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“For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ
Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and death.”
(Romans
8:2)
Solomon
– King of Israel – Britannica
Solomon
king of Israel
Also known as: Shlomo
Cyrus H. GordonAll
Britannica Editors July 24, 2026 •History
Solomon was a biblical Israelite king who built the first
Temple of Jerusalem and who is revered in Judaism and Christianity for his
wisdom and in Islam as a prophet.
Background and sources
Nearly all evidence for Solomon’s life and reign comes from
the Bible (especially the first 11 chapters of the First Book of Kings and the
first nine chapters of the Second Book of Chronicles). According to those
sources, his father was David (flourished c. 1000 BCE), the poet and king who,
against great odds, founded the Judaean dynasty and united all the tribes of
Israel under one monarch. Solomon’s mother was Bathsheba, formerly the wife of
David’s Hittite general, Uriah. She proved to be adept at court intrigue, and
through her efforts, in concert with the prophet Nathan, Solomon was anointed
king while David was still alive, despite the fact that he was younger than his
brothers.
Material evidence for Solomon’s reign, as for that of his
father, is scant. Although some scholars claim to have discovered artifacts
that corroborate the biblical account of his reign in the early 10th century
BCE, others claim that the archaeological record strongly suggests that the
fortified cities and even the Temple of Jerusalem actually emerged more than a
century later. In the latter view, the kingdom of Solomon was far from the vast
empire that the biblical narrative describes.
Reign
The Bible says that Solomon consolidated his position by liquidating
his opponents ruthlessly as soon as he acceded to the throne. Once rid of his
foes, he established his friends in the key posts of the military,
governmental, and religious institutions. Solomon also reinforced his position
through military strength. In addition to infantry, he had at his disposal
impressive chariotry and cavalry. The eighth chapter of 2 Chronicles recounts
Solomon’s successful military operations in Syria. His aim was the control of a
great overland trading route. To consolidate his interests in the province, he
planted Israelite colonies to look after military, administrative, and
commercial matters. Such colonies, often including cities in which chariots and
provisions were kept, were in the long tradition of combining mercantile and
military personnel to take care of their sovereign’s trading interests far from
home. Megiddo, a town located at the pass through the Carmel range connecting
the coastal plain with the Plain of Esdraelon, is the best-preserved example of
one of the cities that Solomon is said to have established.
Palestine was destined to be an important centre because of its strategic location for trade by land
and sea. It alone connects Asia and Africa by land, and, along with Egypt, it
is the only area with ports on the Atlantic-Mediterranean and Red Sea–Indian
Ocean waterways. Solomon is said to have fulfilled the commercial destiny of
Palestine and brought it to its greatest heights. The nature of his empire was predominantly
commercial, and it served him and friendly rulers to increase trade by land and
sea. One particularly celebrated episode in the reign of Solomon is the visit
of the Queen of Sheba, whose wealthy southern Arabian kingdom lay along the Red
Sea route into the Indian Ocean. Solomon needed her products and her trade
routes for maintaining his commercial network, and she needed Solomon’s
cooperation for marketing her goods in the Mediterranean via his Palestinian
ports. Biblical legend makes much of a romance between the Queen and Solomon,
and his granting her “all that she desired, whatever she asked” (1 Kings 10:13)
has been interpreted to include a child.
Tradition recognizes Solomon as an ambitious builder of
public works. The demand for fortresses and garrison cities throughout his
homeland and empire made it necessary for Solomon to embark on a vast building
program, and the prosperity of the nation made such a program possible. He was
especially lavish with his capital, Jerusalem, where he erected a city wall,
the royal palace, and the first famous Temple. Around Jerusalem (but not in the
Holy City itself), he built facilities, including shrines, for the main groups
of foreigners on trading missions in Israel. Solomon’s Temple was to assume an
importance far beyond what its dimensions might suggest, for its site became
the site of the Second Temple (c. 5th century BCE–70 CE).
Legendary wisdom of Solomon
Solomon was renowned as a sage. When two women each claimed
to be the mother of the same baby, he determined the real mother by observing
each woman’s reaction to the prospect of dividing the child into two halves; he
acknowledged the woman who protested as the mother. Solomon was deemed wiser
than all the sages of Egypt and the Middle East—even wiser than some ancient
paragons of wisdom. The biblical Book of Proverbs contains collections of
aphorisms and other wise teachings attributed to him. Like his father, Solomon
was also revered as a poet. The biblical Song of Solomon is attributed to
him—albeit spuriously and likely because of his posthumous fame—in the opening
verse. His reputation as a great lover, reflected in the size of his harem, is
appropriately a major theme in the Song of Solomon. Postbiblical tradition
attributed later works to him: the apocryphal Wisdom of Solomon, on the one
hand, and the Odes of Solomon and Psalms of Solomon, on the other, are tributes
to him as sage and poet.
Decline of the kingdom
The biblical account of his reign states that Solomon’s
personal prestige and genius were required to perpetuate the powerful nation he
had acquired from his father and then further strengthened. It is suspected
that the increase in Israel’s wealth was matched by an increase in extravagance
and that the wealth was not diffused to the people. It is also considered
possible that Solomon’s treatment of the northern tribes showed favouritism to his own tribe of Judah. Solomon’s son and
successor, Rehoboam, ill-advisedly adopted a harsh policy toward the northern
tribes, which seceded and formed their own kingdom of Israel. This left the
descendants of Solomon with the southern kingdom of Judah. Thus, Solomon’s
empire was lost beyond recall, and even the homeland was split into two
often-hostile kingdoms.
Cyrus H. Gordon The Editors of Encyclopaedia
Britannica