This book starts out with King David being an old man. He was old and totally dying and his blankets didn’t keep him warm anymore, so his servants decided that they would bring him a young virgin named Abishag to cuddle with. It’s clearly mentioned that David and Abishag never had sex. I don’t know why that’s important, but It apparently is.
Anyways, David was old and one of his kids named Adonijah decided that he was going to be king and David was too old and busy with his young virgin to do anything about it. Nathan, the prophet that told god to kill Bathsheba’s first born son, went to Bathsheba and told her, “Fuck Adonijah, I think your son Solomon should be king.” Bathsheba didn’t respond with, “Fuck you. I had to lose a son because of things completely out of my control and it’s largely your fault.” Instead she decided to go talk to David about it.
She went to David and was forced to bow to him super low, because that’s just how life worked back then. She said, “Hey. I thought you said my son Solomon would be the king next and now your other shitty kid Adonijah is trying to be the new king of Israel. That’s fucked up.” Nathan stormed in invited after her and said, “David! What the fuck is Adonijah doing? Fuck that guy. And fuck you if you’re the one who told him to succeed you.”
Apparently Bathsheba had gone back into the hallway or something, cuz David brought Bathsheba back into his room and told her that Solomon would definitely be the new king. She got super happy and proclaimed, “May King David live forever!” He didn’t.
Word spread around Israel that Solomon was the new king and people blew trumpets and celebrated. Solomon was kind of concerned that he’d have to kill Adonijah, but Adonijah was totally welcoming of Solomon being king. So he didn’t die.
David gave Solomon a bunch of advice and told him who and who not to slaughter. Officially the era of David was over. He had been king for 40 years. Because god loves the number 40. Adonijah came back to the palace to talk to Solomon, but instead came across Bathsheba. Bathsheba was like, “What do you want?” He said, “I don’t wanna make trouble. I just want David’s virgin cuddle buddy to be my wife.” Nobody discussed this with Abishag, but it was brought up to a lot of people who really shouldn’t have had any say in the matter. Eventually Solomon decided it would be the best course of action was to have his friend Benaiah murder Adonijah, for some reason.
When Joab heard that Adonijah was dead, he hid in a temple and refused to come out. Solomon decided the best course of action was to have Benaiah kill him also. Solomon put Benaiah in Joab’s old position as general. Benaiiah went around and killed everyone who Solomon had a problem with. That’s how conflict was dealt with back then. That’s how people established themselves as kings.
Solomon did a pretty good job of trying to modernize the kingdom of Israel. They’d been at war pretty much all 440-480 years that they’d been out of Egypt. (Apparently there’s a 40 year discrepancy in the Bible as to what year this actually was.) The first thing he did was make a peace treaty with Egypt. Side note. It took them almost 5 centuries before they were willing to make peace with Egypt. That’s how much slavery sucks. It’s a hard thing to forgive even if it didn’t affect you personally at all. Anyways, the next thing Solomon did was build a temple, cuz he didn’t like how people were just going up to mountain tops to sacrifice animals.
He went down to Gibeon to kill and set fire to 1000 animals and god was pleased. God came down to him while he was dreaming (which we in modern days might just call ‘a dream’) and said, “I like you. You kill a lot of animals and that makes me smile. Whatever you ask me for, I’ll totally give you.” Solomon’s only request was, “I just want to be a good ruler.” This made god happier than the ruthless slaughter of a million innocent people and he was just like, “Oh snap! Nobody’s ever asked me for something so selfless before! I’m gonna give you everything you ever want all the time on top of making you super wise.” Solomon woke up and realized it was just a dream. Or was it? Yes. Yes it was.
A few weeks later, a couple of prostitutes came up to him. I don’t know how it was so easy for them just to waltz on up to the king like this, but they had a serious problem. They lived together and each of them had a kid. Lady 1 killed her kid in the middle of the night and tried to pull the old switcheroo with lady 2. Lady 2 woke up holding a dead baby that wasn’t hers and (presumably after freaking the fuck out for a while) saw her own son in Lady 1’s arms. Lady 1 kept saying over and over again that this was all bullshit and that Lady 2 was just making shit up, Lady 2 didn’t really have any evidence to support her claim because DNA testing was still thousands of years away. Solomon had a pretty fucked up way to deal with this, he said, “Bring me that baby. I’ll cut him in half and each of you can have half a dead baby.”
Instead of both ladies deciding that Solomon was obviously a lunatic and bringing their troubles elsewhere, Lady 2 freaked out and said, “No NO NOOO please don’t cut him in half! Let her have him. At least then he’ll live!” But, sociopathic Lady 1 (who had already killed one baby recently and saw no problem with killing another) said, “Do it. I literally have no compassion at all and I wouldn’t mind watching you chop a fucking baby in half with a sword.”
Solomon decided that Lady 2 was the mother based on these reactions. In my opinion, even if she wasn’t, she was definitely the better person to raise a kid. For some reason people consider this a good example of Solomon’s wisdom.
Solomon appointed a bunch of judges and governors. He expanded Israel all the way to the Euphrates river, which is now in the middle of Lebanon and Iraq. He also, somehow, made it so every citizen had grapes and figs growing on their land. I don’t know how a king can do shit like that, but that’s what it said. He expanded the army to the biggest and most modern it had ever been.
After the baby situation, which I think proves that Lady number 1 was just a horrible person a lot more than it proves that Solomon was wise, people from all over came to hear him talk about stuff. It says, “he was wiser than Ethan or Heman or Calcol or Darda.” It doesn’t say who the fuck those people were, but you can be assured that Solomon was wiser than them. He wrote a whole book of Proverbs, but he also gave lectures about animals and shit. He also, apparently wrote 1005 songs. That’s a goddamn lot of songs to write.
The next few chapter are all about the epic temple that Solomon built. It was super huge and amazing and covered in gold. For some reason they never used any iron tools while building it. I didn’t even know that iron tools existed yet. Apparently they did, but they weren’t used. A large amount of it was built by slaves, between 3300 and 3600 slaves because these kinds of details tend to get wonky when recording history.
He spent 7 years building the temple, because god loves the number 7. Then he spent 13 years building his own palace. “I’ll just spend my whole time as king building things!” He apparently had decided. He fucking decked the whole goddamn place out with gold, too. He had a gold altar, a gold table, gold lamp stands and lamps. Gold dishes, basins, wick trimmers, and fucking doors. Gold fucking doors. Imagine trying to open a gold door. Fuck you Solomon.
So Solomon finished his rap-video style palace and temple and decided to bring the (now pretty unimpressive) Ark of the Covenant inside the temple. Apparently it’s worth noting that the only thing inside the Ark was just the Ten Commandments. That’s what people had been hauling around for 4 and a half centuries. Like 5% of the rules god had given them to follow.
Solomon also got busy building a naval fleet. He found a few men who knew how to sail and they brought him back 16 tons of gold. Solomon fucking loved gold. I can’t stress that enough. Eventually, the queen of Sheba, came and gave him 4 more tons of gold. She said, “Your men must be really happy for you.” Solomon said, ‘Yeah. They are. I know I am anyways. I fucking love gold.”
Solomon collected about 666 talents of gold a year. That’s about 25 tons, but I like that it evens out to 666. He had so much fucking gold that he started making armor out of gold. Gold armor is a pretty stupid idea by the way, because it’s way heavier and way softer than bronze or iron. He also made himself an Ivory and gold throne because he apparently hated elephants as much as he loved gold. all of this wealth made him open up trade with the Hittites and the Arameans. So now Israel was at peace with 3 different countries. Which was quite the feat for them.
On top of collecting more gold than anyone had ever accumulated in recorded history, Solomon also had a shitload of wives. Even though god had previously killed people by the 10’s of thousands for fucking foreigners, Solomon had no problem doing exactly that. Any kingdom that would talk to him, also handed over dozens of ladies for him to fuck. He eventually gathered up 700 wives and about 300 sex slaves.
Some of his wives convinced him to start worshipping other gods other than Jehovah and Jehovah got super jealous and was like, “Solomon! I give you retarded amounts of wealth and power and women and this is how you repay me? Fuck you. I am going to make your life a living hell. Well maybe not as bad as the lives of all your slaves, sex slaves, and pretty much anyone living under you. but I’ll make it less amazing.”
Apparently, this whole time, this guy Hadad had been chilling down in Egypt enjoying the good life and the peace treaty that Solomon had set up. Hadad was fucking the Pharaoh’s sister and pretty much could do whatever he wanted. One day, though, he decided it was time to go back to Israel and fuck with Solomon. Hadad caused a lot of problems Solomon. It literally lists zero of them here, but it does mention that he was up there and fucking shit up.
On top of this, Solomon had put this guy Jeroboam in charge of his entire labor force. The one that you might remember had to haul tons and tons of gold back and forth throughout the kingdom to build Solomon’s elaborate gold plated house and temple. Weirdly enough, Jeroboam had enough and it just so worked out that a random prophet named Ahijah ran up to him and tore his brand new clothes off. He tore his robe into 12 pieces and gave Jeroboam ten. Then he threw the other 2 away. Jeroboam was strangely okay with this and, instead of running the fuck away from this crazy man, asked, “What’s that all about?” Jeroboam was like, “It’s a symbol. A symbol that means you’re going to be in charge of 10 of the 12 tribes of Israel. For some reason this is the way I decided to tell you.”
When Solomon heard about this, he tried to have Jeroboam killed. But Jeroboam fled and hid out in Egypt until Solomon died. Which was like a few days later.
Solomon died after 40 years of ruling, because god loves the number 40.
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