Discovery Box1 Kings 5:9-11 
Context5:9 My servants will bring the timber down from Lebanon to the sea. I will send it by sea in raft-like bundles to the place you designate. 1 There I will separate the logs 2 and you can carry them away. In exchange you will supply the food I need for my royal court.” 3
5:10 So Hiram supplied the cedars and evergreens Solomon needed, 4 5:11 and Solomon supplied Hiram annually with 20,000 cors 5 of wheat as provision for his royal court, 6 as well as 20,000 baths 7 of pure 8 olive oil. 9
1 tn Heb “I will place them [on? as?] rafts in the sea to the place where you designate to me.” This may mean he would send them by raft, or that he would tie them in raft-like bundles, and have ships tow them down to an Israelite port.
2 tn Heb “smash them,” i.e., untie the bundles.
3 tn Heb “as for you, you will satisfy my desire by giving food for my house.”
4 tn Heb “and Hiram gave to Solomon cedar wood and the wood of evergreens, all his desire.”
5 sn As a unit of dry measure a cor was roughly equivalent to six bushels.
6 tn Heb “his house.”
7 tc The Hebrew text has “twenty cors,” but the ancient Greek version and the parallel text in 2 Chr 2:10 read “twenty thousand baths.”
sn A bath was a liquid measure equivalent to almost six gallons.
8 tn Or “pressed.”
9 tn Heb “and Solomon supplied Hiram with twenty thousand cors of wheat…pure olive oil. So Solomon would give to Hiram year by year.”
