Jachin and Boaz: The Two Pillars That Held Up Nothing
- 7 days ago
- 2 min read
At the entrance to Solomon's Temple stood two enormous bronze pillars, each around nine and a half metres tall, crowned with ornamented capitals rising several metres more. They are named, individually, in the old texts, which is rare for architectural features of this kind. They carried no weight. They held up no roof. And yet they may be the most discussed detail of the entire building.
Two names, two meanings
The right hand pillar was named Jachin, meaning roughly "he will establish." The left was named Boaz, "in him is strength." Together the names formed something close to a promise, a reminder that what stood behind them was established in strength. They are described in the Hebrew Bible in 1 Kings 7:21 and 2 Chronicles 3:17, and, like the rest of the Temple's bronze work, they were made by Hiram of Tyre, the craftsman sent by the king of Tyre to work alongside Solomon's builders.
Standing for nothing, and everything
What puzzles scholars most is that the pillars appear to have served no structural role at all. They were not part of the building's support. They simply stood, one on each side of the doorway, marking the point where the outside world ended and the Temple began. Most researchers now read them as freestanding, symbolic pillars, a type known from other temples across the ancient Near East, rather than as working architecture. Scholars broadly agree that the pillars fulfilled no function in supporting the portico's roof, and instead see them as two freestanding pillars flanking the entrance, a form found elsewhere in the ancient world.
A threshold, not a wall
That is really the point of them. A pillar that holds up nothing can still hold enormous meaning. Jachin and Boaz did not need to bear weight to do their job, which was to mark a threshold, the last thing you passed before the Temple building itself, its golden Sanctuary and, far beyond that, the Holy of Holies. We walk through that full sequence of courts here.
Lost, but never forgotten
Later tradition holds that the pillars were destroyed when the Temple fell, along with the building around them. Yet their names outlasted the bronze itself. Jachin and Boaz became one of the most referenced details in the entire Hebrew Bible's description of the Temple, still discussed, still debated, nearly three thousand years later.
See them stand again
In TimeLens, you can stand exactly where an ancient visitor once did, at the base of the altar, looking up at Jachin and Boaz flanking the Temple's entrance, restored to their full height for the first time in millennia. This reconstruction is created with Ofer Becker and Becker Innovation.
