2 Chronicles 8:5. Also he built Beth-horon the upper, and Beth-horon the nether, fenced cities, with walls, gates, and bars.
1. Fortifications are as ancient as cities; indeed, some writers assert that the difference, anciently, between cities and villages was simply the difference between walled and unwalled towns. The Egyptian and Assyrian sculptures contain representations of “fenced cities” with walls of squared stone or squared timber on the summit of scarped rocks. Some of the fenced cities of Scripture are thought to have been protected by stockades of wood. Sometimes there was more than one wall to a fortified city. It was thus with Jerusalem. See 2 Kings 25:4; 2 Chronicles 32:6. Sometimes there was a ditch outside the wall, and a low wall or rampart protecting that. At regular distances on the wall there were towers for the purposes of watching and defense. See 2 Kings. 9:17; 2 Chronicles 26:5. The gates were strongly protected with bolts or bars of brass or iron. Sometimes there was built at some central point within the city a citadel or stronghold which might resist attack even after the walls were destroyed.
2. To “build” a city often meant not to give a new town a location, and to erect the houses, but to build walls around a town already inhabited. It was thus that Solomon built the two Beth-horons mentioned in the text. Thus Rehoboam “built” the cities named in 2 Chronicles 11:5-10. So Jeroboam “built” Shechem and Penuel (1 Kings 12:25) and Hiel “built” Jericho (1 Kings 16:34) a city which had been inhabited long before (Judges 1:16; 3:13).