Solomon, Compromised Lover

King Solomon with his wives. Illustrated in 1668 by Giovanni Battista Venanzi.

Solomon was attracted to women and to power. He could get both by marrying both. He found a way to satisfy his desire for what Richard Foster identified as our 3 most vulnerable lusts: money, sex, and power.

He could accumulate exotic women, their eclectic cultures, their family wealth, and their political alliances by marrying into wealthy and powerful families.

God, who never stopped loving or blessing Solomon in his lifetime, responded and reacted to this power grab by declaring an end to it. The united kingdom would not continue. Too much concentrated political power becomes abusive, degrading, and an amalgamated civil religion unto itself.

The state cannot become a god (or, actually it can, but it must not). That is the problem - not women per se, but idolatry and how idolatry perpetuates itself and leads us astray.

We are always in danger. By making ourselves comfortable with systems and powers, by confusing our ultimate loyalties with the symbols of empire and nationalism, by grabbing what we want and putting our own personal, national, or group interests first, we are doing a solomonic power grab.

Let us be warned and informed by the lessons of sacred history.

1 Kings 11:1-13:
King Solomon loved many foreign women along with the daughter of Pharaoh: Moabite, Ammonite, Edomite, Sidonian, and Hittite women, from the nations concerning which the LORD had said to the Israelites, "You shall not enter into marriage with them, neither shall they with you; for they will surely incline your heart to follow their gods"

Solomon clung to these in love.

Among his wives were seven hundred princesses and three hundred concubines; and his wives turned away his heart. For when Solomon was old, his wives turned away his heart after other gods; and his heart was not true to the LORD his God, as was the heart of his father David. For Solomon followed Astarte the goddess of the Sidonians, and Milcom the abomination of the Ammonites.

So Solomon did what was evil in the sight of the LORD, and did not completely follow the LORD, as his father David had done. Then Solomon built a high place for Chemosh the abomination of Moab, and for Molech the abomination of the Ammonites, on the mountain east of Jerusalem. He did the same for all his foreign wives, who offered incense and sacrificed to their gods.

Then the LORD was angry with Solomon, because his heart had turned away from the LORD, the God of Israel, who had appeared to him twice, and had commanded him concerning this matter, that he should not follow other gods; but he did not observe what the LORD commanded.

Therefore the LORD said to Solomon, "Since this has been your mind and you have not kept my covenant and my statutes that I have commanded you, I will surely tear the kingdom from you and give it to your servant. Yet for the sake of your father David I will not do it in your lifetime; I will tear it out of the hand of your son. I will not, however, tear away the entire kingdom; I will give one tribe to your son, for the sake of my servant David and for the sake of Jerusalem, which I have chosen."