Catholic Commentary
The Cedar and Gold Interior of the Temple and Holy of Holies (Part 1)
14So Solomon built the house and finished it.15He built the walls of the house within with boards of cedar; from the floor of the house to the walls of the ceiling, he covered them on the inside with wood. He covered the floor of the house with cypress boards.16He built twenty cubits of the back part of the house with boards of cedar from the floor to the ceiling. He built this within, for an inner sanctuary, even for the most holy place.17In front of the temple sanctuary was forty cubits long.18There was cedar on the house within, carved with buds and open flowers. All was cedar. No stone was visible.19He prepared an inner sanctuary in the middle of the house within, to set the ark of Yahweh’s covenant there.20Within the inner sanctuary was twenty cubits in length, and twenty cubits in width, and twenty cubits in its height. He overlaid it with pure gold. He covered the altar with cedar.So Solomon overlaid the house within with pure gold. He drew chains of gold across before the inner sanctuary, and he overlaid it with gold.
1 Kings 6:14–21 describes the completion of Solomon's Temple, focusing on the interior construction and ornamentation of the sanctuary spaces. Solomon finishes the temple shell and constructs the inner Holy of Holies as a perfect cube twenty cubits on all sides, completely lined with cedar, cypress, and pure gold, built specifically to house the Ark of the Covenant.
Solomon builds the Temple's Holy of Holies as a perfect cube of pure gold—a place so utterly transformed by divine presence that nothing raw or ordinary can show through.
Commentary
1 Kings 6:14 — "So Solomon built the house and finished it." This deceptively simple sentence closes a construction narrative that began in v. 1 and will continue through v. 38, but it signals a decisive moment: the shell is complete and the interior work can now begin. "Finished it" (Hebrew: wayyiklehu) echoes the completion language of Genesis 2:1–2, where God "finished" (wayyəkal) the heavens and the earth. The parallel is not accidental — Solomon's Temple is implicitly presented as a new act of cosmic ordering, a sanctified world within the world.
1 Kings 6:15 — Cedar walls and cypress floors. Solomon clothes the raw stone construction entirely in wood. Cedar (erez) from Lebanon was the finest, most aromatic, most durable timber known to the ancient Near East — a luxury material associated with royalty and longevity. Cypress (bərôš) was similarly prized for its hardness and fragrance. The effect is total encasement: floor, walls, and ceiling become an organic interior, warm and fragrant, hiding the quarried stone beneath. The deliberate concealment of stone is not mere aesthetics; it is theologically loaded (see v. 18).
1 Kings 6:16 — The partition of the Holy of Holies (Devir). Twenty cubits (approximately 30 feet) are sectioned off at the rear of the 60-cubit long sanctuary by a cedar partition running floor to ceiling. This creates the debîr, "the most holy place" — the innermost shrine. The remaining 40 cubits (v. 17) form the hêkāl, the outer nave or main sanctuary. The proportions replicate in stone and cedar the two-zone structure of the Mosaic Tabernacle (the Holy Place and the Holy of Holies), demonstrating that Solomon's Temple is not a Canaanite innovation but the definitive expression of the Mosaic covenant-space.
1 Kings 6:17 — The forty-cubit nave. The outer sanctuary's 40 cubits contrasts with the Devir's 20. The number 40 throughout Scripture denotes a period of probation, trial, and preparation (the wilderness wandering, Moses on Sinai, Elijah's journey, Christ's temptation). The worshipper moves through this longer zone of approach before reaching the concentrated divine presence — a spatial enactment of the soul's journey toward God.
1 Kings 6:18 — "No stone was visible." This is the passage's most symbolically dense detail. Every inch of cedar is carved with pəqā'îm (gourd-shaped ornamental buds) and pəṭûrê ṣiṣîm (open blossoms). The Temple interior becomes a garden — recalling Eden, where God walked with humanity before the Fall. The complete invisibility of the underlying stone signals a theological truth: in the presence of God's glory, the raw, fallen material of the world is transformed and clothed in beauty. Nothing coarse or unfinished is permitted before the divine face.
1 Kings 6:19 — The Ark's destined place. The debîr is built with a single purpose: to receive the Ark of the Covenant (ărôn bərît YHWH). The Ark is the throne-footstool of the invisible God, the locus of the covenant and of the atoning mercy seat. Its placement in the innermost, most inaccessible room tells us something essential: the covenant is not public property to be managed; it is a holy mystery, guarded and approached only under divine sanction.
Verses 20–21 — Pure gold (zahav sagur / zahav ṭāhôr). The cubic space of the Holy of Holies — 20×20×20 cubits — is the most mathematically perfect and symbolically charged shape in Scripture. A perfect cube is also the shape of the New Jerusalem in Revelation 21:16. "Pure gold" (zahav ṭāhôr, refined, beaten gold) is repeated three times across vv. 20–22, a rhetorical insistence on unalloyed purity. The cedar altar in v. 20 is the incense altar before the veil; it too is overlaid. The chains of gold drawn across the entrance to the Holy of Holies in v. 21 mark the threshold — a visible boundary between the accessible and the utterly sacred.
Catholic Commentary
Catholic tradition reads Solomon's Temple as a multilayered type fulfilled progressively in Christ, the Church, and the individual soul. The Catechism teaches that the Temple of Jerusalem "prefigured" Christ's own body (CCC 586), a connection Christ himself makes explicit in John 2:21. Origen (4th homily on Numbers) identified the three zones of sacred space — court, nave, and Holy of Holies — with the three-fold structure of the Christian spiritual life: the purgative, illuminative, and unitive ways. The Devir, entirely golden and inaccessible except to the High Priest once a year, corresponds to the unio mystica, the highest union with God.
St. Thomas Aquinas (ST I-II, q. 102, a. 4) treats the Temple furnishings under the ceremonial precepts, arguing that their material splendor was morally fitting because exterior beauty orders the mind toward interior worship. This principle — that the beauty of a sacred space is not ornamentation but catechesis — underlies the Catholic theology of church architecture articulated in Sacrosanctum Concilium 122–124, which calls for sacred art and architecture to "raise the minds of men to God."
The perfect cube of the Holy of Holies (20×20×20) is directly echoed in Revelation 21:16, where the New Jerusalem is a cube of 12,000 stadia. St. John of the Cross (The Spiritual Canticle, stanza 1) uses the imagery of Solomon's chambers as a figure for the soul's progressive entry into intimacy with God. The complete encasement in gold — leaving no material visible in its raw state — is understood by St. Bede (On the Temple, II.3) as a figure of the Church clothed in divine charity, in which no act or member remains untransformed by grace.
For Today
The passage confronts contemporary Catholics with a counter-cultural claim: that sacred space demands the best human craft and material, not pragmatic minimalism. The invisible stone beneath layers of cedar and gold is a rebuke to the notion that "functional" suffices for worship. For a Catholic today, these verses illuminate why the Church insists on the beauty and distinctiveness of liturgical space — why a tabernacle should be noble, why the sanctuary should communicate transcendence before a word is spoken.
But the typology cuts inward as well. The Fathers consistently read the Temple as the soul. St. Paul makes this explicit (1 Cor 3:16; 6:19). The question these verses pose personally is: what is my inner sanctuary overlaid with? Is the gold of charity, prayer, and sacramental grace covering the raw stone of my nature — or is the stone exposed? The Temple is "finished" (v. 14) and then adorned. Baptism completes our foundation; the life of grace is the continuous work of lining every surface with gold.
Cross-References