What is clear is that Solomon’s Temple, in its size and magnificence, and in its location within the fortified walls of a royal upper city or acropolis, had very little to do with the pure religion of Yahweh which Moses brought out of the wilderness. The Jews later came to see Solomon’s Temple as an essential part of the early faith, but that is not how it must have appeared at the time to pious men beyond the royal circle. Like the corvée, the tax-districts, the chariots, it was new, and in many ways simply copied from the more advanced pagan cultures of the Mediterranean coast or the Nile
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