1 Kings 9:11

11 King Solomon gave twenty towns in the land of Galilee to Hiram king of Tyre, who had supplied him with cedar and cypress ^[a] logs and gold for his every desire.

1 Kings 9:11 Meaning and Commentary

1 Kings 9:11

(Now Hiram the king of Tyre had furnished Solomon with
cedar trees and fir trees
For the building of both his houses; see ( 1 Kings 5:8 1 Kings 5:10 ) ,

and with gold, according to all his desire):
which is not before mentioned, and accounts for it from whence Solomon had his gold; if he made no use, as some think he did not, of what his father left him; see ( 1 Kings 7:51 ) with which he covered several parts of the temple, and made several vessels in it. Hiram traded to Ophir, and had it from thence; and he could supply Solomon with it, and did, before he sent a navy thither:

that then Solomon gave Hiram twenty cities in the land of Galilee;
that is, by or near it, for they were not in the land of Canaan; for then Solomon could not have disposed of them, being allotted and belonging to one of the tribes of Israel, and part of the Lord's inheritance; but they were upon the borders, particularly on the borders of Asher, if Cabul in ( Joshua 19:27 ) , can be thought to be the same with these; though some think that Solomon did not give Hiram the possession of these cities, but the royalties and revenues of them, their produce until the debt was paid: but they rather seem to be a gratuity, and a full grant of them, and might be cities which David had conquered, and taken out of the hands of the ancient inhabitants of them; and so Solomon had a right to dispose of them, being left him by his father; for it is plain as yet they were not inhabited by Israelites; see ( 2 Chronicles 8:2 ) . They are by a Jewish writer ^F6 said to be twenty two, very wrongly.

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FOOTNOTES:

F6 Gloss. in T. Bab. Sabbat, fol. 54. 1.

1 Kings 9:11 In-Context

9 And others will answer, ‘Because they have forsaken the LORD their God who brought their fathers out of the land of Egypt, and have embraced other gods, worshiping and serving them—because of this, the LORD has brought all this disaster upon them.’”

10 Now at the end of the twenty years during which Solomon built these two houses, the house of the LORD and the royal palace,

11 King Solomon gave twenty towns in the land of Galilee to Hiram king of Tyre, who had supplied him with cedar and cypress logs and gold for his every desire.

12 So Hiram went out from Tyre to inspect the towns that Solomon had given him, but he was not pleased with them.

13 “What are these towns you have given me, my brother?” asked Hiram, and he called them the Land of Cabul, as they are called to this day.

Footnotes

• [a]. Or pine or juniper or fir