1 Kings 8:29

“ That your eyes may be open towards this house night and day, even towards the place of which you have said, “My name shall be there,” to listen to the prayer which your servant shall pray towards this place.”

And his prayer was that YHWH would now accept this new Temple as he had accepted the Tabernacle so that YHWH's eyes would be opened towards this house night and day, causing Him to listen to all the prayers that Solomon His servant would, as Israel's intercessor, pray towards this place.

“The place of which you said, ‘My Name shall be there”. He wanted the Temple to be acknowledged as one of the places where He had ‘recorded His Name' (Exodus 20:24. Throughout their history YHWH had chosen places where He would ‘record His Name.' It had been so wherever the Tabernacle was established, for it had contained the ARK which ‘whose Name is called by the Name of YHWH of hosts Who sits among the Cherubim' (2 Samuel 6:2). And that Tabernacle had finally settled in Shiloh (Joshua 18:1) once the country had rest (Joshua 11:23; Joshua 18:1; Joshua 23:1), at ‘the place which YHWH chose to put His Name there' (Deuteronomy 12:5; Deuteronomy 12:11; Deuteronomy 12:21; Deuteronomy 14:23; Deuteronomy 16:2; Deuteronomy 16:6; Deuteronomy 16:11; Deuteronomy 26:2), and it had been there for centuries.

But as a result of the failure of the people to respond fully to the covenant Shiloh had ceased as the place where ‘YHWH had chosen to put His Name there', and there had been a stage of fluidity. Now Solomon was praying that He would accept this Temple as such a place. The prophecy ‘My Name shall be there' (see 1 Kings 8:16) had, according to Solomon, been made to his father David. And the very fact that He had allowed them to build the Temple indicated that that was His purpose for it. The idea of His Name being there was that it would be one place where He was present to listen to the prayers of His people without His being limited to that place.

For the idea of ‘eyes being opened' see Genesis 3:5; Genesis 3:7; Numbers 24:3; Numbers 24:15. For ‘my Name shall be there' compare 1 Kings 8:16. For the idea of ‘the Name' see Genesis 4:25; Genesis 13:4; Exodus 20:24; Exodus 23:21; Exodus 34:5; Deuteronomy 12:5 etc.).