Israel's most revered king, David grows old. On cold nights he sleeps with a young woman for nothing but her body heat.
Deathly sick, he declares Solomon king instead of the oldest son—Adonijah—the one everyone expected to be king. One of Solomon’s first-reported acts as king was to secure his position by executing the competition. He ordered Adonijah killed.
King David secured peace in the region by defeating neighboring armies. Solomon inherited that peace and power. And he expanded it by adding subordinate nations as far north as the Euphrates River, on Turkey’s southern border.
Israel's gilded age
This was Israel’s golden age—40 years of peace and prosperity for everyone but those commoners Solomon drafted. He didn’t draft them for the army. He drafted them for building projects like hauling rocks and timber for his palace and for building cities to help fortify and defend the kingdom.
That’s what doomed his son. People asked King Rehoboam for a breather—some relief from the forced labor and high taxes. He said, “You think my father was heavy-handed. Compared to my heavy hand, my father was a pinky finger” (1 Kings 12:10).
Israel splits into two kingdoms
All the northern tribes left and crowned their own king.
Most kings—north and south—didn’t measure up to God’s lowest bar of acceptance. No kings in the north made the cut. In the south, godly kings included Asa and Jehoshaphat in 1 Kings and Jotham, Hezekiah, and Josiah in 2 Kings.
Two of the worst were Ahab and his Queen Jezebel. Ahab’s death ends the book of 1 Kings. But Jezebel lives to die another day, as dog meat outside her Jezreel getaway palace (2 Kings 9). Instead of looking out the upstairs window at the chariot corps commander who had just assassinated her son, the king, she should have run home to Lebanon.
One Book Split in Two
First and Second Kings were written as one book. But it was too long to fit on a single scroll. So, when Jewish scholars translated it into the international language of the day, Greek, in the decades before Jesus was born, they split it into two books. They did the same with the history books of Samuel and Chronicles.
Writer
The writer is unknown. Scholars most often speculate that the writer or writers lived during the exile, after Babylonian invaders in 586 BC erased Judah from the map by deporting leaders and citizen who survived the war. The writer may have pulled all this information from royal records and from oral history passed down from generation to generation, from one family leader to the next.
Timeline
The combined books of 1-2 Kings cover about 400 years, from David’s reign in roughly 1000 BC until Babylonians leveled Jerusalem and other cities of Judah in 586 BC. First Kings ends with the death of one of the most infamous kings of all: Ahab, with his even more infamous queen, Jezebel.
Top stories
- Solomon shows off his wisdom in the case of a stolen baby, chapter 3.
- Solomon builds Israel’s first Temple, 7-year project, 5-6
- He builds himself a palace, 13-year project, 7
- He shows off his wealth and wisdom to the Queen of Sheba, 10
- He marries foreign women and starts worshiping their gods, 11
- Judah and Israel are constantly fighting border wars, 15
- Elijah declares a famine and moves to Lebanon, where he resuscitates a boy, 17
- In a battle of gods, Elijah calls fire from the sky then kills 400 Baal prophets, 18
- Jezebel vows to kill Elijah, and he runs to Egypt, 19
- Jezebel orders a vineyard owner stoned to death so Ahab can grow vegetables there, 21
Location
Most stories take place in what is now Israel and the Palestinian Territory of the West Bank.
Some Israelites lived east of the Jordan River in what are now parts of Syria and Jordan.
The united kingdom of David and Solomon split into a pair of Israelite kingdoms: Israel in the north and Judah in the south.
Judah’s capital remained Jerusalem throughout, from the time of David until the fall of the Jewish nation 400 years later. Israel’s capital shifted from Shechem (1 Kings 12:35) to Tirza (14:17) to Samaria (16:24).
Purpose
First and Second Kings preserves the story of a nation—a fallen nation if, as many scholars speculate, historians compiled the material while exiled to what are now Iraq and Iran.
First Kings picks up from 2 Samuel with the death of King David and the beginning of Israel’s most productive and gloriously garish generation. They built the nation with gusto and wealth and braggadocio. But the writers did more than promote and puff the Jewish kingdoms. They huffed and puffed about the dark side of the life under kings who worshiped idols.
