Cutting stone

2 Chronicles 2:17-18 - Solomon took a census of all the aliens who were in Israel, after the census his father David had taken; and they were found to be 153,600. He assigned 70,000 of them to be carriers and 80,000 to be stonecutters in the hills, with 3,600 foremen over them to keep the people working.

I think we often forget (or maybe didn't know in the first place) that the temple Solomon had built in Jerusalem was done almost totally with foreign laborers. Men from Tyre cut and shipped the wood. Aliens (non-Israelis) cut and carted the stone. Even the chief interior decorator, Huram-Abi (not Hammurabi), was only half-Israeli.

I wonder what it was like to be one of the 80,000 foreigners who suddenly had to start cutting stone one day. Most likely the vast majority of them had never done it before -- at least not professionally. Many would have been farmers, shepherds, herdsmen, vintners, traders, etc. I wonder who trained them to cut the stone. Surely it wasn't left to chance -- not for something as important as the temple!

Over 150,000 men on this project just for the stone cutting and carrying. That's about like taking the entire male workforce from a city of roughly 600,000 -- pretty close to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, proper -- and suddenly making them federal employees. I wonder what infrastructure was in place to handle that, whether it was considered slave labor or not.