1. ruled . . . offered. The Hebrew uses a participial form of the verb, suggesting sustained activity over an extended time-span.

the River. As throughout the Bible, this means the Euphrates. It is highly unlikely that all the kingdoms to the east as far as the Euphrates could have been subject to Solomon.

2. fare. The literal sense is “bread,” a synecdoche for all kinds of food, and the list that follows includes meat and fowl.

kors. The kor is a large measure, so 30 kors would have been hundreds of pounds.

3. geese. In modern Hebrew, barbur means “swan,” but swans were rare in ancient Israel, and the likely fowl is the goose.

10. greater than the wisdom of all the Easterners and all the wisdom of Egypt. Wisdom was a known international activity, and both Mesopotamia and Egypt were renowned for their wisdom schools, their achievements in astronomy, mathematics, and much else. Here the celebration of Solomon’s unmatched wisdom is properly referred to the broad Near Eastern context.

11. Ethan . . . and Heman and Calcol and Darda. The first two are temple poets to whom, respectively, Psalm 88 and Psalm 89 are attributed, and the last two are mentioned in 1 Chronicles 2:6 as temple choristers, although in Chronicles the last name is spelled Dara. The link between wisdom and the fashioning of poetry or song is a commonly shared assumption in the ancient Near East.

12. proverbs. The proverb was thought of as a quintessential expression of wisdom, a notion evident in the Book of Proverbs, attributed by tradition to Solomon, in part because of this passage. The proverb was formulated in verse, and other kinds of poetry as well are supposed to have been composed by Solomon.

13. trees . . . beasts . . . birds . . . creeping things . . . fish. Solomon’s wisdom includes a mastery of the whole realm of nature. The words here gave rise to later legends that Solomon was able to speak the language of animals.

15. Hiram king of Tyre. Tyre is the principal city on the Phoenician coast.

Hiram was friendly toward David always. These words may reflect an actual historical alliance. It was David who subdued the Philistines, the great enemies of the Phoenicians on the Mediterranean coast, and that victory might conceivably have enabled the commercial and colonial impetus enjoyed by Phoenicia in the tenth century B.C.E.

17. should set them under his footsoles. This posture of subjugation appears in quite a few ancient Near Eastern bas-reliefs celebrating the victory of a king.

20. my servants will be with your servants. This proposal of joint labor may have been motivated by a desire to expedite the costly work. Hiram doesn’t mention it in his response, perhaps because he is not enthusiastic about the idea, but verse 27 reports that ten thousand Israelite workers were sent each month to Lebanon.

no man among us . . . knows how to cut down trees like the Sidonians. Sidon is another Phoenician city, and “Sidonians” is often used as a general term for Phoenicians. It is in their territory that there are large stands of timber, which they used to build ships and as a valuable export, and so they were experienced lumberjacks.

21. when Hiram heard Solomon’s words. A possible though not necessary inference from this formulation is that Solomon’s message was oral, but the emissary or a courtier might have read out a written message to the king.

he greatly rejoiced. He has good reason to rejoice because he sees here the opportunity for a lucrative agreement. The words that immediately follow are his exclamation and not part of his message in response to Solomon.

23. My servants will come down from Lebanon to the sea. They will take charge of transporting the timber from the mountainsides to the seashore.

the wood. This word is added in the translation for clarity. The Hebrew says “them,” a plural accusative suffix referring to “the trees.”

turn the wood into rafts. Binding the cut logs together into improvised rafts is a widespread device for transporting timber by water.

meet my desire to provide the bread of my house. Solomon had offered to pay the wages of Hiram’s workers. Hiram now counters this proposal by stipulating a much higher price—the cost of provisions for the Phoenician court with all its entourage for the entire period in which the labor is done. In this whole exchange, there is an element of canny bargaining reminiscent of the negotiations over a gravesite between Abraham and Ephron the Hittite in Genesis 23.

25. twenty thousand kors of wheat . . . twenty thousand kors of fine-pressed oil. The price exacted, one notes, is very high. Solomon provides wheat and olive oil, which the Land of Israel had in abundance. The mountainous terrain of Lebanon did not favor the cultivation of these crops but was ideally suited for timber, which Israel lacked.

31. they moved great stones. The stones, of course, would have been a much bigger challenge to transport than the wood, which was floated most of the way, but there were quarries in the mountains of Judah not far from Jerusalem.

32. And Solomon’s builders and Hiram’s builders and the Gebalites. It emerges that there was a blended labor force of Phoenicians and Israelites both in Lebanon and in Jerusalem. The Gebalites are residents of the Phoenician town of Gebal. One may infer from the separate reference to them here that they constituted a kind of guild with special building skills, perhaps as stonemasons.