Solomon

Scripture does not say. 1 Kings 11 records the sin, the anger of God and the sentence, and it records no repentance and no restoration. It also records no rejection of him personally, and the sentence is twice softened for David's sake, at 11:12 and 11:13. Three passages pull in different directions and all three belong here. Nehemiah 13:26 holds him up as a warning to a later generation and still calls him a man loved by his God. 2 Samuel 7:14 and 7:15 promised David that when this son did wrong God would discipline him with the rod of men, and that His loving devotion would never be removed from him as it had been removed from Saul. 1 Kings 11:9 to 11:11 is the sentence itself.

The positions, with the men who hold them. Matthew Henry, in 1710, reads 2 Samuel 7 straight onto 1 Kings 11:13 and writes that though Solomon fell he was not utterly cast down, and that God will not suffer those whom He loves to lie still in sin. Albert Barnes, writing in the middle of the nineteenth century, argues from 1 Kings 9:25 that Solomon never openly or wholly apostatized and kept up the temple worship to the end. Adam Clarke, in 1832, puts three questions to 1 Kings 11:11 and answers none of them: whether this was another warning, whether Solomon might yet have recovered himself, and whether there was mercy in the message that he could have sought and found. Augustine states in one exposition of the Psalms that Solomon was rejected by God. That position is named with its holder and is not adopted here.

Ancient Judaism argued the same question and left it where this page leaves it. The Babylonian Talmud, the Bavli, reached its received form in Babylonia between roughly AD 500 and 600, and its tractate Sanhedrin, chapter ten, takes up who has a share in the World to Come. The passage at Sanhedrin 104b opens, in the Sefaria English text, “Rav Yehuda says that Rav says: They sought to enumerate one more, King Solomon, in the list of kings with no share in the World-to-Come.” What follows records that the attempt was stopped, and that a heavenly voice cited Job 34:33 to say the decision belongs to God and not to men. That is aggadah, the narrative material rather than the legal material, and it is carried here as reception history rather than as a reading of the biblical text.

Proverbs names him in its own text three times, at 1:1, 10:1 and 25:1, and 25:1 records that the men of Hezekiah copied a further collection about two and a half centuries after his death. The book also names Agur at 30:1 and Lemuel at 31:1, so it presents itself as a collection headed by Solomon rather than as a single-author volume.

Ecclesiastes never says his name. The speaker is the Teacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem, at 1:1, and king over Israel in Jerusalem at 1:12, which fits him and fits no one else in that line as neatly. The traditional attribution is ancient and leads here. The argument against it is linguistic: the Hebrew of the book carries later forms and vocabulary that many Hebraists date well after the tenth century, and that argument is named rather than dismissed. The question was live long before modern criticism, since Albert Barnes was already writing “Ecclesiastes, if it is Solomon’s” in the 1830s. The Song of Songs carries his name at 1:1 in a Hebrew phrase that can be read as by Solomon, for Solomon or about Solomon, and the site's page on the reading traditions carries that question at length.

Because there was no evidence of any kind. 3:18 says the two women were alone in the house with no one else in it, so there was nothing to weigh but two claims. The king made a test instead of a judgment. Adam Clarke put it plainly in 1832: the real mother would rather give up her claim than see the child cut in pieces, while the pretender would watch that with indifference. The verdict at 3:27 names her by what she did, and 3:26 has already given the reason, that she yearned with compassion for her son.

The Berean Standard Bible renders the Hebrew word at 3:16 as two prostitutes, which is the usual sense and the reading behind nearly every English Bible. A minority reading exists and this page names it. Adam Clarke argued in 1832 that the Aramaic Targum renders the word as tavern-keepers, and that women of that trade would not have dared appear before the king. John Wesley noted in 1765 that the Hebrew word carries both senses, and thought the two were unmarried because no husband appears to contest the case. Either way the placement of the scene stands: the king of Israel heard two women who had no standing and no man to speak for them.

Scripture says she came from the ends of the earth, that she came because of the fame of Solomon concerning the name of the LORD, and that she went home blessing that name. It does not give her name or her country, and two identifications are on the table.

The Arabian identification places her in the Sabaean kingdom of south Arabia. Albert Barnes argued for it on the ground that Arabian Sheba was the spice country of the ancient world while Ethiopia produced no spices, and that Arabian Sheba was a kingdom while Ethiopian Sheba was a town. The Ethiopian tradition claims her as its own and is set out in the Kebra Nagast, the national epic written in Ge’ez and generally dated to the fourteenth century AD, which makes her the mother of Menelik by Solomon. Adam Clarke reported that tradition in 1832 and treated it as a tradition. Charles Spurgeon named both identifications from the pulpit and settled neither, and neither does this page.

1 Kings 9:15 says Solomon fortified Hazor, Megiddo and Gezer, and that verse is what the argument turns on. In the late 1950s Yigael Yadin found that the six-chambered gates at all three sites matched one plan and read the verse as the explanation. The three structures have been called the Solomonic gates ever since. The Tel Gezer Excavation Project, directed by Steven Ortiz and Samuel Wolff from 2006 to 2017, published radiocarbon and ceramic dates placing Gezer's gate stratum early in the tenth century BC, at 998 to 957 BC, and dated the destruction of that fortification system to the third quarter of the same century, which they tie to the campaign of Shoshenq I, the Shishak of 1 Kings 14:25.

Israel Finkelstein has argued since the 1990s for a low chronology that moves this architecture down by roughly a century, to the Omride dynasty of the ninth, and a large part of the field has followed some version of that dating; Finkelstein and Matthew Adams restated the case for Megiddo in Tel Aviv 48 in 2021. Separately, Erez Ben-Yosef's radiocarbon work at the smelting camp at Timna dated a large organized copper industry in the Arabah to the tenth century BC, which is the century Kings assigns to Solomon's fleet, though Ben-Yosef himself attributes the mines to an Edomite polity rather than to Israel. This page reports the evidence and the dispute and gives no verdict either way. It does not say archaeology has proved Solomon and it does not say archaeology has disproved him.

The text gives the reason twice, and it is about blood rather than about worth. At 1 Chronicles 22:8 God tells David he had shed much blood and waged great wars, and that he was not to build a house for the Name on that account. 22:9 names the son as a man of rest whose own name would mean peace, and says God would give Israel quiet during his reign. Nothing in the passage says David was less loved or Solomon more deserving. The house was to be built by a king whose reign had rest in it, and the site's page on the temple carries the building itself at length.

It was spoken to Solomon at night, after the dedication of the temple, about that temple and that nation. The conditions are the ones the verse gives, that God's people who are called by His name humble themselves and pray and seek His face and turn from their wicked ways. The promise attached to them is that God will hear from heaven, forgive their sin and heal their land. This page says who the sentence was spoken to and what it says. It does not stretch it into a claim about any present-day country, and the wider question of what God's promises to Israel mean now is handled on the site's covenant pages.

Scripture does not say, and this page does not supply a figure. He calls himself only a little child at 1 Kings 3:7, which is a statement about being unequal to the office rather than a number. He reigned forty years, at 1 Kings 11:42. Albert Barnes reckoned from that and from Rehoboam's age at accession that Solomon was probably around twenty at the start and around sixty at his death. Jerome, in Letter 74 of AD 398, calls him a boy of twelve. Both figures are inferences drawn from the text rather than statements of it, and the question stays open.