7-3-1 Solomon's Wives
There can be no doubt that many of Yahweh's servants have suffered from an undoubted weakness for women. Despite the clear one man: one woman standard of Eden, the heroes of faith like Moses, Abraham and Jacob all had more than one wife- and, the records hint, suffered because of it. Samson, Judah, Simeon, David and others spring to mind as men who got into hot water because of their unbridled passions. Many a Christian life has foundered on the same rocks. Solomon is the supreme example. Solomon's wives were his undoing.
His tragic loss of faith is analyzed by the Spirit in 1 Kings 11, and the blame is firmly laid on his attitude to women: " King Solomon loved many strange women, besides the daughter of Pharaoh...of the nations concerning which the Lord said unto the children of Israel, Ye shall not go in to them...for surely they will turn away your heart after their gods: Solomon clave unto these in love...and his wives turned away his heart. For it came to pass, when Solomon was old, that his wives turned away his heart" (1 Kings 11:1-4). There is double emphasis here upon the fact that Solomon's wives did turn away his heart, as if to prove the truth of God's prophecy that alien marriage would surely turn away a man's heart from Yahweh. Solomon knew and loved the Law, he must have written out his own copy of it as commanded, and his gift of wisdom would surely have opened his understanding to the many passages which warned of relationships with the Gentile world. Yet Solomon went ahead and married a total of 1000 Gentile wives. Surely he must have reasoned that he could spiritually handle it, they would not surely turn away his heart, he was strong, he could handle it. And how often have the children of God gone running down exactly this road; in attitudes to careers, relationships of all kinds, until over the years true spirituality is whittled away; and nothing, nothing is left.
Solomon failed to mix his wisdom with a true humility and an awareness of his own proneness to failure. The teaching of the word remained only within his brain cells.
The words of 1 Kings 11:1-4 have some interesting implications when analyzed. Even before he built the pagan temples for his wives, his marriages to them are described as " evil in the sight of the Lord" (11:6). Those words are a hard contrast to the minimalizing of marriage out of the Faith which now afflicts the body of Christ. Solomon's marriages are often explained away as political manoeuverings. But the record says that Solomon " clave unto these in love" , surely alluding to God's definition of marriage as a leaving father and mother and cleaving to a wife. Solomon really loved those women; they weren't just political strings to his bow. They would not have turned away his heart if they were only political relationships. 1000 seems a rather exorbitant number of political alliances to have in any case. And Ecc. 2:8 RV says that Solomon sought “the delights of the sons of men, concubines of all sorts”. He took sex to its maximum extent- he had every possible type of woman in his harem. Every hair colour, size, type. “Whatsoever mine eyes desired [this is language elsewhere used about sexual desire] I kept not from them” (Ecc. 2:10). And yet still, he never found one… counting one by one, as he put it. If ever there is a warning against immorality, it is here. The more relationships one has- and our world glorifies this- the less ultimate satisfaction there can be. God’s way has to be best.
A Little Of Both - ?
The criticism of Solomon for marrying these women also applies to his first marriage with the daughter of Pharaoh; besides marrying her, he married the others too, and the criticisms which follow are spoken in the context of both these actions. Yet Solomon married Pharaoh's daughter in his early days, before he asked for wisdom. This is another indication that Solomon did not start off well and then go wrong; right from the beginning he had this incredible dualism in his spirituality. The Talmud (Shabbath F, 56,2) records that “When Solomon married the daughter of Pharaoh she brought to him 1000 kinds of musical instruments, and taught him the chants to the various idols”. Even when Solomon was young, he evidently loved wine (Song 1:2,4)- which was later to be something he (temporarily) abandonned himself to. He had a child by an Ammonite girl one year before he became king (1 Kings 14:21)- so his relationships with foreign women cannot be put down to mere political alliances. If the Song of Solomon is about her rather than the Egyptian woman he married, one can only say that one early error, unrepentended of, paved the way for his later disasters with foreign women. The Song suggests that he met the foreigner he married whilst walking alone in the countryside- which again proves it was a love relationship rather than a political alliance. The record later describes his building of store cities in the very language used of Pharaoh’s using Hebrew labour to build treasure cities (2 Chron. 8:4 cp. Ex. 1:11 Heb.). The influence of his father-in-law was deep, and lasted a long time. Yet in the early days the record describes him as a man who " loved the Lord, walking in the statutes of David his father" (1 Kings 3:3); and the record of his request for wisdom enables us to almost sense the Divine exaltation of spirit with Solomon because he so loved wisdom.
But his early mistake of thinking that he could indulge the 'little of both' syndrome brought his destruction. We all have an element of the 'little of both' syndrome, loving the spiritual life and the things of Israel, but laughing off our human side as something we can handle. The study of Solomon's attitude to women is therefore a classic insight into spiritual psychology. The general characteristics of Solomon have far too many uncomfortable similarities with our own lives. We all have the little of both syndrome, the nonchalant attitude that we can handle a bit of infringement of the letter of the law, that God understands, that our spiritual side justifies our unspiritual side. But this lead one of the finest believers of all time to crash spiritually, to leave behind one of the most ineffable spiritual tragedies that could be imagined.
