At the entrance to Solomon’s Temple stood two monumental bronze pillars. They supported no ordinary doorway and were important enough to be given names: Jachin and Boaz.
Their story begins in the biblical account of the construction of the First Temple in Jerusalem. According to 1 Kings, King Solomon commissioned a craftsman named Hiram of Tyre to create elaborate bronze work for the Temple. Among his creations were two enormous freestanding pillars placed at the entrance to the sanctuary.
The biblical text records their names explicitly. The pillar on the right was called Jachin, generally understood as “He will establish.” The pillar on the left was called Boaz, commonly rendered “In him is strength.”
Together, the names suggest ideas of establishment and strength—appropriate concepts for monuments standing before a sacred structure intended to endure.
But the pillars were far more elaborate than simple architectural columns.
The Book of Kings describes them as cast in bronze, crowned with ornate capitals and decorated with networks, chains, and pomegranates. Their scale and ornamentation would have made them among the most visually imposing objects encountered by someone approaching the Temple.
They marked a boundary.
On one side was the ordinary world. Beyond them lay increasingly sacred space.
That idea of the threshold would give Boaz and Jachin a symbolic life lasting far longer than the building for which they were created.
Centuries after Solomon’s Temple disappeared, its architecture remained extraordinarily influential. Jewish and Christian writers studied its descriptions. Artists attempted to reconstruct it. Architects imagined its proportions. Biblical scholars debated its appearance.
And eventually, its imagery entered the symbolic vocabulary of Freemasonry.
By the eighteenth century, the Temple of Solomon had become one of the central architectural metaphors of Masonic ritual and instruction. The lodge could be understood symbolically as a place of construction—not simply the construction of buildings, but the cultivation and improvement of the individual.
Within that symbolic architecture, Boaz and Jachin became the pillars of the entrance.
They appear repeatedly in Masonic art, tracing boards, engravings and lodge furnishings. Their representation varies considerably. Sometimes they are massive architectural columns. Sometimes globes appear above them. In other depictions they become almost diagrammatic symbols, immediately recognizable to someone familiar with Masonic imagery.
Their importance, however, is not simply decorative.
A candidate entering the symbolic world of the lodge encounters the idea of passing between pillars. It is an architectural gesture transformed into a metaphor: crossing from one condition into another.
The concept is ancient and remarkably persistent.
Doors, gates, arches and pairs of columns have long marked places where something changes. A person passes from outside to inside, public to private, ordinary to sacred, unknown to known. The physical act of crossing a boundary becomes capable of representing an inward transformation.
Boaz and Jachin perform precisely that function within Masonic symbolism.
They stand at the point of passage.
This helps explain why images of the pillars continued to appear in Masonic literature long after their biblical origin. Albert Pike’s influential nineteenth-century Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, for example, discusses the symbolic architecture and traditions associated with Solomon’s Temple within its much broader exploration of Masonic philosophy. The Temple had become something more than an ancient building. It could also serve as an intellectual and moral landscape through which ideas were explored.
There is an especially fitting tension in the history of the two pillars.
The original Temple is gone.
The bronze pillars themselves are gone.
Their precise appearance cannot be recovered with certainty.
Yet their names survived.
Boaz.
Jachin.
Two words recorded thousands of years ago became enough to preserve the idea of two pillars standing before an entrance. Artists repeatedly reconstructed them. Scholars interpreted them. Freemasons incorporated them into a symbolic tradition that carried them into lodge rooms around the world.
That endurance is part of what makes the image so compelling.
Our Boaz & Jachin — Pillars of the Temple design draws from the historical engraved tradition rather than reinventing the pillars as modern symbols. The two columns stand opposite one another as they have in generations of illustrations: architectural, balanced and guarding the space between them.
And perhaps that empty space is the most important part of the image.
Because pillars create a threshold only when there is somewhere to pass.
The symbolism ultimately points not toward the columns themselves, but toward the person who walks between them—and whatever work awaits on the other side.
Before the temple can be built, the pillars must stand.
Boaz & Jachin — Pillars of the Temple — Catalog No. 6301
Hermetic — Within Symbolism
Symbols Worth Wearing.