One of the odder ‘jewish inventions’ I have encountered – in this case quite by chance – is the common idea that ‘jews built the Temple of Solomon’ as well as that frankly weird modern idea that the temple was a ‘wonder of the world’.
In truth neither is true since the famous Temple of Solomon was constructed by Phoenicians not by Israelites/jews as the jewish academic historians Max Margolis and Alexander Marx are at pains to point out when they write that:
‘The building materials were hauled to Jerusalem from various quarters. The wood was cut down by Israelitish labor in the Lebanon; it was then floated by Phoenician sailors down the coast to Jaffa. The stone was chiseled near the quarries; the bronze was cast in the Valley of the Jordan. Phoenician craftsmen, supplied by Hiram king of Tyre, were depended upon for executing the larger part of the work upon well-established models.’ (1)
So, in essence the jews simply provided the unskilled labour that famously cut down the cedars of Lebanon to provide wood for the temple, while the actual skilled labour and the design was provided by the Phoenicians.
Indeed, modern archaeologists have pointed out that the Temple of Solomon was almost certainly nothing special and was almost certainly a copy of similar large Phoenician temples or those found in neighboring Syria. (2)
Jews didn’t even provide the bulk of the funding to re-build the temple after it was destroyed by the Babylonians under King Nebuchadnezzar II. This funding was provided by King Darius of Persia not by the jews themselves. (3)
So no jews had precious little to do with constructing or designing the Temple of Solomon nor they even pay for it to be rebuilt after it was destroyed!
References
(1) Max Margolis, Alexander Marx, 1945, [1927], ‘A History of the Jewish People’, 1st Edition, The Jewish Publication Society of America: Philadelphia, p. 65
(2) Israel Finkelstein, Neil Asher Silberman, 2001, ‘The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of its Sacred Texts’, 1st Edition, The Free Press: New York, pp. 138-142
(3) Margolis, Marx, Op. Cit., pp. 120-121
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