We have need to be reminded of the fact, that, as we become familiar with the books of the Old Testament in childhood, it is not until years later that we learn to correct the wrong chronological conceptions which have arisen from the misadjustment of them as to their order of time. These early erroneous notions continue to haunt the imagination, perhaps through life, and we lose sight of, or quite forget the fact that a period of four or five hundred years intervenes between prophets that take their turn to be read, in the mornings and evenings of a week. Under the misguidance of these chronological errors, we are likely to carry forward, into the era of a people’s maturity, conceptions which belong only to the age of their patriarchal and nomadic simplicity. Some few instructed readers of the Bible may be quite exempt from any such misconceptions; but probably it is many that are subject to them. Moreover, the grave tones of the inspired writers, and their singleness of purpose, so unlike the conventional and sophisticated manner of other writers, favours the idea that the Hebrew nation continued, from age to age, to live on in a condition of pastoral simplicity. Such was far from being their condition; and a more attentive perusal of the historical books of the Old Testament, and of the prophets, will suggest, and more than merely suggest the belief, that this ancient people had reached a stage of advancement in the arts of life--substantial and decorative--which places them, at the least, on a level with any people that were their neighbours and contemporaries, or of any that are known to us by their records and by their monuments. It is true that we are used to think of Solomon’s temple as a magnificent structure; and yet the descriptions given of it in the Books of Kings and Chronicles, convey an impression rather of its metallic splendour and its richness of decoration, than of the cyclopean style of the masonry that sustained it. Was it, in truth, a great work in an architectural sense? This question admits of a probable answer. The series of prophets, in discharge of their function as the reprovers of national sins, mention and rebuke the sumptuous style and the luxurious manners of those who then were the princes of the people; yet they make no boast, as if they were proud of the wealth, and the arts, and the instructed skill of their countrymen. Nevertheless there occur, in many parts of the prophetic writings, incidental allusions to the splendour of the private structures of the city--houses of hewn stone, houses ceiled with costly woods, decorated with ivory and gold, and fitted up with every device which elaborate luxury might ask for, are spoken of even by some of the earlier prophets. We must believe, therefore, that the Jerusalem of the ancient monarchy was a city of palaces and of princely mansions, in constructing which no cost had been spared.