1 Kings 5:13-18
"13 King Solomon drafted forced labor out of all Israel, and the draft numbered 30,000 men. 14 And he sent them to Lebanon, 10,000 a month in shifts. They would be a month in Lebanon and two months at home. Adoniram was in charge of the draft. 15 Solomon also had 70,000 burden-bearers and 80,000 stonecutters in the hill country, 16 besides Solomon's 3,300 chief officers who were over the work, who had charge of the people who carried on the work. 17 At the king's command they quarried out great, costly stones in order to lay the foundation of the house with dressed stones. 18 So Solomon's builders and Hiram's builders and the men of Gebal did the cutting and prepared the timber and the stone to build the house."
Much has been written by historians about the vast sacrifice of human labour and life involved in the building of the great monuments of ancient splendour, and there have not been wanting critics who have castigated Solomon also on this score. Be this as it may, the consideration he showed to his workmen (14) - one month in Lebanon, two months at home - speak of conditions of work scarcely equalled in our own day. This has surely something to say on the question of industrial relations. Here is a situation in which divine wisdom has brought about a truly humanitarian approach to the needs of men. The question is not whether Solomon made use of slave-labour - all the evidence shows that he did, as every ruler of that age invariably did - but how they were treated. This is where the great difference lay. Within the limits which the custom of that age imposed, it is clear that he had regard for human dignity and the sanctity of human personality, and this still remains the great need in industry today - a greater need than ever before when the vast complexity of modern civilisation bids fair to de-personalise man completely and reduce him to a mere cipher, or a pawn to be manipulated at will by unscrupulous hands. Solomon recognized that his men had a right to be human, to have homes and family loyalties, to have time to live. The picture in 4:25 of every man under his vine and under his fig tree contrasts strangely with a world in which vast take-over bids are the order of the day, and prompts us to wonder whether we are not being led, steadily and unwittingly, into a new kind of slavery from which there will be no escape.