1 and 2 Kings - Lesson 2

Dr. John Oswalt
1 & 2 Kings
th630-02
Securing the Throne
Lesson Transcript

In this lecture, we launch into our discussion of the Solomonic narrative, which is chapters one through 11. Let me again lay out for you a roadmap of these chapters. In chapters one and two, we are talking about securing the throne. Then in chapter three, two fateful decisions, two decisions that are going to shape Solomon's entire reign. Then section three is Solomon's kingdom, and this is the big one, chapters four through 10. First of all, in chapter four, administration. How did he set up his kingdom? How was it operated? Then in chapters five through chapter seven, verse 51, building projects. The temple, his palace, and then the temple furnishings. A lot of attention given to that, and we'll talk about that. So administration, chapter four. Building projects, chapter five through 7:51. Then dedicating the temple, chapter eight through chapter nine, verse nine.

And there again, I would subdivide that into the opening ceremony, chapter eight, verses one to 21, his prayer, chapter eight, verses 22 through 61, the closing ceremony, 8:62-66. That takes us to chapter eight, and then Yahweh's response in 9:1-9. I think this is often not included in the dedication, but I think it's inseparable from the dedication. Then in 9:10-28, Solomon's accomplishments, chapter 10, Solomon's glory. So administration, building projects, dedicating the temple, his accomplishments and his glory. And then in chapter 11, the final reckoning. So to securing the throne. One of the things that we're going to see in this narrative is the neutral tone, which the author or editor, writer takes. This is reminiscent of the Book of Judges. The writer simply reports what's happening. He doesn't say in most cases it's good or it's bad. He just reports it.

But this is the mark of a good narrator. A good narrator, if he does his job right, doesn't have to tell us, the reader, what to think. The point is made, and we'll find that again and again in this narrative. He will say something and we'll say, "Oh, wow, that's great," but it's just reported. Or he'll say something else and we'll say, "What? What? How could..." Some scholars suggest that in fact there were two competing authors. One author who had only good things to say about Solomon, and then another author who said, "Nah, I'm going to stick some stuff in here that sort of gives a second point of view on that." I don't think so. I think it's a single author, editor, writer, however you want to say that, who puts this material together, and he does so saying to us, "Now, you make your own decision here about what's going to happen." And we'll see that from the outset.

The first issue that we want to address, which we must address, is the differences between this report and the one we find in Chronicles. In Chronicles, David has collected materials. He then calls the elders, the leaders of the kingdom together, and he officially announces that he has chosen Solomon as his successor, and he blesses Solomon. He prays for him, prays that he will have a single heart, and I want to mention that here. We'll talk about it more. This is a phrase that runs through the Books of Kings. Did the king have a single heart or not? And what is meant there? The King James says, a perfect heart. What is meant there is a personality, a set of commitments, a lifestyle that is solely dedicated to the service and the worship of God.

It's what can be referred to as the opposite of a divided heart. Well, yes, part of me wants God's way, but part of me wants my way. And David prays that Solomon will have a perfect heart. He will have a heart that is wholly God's. Now, again, let me remind you, heart in the Old Testament, and really in most of the Bible does not refer primarily to your affections. Heart is the core of the personality. It's where you think, it's where you feel, it's where you decide. So it's your whole being. Well, when we come to Kings, we say, "Wait a minute, what's going on here?" Because here we find right at the outset that the oldest surviving son, who is Adonijah, begins to set himself up as king. What's going on here? Well, I think what's going on is this. Years have passed. Maybe 10 years have passed since David made his announcement.

Now, as is pretty clearly described here in chapter one, the king is falling into dementia. He hasn't said recently that Solomon is his choice. He hasn't made the point in specifics recently, but he had made it. And my reason for saying this is because Adonijah clearly understands that if he's going to be king, and from his point of view, he has a right to be king, he's the oldest surviving son, he's going to have to do it on the sly. Why would he think he had to do that unless he remembered the announcement that David had made years ago? I think that's what's going on. We've got not two contrasting ideas of how Solomon became king, but again, two aspects of it.

So we see here that David, as I said, is I think, pretty clearly subsiding into a state of dementia. Not only that, a state of impotence. Whether Abishag was chosen to be a concubine for him or not, or whether she was just to sleep with him and keep him warm at night, we don't know for sure, but the point is made. He did not have relations with her. Well, if that became known in the court, and I'm pretty sure it would've become known, then a king who is sexually impotent is a king who is otherwise impotent. We got trouble here. And again, I think this is what gave Adonijah the spur to take action in this.

Adonijah is a fascinating character, and again, the skill of the narrator is so evident here. He doesn't tell us that Adonijah was someone who was full of himself, but what he does tell us makes it pretty evident that that is clear. How interesting that David had never said to Adonijah, "What are you doing that for?" He had never called his son to account. He had never called his son into question. And so Adonijah got the sense that, "Hey, I can do whatever I want. And the old man's not going to say anything." We're also told that he was very good looking. Yes. I think this is all very interesting in regards to David. As a military man, as a politician, David was incredibly decisive. I think it's so interesting that when he got the word that Absalom had had himself crowned king in ways that are very similar to Adonijah, in fact, David instantly abandons the capital city, takes his bodyguard and heads out. My goodness. No waffling, no questioning, well, should we? No, he does it. But in matters of his family, he was incapable of being decisive, particularly after the Bathsheba incident.

The oldest surviving son at that time is Amnon. Amnon takes an ungodly affection for his half-sister, rapes her, then abandons her. Does David do anything about this? No. So Amnon's half-brother Absalom, who is the full brother of Tamar, the offended woman, takes matters into his own hands and has Amnon killed at a party. And we're told again, the power of the narrator, David was comforted when he heard that Amnon was dead. Oh my goodness. Why hadn't he done anything? This is [inaudible 00:12:06] talking, but I think it's because his own conscience smote him, and he was thinking, "Well, after what I've done, how can I take any action here?"

And David was never a man who could abide treachery. He is glad that Amnon is dead, but he's upset at the way Absalom did it. So you see it again and again. And so it seems to me Adonijah is a benefactor of that same indecisiveness on David's part. No, the old man never said I couldn't be king. Yeah, yeah. I know what he said about Solomon back there, but hey, Solomon's not the firstborn son. How our sins dog us. Even when they're forgiven. How easy not to forgive ourselves and not to take the kinds of actions that we ought to take apart from what we have done. That's Adonijah.

Notice how carefully this was all planned. Adonijah chose a bodyguard, 50 men who would run with him. Exactly the same thing that Absalom had done years earlier. He then carefully selects powerful people. Joab, the general. Abiathar, priest. But he had to take a calculated risk in leaving out people who would be especially loyal to David. Like Zadok, the priest. I'll say a bit more about that in a few minutes. Benaiah, the general of David's personal bodyguard. Nathan, the court prophet. And of course, Solomon. Now again, that all suggests to me that he remembered. He knew what David had said years ago, but he is hoping that time has erased the memory of many people as it seems to have erased the memory of the king, and that he can get away with this if he is careful.

Again, we're looking at narrative power here as our narrator defines these characters and what they're doing. And so we come next to Nathan and Bathsheba. Once again, I admit I'm reading between the lines here, and that's not always a good thing to do, but again, I think we're dealing with an old man with a failing memory. So obviously some sort of special appeal is going to have to be made to him. If Nathan were simply to walk in and say, "Hey, wait a minute, David. 10 years ago you said Solomon's going to be the king. Have you changed your mind?" That might not have worked. But if Bathsheba, this one for whom he clearly still had some special affection after all the years that had passed, after everything had happened. Amnon could throw out Tamar whom he had raped, but David could not. Another king would've simply disposed of this woman who reminded him of his failure, but not David. Not David.

So Nathan says, "Bathsheba, you need to go in and ask the king if he's changed his mind." It's not a question of did you announce in public that Solomon was going to be the king? Did you say to me, his mother, your wife? Did you say to me he was going to be king? And that hopefully this special appeal would get through the fog and that the king would say, "Oh, yes." And when he did, then Nathan could come in as the court prophet and say, "Yes, you did say this." So again, it's carefully orchestrated and our narrator reports it to us with a good deal of power.

Then there's Solomon. Now what's going on in the priesthood? In the book of Exodus and then in Numbers and so forth, we have the two sons of Aaron, Eleazer and Ithamar. In the Pentateuch, it is Eleazer who is the high priest, and he is replaced by his son, Phineas. But when we get to the books of Samuel, we find that Eli is the high priest and he is in the line of Ithamar. His descendant is a Abiathar, and then we have this man, Zadok, appearing. And Zadok is in the line of Eleazer. Remember that Eli had been told by a prophet that because he had not corrected the sins of his sons, that line was going to be cut off. So we are meeting this whole situation right in the middle of it, and Adonijah has chosen a Abiathar to be with him in his coterie.

Solomon chooses Zadok, and so we're having something of a new guard coming in. Benaiah, the general of the bodyguard taking the place of the older Joab, who is the general of the army, and Zadok, the younger priest taking the place of Abiathar, the older priest. So we see the statement can be simply made, this line is going to be cut off, but how that is going to happen begins to unfold before our eyes here. So Solomon, as I say, has been choosing something of a younger guard to be with him, whereas Adonijah has chosen the old guard. We're seeing then Solomon, as he begins to act in the ways in which he's going to act carefully, wisely in days to come.

Now, the importance of the two springs that are mentioned here is not entirely clear. I think undoubtedly it has to do with the importance of water. The city of David was on this promontory between the Kidron and the Hinnom valleys. There was a smaller one here, but not so significant. The spring where Solomon was pronounced king was the Gihon Spring, which is located there on the side of David's city. En-rogal, where Adonijah was choosing to be inaugurated is farther down the Kidron Valley, somewhere down in this area. I suspect that Adonijah chose to be inaugurated down here precisely because it was a little ways away from the city and protected a bit. So here's where he's throwing his banquet, and here's where everything is happening.

When David is convinced that, "Oh, yes, yes, I announced that Solomon was to be the king. Yes, yes. Give him my mule and take him to Gihon." Gihon, the powerful spring, even today, and again, the source of life, the source of abundance. So I think the symbolism is pretty clear so that it's not at a distance from the city. It's right here, right here where the word will get around soon that something is happening differently from what Adonijah had planned to happen. And notice the proclamation is, Solomon is king. That's pretty significant because David is still alive, and I think rather like Queen Elizabeth II, he did not want to abdicate. So there's a sense in which, yes, it's a co-regency with King Solomon and King David still being ruling, but with King Solomon being the executive officer as it were, to make this all happen.

We come then to chapter two and the settling of the throne. Here once again, we see the narrator with some power in laying out a situation that some of which we find positive, some of which we find negative, and the narrator is allowing us to make the decisions as to how we will read this. David's first charge shows David at his best. As he says to Solomon, "I'm about to go the way of all the earth. So be strong, act like a man and observe what the Lord your God requires. Walk in obedience to him, keep his decrees and commands, his laws and regulations as written in the law of Moses. Do this so that you may prosper in all you do wherever you go, and that the Lord may keep his promise to me. If your descendants watch how they live, if they walk faithfully before me with all their heart and soul, you'll never fail to have a successor on the throne of Israel." Here it is, as I said in the previous lecture, what is this all about?

It's about keeping the covenant. Walk in obedience. See how you live. Keep his decrees and commands, his laws and regulations as written in the law of Moses. Be a covenant keeper, my son, and if you do, you'll prosper, and the Lord will be able to keep his promises to me that I will have a successor on the throne. So we see here David, at his best. And this verb, walk, is very, very important in the Old Testament and in the new. What is it that God wants from us? He wants us to walk with him. He wants us to live our lives day after day in fellowship with him, in harmony with him, enjoy with him. Walk, walk. I'm not too happy with some of the more contemporary versions, especially in the New Testament where they will say, live. Well, yes, that's right. Walk is a metaphor, and it's a metaphor for how you live your life. But live can be just kind of abstract, kind of fuzzy. Walk, walk.

That's what God said to Abraham back in chapter 17 of Genesis, "Walk before me and be whole. Be what you were meant to be." That's still true for us today. God is calling us to walk with him and we'll see again and again through the Book of Kings. He walked in the ways of his father, David, or he did not walk in the ways of his father, David. So it's not merely did I once make a decision for Christ? It is did I make a decision for Christ that has influenced how I behave the rest of my days? That's what David is calling for for Solomon here. Walk. Walk in the light of what God has promised and the light of the promises we have made to him. So there we see David at his best.

In the rest of the charge. I don't think we feel quite so comfortable. The rest of the charge sort of has to do with settling scores. What about Joab? Joab who has been incredibly loyal to David throughout all of his life. But Joab, who is a murderer. Joab who murdered Abner. Abner was the general of the northern armies in the days when the kingdom was divided before David became king. And Abner came to turn the northern kingdom over to David, and Joab found out about it and killed him. Later after the revolt of Absalom, David offers the general ship to a Judean man, Amasa. Joab found out about it and killed him. So despite Joab's loyalty to David, he's a murderer. In some ways David is to blame for not having in fact executed him for murder during David's own reign. And we can ask, well, why? Did he value Joab's generalship such that he didn't want to do that?

We don't know the answer to that, but he says, "Solomon, I expect you to carry out the just fate that Joab has brought upon himself." Then on the positive sense, he says, there is the old gentleman who cared for David during the Absalom revolt and continued to care for him afterwards. And David says, "Be sure to reward him." And then there's Shimei. Shimei, remember, was the one who was cursing David during the Absalom revolt, throwing dust and rocks on him as he tried to get away. And then after the revolt was put down and Absalom was killed, David is on his way home. Now Shimei is all sweetness and light. And David says to Solomon, "You'll know how to deal with him."

Now, it's interesting to me that especially in terms of Adonijah and Shimei, Solomon displayed a good deal of restraint. He told Adonijah, "If you go home and live as you should, all will be well." He told Shimei, "If you stay in Jerusalem, you're okay. Set foot out of Jerusalem and you're in big trouble." Joab, yes. And it's Benaiah who is the executioner in all of these situations. We don't feel very good about Benaiah and his role in all of this, but again, it's the absolute loyalty to the king. I keep talking about the power of the narrator here, but it is so interesting. We see Adonijah asking Bathsheba to give him Abishag. And we say, "What in the world is the matter with your head? Why would you be so stupid as to ask for such a thing? The king's last concubine be given to you?" But he did. And I suspect it may indeed be a mark of the man. He was full of himself and thought he could get away with anything. Well, he couldn't get away with this.

Solomon says, "The next thing he'll be asking for the kingdom. Benaiah, take care of him." And then there's Shimei. The picture we see of Shimei is a man who is totally ruled by his impulses. He sees the old king going out and says, "Good, get rid of him." Discovers that the old king has in fact survived. And he says, "Oh, good. I'm so glad." Here a couple of his servants run away and he hears they've gone down toward Lachish. So, go get him. Wait a minute, Shimei, if you set foot out of Jerusalem, you're a dead man. He's gone. So again, we see all of these events occurring. Adonijah unable to restrain his desire for possession and power. Shimei unable to restrain his impetuosity.

And then there is Abiathar. This is in verses 26 and 27 of chapter two. To Abiathar, the priest, the king said, "Go back to your fields in Anathoth." Anathoth was a priestly, a Levitical city. "You deserve to die, but I'll not put you to death now because you carried the ark of the sovereign Lord before my father, David. Shared all my father's hardships." So Solomon removed Abiathar from the priesthood of the Lord, fulfilling the word of the Lord spoken at Shiloh about the house of Eli. Again, we see a picture of a man who is not willing to touch the Lord's anointed, but he is going to remove him and send him away.

What we see here then in this story is again, incredibly realistic. It's not whitewashed for us, but on the other hand, it is told with some power and some sympathy and some clarity. How is it that Solomon, who is not by any means, the eldest son, how is it that he became king? Did he just usurp the throne? No, no, no, no. He did so with his father's full approval. Did he merely wipe out anybody who opposed him? No. No. Some he did, but not all. So that we're seeing, again, this picture of life in the real, life in the raw, and the narrator is allowing us to say, "Well, maybe David was a little harsh in his old age. Maybe he shouldn't have given those directions. On the other hand, look what directions he did give." And there it is, the securing of the throne.