2 Chronicles 9:13–31 (NIV)✞: Solomon’s Splendor, Solomon’s Death
Passage
This passage rounds out Chronicles’ description of Solomon’s reign as king.
It starts with a recap of the amount of gold Solomon received every year, which was 666 talents (over 20 metric tons), and that he used some of this gold to make a number of gold shields, which he put in one of his palaces. And… he also made a throne, and overlaid it with gold. And… his goblets were made of gold. In fact, all of his “household articles” were gold – because gold had become so common that “silver was considered of little value in Solomon’s day” (verse 20✞).
We’re told that much of Solomon’s wealth comes from his trading partnership with King Hiram of Tyre, but he’s also bringing in a secondary income just by providing wisdom to other kings!
22 King Solomon was greater in riches and wisdom than all the other kings of the earth. 23 All the kings of the earth sought audience with Solomon to hear the wisdom God had put in his heart. 24 Year after year, everyone who came brought a gift—articles of silver and gold, and robes, weapons and spices, and horses and mules.
Imagine being so wise that you get significant income just from people coming to hear you share your wisdom! (I have a career as a consultant, but that’s definitely not how I’d describe my job…)
In a day and time when military strength was measured in horses and chariots, a summary of Solomon’s wealth includes them as well:
25 Solomon had four thousand stalls for horses and chariots, and twelve thousand horses, which he kept in the chariot cities and also with him in Jerusalem. 26 He ruled over all the kings from the Euphrates River to the land of the Philistines, as far as the border of Egypt. 27 The king made silver as common in Jerusalem as stones, and cedar as plentiful as sycamore-fig trees in the foothills. 28 Solomon’s horses were imported from Egypt and from all other countries.
And I have the same thought I always have when I read this: Weren’t Israel’s kings specifically forbidden from having “many horses” – and even more specifically forbidden from getting them from Egypt? I think the author(s) are still trying to get the message across that Solomon was bringing a lot of wealth and power to Israel, but that there were warning signs already of what was to come. The book of Chronicles might not delve into those problems as deeply as the book of Kings did, but the readers would definitely know all of those details from Kings.
This passage ends with Solomon’s death, after his forty year reign, succeeded by his son Rehoboam.
Thoughts
When I read this passage I can’t make up my mind if it’s fanciful or wasteful. Did Solomon really have all of his household articles made of gold? And the throne!
17 Then the king made a great throne covered with ivory and overlaid with pure gold. 18 The throne had six steps, and a footstool of gold was attached to it. On both sides of the seat were armrests, with a lion standing beside each of them. 19 Twelve lions stood on the six steps, one at either end of each step. Nothing like it had ever been made for any other kingdom.
So one of two things is happening. Either
- The author(s) of Kings/Chronicles are being fanciful in exaggerating how wealthy Solomon was, or
- Solomon was so wealthy that he became completely wasteful in how he used all that God had given him, doing silly things like building huge thrones and making golden cutlery
Either way, I think we’re meant to see some issues with Solomon. He was a good king, but one with faults; we often focus on his foreign wives as pulling him away from God, but might not his vast wealth have been doing the same? The Bible is full of warnings that wealth can be dangerous to our spiritual lives, and Kings/Chronicles are painting a picture of Solomon as one of the richest people who ever lived.
Incidentally, I know there’s always a problem in studying history where we focus on the rulers and forget about the common people, but in this case… I think the focus is purposely on Solomon himself. A couple of times, in writing this post, I was on the verge of talking about the wealth of Israel, instead of just the wealth of Solomon, but I held back because the focus, in this case, really does seem to be on the man. Which is not always a good way to write history, but is a good way to paint spiritual lessons for your readers.
Is this, perhaps, a matter of God showing us that our desires aren’t always what they should be? Because this is clearly the high point in the history of the ancient nation of Israel; God couldn’t possibly have blessed the nation more than He did – and what was the result? Marrying princesses from foreign nations was common practice to cement political alliances, but Solomon was so powerful that he married hundreds of them, which became a problem. God blessed His people materially, but I think that made the rulers of Israel (especially Solomon himself) trust in their wealth and their power instead of trusting in Him.
On that point, God had prevented King David from building a Temple, at least in part because David had been a man of war, but God has now granted peace to His people so they can build Him a Temple – but has that peace made them complacent?
I think, overall, we’re seeing a very common pattern playing out here, of people trusting in the things God has given them instead of trusting in God Himself. We’ll see the fallout of this in the very next chapter: Solomon’s son Jeroboam isn’t going to be the kind of king his father Solomon was, or even close to the kind of king his grandfather David was, and Israel isn’t going to be prepared to handle such a situation; they’re too used to not having to worry about anything because God has blessed them beyond the point of having to worry…
The LORD
I don’t want to read too much into things, but to continue the previous point, I also notice that the personal name of the LORD doesn’t appear in this passage. The whole thing is “Solomon did this” and “Solomon had that” but not “the LORD did this for Solomon” or “the LORD gave that to Solomon.” The closest we get is verse 23✞, in which all of the kings of the world are coming to hear the wisdom that God had put in Solomon’s heart – but not that “the LORD had put in Solomon’s heart.”
Some background, so you can see where I’m coming from: When we see the name “LORD” in the Old Testament, rendered in all capitals like that (usually in “small caps,” for readability) that’s God’s personal name—and we see it all over the Old Testament, because God is personally intervening with His people all through the Old Testament—but when we see “God” it’s less personal; “God” is more of a title than a name. Yes, there is only one God, so when the Bible refers to God it’s talking about that one God, but that’s not the same as referring to Him by name.
Let me quote an article from the folks who created the English Standard Version translation of the Bible, which, I think, applies to most modern English translations of the Bible:
7. In the translation of words referring to God, the ESV takes great care to convey great nuance when it comes to the Hebrew and Greek terms.
Concerning terms that refer to God in the Old Testament: God, the Maker of heaven and earth, introduced himself to the people of Israel with a special personal name, the consonants for which are YHWH (see Exodus 3:14–15 (ESV)✞). Scholars call this the “Tetragrammaton,” a Greek term referring to the four Hebrew letters YHWH. The exact pronunciation of YHWH is uncertain, because the Jewish people considered the personal name of God to be so holy that it should never be spoken aloud. Instead of reading the word YHWH, therefore, they would normally read the Hebrew word ’adonay (“Lord”), and the ancient translations into Greek, Syriac, and Aramaic also followed this practice. When the vowels of the word ’adonay are placed with the consonants of YHWH, this results in the familiar word Jehovah that was used in some earlier English Bible translations.
As is common among English translations today, the ESV usually renders the personal name of God (YHWH) by the word LORD (printed in small capitals). An exception to this is when the Hebrew word ’adonay appears together with YHWH, in which case the two words are rendered together as “the Lord [in lowercase] GOD [in small capitals].” In contrast to the personal name for God (YHWH), the more general name for God in Old Testament Hebrew is ’elohim and its related forms of ’el or ’eloah, all of which are normally translated “God” (in lowercase letters). The use of these different ways to translate the Hebrew words for God is especially beneficial to English readers, enabling them to see and understand the different ways that the personal name and the general name for God are both used to refer to the One True God of the Old Testament.
10 Things You Should Know About the ESV Translation, with small caps formatting applied and some Scripture links added
Incidentally, this is also why you don’t see the word “LORD” written like that in the New Testament – you only see “Lord,” never the all-capitalised “LORD.” The New Testament was written in ancient Greek, not ancient Hebrew—technically, “ancient Greek” and “even more ancient Hebrew”—and they didn’t have this convention of a special word, such as YHWH, that they used for God’s personal name. In the New Testament they just use the Greek words for “Lord” and “God.”
So we see that the Bible sometimes uses a personal name for God (He is the LORD), and sometimes uses a general name (He is God). We do the same thing today; for example, I’m an Elder at my local church, and, at the moment, happen to be the only one. (The Pastor is technically an “Elder,” just a paid Elder, but we’ll set that nuance aside.) So if someone approached someone else from my congregation and said, “the Elder said I should talk to you,” it would be clear who was meant: the person is talking about me. But it would also be clear that this person doesn’t know me; maybe they’re new to the church and haven’t yet gotten to know everyone, or maybe I’ve just done a terrible job of making myself available to the congregation. On the other hand, if they said, “David said I should talk to you,” that shows more of a personal relationship. It’s not necessarily a close, intimate friendship, but it’s at least enough that the person is on a first-name basis with me.
So now let’s compare the last passage (verses 1–12✞) with the one we’re looking at here. As mentioned, the personal name of the LORD doesn’t appear at all in this passage but in the previous passage (about the visit of the Queen of Sheba) it appears four times. Twice the author(s) of Chronicles (and probably Kings) refer to “the temple of the LORD” (verses 4✞ and 11✞), and twice the Queen of Sheba herself—who is not an Israelite—refers to the LORD when talking to Solomon:
Praise be to the LORD your God, who has delighted in you and placed you on his throne as king to rule for the LORD your God. Because of the love of your God for Israel and his desire to uphold them forever, he has made you king over them, to maintain justice and righteousness.”
2 Chronicles 9:8 (NIV)✞, emphasis added
So all that to say… I’m wondering if the author(s) are making a point about Solomon by not including the personal name of the LORD in this passage, in which Solomon’s reign is summarised. After all, it would have been easy to write this text in such a way as the personal name of the LORD did appear; for example, let’s look at a few verses:
22 King Solomon was greater in riches and wisdom than all the other kings of the earth. 23 All the kings of the earth sought audience with Solomon to hear the wisdom God had put in his heart. 24 Year after year, everyone who came brought a gift—articles of silver and gold, and robes, weapons and spices, and horses and mules.
Those verses could easily have been written like this instead:
22 The LORD made King Solomon greater in riches and wisdom than all the other kings of the earth. 23 All the kings of the earth sought audience with Solomon to hear the wisdom the LORD had put in his heart. 24 Year after year, everyone who came brought a gift—articles of silver and gold, and robes, weapons and spices, and horses and mules.
Very simple changes—and, frankly, consistent with how much of the Old Testament is written—so I wonder: why didn’t the author(s) write it that way? Again, I worry that I’m in danger of reading too much into this, but it feels like a choice. It feels like there’s less of a personal relationship between Solomon and the LORD than there had been with his father David.
My Methodology
Incidentally, I should mention that I’m basing this on instances where the all-capitals version of the word “LORD” appears in the translation(s) I’m looking at. I’m not able to read ancient Hebrew, so I’m relying on the translators’ skills.
That being said, the NIV, ESV, NKJV, and KJV—all of which follow the convention of putting the personal name of the LORD in all capital letters—all agree on where it appears in this chapter (and where it doesn’t), as does the ASV which renders the personal name as “Jehovah” instead of “the LORD” but still puts the name “Jehovah” in the same places where the other translations put “the LORD.” So I may be reading too much into it, but I am confident as to where the author(s) are putting the personal name of the LORD and where they’re not.
666 Talents
When I blogged through 1 Kings 10, which also mentions the 666 talents of gold that Solomon received each year, I said this:
Wait… 666 talents of gold? Does that mean–
No. I don’t see the number 666 as being significant. I don’t think this is the author trying to sneak in a secret message about Solomon being evil or anything like that. Sometimes a number is just a number. I could be wrong—the number 666 sounds overly precise—but I’m not reading into this number in any way.
Let me revise my thinking on that; the author(s) could be sneaking in a message here. But, before anyone’s head goes there, I’m not thinking that Solomon was the Antichrist, or that this has anything to do with “the number of the beast” outlined in Revelation 13:8✞ – except that both authors might have used the number 666 for similar reasons.
I feel like I just said this recently (or maybe my memory is going?), but we should remember that the authors of the Bible—especially in the Old Testament but I think it continues into the New—didn’t use numbers the way we use numbers. Speaking from my own personal experience I know that makes a lot of modern-day North Americans very uncomfortable, but it’s just how it is. I mean… they didn’t even have a numbering system that would allow for the kind of precision we have.
So numbers are intended to convey meaning in addition to—or even instead of—numerical precision. For example–and I’m making this example up—if I’m a biblical author writing about a very large army, and want to get across the fact that it’s a very good army—“perfect,” even—I might say it’s 70,000 people. It conveys that the army is big, but also that it’s perfect, because I’m using the number 7.
Is it actually 70,000? Or 73,950? Or 50,000? Who knows? I don’t have the kind of precise numerical system that can be accurate about it anyway, unless the numbers very coincidentally happen to be nice round numbers. And, frankly, the difference between 70,000 and 50,000 and 73,950 aren’t that meaningful to me anyway. (If we’re honest, those differences aren’t meaningful to the modern reader, either; if someone tells me they were at a recent concert with 23,000 people in attendance, and someone corrects them and says no, it was actually 24,000 people, is that a meaningful distinction to me? Yes, we have a numbering system—and technology for tracking tickets—that can tell me precisely how many people were at the concert, but I can’t visualise the difference between 23,000 and 24,000.)
I said that 7 is the “perfect number,” but why is 7 so significant? Any discussion I’ve seen usually points back to Genesis, when God rested on the seventh day of creation. The Bible Project has a good comment on it:
Seven was symbolic in ancient near eastern and Israelite culture and literature. It communicated a sense of “fullness” or “completeness” (שבע “seven” is spelled with the same consonants as the word שבע “complete/full”). This makes sense of the pervasive appearance of “seven” patterns in the Bible.
Another site I looked at mentioned that there are over 700 times in the Bible where they use the number 7. (No, I don’t think they used the number 700, in this case, just to include the number 7 in it…)
So what does that have to do with the number 666? The best explanation I’ve heard of this number is that it’s intended to show that it’s falling short of the perfect number, 7. Is Solomon “perfect?” I mean… he’s close, but no, he’s not perfect. So… maybe a 6 instead of a 7? Or 6-6, which is even closer? Or 6-6-6, which is really close to being perfect but still not quite? (That’s the best explanation I’ve heard as to why the number of the beast in Revelation is 666. He’s trying to pass himself off as the Christ, but he’s not, no matter how much he tries to look like Him.) Again, this still doesn’t ring true to modern readers – but let’s remember that ancient Israelites didn’t have fractions or decimals. If they had, maybe whey would have said 6.66 instead of 666. We’re reading this as a very literal number, and “six hundred sixty-six” is nowhere close to “seven,” but that’s not the meaning the ancient writers were trying to convey. Solomon received “six hundred sixty-six” talents of gold, but the readers weren’t expected to be thinking “six hundred sixty-six,” they were expected to be thinking “six-six-six,” or, “not-quite-seven, not-quite-seven, not-quite-seven.”
I’m probably not getting nuances here, but I’m trying to point out that modern readers should neither be thinking of a very precise number of “six hundred sixty-six talents,” nor should we be thinking, “this is the number of the beast!”
So I still agree with part of my earlier point from my 1 Kings 10 post—I don’t think the author(s) of Kings or Chronicles are trying to say Solomon is “the antichrist”—but I’ll soften my stance to say that the author(s) of Kings/Chronicles might have been using that number to subtly show that Solomon wasn’t “perfect.”
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