Solomon's Apostasy

The event

The same king who once asked God for wisdom above every other gift spent his later years drifting steadily away from the God who gave it. Solomon's seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines — many taken as part of political alliances with surrounding nations, exactly the kind of marriages Deuteronomy 17:17 had specifically warned Israel's kings against — 'turned away his heart after other gods.' He built high places for Chemosh and Molech, and for Ashtoreth, the gods of his foreign wives, on a hill just outside Jerusalem, and Scripture states plainly that 'his heart was not wholly true to the LORD his God, as the heart of David his father had been.'

The LORD's response came directly to Solomon: because he had not kept the covenant, the kingdom would be torn away — though not in Solomon's own lifetime, for David's sake, and not entirely, since one tribe would remain for David's line, for the sake of Jerusalem, 'the city that I have chosen.' The LORD then began raising up adversaries against Solomon in his later years, including Jeroboam, a capable young official whom the prophet Ahijah met on a road outside Jerusalem and told, by tearing his own new cloak into twelve pieces, that ten of those pieces — ten tribes — would soon belong to him.

This decline is one of Scripture's most sobering case studies: wisdom and blessing beyond measure did not, by themselves, guard Solomon's heart. It stands as a warning that runs straight through to the New Testament's own repeated cautions about the deceitfulness of riches and divided devotion, and it sets up, in the very next generation, the fracture of the kingdom his father and grandfather-generation had built.

Scripture references

• 1 Kings 11:1-40