Troublesome Topic: Why Did Solomon Turn from God to Idols?

Why did he start out good and then turn against God? What changed? What made him break?

What We Can Be Sure of from Scripture

The passage shown above, tells us that Solomon was a king that followed God. We are not told anything different until I Kings 11:1-8, where we read about his apostacy which drew God’s wrath. We are told specifically in I Kings 11:4 that “when old, Solomon’s wives turned his heart toward other gods.” This happened when he was old, not “as he grew old,” which is the way the NIV incorrectly translates the Hebrew wording. So, for most of his life he followed God and God’s ways either very well, or reasonably well. His apostacy did not come until the end of his life. But once again, why did he break?

Allow me to describe several of the pressures that grew as Solomon got older. In this section, these are things the Bible makes clear, we just have to find them and piece them together. Further below I will get into more speculation.

1. Solomon accomplished many grandiose building projects, but they came at a high price. We know Solomon relied heavily on forced labor to accomplish his lofty and numerous building projects. The foreigners living in Israel were made to do the hard work and Israelites were made supervisors over them, but even the Israelite supervisors did not have a choice in the matter. The foreigners had to work all the time, while the Israelites worked one month for Solomon and two months on their own land.

He also relied on high taxes to help support his growing enterprises. Although he had lots of gold and silver coming from his mines, from his maritime expeditions, and from his treaties with foreign nations, it was not coming in fast enough to keep pace with his grandiose plans. The people found themselves paying higher and higher taxes.

2. The tribe of Ephraim was the source of much of the opposition against Solomon (both Sheba and Jeroboam came from the tribe of Ephraim).

We know Jeroboam, the one who eventually took the northern tribes away from Solomon’s son Rehoboam, was in charge of forced labor. Thus he was well acquainted with the feelings of the people about this situation.

3. We are told that Solomon made silver as common in Jerusalem as stones (I Kings 10:27, and II Chron 9:27).

Safe Assumptions Based on Inferences in Scripture

1. There was discontent over the forced labor. Even the one month on, two months off arrangement was found to be undesirable by the Israelites because it was being forced upon them; they had no choice. This made quite a few people turn against him and the opposition grew stronger as he got older. Solomon had tried to be a unifying force among the disgruntled tribes, but his actions ended up being forces that worked toward the disintegration of the kingdom he had worked so hard to build.  

You already know how people feel about high taxes.

2. At first it sounds like a good thing that silver would be as common as stones, and at first I’m sure people were happy about having more silver circulating and becoming more available. But there was an unintended consequence; if money grew on trees, money would have the same value as leaves which we rake up in the fall and burn or throw away! The fact that silver was as common as stones means that the value of silver had dropped to that of a stone, almost nothing. What good is it to have lots of money if that money is worth almost nothing and its purchasing power is almost zero? This turned people against Solomon also. This wonderful king who started out bigger than life, began to shrink before their very eyes to be less than normal size; he became small and undesirable in their eyes and his grandiose projects became a source of repugnance and anger, not a source of pride.

We are not told the reaction of the people to this situation, but we can imagine that they were not happy. Only a few of them would have seen this coming. Most of them did not understand economics very well so they would been happy with more silver and gold moving from hand to hand, until reality set in.

3. Although his foreign wives may have been forced to become proselytes, and may have been given a degree of education about what it meant to be an Israelite, it appears they did not leave behind the religious teaching they grew up with. Rather they simply added YHVH to their list of “gods.” They followed the outward practices of Judaism because they had to, but they still thought like foreigners. Being proselytes would explain why Solomon’s many foreign wives were not seen as a big problem by most of his countrymen, and being foreign in their thinking process would explain why they were able to eventually lead him astray to worship other gods. If he demanded that they become proselytes, why did he later give in and build shrines and altars for them so they could worship their foreign gods? What changed?

I Kings 11:2 uses the word “cling” – “he clung to them in love.” This is the word God uses for marriage relationships. This is what you should do; you should cling to your wife. The problem was that these women were brought up worshipping other gods, and those early beliefs cannot be easily removed. For that very reason God forbade Israelites from marrying foreign women; He knew what would happen.

I want to be clear that the prohibitions in God’s law for the Israelites against marrying foreigners are not an example of racism. It had nothing to do with the color of their skin; it had everything to do with their religious beliefs and practices. The people of the nations around them had and still have similar colored skin and hair. This was purely about maintaining the purity of the religion.

Several years earlier, Solomon had learned and finally written how life’s accomplishments were like a vapor, temporary, unpredictable, and unreliable. Why was he not able to let it go? If he had to make a choice between the complex system he had built (which included foreign treaties and foreign wives), and following God from the heart with whatever personal sacrifices God would require, why did he choose his own way rather than God’s way?

One thing to consider is that so many people were depending directly on him because he had set himself up as the one who would supply their needs. The system he had built was dependent on him and his big brain. That kind of dependency is unhealthy in any situation.

I have tried to make the case that he was angry at God and I think that was the main reason Solomon could not turn to God the way his father had done. If he refused to let go of his anger, then he would never get right with God, so the only way left to choose was his own.

The Following Are Simply Educated Guesses on My Part

There was talk among some of the tribes of pulling away from Solomon’s reign. The unity that had existed under David, and when the temple was dedicated had deteriorated. When Solomon helped the middle class grow they were happy, but now that taxes were too high, the various tribes returned to the attitude that they did not need each other. Solomon felt like they did not appreciate how much he did for them. In reality what they did not appreciate was the price associated with what he did, and they wondered how much of it was for them and how much was for him. The killing of tax collectors was becoming more and more common. It was getting hard to find people willing to take the job of a tax collector. This was a signal that high taxes would no longer be tolerated.

The primary source of antagonism came from the tribe of Ephraim. They thought they deserved the throne, and they were sore about it. Jeroboam was from Ephraim. Earlier, Sheba, son of Bikri had lead an uprising against David. Though he was a Benjamite, it appears he was residing in the hill country of Ephraim.

As the years passed and his anger toward God grew, he looked for fulfillment in many other ways, but never found any. His relationship with God remained cold and distant. He continued for many years giving people good advice in memorable little packages called proverbs, but spiritual truth was slowly becoming something distant, something for others, not for him.

He had heard about other types of sexual experimentation but had never experienced them. His Israelite wives would have consented to these strange things only because he was the king, but they would not have been happy about it. So he began to consider having sex with his foreign wives after all. But there was the problem of inheritance to their children; it would be a violation of the Law to not give them their rightful inheritance. But that was not the case with the concubines. These women were not sex slaves, rather they were wives in the full sense of the word with the same rights as a free-born wife except one; any children they bore to their husband would not receive an inheritance. Solomon had a relatively small number of Israelite wives – more than most men, but small compared to the full number of wives he had. He was getting bored with them. He decided instead to have sex with some of his foreign concubines. He started with one whose mother was an Israelite and father was a ruler of a foreign nation.

Solomon gave in and built shrines for his foreign wives. He never intended on joining them in the worship of their gods, but he figured building them a few shrines would not hurt anything. After all, Israel was becoming more and more secularized all the time. The influx of more money and more buying power had brought people from an agrarian and nomadic lifestyle to the city and a life of commerce. They learned about many things they had not even know existed. That quickly lead to a door that would open to idolatry. He tested the doorknob; it gave no resistance. Before he knew what had happened, he had walked through that door and accepted all that was on the other side, the fertility cult, the public prostitution for religious “worship,” even child sacrifice.

His foreign wives had expected to have children by him and have their children to be included as heirs of Solomon’s wealth. They realized he would want to put a full-blooded Israelite on the throne, so they did not expect their son to be made king. But getting a share of his vast wealth was very attractive to them. As time went by they saw that Solomon had no intention of giving them sons who might inherit part of his wealth.

There came a point where he no longer cared about doing things God’s way. His anger at God caused him to throw all caution to the wind; his downward spiral happened at warp speed. His relationship with Zabud, his spiritual advisor, had slowly become more tense; now it completely disintegrated overnight. Solomon, the wholesome one, the real deal, the man of peace and wholeness, chose to run from God rather than to God.

Solomon said, “Fine, if I can’t beat them, I guess I’ll join them. If the culture sees women as little more than sex slaves, why should I do any differently?” That is when he threw himself into sexual gratification of all kinds. He let loose of his religious moorings and started floating down stream with the flow of self-gratification.

When he turned away from God he became addicted to sex. But even so, he did not have sex with all his wives because many of them were getting old just like he was. While many women of that region did not live long enough to enter old age, the women of the palace lived longer but because of their life of ease they became flabby and lacked muscle tone.

Besides that, those older wives and concubines had grown resentful, grouchy, and angry. In those days a woman’s role was seen as having babies and raising them. If a woman was barren, it was considered a curse. To be married and not even be given the opportunity to have children was an affront to her understanding of what it meant to be a woman. Even concubines were supposedly granted the rights of protection, provision, and childbearing. Solomon did well at providing the first two, but (in my opinion) he refused to bear any children with many of his foreign wives and concubines. Because of these attitudes of anger and resentment, the places where these women were quartered were miserable places. Ahishar, the administrator of Solomon’s palaces, had what was quite possibly the hardest job in the kingdom. 

But once Solomon started going to his young, foreign wives for happiness, he didn’t stop.

As I envision it, Solomon went at the request of a few of his foreign wives to observe a ritual at one of the fertility cults. He went in a disguise, but word got out anyhow and by the end of the day it seemed that everyone in Israel knew what had happened. Word also spread among his foreign wives and concubines. Suddenly all of them wanted him to join them at their shrine or ritual. It was not enough for him to go to one of these things; in their minds he had to participate in all of them. He had opened a door which he could not close.

In the weeks to follow he observed some child sacrifices associated with the worship of Baal and Chemosh. While he did not enjoy it, he was not repulsed by it the way he would have been in his younger years. Besides, he did not want his relationships with the fathers of his foreign wives to become more stressed than they already were.

In his video on Megiddo, Ray Vanderlaan gives a good depiction of what child sacrifice was like in the worship of Baal. On a raised platform made of packed earth stood a statue of a bull. Only the front half of the bull was present, and it was sitting upright the way a man sits in a chair. But the face and legs were obviously those of a bull. Between the extended forelimbs was a chamber which extended below the arms as if the bull had a large clay pot between his arms. They would build a fire in that pot and get everything red hot. Then a parent or a married couple would bring their child and hand it to the priest who would lay the baby on those red-hot arms and at some point it would fall into the pot which was full of fire or embers.

Why would parents do such a thing? They believed that Baal was the god that controlled all fertility, including that of their fields and their flocks. If they wanted a good harvest or a good herd, they needed to appease the fertility god with the kind of sacrifice he demanded – one produced by their own reproductive acts – a human baby. They had lots of babies so they figured they could spare one every few years in order to be “assured” the prosperity of their fields and herds. After all, what good is it to have children if you can’t feed them? Sacrificing one or two to the fertility god seemed like a good trade off.

The wives of the king had no lack of provisions to motivate them to offer this kind of sacrifice to the fertility god. In their cases they may have been asking the fertility god to grant them the opportunity to have numerous children with the king – something that did not happen because I think he died shortly after taking his plunge into sin and idolatry.

Solomon may have allowed them to participate in child sacrifices with the children he had fathered with them because his wives had no other children to offer. These would have been little babies which he fathered in his frenzy of sexual freefall during the last handful of years of his life.

The answer to why he broke seems logically to come from the confluence of several things: his anger toward God, his truncated grieving process, his bottled-up emotions, mounting political frustrations and his search for a source of true happiness apart from God (sexual addiction). Earlier he had a strong relationship with God and a wife who knew how to meet all his needs, emotional, relational, intellectual, as well as physical. But he had been stripped of his wife and he had slowly loosened his grip on God. It is quite possible that he knew he would never find another relationship that would feel as close, as fitting, and as satisfying as his marriage to Shuly. Maybe he tested the waters and found that none of his 700+ wives came close to having the full package of gifts and abilities that she had possessed. If he refused to go to God for joy and peace (the way his father had always done) then we know all his other attempts to find them would be futile. At some point all these forces working constantly against him made him break, and he started seeking joy and peace outside of what was acceptable for a good Jew.

Why did he seek sexual fulfillment from his foreign wives and not his Jewish wives?

It is quite possible that his Jewish wives seemed boring by comparison. After all, the women who had been brought up around the fertility cults knew a great deal more about sexual activity than did the chaste girls who only knew how to follow the Law given through Moses. In the fertility cults, part of the “worship” of their god and goddess was that a priest and priestess of whatever fertility cult it was (and there were many) would have sexual intercourse on a platform in front of the entire audience. It is only logical that this was not kept simple, rather it developed into quite a show, a drawn-out, hyped-up, gripping and tantalizing show. Then the “worshippers” (usually men) would pair off with shrine prostitutes that were present for this purpose, and they would have sex on the ground or the floor around the platform. It is not hard to see from this that the good little Hebrew girls would not be as exciting as those who had been in the fertility cults. Once something inside Solomon broke, it is easy to see that he would go to them in his search for pleasure.

We do not know if he only supported and promoted idol worship by building these shrines, or if he also went there and participated. Many Christians assume he participated, but some scholars think just supporting idolatry and opening the door for it made him guilty in God’s eyes and therefore the recipient of God’s wrath. I picture him going all the way, not just opening a door for others to go through.

The next lesson is: Did Solomon Repent?