One of the most interesting exercise to do is to scan the concordances of the different English translations to see how often the word 'temple' appears in them. Here are the results for the Old Testament alone:1
NIV: 668x.
NRSV: 189x.
NKJV: 254x.
NASB: 144x.
RSV: 155x.
AV/KJV: 94x.
How is it possible for the different translations to differ to greatly over such a simple matter? The answer is simple: there are many more ways of referring to a temple in Hebrew than there is in English.
One of the most common but also general Hebrew term for a temple is bet, which simply means 'house,' as in bet ba'al berit, 'house of Baal Berith' (Judg 9:4). The expression bayt-YHWH, 'the temple of the Lord' occurs nearly 240x in the OT. Bet is such a flexible word—it can equally be translated a 'home,' a 'dwelling,' a 'palace,' a 'dynasty'—it can easily mess up one's statistics if one is not careful.
Another common word translated 'temple' is hekal which is commonly translated 'palace.' Though not as variously translated as bet, it too is often translated temple. Eli, Samuel's priestly mentor, e.g., is reported as "sitting on a chair by the doorpost of the Lord's hekal when he noticed Hannah's tortured prayer for a son (1 Sam 1:9). Similarly, Samuel was "lying down in the hekal of the Lord" when He call him, and he ran to Eli thinking it was the latter calling him (2 Sam 3:3).
All the earliest references of the word 'temple' in the Old Testament refer to pagan temples.The first specific reference is found in Judg 9:4, when Abimelech used the silver he had taken from a pagan temple to hire a gang of ruffians and, with them, slaughtered seventy of his brothers in his ancestral home.
heykal, debir, bet,
Low Chai Hok
©Alberith, 2020