Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to 1 Kings · About this commentary
Give Your Servant a Hearing Heart
1 Kings 3:1-15
1 Solomon made a marriage alliance with Pharaoh king of Egypt. He took Pharaoh’s daughter and brought her into David’s city until he had finished building his own house, Yahweh’s house, and the wall around Jerusalem. · WEB
Offered anything he asks, the new king asks for the one thing his office actually requires — and is given it, plus what he did not ask for.
Solomon made a marriage alliance with Pharaoh king of Egypt 1 Kings 3:1.
The chapter that will praise Solomon's wisdom opens with the first of the treaty marriages that eventually ruin him. The narrator does not comment yet, but sets it first, and adds the second qualification immediately: Solomon loved Yahweh... except that he sacrificed and burned incense in the high places 1 Kings 3:3. Two flaws named before the great scene begins, both of them tolerable-looking, both of them the exact seeds of chapter eleven.
In Gibeon, Yahweh appeared to Solomon in a dream by night; and God said, "Ask for what I should give you" 1 Kings 3:5.
The offer is open, which makes the answer a portrait of the man. And Solomon's reply begins where a wise reply should — not with his need but with his father's history: you have shown to your servant David my father great loving kindness... you have given him a son to sit on his throne, as it is today 1 Kings 3:6. He understands his own accession as the keeping of a promise made to someone else.
"I am just a little child. I don't know how to go out or come in" 1 Kings 3:7.
He is a grown man with a settled kingdom and four executions behind him, and the self-description is not false modesty; it is the accurate assessment of anyone who has understood the size of the job. Then the request: give your servant therefore an understanding heart to judge your people, that I may discern between good and evil 1 Kings 3:9. The Hebrew is a hearing heart, which is better still — not cleverness but the capacity to listen and then tell right from wrong. It is asked for a stated purpose, and the purpose is other people.
"Because you have asked this thing, and have not asked for yourself long life, nor... riches... nor the life of your enemies" 1 Kings 3:11.
God's reply names the three requests a king would normally make, and every one of them is about the king himself. What pleases God is not that Solomon asked for something spiritual but that he asked for something for his people. The grant is unqualified — no one like you before you, and after you none will arise like you 1 Kings 3:12 — and then the addition: riches and honor, unasked, which is the pattern Jesus states as a principle Matthew 6:33.
"If you will walk in my ways, to keep my statutes and my commandments, as your father David walked, then I will lengthen your days" 1 Kings 3:14.
And the condition arrives at the end, attached to the one thing not yet given. The wisdom is granted outright; the long life is conditional on obedience. This is the first of the two appearings the book counts 1 Kings 9:2 1 Kings 11:9, and the condition stated here as promise will be restated as warning after the temple is built. Solomon wakes, goes to Jerusalem, and worships before the ark — leaving, for this one moment, the high place he had come to.
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