The Kingdom Splits

Read it: 1 Kings 3; 1 Kings 11–12

David died, and his son Solomon, the son of Bathsheba, became king. He began well. “Solomon loved the LORD” (1 Kings 3:3), and one night at Gibeon, a hilltop place of worship, God appeared to him in a dream with an astonishing offer: “Ask, and I will give it to you!” (1 Kings 3:5).

A wise request

Solomon was young and felt it: “I am only a little child, not knowing how to go out or come in” (1 Kings 3:7). So he didn’t ask for money, a long life or victory over his enemies. He asked for this: “give Your servant an understanding heart to judge Your people and to discern between good and evil” (1 Kings 3:9). God was pleased, and He gave Solomon “a wise and discerning heart” (1 Kings 3:12), along with the wealth and honour he hadn’t asked for.

Soon the whole nation saw the wisdom at work. Two women came to the king, sharing a house and each with a newborn baby. One baby had died in the night, and now both women claimed the living child. There were no witnesses and no way to prove anything. Solomon called for a sword and ordered the baby cut in two, half for each. One woman agreed. The other cried out to give the child to her rival rather than let him die. Solomon knew at once who the real mother was. “They saw that the wisdom of God was in him to administer justice” (1 Kings 3:28).

Solomon’s reign was Israel’s high point. He is linked with thousands of proverbs and songs, and “King Solomon surpassed all the kings of the earth in riches and wisdom” (1 Kings 10:23). Above all, he built the temple that his father had dreamed of, on a hill in Jerusalem. And when the ark was carried inside, the same thing happened that had happened at the tabernacle: “the cloud filled the house of the LORD” (1 Kings 8:10). God’s presence had a permanent home among His people. Yet Solomon knew no building could hold God: “Even heaven, the highest heaven, cannot contain You, much less this temple I have built” (1 Kings 8:27).

A heart that drifted

But centuries earlier, Moses had warned about kings. A king “must not take many wives for himself, lest his heart go astray. He must not accumulate for himself large amounts of silver and gold” (Deuteronomy 17:17). He was not to build up a great force of horses from Egypt either. Solomon did all three.

He made alliances with other kingdoms by marrying their princesses, until “He had seven hundred wives of royal birth and three hundred concubines—and his wives turned his heart away” (1 Kings 11:3). To please them, he built shrines for their gods, even for Molech, a god worshipped with child sacrifice. “His heart had turned away from the LORD” (1 Kings 11:9).

There wasn’t one dramatic moment. Solomon drifted, decision by decision, over years. The wisest man in the world shows that knowing what is right is not the same as loving God with all your heart. Wisdom doesn’t protect a divided heart.

God told Solomon that the kingdom would be torn away from his family, but, because of His promise to David, not in Solomon’s lifetime, and not all of it. One tribe would stay with David’s line (1 Kings 11:11–13). A prophet named Ahijah met one of Solomon’s officials, Jeroboam, tore his own new cloak into twelve pieces and gave him ten. Ten tribes would be his.

Heavy yoke

After Solomon died, his son Rehoboam went north to Shechem to be crowned. The people came to him with one request. Solomon’s building projects had been paid for with heavy taxes and forced labour. “Your father put a heavy yoke on us,” they said. “But now you should lighten the burden of your father’s service and the heavy yoke he put on us, and we will serve you” (1 Kings 12:4). A yoke is the wooden frame across an ox’s neck for pulling a plough.

The old advisers who had served Solomon gave wise counsel: “If you will be a servant to these people and serve them this day, and if you will respond by speaking kind words to them, they will be your servants forever” (1 Kings 12:7). Rehoboam ignored them and listened to the young men he had grown up with instead. His answer was a boast: “Whereas my father made your yoke heavy, I will add to your yoke. Whereas my father scourged you with whips, I will scourge you with scorpions” (1 Kings 12:14).

That was the end of the united kingdom. “What portion do we have in David ... To your tents, O Israel!” (1 Kings 12:16). The ten northern tribes made Jeroboam their king, and the nation split in two. The north kept the name Israel. The south, much smaller, was called Judah, with Jerusalem, the temple and David’s family on the throne.

Jeroboam worried that his people would keep going south to worship at the temple and drift back to Rehoboam. So he made two golden calves, one in Bethel and one in Dan, and announced, “Here, O Israel, are your gods, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt” (1 Kings 12:28). They were almost exactly the words spoken at the golden calf in the wilderness. The verdict: “this thing became a sin” (1 Kings 12:30). For the next few centuries the story follows two kingdoms and a long line of kings, most of them bad, and God keeps sending prophets to call His people back.

Where Jesus is in this

Solomon was the wisest king Israel ever had, until Jesus. Jesus said, “The Queen of the South will rise at the judgment with this generation and condemn it; for she came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon, and now One greater than Solomon is here” (Matthew 12:42). Paul says that Christ Jesus “has become for us wisdom from God” (1 Corinthians 1:30). He isn’t just someone who gives wise advice. He is what wisdom looks like.

And notice the contrast with Rehoboam. The New Testament doesn’t link the two, but Jesus could hardly sound more different from the king who promised heavier yokes: “Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light” (Matthew 11:29–30). He followed the old men’s advice that Rehoboam rejected: “For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45).

Think about it: Solomon didn’t fall in a day; his heart drifted over years. What small choices are shaping the direction of your heart right now?

Go deeper: Prayer and Praying Men by E. M. Bounds — in a tour of the praying men of the Old Testament, Bounds looks at David’s prayers and then at Solomon, who asked God at Gibeon for an understanding heart and whose prayer at the temple’s dedication was answered with fire and glory. Start with chapter 3, “Praying Saints of the Old Testaments (Continued)”.