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Context No. 1083 of 4322 · 2 Chronicles

Context · Reflection

2 Chronicles 2:13-18: in context

13Now I have sent a skillful man, endowed with understanding, Huram-abi, 14the son of a woman of the daughters of Dan; and his father was a man of Tyre. He is skillful to work in gold, in silver, in bronze, in iron, in stone, in timber, in purple, in blue, in fine linen, and in crimson, also to engrave any kind of engraving and to devise any device, that there may be a place appointed to him with your skillful men, and with the skillful men of my lord David your father. 15“Now therefore, the wheat, the barley, the oil, and the wine which my lord has spoken of, let him send to his servants; 16and we will cut wood out of Lebanon, as much as you need. We will bring it to you in rafts by sea to Joppa; then you shall carry it up to Jerusalem.” 17Solomon counted all the foreigners who were in the land of Israel, after the census with which David his father had counted them; and they found one hundred fifty-three thousand six hundred. 18He set seventy thousand of them to bear burdens, eighty thousand who were stone cutters in the mountains, and three thousand six hundred overseers to assign the people their work.

Solomon is preparing to build the temple, and Hiram of Tyre sends him a master craftsman, Huram-abi, described in detail: his mother was an Israelite of the tribe of Dan, his father a man of Tyre, and he is skilled in every material and craft, gold, silver, bronze, iron, stone, wood, and the fine dyed fabrics, able to make any design. Hiram sends him to work alongside Solomon's craftsmen. The passage also counts the massive labor force of resident foreigners assigned to the work.

The man God's temple got as its master artisan was a person of mixed background, half-Israelite and half-Tyrian, a craftsman whose skill had been honed outside Israel and who came in from the pagan trading city of Tyre. Scripture is not embarrassed by this; it names his lineage and his skills with evident respect, and puts him at the center of building the house of God. There is a quiet openness here, the same we have seen elsewhere, that God's work draws on gifted people from beyond the covenant boundary, that the skill of an outsider is welcomed and honored in service of the holy. And notice how carefully the passage catalogs his abilities, a person of real, wide-ranging craftsmanship, treated as a gift. The temple, the most sacred building in Israel, was built with the hands of a half-foreign artisan whose art was his offering. It is worth remembering, in a faith sometimes tempted to wall itself off, that God has always welcomed the skills of people the insiders might have overlooked, and put them to holy use.

Do I welcome and honor the gifts of people from outside my own circle in the work of God, as the temple welcomed the skill of Huram-abi?

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