Commentary - 1 Kings 3:1-4

Bird's-eye view

This short passage at the beginning of Solomon's reign is a potent mixture of great promise and ominous foreshadowing. We see the kingdom established, Solomon in charge, and a grand project of building underway for the glory of God. We are explicitly told that "Solomon loved Yahweh." This is the foundation. And yet, right alongside these encouraging realities, we see the seeds of future apostasy being sown. His marriage to Pharaoh’s daughter was a shrewd geopolitical move, but a disastrous covenantal compromise. The worship at the high places was understandable given the circumstances, there was no Temple yet, but it was still a deviation from the pattern God had commanded. This passage, then, sets the stage for the entire tragic glory of Solomon's reign. It shows us a man genuinely devoted to God, blessed by God, and yet simultaneously making compromises that will eventually bear bitter fruit. It is a snapshot of incipient glory and incipient rot, all mixed together.

The key here is to see both sides of the coin. We are not meant to read this and simply condemn Solomon as a compromiser from the get-go, nor are we to read it as a simple endorsement of his early reign. The narrator is more subtle than that. He presents us with the facts, laying out the good and the not-so-good side-by-side, forcing us to wrestle with the complexities of a man's walk with God. Solomon's story is a profound illustration of how a man can love the Lord, walk in the statutes of his father, and yet still have significant blind spots that, if left unchecked, will lead to his downfall. It is a warning against pragmatism in the things of God and a reminder that even the best of starts does not guarantee a faithful finish.

Outline

Context In 1 Kings

First Kings opens with the final days of David and the messy transition of power to Solomon. After a failed coup attempt by his half-brother Adonijah, Solomon's claim to the throne is secured by the intervention of Nathan the prophet and Bathsheba, his mother. David gives Solomon his final charge, and Solomon quickly consolidates his power by dealing decisively with his remaining political enemies. Chapter 3, therefore, marks the true beginning of Solomon's reign in his own right. The kingdom is at peace, the succession is settled, and Solomon is free to govern. This chapter immediately follows the establishment of his rule and precedes the famous account of God granting him wisdom. The events here, the marriage, the sacrificing at Gibeon, are the backdrop against which God appears to him in a dream. This section is crucial because it establishes the spiritual state of the king at the outset of his glorious and ultimately tragic reign.

Key Issues

A Complicated Beginning

We modern evangelicals have a tendency to want our heroes to be simple. We want them to be either all good or all bad. But the Bible is a grown-up book, and it presents us with grown-up realities. The story of Solomon is the story of a man who was simultaneously a fountain of divine wisdom and a cesspool of foolish compromise. And it all starts here. The seeds of both his magnificent success and his spectacular failure are present in these first few verses of chapter 3.

The text forces us to hold two competing ideas in our heads at the same time. Idea one: Solomon loved the Lord and was blessed by Him. Idea two: Solomon made a series of foolish, disobedient choices right out of the gate. This is not a contradiction; it is a description of the human condition, even for the wisest man who ever lived, apart from Christ. This is what a divided heart looks like. It can produce glorious acts of piety, like a thousand burnt offerings, and in the next breath, it can sign a treaty with Egypt that is sealed with a pagan wife. Understanding this tension is the key to understanding Solomon, and it is the key to understanding ourselves.

Verse by Verse Commentary

1 Then Solomon formed a marriage alliance with Pharaoh king of Egypt, and took Pharaoh’s daughter and brought her to the city of David until he had completed building his own house and the house of Yahweh and the wall around Jerusalem.

The chapter opens with a political masterstroke that is a spiritual disaster. Forming a marriage alliance with Egypt, the regional superpower, was a brilliant move from a worldly perspective. It secured his southern border and elevated Israel's status on the international stage. To get a daughter of Pharaoh as a wife was a major diplomatic coup; Pharaohs typically did not marry their daughters to foreign kings. So, in the eyes of the world, Solomon had arrived. But in the eyes of God, he had stumbled badly. God's law explicitly forbade the king from multiplying wives and from marrying foreign women who would turn his heart away to other gods (Deut. 17:17; Deut. 7:3-4). This was not just any foreign woman; this was the daughter of the Pharaoh, the very symbol of the pagan world power from which God had delivered His people. He is beginning his great building project for the house of Yahweh by first making a covenant with the gods of Egypt. The text notes that he brought her to the city of David, the holy city, foreshadowing the corrupting influence she and his other foreign wives would later have. This is pragmatism over principle, and it is the first crack in the foundation of his kingdom.

2 The people were still sacrificing on the high places because there was no house built for the name of Yahweh until those days.

The narrator here provides a bit of context that serves as a partial explanation, but not a full justification. The law required that all sacrifices be brought to the central sanctuary, "the place where Yahweh chooses to put His name" (Deut. 12:5-6). But at this point in history, that place did not yet exist in its permanent form. The Tabernacle was at Gibeon, but the Ark was in Jerusalem. This created a degree of liturgical confusion. So, the people resorted to the "high places," which were traditional hilltop sites of worship, many of which had Canaanite origins. The narrator's tone is explanatory, not entirely condemnatory. He is saying, "This is the situation on the ground." It was an irregularity born of necessity, but it was an irregularity nonetheless. It was a deviation from God's explicit command, and this practice of worship at the high places would become a recurring snare for Israel throughout its history. Even after the Temple was built, the high places were never fully eradicated, serving as a constant source of syncretistic corruption.

3 And Solomon loved Yahweh, walking in the statutes of his father David, except he sacrificed and burned incense on the high places.

Here is the central tension of the passage, stated plainly. "Solomon loved Yahweh." This is a genuine statement of fact. His devotion was real. He desired to follow the example of his father David, who, for all his grievous sins, was a man after God's own heart. But this genuine love was compromised. It was followed by a great, big "except." He loved God... except for this one area of disobedience. He walked in David's statutes... except when it was inconvenient. The issue was the high places. While the people's worship there was explained by the circumstances, Solomon's participation as the king is singled out for criticism. He should have known better. This "except" is a small word, but it contains the seed of apostasy. Great falls do not begin with a leap off a cliff; they begin with one small step away from the path of obedience. Solomon's love for God was real, but it was not wholehearted. There was a corner of his life that he had not fully surrendered to the lordship of God's Word.

4 And the king went to Gibeon to sacrifice there, for that was the great high place; Solomon offered one thousand burnt offerings on that altar.

Solomon's divided heart is on full display here. He goes to Gibeon, which was the "great high place," likely because the Mosaic Tabernacle was located there. His choice of location is, therefore, understandable. And what he does there is staggering in its scale. A thousand burnt offerings. This was an act of lavish, extravagant piety. A whole burnt offering, or an ascension offering, was one in which the entire animal was consumed on the altar, ascending to God in smoke. It was an act of total consecration. To do this a thousand times over was an unparalleled display of devotion and royal largesse. No one could doubt the sincerity of the gesture. And yet, it was still being done at a "high place." He is performing this grand act of worship within a framework of liturgical irregularity. This is the picture of a man trying to compensate for a lack of qualitative obedience with quantitative piety. He is doing a slightly wrong thing in a very big way. And it is in the aftermath of this very sacrifice that God will appear to him, a testimony to the fact that God graciously meets us even in our mixed and muddled worship.

Application

The story of Solomon's beginning is a mirror for every Christian. Who among us can say that our love for the Lord is not followed by a significant "except"? We love God, except when it comes to our money. We love God, except when it comes to our entertainment choices. We love God, except when it comes to forgiving that one person. We are all masters of the divided heart. We can sing praises with gusto on Sunday morning and then make a dozen pragmatic, faithless decisions on Monday morning. Like Solomon, we are tempted to think that our grand gestures of piety can cover over our "small" areas of compromise.

The warning here is against the logic of pragmatism in the Christian life. Solomon's marriage to Pharaoh's daughter made perfect sense to the world. It was a smart move. But it was a direct violation of a command of God. We are constantly faced with choices where the "smart" thing is the disobedient thing. The world tells us to make alliances, to hedge our bets, to secure our borders. The Word tells us to trust and obey. The world tells us to worship where it is convenient; the Word tells us to worship as God has commanded.

The encouragement is that God does not abandon us in our inconsistencies. He appeared to Solomon at Gibeon, right after this compromised worship. He did not wait for Solomon to be perfect. God's grace meets us where we are. But His grace meets us in order to change us, not to leave us in our compromises. The trajectory of Solomon's life is a tragic tale of what happens when those initial compromises are not repented of, but are instead allowed to grow and fester. Let us, therefore, take the warning to heart. Let us ask God to expose the "excepts" in our own lives and grant us the grace to love Him, not with a divided heart, but with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength.