And then he built chambers against all the house, five cubits high: and they rested on the house with timber of cedar.
All Commentaries on 1 Kings 6:10 Go To 1 Kings 6
Bede
AD 735
This means the breastworks that were constructed on top of the roof of the house all around in case anyone who came up to the upper parts of the building should suddenly fall to the bottom. And in every house that anyone built, Moses ordered this to be done, saying, “When you build a new house, you shall make a parapet for your roof all the way around, lest blood be shed in your house and you be to blame should anyone slip and fall down headlong.” Now these structures or breastworks are called sides above, where, after the words “and on the wall of the temple he built structures all around, running around the walls of the house, both the temple and the oracle,” the following is immediately added: “and he made side chambers all around.” These side chambers, of course, we have understood as denoting the divine protection that helps us not to give up while still struggling in this world and daily striving after higher things according to our capacity. We ought to understand this passage also in the same sense, but with this distinction that in this life, whether amid the frequent temptations of our implacable enemy or the obstacles of our frailty, we are often, indeed constantly, protected by heavenly compassion, but in the life which, as we have stated above, the top of the roof of the temple suggests, we are protected by so great a grace of God who is with us, that we neither want nor are able to sin, nor are we affected by fear of either death or pain or the adversary who tempts us. The Lord speaks of the helps he gives us in the present life, as if they were the sides of the structures, when he says of his people, “They will call on me, and I shall hear them; I am with them in their tribulation, and I shall rescue them and glorify them.” Of his grace to come whereby that heavenly city is illumined, the prophet says to the same city, “Praise the Lord, Jerusalem,” and so forth as far as “peace in your borders.” Now this structure on the roof of the house of the Lord is rightly said to be five cubits high because, of course, the presence of God’s glory in that homeland [of ours] fills us in such a way that nothing else is sweet to our sight, our hearing, our sense of smell or taste or touch except to love the Lord our God with our whole heart, our whole soul, our whole mind, and to love our neighbor as ourselves.
