Moses Built the Holy of Holies Twice the Size That Solomon Did

The old rabbis loved comparing Moses and Solomon. Not to decide who was greater, although they sometimes flirted with the question, but because the two of them bracketed the whole history of Israel. Moses at the beginning, in a tent in the desert with no walls. Solomon at the middle, in a stone house in Jerusalem with everything carved in cedar. The prophet and the king. The man who climbed Sinai and the man who built the Temple the climb was for.

The strangest comparison comes in a passage from Midrash Tehillim, the medieval midrash on Psalms that absorbed centuries of earlier rabbinic teaching. The question is about floor dimensions. Moses built a tabernacle in the wilderness. Its Holy of Holies, the innermost chamber where the ark rested, was twenty cubits by twenty cubits. Solomon built his Temple in Jerusalem more than four centuries later, bigger in every other way, richer, taller, longer, and yet the inner sanctuary was only ten cubits by ten cubits. Half the size of Moses's portable one.

The rabbis could not leave that alone. Why would the permanent house of God be smaller in its most sacred room than the temporary one?

Rabbi Huna, quoted in Midrash Tehillim and attributed to the third century, gave an answer that sounds almost kabbalistic. The point of the Holy of Holies is not its dimensions in the world. It is the presence that enters it. A twenty-cubit tent and a ten-cubit room are both too small for God anyway. As Solomon himself says at the dedication of his own Temple in (1 Kings 8:27), "Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you. How much less this house that I have built." The smaller chamber in the smaller sanctuary is not a demotion. It is an acknowledgment. Even the wealthiest king in Israel's history had to admit that he could not out-build a nomadic prophet.

The Tikkunei Zohar, a fourteenth-century kabbalistic work associated with the school of Moses de Leon in Castile, circles the same comparison from a different direction. It says Moses and Solomon are the two cornerstones of divine revelation. Moses is Torah, the word coming down. Solomon is chokhmah, wisdom reaching up. The Tikkunei Zohar assigns each of them a sefirah on the mystical tree, and pairs their roles as giver and receiver. Every Jewish reading of Torah, in the kabbalistic framework, happens between Moses's mountain and Solomon's Temple. You cannot have the Torah without the place to bring it. You cannot have the place without the book it was built for.

The Bamidbar Rabbah, redacted in twelfth-century Europe from much older rabbinic material, takes a harsher tone. Both Moses and Solomon were capable of hearing the voice of God directly, and both of them made mistakes with the information. Moses sent twelve spies into Canaan and watched them destroy the faith of a generation. Solomon, with all his wisdom, married a thousand wives and watched his own children lose the kingdom. The rabbis are unsparing. Moses and Solomon are not held up as perfect men. They are held up as two case studies in what happens when a person with access to the deepest possible knowledge of God still has to live a normal human life and make decisions from inside a body.

The rabbinic tradition preserves a second, gentler contrast in Shir HaShirim Rabbah, the fifth-century Palestinian midrash on the Song of Songs. The midrash pairs Moses the Torah-giver with Solomon the song-giver. Moses wrote the Torah in prose. Solomon wrote three books of the Hebrew Bible in poetry: Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Songs. The rabbis read this as complementary. Moses brought the law. Solomon brought the love. Moses came down the mountain with tablets. Solomon sat on a throne and wrote a love poem between two lovers that the rabbis read as a love poem between God and Israel.

One of them is the voice of authority. The other is the voice of longing. The rabbis refused to choose.

The most ambitious midrashic comparison is in Shemot Rabbah, redacted around the tenth century. It says that Moses and Solomon were each given the Song. Moses sang the Song at the Sea, after the Egyptians drowned and the people crossed on dry land. Solomon sang the Song of Songs in his wisdom. The Song at the Sea is a victory song, raw and triumphant, sung while the bodies of Egyptian soldiers were still washing up on the shore. The Song of Songs is a love song, tender and private. The rabbis read them as the same song sung by two different men in two different moments of Jewish history. The midrashic tradition insists that every true song of Israel is partly Moses and partly Solomon. Partly victory. Partly yearning.

The Kohelet Rabbah, the midrash on Ecclesiastes also redacted around the tenth century, adds one more pairing. Moses had to keep the people alive in the wilderness. Solomon had to keep them alive inside their own kingdom. Both failed in the end. Moses watched his generation die in the sand. Solomon watched his kingdom splinter before his own eyes, or at least before the eyes of his son Rehoboam, who inherited the divided house. The rabbis read Ecclesiastes, traditionally attributed to Solomon in his old age, as a book written by a king who had everything and ended up sounding like a prophet in the desert. Vanity of vanities, says the preacher. Everything is vapor. The great king of Jerusalem, in his last book, sounds exactly like a man who has been wandering in a wilderness for forty years.

Moses and Solomon, in the rabbinic imagination, are the same voice at two ends of the same story. One built the first sanctuary out of goat hair and acacia wood. The other built the second out of cedar and gold. Both of them knew the smaller room was always going to be big enough.