Bible Commentaries

Here are recorded some of the doings of the king. He consolidated the internal strength of the nation by building cities. He organized the labor of the conquered peoples in his dominions. He set the Temple worship in order.

He enlarged his commercial activities.

It was during this period that he took Pharaoh's daughter to the house he had built for her and gave his reason for doing so. "My wife shall not dwell in the house of David, king of Israel, because the places are holy, whereunto the Ark of Jehovah hath come." These were the words of compromise. Solomon's marriage with the daughter of the king of Egypt was a purely political act, arising out of the affinity he had with her father (1 Kings 3:1-28 :l). There can be no question that this affinity was wrong. God had delivered His people from Egypt, and there was never the slightest need, either military or economic, for it. It was a political seduction which persistently threatened the nation, and which more than once cost them dear. Having made the blunder and become affianced to this woman, Solomon sought to safeguard against the possible religious danger by building her house away from the city of David.

This compromise was a failure, as compromise invariably is. In 1 Kings 11:1-8 we read that presently Solomon built places of idol worship in Jerusalem for "all his foreign wives." Compromise is pathetic in that it always witnesses a conviction of what is the high and the true, and attempts to ensure its realization while yielding to the low and the false. It is evil, for its invariable issue is that the low and the false ultimately gain the ascendance and the high and the true are abandoned. To build a house for Pharaoh's daughter outside the Holy City is to open its gates sooner or later to Pharaoh's gods.