Albert Barnes Commentary 1 Kings 11

In noting Solomon’s excessive accumulation of silver and gold (1 Kings 10:14–25), his multiplication of horses (1 Kings 10:26–29), and his multiplication of wives, the writer clearly has in mind the Mosaic law's warning against these three forms of royal extravagance, all of which were forbidden to an Israelite king.

Zidonians - That is, Phoenician women. A tradition states that Solomon married a daughter of Hiram, king of Tyre.

You shall not go in to them... - These words are not a quotation from the Pentateuch. They merely give the general meaning of the two passages prohibiting intermarriage with neighboring idolaters (as noted in the marginal references). Strictly speaking, the prohibition in the Law against intermarriage was confined to the Canaanite nations. But the principle of the prohibition applied equally to the Moabites, Ammonites, and Edomites, who all bordered on the Holy Land, and was so applied by Ezra (Ezra 9:1) and Nehemiah (Nehemiah 13:23).

These numbers seem excessive to many critics, and it must be admitted that history offers no parallel to them. In Song of Solomon 6:8, the number of Solomon’s legitimate wives is said to be sixty, and that of his concubines eighty. It is perhaps probable that the text has suffered corruption in this place. For “700,” we should perhaps read “70.”

About fifty or fifty-five. Based on his age when he took the throne (see note on 1 Kings 2:2), he could not have been more than about sixty when he died.

The true nature of Solomon’s idolatry was neither a complete apostasy from which there could be no recovery, nor a mere toleration that was more praiseworthy than blameworthy.

Solomon never openly or wholly apostatized. He continued to attend the worship of Yahweh and faithfully made his offerings three times a year in the temple (1 Kings 9:25). However, his heart was not “perfect” with God. The religious earnestness of his younger days was weakened by wealth, luxury, and sensuality. This decline led to an increasing worldliness, which resulted in worldly policies and a religious broad-mindedness that arose from his contact with many different human opinions.

His lapse into deadly sin was undoubtedly gradual. Partly from ostentation and partly from the sensuality common to Eastern monarchs, he established a harem on a grand and extraordinary scale. To gratify these “strange women”—that is, foreigners, who were admitted for political reasons or for the sake of variety—he built magnificent temples to their false gods directly opposite Jerusalem, as obvious rivals to the Lord’s temple.

He thus became the author of a syncretism that sought to blend the worship of Yahweh with the worship of idols—a syncretism that held a fatal attraction for the Jewish nation.

Finally, he himself appears to have frequented the idol temples (1 Kings 11:5, 10) and to have taken part in the dreadful impurities that constituted the worst horror of these idolatrous systems. In this way, he was apostatizing in practice, even though he theoretically never ceased to believe that Yahweh was the true God.

Went after - This expression is common in the Pentateuch and always signifies actual idolatry (Deuteronomy 13:2; Deuteronomy 28:14, etc.).

For Ashtoreth, or Astarte, the goddess of the Zidonians, see the notes on Exodus 34:13 and Deuteronomy 16:21. On the tomb of a Phoenician king, discovered in 1855 on the site of Sidon, mention is made of a temple of Astarte there, which the monarch built or restored, and his mother is said to have been a priestess of the goddess.

Milcom or Molech (1 Kings 11:7) are variants of the term ordinarily used for “king” among the Semitic races of Western Asia, which appears in names such as Melkart (Phoenician), Abimelech (Hebrew), Adrammelech (Assyrian), Abd-ul-malik (Arabic), etc. On the character and worship of Molech, see the note on Leviticus 20:2-5.