Saul, David, and Solomon: The United Kingdom (8 of 15)

About a hundred and twenty years, three kings, and a covenant that outlasts all of them.

It begins with a request God treats as a rejection and ends with a nation splitting in half.

Why Did Israel Want a King?

To be like the other nations, and Samuel is told that is the problem.

1 Sam 8. The elders come to Samuel and ask for a king to lead them, such as all the other nations have. The immediate trigger is dissatisfaction with Samuel’s sons and the prospect of the office passing to them.

Underneath that is a misunderstanding of what the office was. A judge held no continuity and no succession, and final decisions rested with God. Asking for a king with an heir was asking for something the office never had, which is why God tells Samuel it is not Samuel they have rejected but God himself as king.

Samuel is not simply warning them either. The text has him commissioned to witness against them, which is legal language, and the excesses he lists are testimony entered on the record before the fact.

Samuel then warns them exactly what a king will do. He will take their sons for his chariots and his armies, their daughters for his household, the best of their fields and vineyards, a tenth of their grain and flocks, and eventually they will be his servants and will cry out because of the king they chose.

They hear the entire list and answer that they want a king anyway, so they can be like the other nations and have someone to go out and fight their battles.

They get exactly what they asked for.

How closely the warning matches Solomon is argued, and the argument is worth knowing because the easy version of the claim does not hold. Some read the speech as reflecting Canaanite city-state kingship of the kind documented in Akkadian texts from Ugarit rather than any Israelite reign. And there is a detail that cuts against reading it as a description of Solomon written after the fact: the loudest popular grievance against Solomon was his conscription of Israelites for building projects, and building programmes and labour gangs are exactly what Samuel’s list does not mention.

The general tenor fits. The specific complaint that actually split the kingdom is absent.

Why Was Saul Rejected?

Two incidents, both about acting on his own authority.

The first is 1 Sam 13, where Saul offers the burnt offering himself rather than waiting for Samuel, because the army was scattering and he felt compelled.

The second is 1 Sam 15, the campaign against Amalek, where he spares the king and the best of the livestock and then tells Samuel he has carried out the Lord’s instruction.

Samuel’s reply contains the line the whole passage turns on: does the Lord delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as much as in obeying the voice of the Lord? To obey is better than sacrifice.

Saul’s failure is not that he was less moral than David, who does considerably worse later. It is that he consistently substituted his own judgment for the instruction and then explained why it had been necessary.

His later career is deterioration: the pursuit of David, the slaughter of the priests at Nob, and finally the medium at Endor, consulting the dead after having expelled the mediums himself.

How Did David Become King?

Anointed as a boy, then hunted for years before he took the throne.

1 Sam 16 has Samuel sent to Jesse’s house, going through seven sons, and being told that people look at the outward appearance but the Lord looks at the heart. The youngest is out with the sheep.

The Goliath account in chapter 17 is the public introduction, and the argument David makes is theological rather than military: the Philistine has defied the armies of the living God, and the battle is the Lord’s.

Then years as a fugitive. Saul’s jealousy, Jonathan’s friendship and its covenant, the cave at En Gedi and the cave at Ziph where David twice has Saul at his mercy and refuses to strike the Lord’s anointed.

That restraint is the substance of his claim to the throne. He does not take it.

Saul and Jonathan die at Gilboa, and David’s response is a lament rather than a celebration, including the line about how the mighty have fallen and his grief for Jonathan.

What Was the Davidic Covenant?

A promise of a dynasty that would not end, given when David proposed building a house for God.

2 Sam 7. David observes that he lives in a cedar palace while the ark is in a tent, and proposes building a temple. Nathan initially agrees, then receives a word overnight reversing it.

The reversal contains a wordplay that carries the whole passage. David wants to build God a house, meaning a building. God says he will build David a house, meaning a dynasty.

The terms: a son who will build the temple, a throne established forever, and discipline for wrongdoing that will not amount to removal of steadfast love as it was removed from Saul.

That promise is the seed of every messianic expectation that follows. It works alongside the Abrahamic covenant rather than replacing it: Abraham was promised an enduring nation, David an enduring dynasty to rule that nation, so the kings promised to Abraham arrive through David’s line.

Son of David becomes a title, and it is the title the crowds use at the triumphal entry and the one a blind beggar shouts outside Jericho.

There is external evidence for the dynasty as a dynasty. Two ninth-century inscriptions from outside Israel, one found at Dan and the Moabite Mesha Stele, refer to the house of David as the name of a ruling line. And 1 Kgs 9:15 says Solomon fortified Hazor, Megiddo and Gezer, which excavation has borne out.

The honest counterweight is Jerusalem itself, where finds from the united monarchy period are sparse, and that sparsity drives most of the sceptical case. Inscriptions from Khirbet Qeiyafa and Tel Zayit have been cited on the other side as evidence of the literacy a centralised administration would require. The question is live.

What Happened With Bathsheba?

Adultery, then a cover-up, then a murder, and the text does not protect him.

The placement is not accidental. The episode sits at the structural centre of 2 Samuel, as Saul’s failure sits at the centre of 1 Samuel, with the rise to power before it and the long decline after. And it follows immediately on the covenant, so the highest point of David’s life is set directly against the lowest.

2 Sam 11-12. It opens by noting it was the season when kings go off to war, and David stayed in Jerusalem. He sees her, sends for her, sleeps with her, and she conceives.

The cover-up fails because Uriah refuses to go home while the army is in the field, which is the conduct of a better man than his king. So David sends him back carrying his own death warrant, with instructions to Joab to place him where the fighting is fiercest and withdraw.

Nathan’s confrontation in chapter 12 is a parable about a rich man taking a poor man’s one lamb. David condemns the man in it and Nathan says, you are the man.

Ps 51 is traditionally connected to this. The consequences are permanent: the child dies, and the violence and sexual sin move into David’s own household with Amnon, Tamar, and Absalom.

What Was Absalom’s Rebellion?

A son taking the kingdom, and a father who could not fight him properly.

2 Sam 15-18. Absalom spends four years standing at the gate, telling petitioners that their case is good but there is no one appointed to hear it, and stealing the hearts of Israel.

David flees Jerusalem barefoot and weeping, and the sequence includes Shimei cursing him along the road while David refuses to let anyone silence him.

The battle in the forest of Ephraim goes David’s way, and Absalom is caught in a tree and killed by Joab against explicit orders.

David’s reaction is the line that ends the whole affair: O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom, if only I had died instead of you.

Joab then rebukes him for humiliating an army that has just saved his life, which is fair and also misses what is happening to the man.

What Was Solomon’s Reign?

Wisdom, wealth, the temple, and then a decline nobody expected.

He asks for a discerning heart to govern rather than for long life or riches, and is given wisdom along with what he did not ask for.

The temple is built and dedicated, and the prayer in 1 Kgs 8 includes provision for the foreigner who comes from a distant land because of the name.

Then 1 Kgs 11. Seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines, many of them foreign, and as he grew old his wives turned his heart after other gods, and he built high places for Chemosh and Molek.

The man who built the temple built shrines for other gods on the hills opposite it.

The judgment is that the kingdom will be torn from his son, though one tribe will remain for David’s sake. Solomon’s reign ends with adversaries raised up and Jeroboam already marked out, and the split follows immediately on his death.

Part of a series following the Old Testament timeline.

Sources

The biblical texts cited: 1 Sam 8-31, 2 Sam 1-24, and 1 Kgs 1-11, especially 1 Sam 8:10-18, 15:22, 16:7, 2 Sam 7, 11-12, 18:33, and 1 Kgs 3, 8, and 11.

R. P. Gordon, 1 and 2 Samuel (Sheffield Academic Press, 1998), 42-43. Supports the debate over whether Samuel’s warning reflects Solomonic practice or a Canaanite city-state model, and the observation that building programmes and labour gangs are absent from the list.

Stephen B. Chapman, 1 Samuel as Christian Scripture (Eerdmans, 2016), 98-99. Supports the reading of the request as deposing God and of Samuel as commissioned to witness against the people.

William J. Dumbrell, Covenant and Creation (Paternoster, 2013), 208-209. Supports the account of the judge’s office as lacking continuity.

Larry G. Herr, “The Iron Age II Period: Emerging Nations,” Biblical Archaeologist (2001), 122-123. Supports the Dan and Mesha Stele references to the house of David.

John D. Currid, Ancient Egypt and the Old Testament (Baker Books, 1997), 161. Supports the excavation of the Solomonic fortifications at Hazor, Megiddo and Gezer.

M. L. Strauss, “David,” in New Dictionary of Biblical Theology (InterVarsity Press, 2000), 436. Supports the house wordplay in 2 Sam 7 and the placement of the fall after the covenant.

Where the sourcing stops: the traditional connection of Ps 51 to the Bathsheba episode comes from the psalm’s superscription, which is early but is not part of the narrative account. The chronology of the united monarchy follows the timeline’s dating.

Footnotes

1. Samuel’s warning is often read as a prophecy that Solomon’s reign fulfils point by point. It is looser than that. The verb that governs the whole speech is take, and taking is what happened, but the particular abuse that broke the kingdom in two is not on Samuel’s list. Reading the speech as a retrojection from Solomon has to explain that absence.
2. That the account of David’s worst act is preserved in full, along with the prophetic condemnation and the family consequences, is a striking feature of Israel’s national literature. The founding dynasty’s central figure is recorded committing adultery and arranging a murder, in the document his own dynasty preserved.