What Does 1 Kings 6:14 Mean?
So Solomon built the house, and finished it.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
So Solomon built the house, and finished it.THE KEY
Solomon’s name carries shalom, wholeness, so the verse lets the builder’s name echo the state a finished house can hold.
THE MEANING
The house is built and brought all the way to its end: completion is part of what makes a dwelling whole. Solomon’s name carries shalom, wholeness, so the builder and the finished house sound together in the verse. This speaks now wherever something is being shaped into a place able to hold life.
THE ROOT
שְׁלֹמֹה
Shelomoh
GROWS FROM
שלם
To be whole, complete, or intact; wholeness that carries well-being.
Solomon’s name grows from the root of shalom, wholeness. The builder’s name therefore sounds alongside the completed house as a nature of intactness.
ALSO GROWS
shalom: Wholeness, well-being, soundness.
שָׁלוֹם
This familiar branch carries the root heard in Solomon’s name and gives the finished house a quality beyond mere structure.
shalem: Whole, complete, intact.
שָׁלֵם
It names the condition toward which the building comes: a dwelling brought to wholeness.
וַיְכַלֵּהוּ
waykhallehu
GROWS FROM
כ־ל־ה
To complete or bring to an end; in other forms, to consume.
“finished” in this verse is waykhallehu. The Hebrew root holds completion and consumption within the same word family: something is brought all the way to its end. Here, the context gives that ending the shape of a completed house.
ALSO GROWS
kalah: To be complete, finish, or cease.
כָּלָה
This branch shows that the house is carried through to its completion, not simply left standing.
killyon: Ruin, destruction, or being consumed.
כִּלָּיוֹן
The same root’s darker ending makes the context matter: here, the end is fulfillment rather than ruin.
THE PATTERN
A dwelling takes shape through work carried to completion, then becomes a place for presence.
And he raised up the enclosure all around the dwelling and the altar, and set the screen at the gate of the enclosure. So Moses finished the work. And the cloud covered the tent of meeting, and the weight of the LORD filled the dwelling.In whom you also are built together into a place where God settles, through breath.You also, as living stones, are built up into a house of breath, a set-apart priesthood, to carry up sacrifices of breath, well received by God through Jesus, the Anointed One.THE THREAD
And in the eleventh year, in the month Bul, which is the eighth month, the house was finished in all its parts, and according to all its ordinance. And he was seven years building it.The word translated “finished” here comes from kalah, while 1 Kings 6:38 uses shalam for the house’s completion, the same root carried in Solomon’s name. The name’s wholeness now belongs to the house itself.
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