"The House which King Solomon built for the Lord," Chapter Six of the Book of Kings informs us, "was 60 cubits long and 20 cubits wide and 30 cubits high." It was built of stone, covered with cedar and overlaid with gold, the Old Testament text continues, and it took Solomon seven years to finish, writes David Horovitz.
But 3,000 years later two eminent Israeli scholars are daring to quibble with the Biblical account.
Their assessment, which has this week seen them branded as charlatans by one Israeli ultra-Orthodox leader and witheringly dismissed by several others, is that King Solomon, that wise son of David and Bathsheba, may not have built Jerusalem's first Jewish temple at all, and that the great architectural boom ascribed by the Bible to his monarchy actually occurred a century or so later.
The two sceptical Israeli archaeologists, Dr Israel Finkelstein and Dr David Ussishkin, both of Tel Aviv University, claim that all available evidence points to the Jerusalem of Solomon's period - in the 10th century BC - having been a relatively small settlement, and certainly not the headquarters of the prosperous empire suggested in the Bible. "It was a very small capital," asserted Dr Usishkin.
The two men, who are currently leading a dig at Meggido in northern Israel, another site traditionally assumed to have been developed by Solomon, believe that the empire building more probably took place in the time of King Ahab, 100 years later.
One of Israel's chief rabbis, Dr Eliahu Bakshi-Doron, has given the new claims short shrift. "We don't need the confirmation of archaeologists," he said. "What's written in the Bible is what we accept."
In ordinary circumstances the best way to resolve the dispute, of course, would be to dig. But the Temple Mount is topped by the Dome of the Rock, built 1,300 years ago over the reputed inner sanctum of the Jewish Temple. And excavating there is out of the question.