First Book of Kings

← Encyclopedia

The First Book of Kings is the biblical narrative that carries the story of Israel’s monarchy from the death of David through the reign of Solomon and into the years after the kingdom split in two. In the Hebrew canon, First and Second Kings form a single book, Melakhim; the division into two is a later convenience, inherited from the Greek and Latin traditions and kept by most printed Bibles since.

Its first half belongs to Solomon. The book opens on an aged David, a contested succession, and Solomon’s consolidation of the throne; it then gives him the famous dream at Gibeon in which he asks not for long life or riches but for an understanding heart, and the judgment between two women claiming one child that becomes the standing emblem of his wisdom. At its center stands the building of the Temple in Jerusalem — its dimensions, its furnishings, and its dedication set out at length — together with the king’s palace, his wealth, and the visit of the queen of Sheba. The same chapters record the turn: the foreign wives, the high places, and the verdict that Solomon’s heart was drawn after other gods.

After his death the kingdom divides. The northern tribes break with Solomon’s son Rehoboam, and the book settles into a paired chronicle of two realms — Israel in the north, Judah in the south — judging king after king by whether he did what was right in the sight of the Lord. Out of that framework rises the figure who dominates the book’s last third: Elijah the Tishbite, who confronts King Ahab and Queen Jezebel, calls a drought upon the land, and on Mount Carmel challenges the prophets of Baal to a contest of fire over the sacrifice — and then, fleeing for his life to Horeb, meets God not in wind, earthquake, or fire but in a low murmur, a sound of thin silence.

Critical scholarship reads Kings as the close of a larger composition, the Deuteronomistic History running from Joshua through Kings, shaped during the Judahite monarchy and given its final form in or after the Babylonian exile. On this view the book is less a chronicle than a theological reckoning: an account of why the kingdoms fell, written by editors who measured every reign against the law of Deuteronomy and who name older sources — annals of the kings of Israel and of Judah — now lost. Jewish and Christian tradition received it as scripture and as prophecy, the deeds of Elijah in particular feeding later expectation of his return. The Temple it describes so precisely was destroyed twice and never excavated; the book remains the fullest written account of what stood there.

→ Related: Second Book Of Kings · Book Of Zephaniah · Book Of Zechariah