Here's the project David wasn't permitted to undertake, now handed to his son to complete. Solomon secures cedar and craftsmen from Hiram, king of Tyre — a genuinely documented ancient Phoenician king, which is worth knowing, since Lennox would point out this is the kind of specific, checkable diplomatic detail that grounds the account in real ancient Near Eastern politics rather than legend. The Temple itself takes seven years to build (1 Kings 6:38), overlaid in gold, filled with cherubim and elaborate craftsmanship, and its dedication is the high point of Solomon's entire reign. When the Ark is finally brought into the finished house, "the cloud filled the house of the LORD, so that the priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud: for the glory of the LORD had filled the house of the LORD" (1 Kings 8:10–11). That's the same glory-cloud that filled the wilderness tabernacle centuries earlier under Moses — the same presence, now permanently housed rather than carried on poles through the desert.
Solomon's dedication prayer is worth pausing on for a detail easy to miss: he explicitly asks God to hear the prayer of the foreigner who comes to this house "out of a far country for thy name's sake... that all people of the earth may know thy name, to fear thee, as do thy people Israel" (1 Kings 8:41–43). Lamin Sanneh's whole argument about the outward-facing shape of biblical faith is written directly into this prayer — the Temple, at the very moment of its dedication, is imagined as a house whose God is available to more than the nation that built it, not a shrine meant to stay closed to outsiders.