10. The foundation stones were huge, good stones—some of them four and a half metres long and others three and a half metres long.
11. The cedar beams and other stones that had been cut to size were on top of these foundation stones.
12. The walls around the palace courtyard were made out of three layers of cut stones with one layer of cedar beams, just like the front porch and the inner courtyard of the temple.
13-14. Hiram was a skilled bronze worker from the city of Tyre. His father was now dead, but he also had been a bronze worker from Tyre, and his mother was from the tribe of Naphtali.King Solomon asked Hiram to come to Jerusalem and make the bronze furnishings to use for worship in the Lord's temple, and he agreed to do it.
15. Hiram made two bronze columns eight metres tall and almost two metres across.
16. For the top of each column, he also made a bronze cap just over two metres high.
17. The caps were decorated with seven rows of designs that looked like chains,
18. with two rows of designs that looked like pomegranates.
19. The caps for the columns of the porch were almost two metres high and were shaped like lilies.
20. The chain designs on the caps were just above the rounded tops of the two columns, and there were two hundred pomegranates in rows around each cap.
21. Hiram placed the two columns on each side of the main door of the temple. The column on the south side was called Jachin, and the one on the north was called Boaz.
22. The lily-shaped caps were on top of the columns.This completed the work on the columns.
23. Hiram also made a large bowl called the Sea. It was just over two metres deep, about four and a half metres across, and thirteen and a half metres around.
24. Two rows of bronze gourds were around the outer edge of the bowl, ten gourds to about every forty-five centimetres.
25. The bowl itself sat on top of twelve bronze bulls with three bulls facing outwards in each of four directions.
26. The sides of the bowl were seventy-five millimetres thick, and its rim was like a cup that curved outwards like flower petals. The bowl held about forty thousand litres.