Solomon (according to the scriptures) ascended the throne of Israel four hundred and eighty years after the Exodus of the Jewish tribes out of the “land of Egypt.” Although the Rabbins assert that the wealth amassed and left by David to his son was so immense, as to render his very tomb an exchequer to future governments, yet no means, merely human, can account for the astounding disbursement of treasures, recorded between the beginning and the close of a reign, the most magnificent ever registered, in the royal fasti of any age or region. Between the simple “curtained ark” of the holiest of times, the “Holy of Holies,” “carried on men's shoulders,” and that mighty Temple, the world's wonder, and the age's miracle, (whose lofty domes were “overlaid with pure gold,” whose marble and cedar chambers were “partitioned with chains of gold,” whose columns were chaptered with clusters of golden fruit and flowers, and chapleted with “lillies and pomgranates,”) what an interval of progress in art and sumptuousness! Between the predatory life and warfaring vicissitudes of Saul and of David, and the pompous state, and voluptuous repose of him, who legislated from a “throne of ivory, overlaid with pure gold,” amidst provincial satraps and tributary princes—what a contrast!