“Yahweh gave Solomon wisdom, as he promised him. There was peace between King Hiram and King Solomon. The two of them made a treaty. King Solomon conscripted forced labor out of all Israel. The levy numbered thirty thousand men. He sent them to Lebanon, ten thousand a month in shifts. They would be a month in Lebanon and two months at home. Adoniram was in charge of the forced labor. King Solomon also had seventy thousand laborers and eighty thousand stone cutters in the hill country, besides his three thousand three hundred supervisors, who were over the work, having charge of the people who carried on the work. At the king’s command, they quarried out great, costly stones in order to lay the foundation of the house with dressed stones. So Solomon’s builders, Hiram’s builders and the men of the Gebalites did the stone cutting. They prepared the timber and the stone to build the house.”
Hiram and Solomon had a peace treaty that worked well for both of them. King Solomon used forced labor that Adoniram organized. Every third month they had to go to Lebanon to work on the wood and then they would have 2 months off. Then King Solomon also had 70,000 laborers and 80,000 stone cutters, a lot of people so that there were over 3,300 supervisors. He was well organized. Hiram’s people and the Gebalites, from another Phoenician town near Tyre, were the stone cutters and wood workers.
Eugene Finnegan Bible Project 