Why Did GOD Allow SOLOMON to End Up in Idolatry?

Why Did GOD Allow SOLOMON to End Up in Idolatry?

The wisest man in history built altars to false gods. And in the next few minutes, you’re going to understand why God allowed it. Even though he warned him to his face twice years in advance, because this was not an oversight of heaven. It was the most announced fall in the entire Bible. And its ending is not the one you were taught. This king was called at birth beloved of God. And he ended up raising sanctuaries to the divinities of his enemies on the hill you see today to the east of Jerusalem, a walk away from the temple he himself had built for the true God. We’re not talking about just any pagan. We’re talking about the monarch who when God offered to let him ask for whatever he wanted did not ask for gold or victory or a long life. He asked for a heart that knew how to listen. And that same heart decades later is the one scripture says turned away. The word is cold and precise. It doesn’t say he was deceived. It doesn’t say he was forced. It says his heart inclined toward another side. Hold on to that second name, beloved of God, because we’re going to come back to it at the end and it’s going to hurt. And hold on to that hill east of the city because it had a name in the days of this king and they gave it another one three centuries later and that change of name is one of the most brutal ironies in the entire Hebrew Bible. Now then, in the very question we opened with there’s a trap, when we say that God allowed something, we imagine a father who sees his son approach the fire and decides for some mysterious reason not to stop him. That image consoles us because it shifts the blame to heaven. If God allowed it, then the responsibility at bottom is not the kings. And maybe that’s why the subject is so appealing. We all want secretly a God who stops us just before we ruin ourselves. The detail is that the biblical account does not describe a distracted God who looks the other way. It describes a God who spoke. And what he said and how many times he said it is what turns this story into something far more uncomfortable than a theological mystery. So the honest question is not why heaven stayed silent. It’s this. How does the wisest man in the world fall when the very god who gave him that wisdom warned him in lavish detail what was going to happen? That’s the story. And to understand it, first you have to see from what height he fell. Come back with me to the chapters before the disaster. When the kingdom was still shining, a queen arrives in Jerusalem from the south, the queen of Sheba, who had heard rumors about the wisdom of this monarch, and crossed an entire desert to test him with hard questions. And the chronicle says that when she saw his discernment, the palace he had raised, the food of his table, the organization of his servants, and the offerings that went up to the temple, she was literally left breathless. There was no more spirit in her, says the text. And she acknowledged that not even half had been told to her, and it wasn’t only wealth. The chronicle affirms that he spoke 3,000 proverbs, and that his songs were 1,005, and that he spoke of the trees from the cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop that sprouts on the wall, and of the beasts, the birds, and the fish. Kings of distant lands sent emissaries just to hear him. That was Solomon at his peak. A king before whose court a foreign monarch fell mute with astonishment. A man whose fame crossed borders. A kingdom so prosperous that according to that same passage, silver became so abundant in Jerusalem that it was almost worthless. That’s the starting point. Not the story of some wretch who never had anything, but that of a man at the absolute summit of the known world, with all the discernment a human being can receive who from that height without hurry began to come down. And to be fair to him before telling the fall, we have to acknowledge that a defense exists, a good one. And if we’re going to dismantle it, we’d better first build it well. Imagine you’re the king of a small kingdom surrounded by empires. Egypt to the south with centuries of accumulated power, the Phoenicians to the north, masters of the commerce of the known world, the kingdoms of Moab, Ammon, and Edom pressed against your borders, each with its armies and its grudges. You’ve just inherited the throne of your father, a warrior who spent his life on campaign. And you, unlike him, don’t want war. You want to build a temple, palaces, walls, trade routes. You want your people for the first time in generations to live without fear. And how did you secure peace between nations in the ancient world? Not with treaties signed on paper, with marriages. The king of one nation took for his wife the daughter of the neighboring king. And that bond of blood became a non-aggression pact. Every foreign princess who entered your palace was in practice a permanent embassy, an alliance that breathed and that with luck gave you heirs who united two crowns. From that logic, what the son of David did was pure politics, brilliant even. He took wives from Egypt, from Sidon, from Moab, from Ammon, from Edom, from the Hittites. Each wedding put out a possible war. The most prestigious was the first, the daughter of the Pharaoh of Egypt, the oldest power in the known world. To become related to the Pharaoh was a diplomatic coup Israel had never achieved before. And for that princess, the king built a house of her own inside the city. To any observer of the era, this was not a man gone astray, but a genius of foreign policy. And a lot of people reading this think the poor man wasn’t sinning. He was governing. He was doing what any competent monarch of his era did. Are we going to condemn him for being a good strategist? It’s a strong argument. And if the Bible shared that logic, there would be no video, but it doesn’t share it. And the reason it doesn’t share it was written word for word centuries before this king was born. Here comes the first twist. And it’s one of those that reorders the whole story long before there was a king in Israel in the book of Deuteronomy in its chapter 17. There’s a passage the scholars call the law of the king. It’s an astonishing text because it dictates rules for a monarchy that did not yet exist and it forbids the future king, whoever he turns out to be, exactly three things. First, he must not multiply horses for himself, nor make the people return to Egypt to obtain them. Second, he must not multiply wives, and it gives the reason explicitly so that his heart would not turn away. And third, he must not accumulate for himself silver and gold in great quantity, horses, women, gold. Stop on that list because if you know the life of Solomon, your blood is already freezing. It’s the exact portrait of his reign. Not one of the three, all three. About the horses, the chronicle tells that he imported them from Egypt by entire caravans and that he came to have thousands of stables. He broke the first rule precisely where the command had placed the alarm, by doing business with Egypt. About the wives. The number is one of the most remembered in all of scripture. 700 of princess rank and 300 concubines, a thousand women. The law said, “Do not multiply.” He didn’t multiply them. He collected them on a scale no other figure in the account comes close to matching. And about the gold, it’s recorded that the weight of what came to him in a single year was 666 talents. A figure so enormous that the narrator almost lingers as he inventories his luxury. Shields of gold, an ivory throne overlaid with gold, cups of gold. He broke the third rule with an ostentation that if you read carefully does not sound like praise. It sounds like a warning disguised as an inventory. Do you understand why the political defense collapses? This king is not being judged by a rule invented afterward to condemn him. He’s judged by a law that according to the account itself existed before he came to the throne and that named his three sins one by one as if someone had drafted the warning with his file in hand centuries before the events. And it’s worth understanding why the book of kings measures things this way because it’s not a minor detail. Many specialists following the work of the scholar Martin Noth in the mid-twentieth century note that the books running from Joshua to Kings seem composed under a single gaze. That gaze they call the Deuteronomistic history. And its measuring rod is always the same. Each king is evaluated by one single thing, his fidelity to the one God. Not by his victories, not by his wealth, not by his public works, but by whether his heart remained in the covenant. It’s worth saying that this is an academic model, very influential, but also debated and not a claim the text makes about itself. Even so, it explains something crucial. That’s why a king can be for the world the most successful in his history, and even so, the account will send him off with a verdict of failure because he was not being measured by what the world measures and with the measuring rod of loyalty, his life ends in the red. Which returns the question I want you to carry with you. If the trap was so clearly marked, how did the man with the most discernment in the world fall into it precisely? For that we have to go back to the beginning to the night when everything started well because the heart that turned away was not always turned away. There was a moment when that same heart asked for something beautiful. Imagine the scene and I want you to imagine it because here the account is sparse and I’m going to fill in the edges with what’s reasonable, not with what’s written. The king is young. He has just inherited a consolidated but fragile kingdom. In those first years, since the temple does not yet exist, the people offer sacrifices in what the Bible calls high places, open air sanctuaries on the hills, and the text itself lets slip an uncomfortable nuance. This king loved God, yes, but he too sacrificed on those high places. It’s a small detail, easy to overlook, but it’s the first crack, the distant seed of those same hills he would one day fill with foreign altars. With that ambiguity already on his shoulders, he goes up to a sanctuary at Gibeon to offer sacrifices. And that night, while he sleeps, God appears to him in a dream and makes him an offer that seems like a fairy tale. Ask for whatever you want. It’s likely that almost anyone in his place would have asked for the obvious. Power, years of life, the heads of his enemies, wealth. He asks for none of that. He recognizes himself as a child who doesn’t know how to govern. And he asks for one single thing. And it’s worth stopping on the exact words because in Hebrew, they’re more moving than they’re usually translated. He asks for a lev shomea. Lev is heart but not in our romantic sense, in the ancient one the center of the will of judgment of decision and shomea comes from listening. The young king does not literally ask for a magical gift of knowledge. He asks for a heart that knows how to listen capable of discerning between good and evil in order to judge his people. Let that image settle because it’s the core of the whole tragedy. What this man received was not a formula of wisdom. It was a heart tuned to listen. And the same instrument that was tuned to hear the voice of God ended up over the years tuned to hear something else. And here’s the fact that is almost never told with the weight it deserves. The one that makes the word allow fall short forever. God did not speak to this man once. He spoke to him twice. The first is this dream at Gibeon. The second occurs years later when the king has just finished the temple, the work of his life. And it’s worth stopping for a moment on that temple because it was the highest point of his spiritual life. The day he dedicated it, the chronicle tells a cloud filled the sanctuary in such a way that the priests could not even stay on their feet to officiate. The king knelt before all the people, extended his hands to heaven, and pronounced one of the most beautiful prayers in all of scripture, asking that that place be the point to which his nation could always return. That afternoon, he was the very image of devotion, and no one who had seen him would have bet a single talent that this man would end up raising rival altars on that same hill. And it’s right there at his summit when God appears to him again. And this time the tone changes completely. It’s not an offer. It’s a condition and a threat. The passage puts in God’s mouth something chilling. If you or your children turn away from me, if you go and serve other gods and bow down before them, I will cut Israel off from the land I gave it. And this house that I have sanctified, I will cast out of my presence. And this temple, he says, which today is glorious, will be left in ruins. And everyone who passes by will be appalled and will ask why God did this to this land and to this house. And the answer the account itself anticipates falls like a slab because they abandoned their god and clung to foreign gods. Read it slowly because it’s the key to everything. God describes to the king years in advance the exact scene of the ruin. He names the cause for him serving other gods. He names the consequence for him, the destruction. He places before him the complete photograph of the accident before he gets into the car. So the most faithful answer to the question in the title is this. God did not allow it in a blind spot or in silence. He warned it out loud with the first and last name of the sin. And there’s an enormous distance, moral and theological, between not preventing something and warning of it in advance twice. Hold on to this idea because at the end we’re going to take it to a place you don’t expect. If this way of reading the Bible, separating what the text says from what tradition added on top of it is the one you were looking for stay, what comes now is the part almost nobody dares to tell with precision. Who those foreign gods were and what they demanded of a king. And to understand why the text treats this as the ultimate betrayal and not as a simple political slip, you have to know how Israel understood its bond with God. It was not the contract between a subject and his boss. It was a covenant described again and again with the language of marriage. God as husband, the people as wife, and faithfulness as the heart of everything. That’s why in the logic of scripture, serving other gods was not an administrative error. It was spiritual adultery. And there’s something almost unbearably ironic in that it was through wives, through real women brought by love and by convenience that the king ended up committing that infidelity against the god who had loved him first. Because the account doesn’t speak in the abstract. It names them. And behind each name, there’s a real cult documented outside the Bible with very concrete demands. The first is Ashtoreth, the goddess of the Sidonians. And here you need a linguistic fact that is a small masterpiece of irony. In the documents recovered from ancient Ugarit and from Phoenician culture, this deity appears as a power of fertility, of love, and also of war, worshiped by multitudes all along the eastern Mediterranean and her name was pronounced in all probability something like Astarte. Now notice how the Hebrew names her, Ashtoret. Many specialists have noticed something curious in that vocalization. The vowels the scribes who preserve the text put on it would not be the original ones of the goddess’s name. They would be according to this widely held reading those of another Hebrew word boshet which means shame. It’s as if the guardians of scripture in writing the goddess’s name had embedded within it the word dishonor. It’s worth saying with caution because it’s a widely accepted explanation but not the only possible one. Some attribute it to a natural phonetic change. Even so, it’s hard not to see the intention. Every time someone read that name, they read hidden inside the word shame. The second is Milcom, the idol of the Ammonites, sometimes associated with the figure of Molech. And the third is Chemosh, the god of Moab. Names that today mean nothing to most people, but that in their time were religious powers with temples, priests, and rituals. And why would anyone want to serve them? It’s a question almost never asked, and it’s key to understanding the fall. These cults were not attractive by accident. They promised very tangible things. Fertility for the fields and for the womb, rain in its season, harvests, protection for the city, for a Moabite or Ammonite princess who arrived in Jerusalem from her land. They were not abstract idols. They were the gods of her childhood, those of her mother, the ones who, according to her, had cared for her people for generations, asking for a place to honor them, did not seem like betrayal to her. It seemed like the most natural thing in the world. Multiply that by the dozens of nations represented in his harem, and the palace of the wisest man in the world became room by room a living map of all the cults of the Near East. An altar here, an idol there, each one brought by love, each one with its small parcel of loyalty. And there exactly is the subtlety of the poison. Now I have to tread carefully because about these cults everything has been said and a good part is exaggeration. Tradition associated Molech with child sacrifice with the horrifying image of infants offered to the fire. The Bible itself in books like Jeremiah condemns the practice in the valley of Hinnom on the outskirts of Jerusalem of making sons pass through the fire in honor of these deities that the practice existed in the Phoenician and Canaanite world is something many scholars accept on the basis of biblical sources and other indications. In Carthage, for example, archaeologists have recovered precincts with thousands of urns holding the cremated remains of very small children alongside stelae dedicated to their gods, which for a good part of the specialists points to real sacrifices, although the extent and frequency are still in discussion. But there’s also a serious debate about the details. The scholar Otto Eissfeldt, for example, proposed on the basis of Punic inscriptions from Carthage that the word molk was not the name of a god, but the name of a type of sacrifice. His thesis convinced many, although others like John Day dispute it. The honest truth is that we don’t have absolute certainty about the exact mechanics of these rituals and whoever sells it to you with total certainty is embellishing. What scripture does affirm with no ornament is a sentence that falls like a stone. This king built a high place for Chemosh, the abomination of Moab, and another for Milcom, the idol of the sons of Ammon, on the mountain that is in front of Jerusalem, east of the city. Remember the hill I asked you to hold onto. This is it. That elevation that separates the city from the desert, is what we know today as the Mount of Olives, the same place that centuries later would weigh so heavily in the accounts of the New Testament. And here the irony becomes almost unbearable. This same man had built for the God of Israel a temple whose holiest place contained no image, barely an ark of wood and gold and a deliberate emptiness because that god was not represented by any figure. And that same builder raised in full view of the holy city altars with visible and tangible idols to the gods of his neighbors. The architect of the invisible god turned patron of statues. Those sanctuaries hold on to this too did not collapse with him. They stayed on that hill for centuries. And when we come back to them, you’ll see why the mountain changed its name. First, let’s imagine together how all this could have happened. Not what the account says, which here is sparse, but a plausible scene, one among hundreds that could have been repeated. Be clear that what I’m going to describe is imagination, an exercise to understand the mechanism, not a historical fact. Imagine a night well into the reign. The king is no longer young. He has built his temple, filled his treasury, received kings and queens from distant lands. And that night, one of his wives, perhaps one he truly loves, perhaps the one who came from Moab as almost a child, speaks to him in a low voice. She tells him she misses her land. That in the festivals of her people a fire was lit for Chemosh. And she, as a little girl, watched the flames holding her mother’s hand. That she doesn’t ask for much. Just a place, small, discreet, on the hill across the way, where she can honor the god of her childhood without having to renounce him entirely. And what does a king in love, powerful, convinced that his own faith is unbreakable, do? He probably thinks nothing’s wrong. That he will go on being faithful to Yahweh. That this is barely a gesture of love toward a woman who left her world to come with him. And that a small altar on a hill doesn’t change who he is on the inside. And he gives the order, just one, out of love, not out of apostasy. The problem is that the following year there’s another wife from another land with another god and the same nostalgia and the king who already granted one by what authority does he deny hers to her. So there’s a second altar and then a third and each one separately is an understandable human gesture. None of them is the betrayal. The betrayal is in none of them. It’s in the sum. It’s in the man who without having decided it in a single instant one day lifts his gaze toward the hill across the way and sees a row of foreign sanctuaries and no longer remembers at what exact moment he stopped being the king who served only Yahweh. Hold on to this scene too because at the end it’s going to turn toward you. Now, it’s worth stopping on a problem that archaeology poses for us. Because this channel doesn’t tell you only the comfortable part, and it’s that when we step outside the text and look for this king in the ground in the stones, things get complicated. Before being a late idolater, he was a colossal builder. And the account devotes entire chapters to it. The temple, which was raised in 7 years, his own palace, which took 13. There’s already a detail there that some underline, though it’s worth offering it as a reading and not as the narrator’s verdict. 7 years for the house of God, 13 for his own. The text doesn’t comment on it. It just puts the numbers side by side. But it’s hard not to wonder where the heart of a man who devoted almost twice as much time to his palace as to the sanctuary was slipping off to. The account also mentions that he fortified three key cities, Hazor, Megiddo, and Gezer. And here enters one of the most fascinating discussions in recent biblical archaeology. In the 20th century, the Israeli archaeologist Yigael Yadin excavated those cities and found something notable. Monumental six-chambered gates with almost identical dimensions in all three. Yadin concluded that they were the work of a single royal architect and attributed them to Solomon, leaning on that verse. For years, those Solomonic gates were one of the favorite proofs that his kingdom was as large and organized as the Bible paints it. And then came the challenge. The archaeologist Israel Finkelstein proposed what is known as the low chronology. According to his analysis, those structures would not be from the 10th century before our era, the time of Solomon, but from a century later, from the time of the dynasty of Omri, the house of Ahab. If Finkelstein is right, those gates were not built by Solomon, and that would reopen an enormous question about how large his kingdom really was. Who’s correct? The honest answer is that the debate is still open. There are first rate archaeologists in both camps with radiocarbon datings that some read one way and others read another. I’m not going to close the question for you with a false certainty because there isn’t one. The image of a builder king has at the very least a foundation in stone that specialists continue to debate seriously. And honesty here is to show you the discussion, not to pick the camp that suits us best. Let’s go back to the text because there’s a twist that changes how we understand the punishment. When you read the end of the story carefully, you discover that God’s judgment was not a future threat that would be fulfilled after his death. It was already walking through the world while the king was still on his throne. The account says that God raised up adversaries against him and names them one by one. The first is Hadad, a prince of Edom, who as a child survived a slaughter by David’s army in his land and grew up as a refugee in Egypt, feeding his rancor. When he learned that David and his general Joab had died, he asked the Pharaoh for permission to return to his land and came back with a single thing in mind, to make Israel pay for what they had done to his people. He lodged himself like a thorn in the side of the kingdom. The second is Rezon who gathered a band, seized Damascus and harassed Israel from the north all the days of Solomon. And the third, the most important, is Jeroboam, an official of the king himself, a capable man he had put in charge of important works. And it’s worth understanding what those works were because they explained the resentment that was brewing. All the glory of his constructions, the temple, the palaces, the walls, was paid for with something very concrete, forced labor and heavy tributes that fell above all on the tribes of the north. Jeroboam supervised precisely that northern labor force, and saw the discontent up close. Years later, when the people would complain to Solomon’s son that his father had put too hard a yoke on them, that complaint would not come out of nowhere. It had been accumulating for years beneath the foundations of every monumental work. But that’s getting ahead. What happens to this Jeroboam is worth stopping on because it’s pure prophetic theater. One day leaving Jerusalem, a prophet named Ahijah crosses his path wearing a new cloak. And the prophet with hardly any explanation grabs his own new cloak and tears it with his hands into 12 pieces right there in front of him. Then he holds out 10 and tells him to take them because thus has God spoken. I am going to tear the kingdom out of the hand of this king and I am going to give you 10 of the 12 tribes. Imagine the moment. An official receiving from the hands of a stranger 10 scraps of cloth and with them the announcement that his boss’s empire is going to split and a part of it will be his. When the news reached the king’s ears, he tried to kill Jeroboam. And Jeroboam had to flee precisely to Egypt until the monarch would die. Do you catch the magnitude? The sentence to break the kingdom was not a distant announcement. Its executives were already on stage. One lurked from the south, another from the north, and the third, the one who would inherit 10 tribes, had worked inside the government itself. The punishment did not come like a bolt fallen from the sky, but like a noose that kept tightening with human actors while the king still reigned. And notice how the text itself justifies that punishment because it closes off any doubt about the warning. The account says that God became angry with Solomon and gives the exact reason because his heart had turned away from the God of Israel who had appeared to him twice. It doesn’t say the God who created him or the one who made him king. It underlines specifically the two appearances. Scripture itself counts those two times as the aggravating factor of the judgment. It was not a man who never listened. It was a man to whom God showed himself in person twice and who even so turned his head away. And the sentence itself is of a surgical precision. God tells him that for not having kept the covenant, he will tear the kingdom away from him and give it to one of his servants. But he adds two conditions that cannot be overlooked. He will not do it in his days but in his sons. And he will not take the whole kingdom from him but will leave him one tribe. The reason the account is explicit for love of David his father and for love of Jerusalem the city God had chosen. Stop on that because it dismantles the caricature of the vengeful God. The judgment is real, but it’s shot through with restraint. God breaks his own sentence out of loyalty to a promise he made to David generations earlier. The king is being judged and protected at the same time. And here, many expect, the part where the story straightens out. Yes, he fell, but in the end, he repented and wrote Ecclesiastes, that melancholy book about the vanity of everything. It’s the version almost all of us were taught. It’s reassuring. It closes the circle. And I have to tell you with all respect because I know it’s the favorite version of many people who love this king. The book of Kings does not say that. Nowhere. Look for it from beginning to end. Look for his repentance. It isn’t there. His biography closes with the idolatry, with the adversaries rising up, with the sentence of the division, and with the news of his death after 40 years of reign. There’s no scene of return. There are no recorded tears. There’s no going back to the god of his youth. The narrator who devoted chapters to his glory dispatches his ending without a single line of redemption. And that silence in such a careful account is deafening. But what about Ecclesiastes? That too has to be said honestly that Solomon wrote Ecclesiastes is a traditional attribution very ancient and very beloved based on the fact that the book presents itself as the words of a son of David, king in Jerusalem. But a good part of scholars seriously disputes that authorship. Above all, because of the language, the Hebrew of Ecclesiastes contains Aramaisms and terms of phrase that point to a considerably later era. There’s even a Persian loan word in it, the word pardes, which means garden or park, a term that would hardly have been in the mouth of a king who lived centuries before the Persian Empire existed. This does not make Ecclesiastes any less valuable, nor any less inspired for whoever holds it as scripture. It only means that using it as proof of a repentance is building on a base that most specialists consider fragile. And on this channel, we prefer to tell you that even if it leaves us without the happy ending, rather than sell you a comfort the text doesn’t support because the strength of this story is precisely in its lack of resolution. This is not the account of the one who fell and came back. It’s the warning of the one who had everything.