But you trusted in your beauty and used your fame to become a prostitute. You lavished your favors on anyone who passed by and your beauty became his. – Ezekiel 16:15

Today’s Scripture Reading (April 6, 2017) Ezekiel 16

Solomon was born somewhere around 1010 B.C.E., and from the very beginning, he was a child of privilege. Solomon was the son of King David and the woman who became his favorite wife, and who also was the focal point of one of David’s most famous sins, Bathsheba. Even though Solomon had older brothers, born from women who had less favor in the eyes of David, it seems that the reigning King of Israel determined quite early on to make Solomon his heir. The decision caused havoc in the house of David and, because of Solomon’s exalted status, it does not appear that anything was denied of him in his childhood. As a result, nothing was denied to him as he grew older and became king. What Solomon wanted, Solomon got.

Maybe the most obvious outcome of this is evident in Solomon’s sex life. There was not a beautiful woman alive that Solomon did not want to possess and bring into his bed. The result was that Solomon had 700 wives and 300 concubines. Except for Naamah, the daughter of the Pharaoh reigning in Egypt, and the woman who might have been Solomon’s 1001 lover, the Queen of Sheba, the women go unknown and unnamed. These women were no more than objects charged with pleasuring the king.

Israel had always seemed to struggle with the concept of remaining loyal to their God, during the reign of Solomon this conflict was raised to an exponential level. With each of Solomon’s wives came a god. And Solomon began to build temples and high places to each of these gods in order to please the women who were pleasing him. James Burton Coffman sums up the situation well.

But no sooner had God given them a magnificent and glorious kingdom under Solomon, than the nation, led by the scandalous Solomon, did exactly what is outlined here. "They committed spiritual adultery with every nation on earth." Solomon had seven hundred wives, each of them representing an alliance he had made with some foreign state or principality, and three hundred concubines. This was not merely "spiritual adultery." It was unmitigated, lustful adultery practiced on a gargantuan scale. There's no better word for it than the harsh realism of this allegory. All of that reprehensible conduct showed that Israel was no longer trusting God who had so richly blessed them. They were trusting their own ability to take care of themselves by their alliances with other states. (James Burton Coffman, Commentary on Ezekiel)

Israel never really recovered. There were moments when good kings in Judah would attempt to lift the nation above the “spiritual adultery” that had trapped them. But in the end, the good kings could not counteract the adultery that had been put in place by Solomon. In the eyes of Ezekiel, this adultery was what had doomed his nation – and his home. 

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Ezekiel 17