the innermost, rearmost room of Solomon's temple: the windowless inner chamber that housed the ark of the covenant.
The debir was the deepest room of Solomon's temple, a windowless cube at the far western end, entered through olive-wood doors from the large main hall (הֵיכָל) in front of it. It was the temple's most sacred space, the room where the ark of the covenant rested beneath the outstretched wings of two carved cherubim.
The name itself simply means "the back room." It comes from an old word for "behind" or "the rear part" (the same idea survives in the Arabic word for "hinder part"), so it describes the room by its position: the last and deepest chamber, the endpoint of a path that ran from the porch, through the main hall, to this final room.
Every mention but one falls in the accounts of building and furnishing the temple in 1 Kings 6 to 8 and 2 Chronicles 3 to 5. Archaeologists have since uncovered temples of the same three-part design across ancient Syria, most strikingly at a site called 'Ain Dara, where the rearmost zone is walled off and raised in just this way, so the layout the Bible describes turns out to be a well-attested regional pattern.
The one time the word steps outside the building accounts is Psalm 28:2, where a worshipper lifts his hands "toward your holy debir." He is praying in the direction of this innermost room, where God was pictured as enthroned. Even there the word still names the same physical chamber, now seen as the place toward which prayer is aimed.
Disputed
What physical form the innermost room actually took inside Solomon's temple.
- contestedA fully walled-off room built behind the main hall and shut off by doors and partitions.; Martin Noth, Konige, BKAT IX/1 (1968); Ernst Wurthwein, Die Bucher der Konige, ATD 11/1, 2nd ed. (1985); Simon J. DeVries, 1 Kings, WBC 12 (1985)
- contestedA raised, screened-off platform at the rear of the main hall, reached by a short stairway, like the one uncovered at the 'Ain Dara temple in Syria.; John M. Monson, "The New 'Ain Dara Temple: Closest Solomonic Parallel," Biblical Archaeology Review 26/3 (2000); Victor Hurowitz, "YHWH's Exalted House," in Temple and Worship in Biblical Israel, ed. J. Day (2007)
- minorityA freestanding wooden cube standing inside the main hall rather than a separate room.; Kurt Mohlenbrink, Der Tempel Salomos (1932)