a forest of cedar pillars - is called in the Arabic the “house of his arms,” because, according to 1Ki 10:17, it also served as a keeping-place for arms:” it is hardly to be regarded, however, as simply an arsenal, but was probably intended for other purposes also. He built it “a hundred cubits its length, fifty cubits its breadth, and thirty cubits its height, on four rows of cedar pillars, and hewn cedar beams (were) over the pillars.” As the building was not merely a hall of pillars, but, according to 1Ki 7:3, had side-rooms (צלעת, cf. 1Ki 6:5) above the pillars, the construction of it can hardly be represented in any other way than this, that the rooms were built upon four rows of pillars, which ran round all four sides of the building, which was 100 cubits long and fifty cubits broad in the inside, and thus surrounded the inner courtyard on all sides. Of course the building could not rest merely upon pillars, but was surrounded on the outside with a strong wall of hewn square stones (1Ki 7:9), so that the hewn beams which were laid upon the pillars had their outer ends built into the wall, and were supported by it, so as to give to the whole building the requisite strength. (Note: Thenius therefore supposes that “the lower part of the armoury formed a peristyle, a fourfold row of pillars running round inside its walls and enclosing a courtyard, so that the Vulgate alone gives the true sense, quatuor deambulacra inter columnas cedrinas;” and he points to the court of the palace of Luxor, which has a double row of pillars round it. The number of pillars is not given in the text, but Thenius in his drawing of this building sets it down at 400, which would certainly present a forest-like aspect to any one entering the building. Nevertheless we cannot regard this assumption as correct, because the pillars,which we cannot suppose to have been less than a cubit in thickness, would have been so close to one another that the four rows of pillars could not have formed four deambulacra. As the whole building was only fifty cubits broad, and this breadth included the inner courtyard, we cannot suppose that the sides of the building were more than ten cubits deep, which would leave a breadth of thirty cubits for the court. If then four pillars, each of a cubit in thickness, stood side by side or one behind the other in a space of ten cubits in depth, the distance between the pillars would be only a cubit and a half, that is to say, would be only just enough for one man and no more to walk conveniently through. And what could have been the object of crowding pillars together in this way, so as to render the entire space almost useless? It is on this ground, probably that Hermann Weiss assumes that each side of the oblong building, which was half as broad as it was long, was supported by one row, and therefore all the sides together by four rows of cedar pillars, and the beams of the same material which rested upon them. But this view is hardly a correct one; for it not only does not do justice to the words of the text, “four rows of pillars,” but it is insufficient in itself, for the simple reason that one row of pillars on each side would not have afforded the requisite strength and stability to the three stories built upon them, even if we should not suppose the rooms in these stories to be very broad, since the further three rows of pillars, which Weiss assumes in addition, according to 1Ki 7:3, as the actual supporters of the upper building, have no foundation in the text. The words “four rows of cedar pillars” do not absolutely require the assumption that there were four rows side by side or one behind the other on every side of the building; for the assertion that טוּר does not denote a row in the sense of a straight line, but generally signifies a row surrounding and enclosing a space, is refuted by Exo 28:17, where we read of the four טוּרים of precious stones upon the breastplate of the high priest. - Is it not likely that the truth lies midway between these two views, and that the following is the view most in accordance with the actual fact, namely, that there were four rows of pillars running along the full length of the building, but that they were distributed on the two sides, so that there were only two rows on each side? In this case a person entering from the front would see four rows of pillars running the whole length of the building. In any case the rows of pillars would of necessity be broken in front by the entrance itself.
The utter uncertainty as to the number and position of the four rows of pillars is sufficient in itself to render it quite impossible to draw any plan of the building that could in the slightest degree answer to the reality. Moreover, there is no allusion at all in the description given in the text to either entrance or exit, or to staircases and other things, and the other buildings are still more scantily described, so that nothing certain can be determined with regard to their relative position or their probable connection with one another. For this reason, after studying the matter again and again, I have been obliged to relinquish the intention to illustrate the description in the text by drawings.)