Chapiter

A chapiter is the head or capital of a column — the shaped, often decorated block that crowns a pillar and carries the beam or architrave above it — and the word is the older English rendering, current in the King James Version, of what modern translations usually call a "capital." Historically the English term descends through Old French from Latin capitulum, "little head," the same root that gives architecture its word "capital," so the term names the pillar's head quite literally.

The Hebrew behind these renderings is not always the same word, which is a linguistic point worth noting. In the tabernacle account the pillars of the screen are said to have their heads overlaid with gold, along with their hooks and fillets, while their five sockets were of bronze (Exodus 36:38); there the Hebrew is simply the ordinary word for "head." In the temple descriptions the word is a different one, meaning "crown" or "tiara," used specifically for the cast capitals of the two great free-standing pillars. The text says Solomon's craftsman made capitals of molten bronze for the tops of those pillars, and that they were ornamented with network and with pomegranates in rows around them (1 Kings 7:20; 2 Kings 25:17). The two pillars were set at the porch of the temple and were given names, Jachin on the right and Boaz on the left (1 Kings 7:21); the narrative does not explain the names, though one way to read them is as short confessional phrases meaning something like "he will establish" and "in him is strength."

The same decorative vocabulary runs through the whole ensemble of temple bronze. The capitals with their bowls and networks are listed among the works of Hiram alongside the basins, pots, and shovels (2 Chronicles 4:12–13; 1 Kings 7:40), and the great molten sea shares the floral idiom, its brim worked like the brim of a cup, like the flower of a lily, a handbreadth thick and holding two thousand baths (1 Kings 7:23–26). Panel work elsewhere in the same furnishings carried cherubim, lions, and palm trees with wreaths all around (1 Kings 7:36). The capitals were therefore not structural only but part of a coordinated program of cast ornament. The reported measurements are not uniform: the capital is given as five cubits in 1 Kings 7:16 and three cubits in 2 Kings 25:17, a difference the texts leave standing, and the later passage records the bronze capitals, network, and pomegranates being broken up and carried off when Jerusalem fell (2 Kings 25:17).

Christian traditions differ here mainly in translation practice and in how they read the named pillars rather than in doctrine. Traditions that retain the King James text keep "chapiter" as a familiar archaism, while most modern versions use "capital," and readers comparing them should know the two render the same feature. Among interpreters, some treat Jachin and Boaz as bare architectural labels, others as royal or cultic mottoes, and still others as typological pointers to divine steadfastness; the text itself supplies the names without glossing them, so each of these remains an interpretive suggestion rather than a statement Scripture makes.

AI-generated reference entry, grounded in the passages where this term appears — history and Scripture stated as such, interpretation labeled as interpretation. Not a substitute for the text itself.