A Reference on the Porch of the Temple
Light & Strength
Jachin and Boaz — the twin bronze pillars that stood at the entrance to Solomon's Temple, and the threshold they came to represent.
Origins
Two pillars, two names, one porch
Before either word meant anything to a lodge, they named two objects of bronze. What we can say about them begins in the account of their casting.
Jachin
יָכִין“He will establish” / “He shall establish”
Cast in bronze by Hiram, the craftsman of Tyre, and raised at the vestibule of the Temple. Its name carries a promise of permanence — that what stands here has been set in place by design, not accident.
1 Kings 7:21 · 2 Chronicles 3:17
Boaz
בֹּעַז“In him is strength” / “In strength”
Its companion, matched in height and ornament, on the opposite side of the entrance. Where Jachin speaks to endurance over time, Boaz speaks to the capacity to bear weight — structural and otherwise — in the present.
1 Kings 7:21 · 2 Chronicles 3:17
The Second Half of the Name
Where light enters the pairing
Strength has a source text. Light, in this pairing, is an interpretation — and it's worth being honest about which is which.
The pillars themselves are named for establishment and strength, not illumination. But the porch they guarded faced east, toward the rising sun, and every account of the vestibule places the pillars as the last thing a visitor passed through the light of before entering the dim interior of the Temple proper. The passage from open sky to shadowed sanctuary, between two named columns, is where later tradition — particularly Masonic tradition — found room to read light into the architecture: not as a third pillar, but as what the two pillars stand between.
"More light" is the request a candidate makes at the threshold, not a possession already held.
In Masonic initiation, the language of “seeking light” and being brought “from darkness to light” is central to the first degree, and the pillars — or their miniature stand-ins on the Wardens' pedestals — are frequently the literal gate a candidate passes through on the way there. Strength, in that reading, is what the structure is made of. Light is what the structure is for.
That's the frame this site works from: Jachin and Boaz as the documented, named, physical pair, and light as the interpretive thread that later hands wove between them. The two are kept distinct throughout rather than blurred into a single ancient doctrine.
From Temple to Lodge
How the pillars entered Masonic ritual
The pillars' second life is far better documented than their first — it survives in printed exposures, lodge inventories, and jurisdictional rulebooks rather than in a single scattered biblical chapter.
First Appearance in Print
The Wardens each holding a small column representing Boaz and Jachin is described in English ritual exposures from the 1760s — Three Distinct Knocks (1760) and Jachin and Boaz (1762) among the earliest. The device is an 18th-century development of speculative Masonry, not a survival from the operative period.
The Wardens' Columns
In many lodges, miniature versions of the two pillars sit on the pedestals of the Senior and Junior Wardens and are raised or lowered to mark whether the lodge is at labor or at refreshment — a working use of the symbol, not only a decorative one.
No Fixed Position
Placement varies by jurisdiction: in front of the Master's chair in much of England, near the Wardens in the west in early American practice, or at the northwest corner by the preparation room in some U.S. lodges today. There is no single correct layout.
Even the Sides Disagree
Which pillar stands where is not settled between traditions. Historically, the “Ancients” and “Moderns” grand lodges reversed the arrangement from one another, and present-day sources still differ on which Warden's column carries which name.
A gate is only a gate if something passes through it
Two-pillar thresholds appear elsewhere — flanking obelisks at Egyptian temple pylons, paired guardian columns at gates across the ancient Near East — as a widespread architectural grammar for marking a boundary, not evidence of a shared lineage with Jachin and Boaz specifically. What's constant is simpler than any hidden doctrine: a passage between two fixed points asks something of whoever walks through it. For the Temple, that was reverence. For the lodge, it's most often framed as the candidate's own readiness.
Sourcing
References
- 1 Kings 7:15–22 — casting, dimensions, and naming of the pillars.
- 2 Chronicles 3:15–17 — the parallel Chronicles account, with differing height figures.
- 2 Kings 25:13–17 and Jeremiah 52:17 — the destruction of the pillars and removal of the bronze.
- Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, Book 8, Ch. 3 — an early post-biblical description of the pillars' placement.
- Three Distinct Knocks (London, 1760) and Jachin and Boaz (London, 1762) — the earliest printed Masonic exposures describing the Wardens' columns.
- Harry Carr, “Pillars and Globes, Columns and Candlesticks,” Quatuor Coronati Lodge research notes — on the historical development of the Wardens' columns in lodge furniture.