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Context No. 75 of 4322 · 1 Kings

Context · Reflection

1 Kings 9:15-23: in context

15This is the reason of the forced labor which King Solomon conscripted: to build the LORD’s house, his own house, Millo, Jerusalem’s wall, Hazor, Megiddo, and Gezer. 16Pharaoh king of Egypt had gone up, taken Gezer, burned it with fire, killed the Canaanites who lived in the city, and given it for a wedding gift to his daughter, Solomon’s wife. 17Solomon built in the land Gezer, Beth Horon the lower, 18Baalath, Tamar in the wilderness, 19all the storage cities that Solomon had, the cities for his chariots, the cities for his horsemen, and that which Solomon desired to build for his pleasure in Jerusalem, and in Lebanon, and in all the land of his dominion. 20As for all the people who were left of the Amorites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, who were not of the children of Israel— 21their children who were left after them in the land, whom the children of Israel were not able utterly to destroy—of them Solomon raised a levy of bondservants to this day. 22But of the children of Israel Solomon made no bondservants; but they were the men of war, his servants, his princes, his captains, and rulers of his chariots and of his horsemen. 23These were the five hundred fifty chief officers who were over Solomon’s work, who ruled over the people who labored in the work.

Kings mostly presents Solomon as the peak of Israel's power, and this passage is a piece of administrative record inside that account. It explains the forced labor Solomon conscripted, and lists what it built: the temple, his own palace, the Millo and the wall of Jerusalem, and the fortress cities of Hazor, Megiddo, and Gezer.

Those three names have been at the center of a long archaeological argument. Excavators found nearly identical six-chambered gates at all three sites, and Yigael Yadin matched them to this verse, reading them as Solomon's own building program from the tenth century BC. Israel Finkelstein and others later argued from pottery and radiocarbon that the gates are about a century later, from the northern kings. The dispute is not settled, and it is one of the sharpest in the field.

The text is also candid about the cost. The labor gangs were drawn from the peoples left in the land, while Israelites served as soldiers and officers. The passage after it notes Solomon's building for his own pleasure. A generation later the northern tribes broke away, and the first grievance they named was the labor. What am I building that looks impressive from outside, and who is carrying the actual weight of it?

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