Day 124 2 Chronicles 1-4

Now Solomon is the Chosen One, and from the beginning the writer of Chronicles wants to make it clear that it is the "LORD his God" who makes him "exceedingly great" (1:1). And Solomon makes a good start. His first act as king is a profoundly "conservative" one—it returns the nation to the roots of its identity. After the death of his father David, Solomon gathers "all Israel" to the tabernacle, the Tent of Meeting, which is still pitched at Gibeon, to worship the LORD in the traditional way. Although David moved the Ark of the Covenant to Jerusalem to consolidate his power, and offerings are made there, the tabernacle at Gibeon is still the proper place to make sacrifices, and that is what Solomon does (1:2-6).
We remember Solomon's prayer for wisdom (1:10) from the account in 1 Kings 3. Here in Chronicles that prayer and its answer explicitly fulfill the request David had made for his son in 1 Chronicles 22:12. The chronicler is at pains to demonstrate that there is continuity between the reign of David and that of Solomon. Solomon is the good son that David asks for, and because Solomon rightly requests wisdom to govern well, as David hopes he would, the LORD grants him vast wealth as well.
Solomon's wealth, which appears early in his reign, provides the where-with-all necessary for his great task of building the Jerusalem temple. The basis of this wealth, according to the chronicler, is his activity as an arms dealer. Solomon imports horses and chariots from Egypt and exports them to the nations to the north, "to all the kings of the Hittites and the kings of Aram" (1:15), making the profits necessary to pursue his building plans.
But the task of building the temple with proper magnificence would not have been possible if Solomon had not forged an alliance with Huram of Tyre (2;3), the same of Hiram of Tyre (note the name change) with whom David had made a commercial treaty early in his reign (1 Chronicles 14:1ff). This Phoenician king provides both raw materials—notably cedar lumber—and skilled labor to build a house "for the name of the LORD" (2:4).
Such a house cannot contain God, the chronicler makes clear (2:6). The temple Solomon proposes to build is a house where his "name" dwells (2:4), a place where the people can invoke that name and offer sacrifices as a sign that they acknowledge that everything they have is a gift from the Lord.
So King Huram dispatches a certain Huram-abi, the son of a Tyrian father and an Israelite mother, to oversee the building (2:13). Of this building we are not given the exhaustive architectural detail we get of Solomon's temple in 1 Kings. The chronicler is much more interested in the worship that takes place there than in the building itself. But he wants to make it clear to us that that Solomon did not use the people of Israel as slaves to build their temple (2:17)—to use other members of the house of Israel as slaves is explicitly forbidden in Leviticus 25:39-45, and Solomon does things right.
The measurements of the temple and its furnishings need not detain us. But we should note that is it is sited on the threshing floor that David buys from Ornan the Jebusite as a place of sacrifice during the plague (1 Chronicles 22:1). It is also the site where Abraham obediently offers to sacrifice his son Isaac in Genesis 2. The building is built according to the plans that God had revealed to David. It roughly follows the plan of the tabernacle that God reveals to Moses in the Exodus, but the emphasis in Chronicles is not upon the covenant made with Moses, but rather upon God's covenant with David, and the continuity of Solomon's work with that covenant.
Again, as in 1 Kings, we are given a description of the "molten sea" (4:2), which is a distinctive element of the temple's design. We are told that the sea is made "for the priests to wash in" (4:6), but it is certainly more than a giant wash basin. Chapter 4:2-6 gives a fuller description of the sea than of any other part of temple. It is an enormous bronze vessel which stood on the backs of twelve bronze oxen, probably symbolizing the twelve tribes of Israel (4:4). But we do not fully understand its meaning and purpose. Perhaps it symbolizes the watery chaos out of which the LORD first called his creation (see Genesis 1:1-2)—we just don't know. Like so many other details in scripture, we see it described, but we are left to wonder about its full significance.