1 Kings: Solomon’s Glory, and Who Paid for It

At a Glance

Who wrote it: Unknown. It continues the long history from Joshua to Kings. It names older sources that are now lost, such as the book of the acts of Solomon (1 Kings 11:41).

When: It covers about 970 to 850 BC. Kings reached its final form during the exile, after 561 BC. In my day 1 and 2 Kings were one scroll.

Where it fits: It picks up where 2 Samuel ends, in King David’s last days, about 970 BC. It runs through Solomon’s reign and the split into two kingdoms, to the death of King Ahab, about 850 BC.

Where I quote it: Solomon in all his glory (Matthew 6:29). The queen of the South (Matthew 12:42). Elijah and the widow of Zarephath (Luke 4:25–26).

If you only read three chapters: 1 Kings 12, 1 Kings 17 and 1 Kings 21.

Words to Know

Forced labor — work the king demanded from his subjects without pay. The Hebrew word is mas.

Baal — the Canaanite storm god, rival to the LORD in this book.

Elijah — the great prophet of the northern kingdom. My people expected him to return.

Inheritance — family land, which by the Law was never supposed to be sold away for good.

The Book in Brief

First Kings opens with King David old and dying. In chapters 1 and 2, his son Adonijah tries to make himself king. The prophet Nathan and Bathsheba persuade David to name her son Solomon instead. After David dies, Solomon has Adonijah and the general Joab killed.

Chapters 3 to 11 tell of Solomon’s reign. In a dream God offers him whatever he asks. He asks for wisdom to judge the people, and God adds riches and honor. He settles the case of two women who claim the same baby. With cedar from Hiram, king of Tyre, and forced labor from his own people, he builds the Temple and a great palace, and prays at the Temple’s dedication. The queen of Sheba comes to test his wisdom, and gold pours in. But Solomon loves many foreign women, and in his old age they turn his heart to their gods. A prophet tears a new cloak into twelve pieces and gives ten to Jeroboam, one of Solomon’s officials, as a sign that he will rule ten tribes.

In chapter 12, after Solomon’s death, his son Rehoboam refuses to lighten the people’s load, and the kingdom splits in two. The northern tribes make Jeroboam king of Israel. Rehoboam keeps Judah and Jerusalem. Jeroboam sets up two golden calves to keep his people from worshiping in Jerusalem.

Chapter 13 tells of a prophet from Judah who denounces Jeroboam’s altar. Chapters 14 to 16 hurry through the next kings, judging each by whether he served the LORD alone. In the north, one king after another is overthrown, until Omri builds a new capital at Samaria. His son Ahab marries Jezebel, a princess from Sidon, and builds a temple for Baal.

Chapters 17 to 22 belong to Ahab and the prophets who oppose him, above all Elijah, who announces a drought, is fed by a widow in Zarephath, defeats the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel, and flees from Jezebel to the mountain of God. Jezebel has Naboth killed so that Ahab can take his vineyard. In the last chapter Ahab ignores a prophet’s warning, goes to war against Aram, and is killed by an arrow.

Solomon is the richest, wisest, most glorious king my people ever had. He built the Temple. Kings and queens came from far away to hear him.

I mentioned him twice, and both times I was making him smaller.

Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow. They don’t toil, neither do they spin, yet I tell you that even Solomon in all his glory was not dressed like one of these (Matthew 6:28–29).

And when people demanded a sign from me, I said the queen of the South would rise up at the judgment and condemn them, for she came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon; and behold, someone greater than Solomon is here (Matthew 12:42).

The two mothers

Solomon’s wisdom is famous for one case (1 Kings 3:16–28). Two prostitutes share a house. Both had babies, and one baby died in the night. Each woman claims the living child is hers.

Solomon calls for a sword and orders the baby cut in half. One woman says, Oh, my lord, give her the living child, and in no way kill him! (1 Kings 3:26). And Solomon knows she is the mother.

Notice who stands before the king. Two prostitutes, with no husbands and no family to speak for them. And the king listens to them himself. That is the best of Solomon.

Who built the Temple

Here is the worst.

Solomon took his own people for forced labor. He sent thirty thousand men from Israel to Lebanon to cut timber, in shifts, one month there and two months home. He had seventy thousand carriers and eighty thousand stonecutters in the hills (1 Kings 5:13–15). It took seven years to build the Temple, and thirteen to build his own palace (1 Kings 6:38; 7:1).

Later in the same book, a writer insists that Solomon only made foreigners into bondservants, and that of the children of Israel Solomon made no bondservants (1 Kings 9:20–22). Read chapter 5 again and decide for yourself.¹

Go deeperLooking for Solomon in the ground

The same book says what Solomon’s forced labor was for: to build the LORD’s house, his own house, Millo, Jerusalem’s wall, Hazor, Megiddo, and Gezer (1 Kings 9:15). Archaeologists have dug at all three of those cities.

In the 1950s the Israeli archaeologist Yigael Yadin uncovered a great city gate at Hazor, with three small rooms on each side of the passage. A gate of the same plan had already been found at Megiddo, and Yadin spotted a third in the old plans of a dig at Gezer, where the first excavator had dated it far too late. Three matching gates, in the three cities named in one verse, looked like the work of one royal builder. Yadin called them Solomon’s.²

In 1996 another Israeli archaeologist, Israel Finkelstein, argued that the pottery used to date these layers had been dated about a century too early. If he is right, the gates belong to the 800s BC, the time of Omri and Ahab, and Solomon is left with a much smaller kingdom. Others, among them Amihai Mazar, answered that the evidence still allows a date in Solomon’s century. Radiocarbon tests have been used on both sides, and the argument is not settled.³

Two things stand out. No inscription found so far names Solomon. And in 1993, at Dan in the far north, archaeologists found part of a victory monument set up by an Aramean king in the 800s BC, which seems to call the kingdom of Judah “the house of David.” Most scholars read it that way. If they are right, then about a century after Solomon, Judah’s enemies knew it as the kingdom of David’s family.⁴

What the Law said a king could not do

You may remember that Deuteronomy forbade a king to multiply horses, wives, and silver and gold (Deuteronomy 17:16–17).

Solomon imported horses from Egypt (1 Kings 10:28). He had seven hundred wives, princesses, and three hundred concubines (1 Kings 11:3). And the gold that came to him in a single year weighed six hundred sixty-six talents (1 Kings 10:14).

Every line of that law reads like it was written while looking at Solomon.

A heavier yoke

When Solomon dies, his son Rehoboam goes to Shechem to be made king. The northern tribes come to him with one request. Your father made our yoke difficult. Now therefore make the hard service of your father, and his heavy yoke which he put on us, lighter, and we will serve you (1 Kings 12:4).

Rehoboam asks his father’s old advisers. They tell him, If you will be a servant to this people today, and will serve them … then they will be your servants forever (1 Kings 12:7).

Then he asks the young men he grew up with. They tell him to say, My little finger is thicker than my father’s waist. Now my father burdened you with a heavy yoke, but I will add to your yoke. My father chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions (1 Kings 12:10–11).

He takes the young men’s advice. The northern tribes walk away. When the king sends his officer in charge of forced labor to bring them back, they stone him to death (1 Kings 12:18).

The kingdom of David and Solomon split in two over forced labor and a heavy yoke.

So listen to what I said, and hear what the people who heard it remembered: Come to me, all you who labor and are heavily burdened … Take my yoke upon you … For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light (Matthew 11:28–30).

And listen to the old men’s advice to Rehoboam, then to what I told my friends: Whoever wants to become great among you shall be your servant (Mark 10:43). Rehoboam was told the same thing a thousand years before me. He did not listen.

Golden calves again

The new northern king, Jeroboam, does not want his people going to Jerusalem to worship. So he sets up two golden calves, one in Bethel and one in Dan, and he says, Look and behold your gods, Israel, which brought you up out of the land of Egypt! (1 Kings 12:28). They are almost the same words the people said over the golden calf in the desert.

From here on, the book judges every northern king by whether he followed the sins of Jeroboam.

Elijah and the widow

Then comes Elijah, the prophet who appears out of nowhere and tells King Ahab there will be no rain.

During the drought, God sends Elijah to a town called Zarephath, outside Israel, in the territory of Sidon. There he finds a widow gathering sticks. She has one handful of flour and a little oil left, and she is about to make a last meal for herself and her son and then die. Elijah asks her to feed him first. She does. Her flour and oil do not run out until the rain comes (1 Kings 17:8–16).

When I preached in my hometown of Nazareth, I reminded them of her. There were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah … Elijah was sent to none of them, except to Zarephath, in the land of Sidon, to a woman who was a widow (Luke 4:25–26).

My own neighbors were so angry that they drove me out of town and tried to throw me off a cliff (Luke 4:28–29). That is what it cost to remind them that God’s prophets went to foreigners.

Fire and a still small voice

On Mount Carmel, Elijah challenges the 450 prophets of Baal to a contest. Each side builds an altar and prays for fire. Baal’s prophets shout and dance all day, and nothing happens. Elijah drenches his altar with water and prays once, and fire falls from heaven (1 Kings 18).

Then Elijah has all 450 prophets of Baal killed (1 Kings 18:40).

Then, when the queen threatens his life, the great prophet runs into the desert and asks to die. On the mountain of God there is a wind, then an earthquake, then a fire, and God is not in any of them. After the fire comes a still small voice (1 Kings 19:11–12).

God came to Elijah in a quiet voice, after he had tried fire.

Go deeperWho Baal was, in his own people’s stories

For a long time, almost everything anyone knew about Baal came from his enemies, the writers of the Bible. That changed in 1928, when a farmer ploughing near the coast of Syria broke into an ancient tomb. It led archaeologists to the ruins of Ugarit, a city destroyed around 1185 BC. From 1929 a French team led by Claude Schaeffer dug up its tablets: clay, written in an alphabet nobody had seen before, in a language close to Hebrew.⁵

Among them is a long poem about Baal. In it he is the god of storm and rain, and one of his titles is “rider of the clouds.” He fights the Sea and defeats him. He is given a palace of his own. Then he goes down into the throat of Death, a god named Mot, taking his clouds and his rain with him, and he is reported dead. While he is gone, the furrows of the fields dry up. Before he returns, the old god El dreams that the heavens rain oil and the valleys run with honey, and so he knows that Baal lives.⁶

Read 1 Kings 17 and 18 with that in mind. The contest on Mount Carmel comes in the third year of a drought, and the real question is who sends the rain. When Baal’s prophets get no answer, Elijah mocks them: Either he is deep in thought, or he has gone somewhere, or he is on a journey, or perhaps he sleeps and must be awakened (1 Kings 18:27). Some scholars hear in that a jab at a god whose own stories have him going away to the land of the dead.⁷

Some of Israel’s poets seem to have borrowed Baal’s titles for the LORD. A psalm calls God the one who rides on the clouds (Psalm 68:4). They took the title and gave it to the God who, they said, really sends the rain.

Naboth’s vineyard

1 Kings 21 is the story I most want you to read.

King Ahab wants a vineyard next to his palace. It belongs to a man named Naboth. Ahab offers to buy it or trade for it. Naboth says no: May the LORD forbid me, that I should give the inheritance of my fathers to you! (1 Kings 21:3). By the Law, family land was not his to sell for good.

Ahab goes home and sulks. His wife, Jezebel, tells him to cheer up and writes letters in his name to the leaders of Naboth’s town. She tells them to hold a fast, seat Naboth in a place of honor, and bring two men, wicked fellows, to testify that he cursed God and the king (1 Kings 21:9–10).

They do. Naboth is stoned. Ahab takes the vineyard.

Look at how it was done. The Law said a man could only be condemned on the word of two witnesses (Deuteronomy 19:15). So they found two. They used the Law’s own protection to kill a man and take his land.

Elijah meets Ahab in the vineyard and says, Have you killed and also taken possession? (1 Kings 21:19).

When I was tried before the council, Mark says they could not find a charge until false witnesses stood up, and even then their testimony did not agree (Mark 14:55–59). It is an old way to get rid of a man who is in the way.

Go deeperOmri and Ahab in their enemies’ records

First Kings gives Omri’s reign six verses. It says he bought a hill and built Samaria on it, that he did evil, and that the rest of his deeds are written in another book (1 Kings 16:23–28). His neighbors remembered him far longer. For more than a century after his death, Assyrian scribes called the northern kingdom “the house of Omri.”⁸

In 1868 a missionary in what is now Jordan was shown a black stone covered in writing. It had been set up by Mesha, king of Moab, the same king who rebels against Israel in 2 Kings 3. Mesha says that Omri humbled Moab for many years, because Moab’s god Chemosh was angry with his land, and that Omri’s son meant to do the same. Then he tells how he fought back, took Israel’s towns, and dragged the LORD’s vessels before Chemosh. It is the oldest certain mention of the LORD’s name outside the Bible. Before the stone could be moved, local people heated it and smashed it. A paper impression taken just before saved most of the text, and the pieces are now in the Louvre in Paris.⁹

Ahab appears in an Assyrian record. In 853 BC the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III fought a coalition of kings at Qarqar, in Syria. His monument names “Ahab the Israelite” among them, with 2,000 chariots and 10,000 foot soldiers. Some scholars think the chariot number is a scribe’s mistake. Either way, Ahab was one of the main powers in the region. First Kings never mentions the battle.¹⁰

The writers of Kings were not keeping a record of power. They wanted you to remember Naboth’s vineyard.

Check It Yourself

Look up: 1 Kings 12:1–19.

You will find: that the kingdom split because the king refused to lighten the people’s yoke.

Then read 1 Kings 21:1–19. Count the witnesses, and see what the Law’s own rules were used for.

The Short Version

• I measured Solomon in all his glory against a wildflower.
• Solomon built the Temple with forced labor from his own people, and broke every limit Deuteronomy put on kings.
• The kingdom split over a heavy yoke. Rehoboam was told to be a servant to the people, and refused.
• I reminded Nazareth that Elijah was sent to a foreign widow, and they tried to kill me for it.
• Naboth was killed by two false witnesses so the king could take his family land.