"King Solomon, however, loved many women besides Pharaoh's daughter---Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Sidonians and Hittites. They were from nations about which the Lord had told the Israelites, 'You must not intermarry with them, because they will surely turn your hearts after their gods.' Nevertheless, Solomon held fast to them in love. He had seven hundred wives of royal birth and three hundred concubines, and his wives led him astray." (1 Kings 11:1-3) The word "love" is not used here in the same way it would be used to say that a husband of one wife loves his wife. Solomon married 1,000 women and there is no way he could have established a deep and meaningful relationship with that many women. Even if he spent the night with a different woman every night of the year, this means he would only see the same woman approximately once every three years. So I think when the author tells us Solomon "loved" these women, he means that Solomon had an insatiable lust for women---that there was something that he was unable to find satisfying about having just one mate. He was always looking for something in these relationships and not finding what he was looking for.
Have you ever known anyone who never seems satisfied with what they have? I've known people who keep changing spouses, changing jobs, changing houses, changing churches/religions, changing what area of the country they live in. I believe what's happening is that they are looking for something or someone to fill an empty space inside them that can only be filled by a close relationship with their Maker. Whenever we begin feeling a restless dissatisfaction with what we have, we need to look inwards instead of outwards. Have we drifted from the Lord? Is what we're feeling a spiritual emptiness rather than a genuine problem with our circumstances in life?
Some of Solomon's marriages may have been primarily for the purpose of forming political alliances, and I think his marriage to Pharaoh's daughter is probably an example of this, but the author makes it clear to us that Solomon had a fetish for the exotic. Why, instead of marrying all these foreign women, did he not settle down with one wife---a good Israelite wife---and make her his queen and the mother of his children? It seems to me that he only found pagan women attractive, much like Samson who only found Philistine women attractive and scorned the idea of marrying a woman of his own nation. And, just as Samson's love of heathen women caused him to drift from the Lord's commandments, Solomon's love of heathen women will cause him to drift from the ways of the Lord. "As Solomon grew old, his wives turned his heart after other gods, and his heart was not fully devoted to the Lord his God, as the heart of David his father had been." (1 Kings 11:4)
David had multiple wives, which wasn't a good example for Solomon, but there is never any indication that David ever engaged in idolatry. His first wife, Michal the daughter of King Saul, was unlawfully "divorced" from him by Saul and given to another man. I believe David was free to remarry because of that and this is what he did, choosing a woman named Ahinoam during the years when he lived in exile from Israel while Saul sought his life. David also asked Abigail, the widow of the evil Nabal, to marry him after she showed so much kindness to him and his men. Although no man needs more than one wife, we can understand David's desire to protect and provide for Abigail, especially since Nabal died at the hands of the Lord for his wickedness toward David's men. But David also took more wives: Maachah, Haggith, Abital, and Eglah. Then he took Bathsheba, the widow of Uriah, as his wife after committing adultery with her, getting her pregnant, and arranging to have her husband killed in battle. The Bible tells us he took some concubines in addition to these wives. His final wife, Abishag, was not chosen by him and he never consummated his union with her, for she was chosen by his attendants to provide an ancient medical "cure" that entailed sleeping in the same bed with the aging king who could no longer maintain his own body heat. Because she lived in his private rooms and attended to so many of his basic needs, it was necessary that she be legally married to him for propriety's sake.
So we see that David didn't set the example for Solomon that he should have in regard to marriage but David wasn't drawn into idolatry with any of his wives, maybe because most of them (other than the concubines) were Israelites. Also his concubines may have been converts to the God of Israel. But Solomon grew up with a father who had multiple wives and he decided to have multiple wives too, only on a much larger scale than any other man on earth. I can't help wondering whether one reason Solomon had such an excessive number of wives was so he could keep his name in the press, so to speak. His reputation has spread all over the known world and everyone who has heard of him knows that no other king's realm can come close to comparing to the wealth of Solomon's. It could be that, to further bolster his fame and the tales of his wealth, he took on a thousand wives. If so, we can attribute his accumulation of wives not only to his insatiable lust for heathen women but also to the sin of pride.
The Bible says Solomon drifted from the Lord as he grew old. In his younger days he was more faithful to his God but as time went on, and as he accumulated an ever-growing heathen harem, and as he became more and more accustomed to wealth and comfort and pleasure, it was easier to give in to various temptations than to fight them. This is probably why we find him building heathen altars to please his foreign wives. This is probably why we find him joining his wives at pagan religious ceremonies. "He followed Ashtoreth the goddess of the Sidonians, and Molek the detestable god of the Ammonites. So Solomon did evil in the eyes of the Lord; he did not follow the Lord completely, as David his father had done. On a hill east of Jerusalem, Solomon built a high place for Chemosh the detestable god of Moab, and for Molek the detestable god of the Ammonites. He did the same for all his foreign wives, who burned incense and offered sacrifices to their gods." (1 Kings 11:6-8)
The man who built the temple for the one true God is now building altars for false deities. Tomorrow we'll study the Lord's response to this and we'll discuss the gods mentioned here and why the Lord finds them especially "detestable".
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