First Book of Kings

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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.

That single scroll was long. The Septuagint, translating into Greek for the Jews of Alexandria, broke the unwieldy book of the kings in two and folded it together with the Books of Samuel under one heading, the four “Books of Reigns” — Samuel becoming First and Second Reigns, Kings the Third and Fourth. The Latin Vulgate kept the four-fold count but restored the older names, calling them the four Books of Kings; the partition then passed into the Hebrew printed Bibles of the sixteenth century, where Melakhim became Melakhim Alef and Melakhim Bet. The break falls in the middle of a single sentence about the reign of Ahaziah, where no natural seam exists — a sign that the cut was made for the convenience of the scribe and the scroll, not for the sake of the story. To read First Kings, then, is to read the opening movement of a book that does not end where the page does.

The reign of Solomon

Its first half belongs to Solomon. The book opens on an aged David, a contested succession, and Solomon’s consolidation of the throne. David lies dying and cannot keep warm; his son Adonijah, the eldest surviving, has himself proclaimed king at a feast outside the city, with the army commander Joab and the priest Abiathar behind him. The prophet Nathan and Solomon’s mother Bathsheba move first, securing the old king’s oath that Solomon will succeed, and Solomon is anointed at the spring of Gihon while Adonijah’s feast is still in progress. What follows is a sequence of executions and banishments — Adonijah, Joab, Shimei — by which the new king clears the field. The narrative does not soften this. The throne is settled in blood, and only then, the text says, was the kingdom established in Solomon’s hand.

It then gives him the famous dream at Gibeon. Sacrificing at the great high place before the Temple was built, Solomon is met by God in the night and invited to ask for whatever he wishes. He asks not for long life, nor for riches, nor for the death of his enemies, but for a listening heart — the Hebrew is literally a hearing heart — to discern between good and evil and to govern a people too numerous to count. The answer pleases God, who grants the wisdom asked for and adds to it the wealth and honor he did not ask. The judgment between two women claiming one living child follows almost at once: the king’s order to divide the infant with a sword, the true mother’s plea that it be given whole to the other rather than killed, and the verdict that hands her the child. This becomes the standing emblem of Solomonic wisdom, and the book glosses it exactly so — all Israel hears the judgment and stands in awe, seeing that the wisdom of God was in him to do justice.

At the book’s center stands the building of the Temple in Jerusalem. Its dimensions, its cedar and gold, its two bronze pillars Jachin and Boaz, the molten sea on its twelve oxen, the inner sanctuary housing the ark beneath the wings of two great cherubim — all are set out at length and with an architect’s patience, a description that has become the fullest written portrait of the First Temple in existence (see Temple Mount). The work runs seven years, drawing on the cedar of Tyre under a treaty with King Hiram and on a levy of forced labor; the king’s own palace, larger and taking thirteen years, is built beside it. At the dedication the ark is brought up, the cloud of the divine presence fills the house so that the priests cannot stand to minister, and Solomon prays the long dedication prayer that asks God to hear from heaven when his people turn toward this place — a prayer that already imagines exile and return, and so reads as written with the later catastrophe in view. The chapters that follow record the king’s wealth: the gold of Ophir, the fleet to Tarshish, the throne of ivory, the annual tribute, and the visit of the queen of Sheba, who comes to test him with hard questions and departs declaring that the half had not been told her.

The same span records the turn. Solomon’s many foreign wives — the text counts seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines — draw his heart toward their gods: Ashtoreth of the Sidonians, Milcom of the Ammonites, Chemosh of Moab. He builds high places for them on the hill east of Jerusalem, and the verdict is delivered flatly: his heart was not wholly true to the Lord his God as the heart of David his father had been. For this the kingdom is sentenced to be torn from his line, though for David’s sake the tearing is deferred to his son’s reign and one tribe is left. Adversaries rise — Hadad of Edom, Rezon of Damascus, and Jeroboam, an officer to whom the prophet Ahijah of Shiloh tears a new cloak into twelve pieces and gives ten, naming him king over the ten northern tribes before Solomon is dead.

The division of the kingdom

After Solomon’s death the kingdom divides. His son Rehoboam goes to Shechem to be made king and is met by an assembly asking for relief from his father’s heavy yoke; advised by his elders to lighten it and by his young companions to increase it, he chooses the harsher word — his little finger, he tells them, will be thicker than his father’s loins. The ten northern tribes break away under Jeroboam, and the realm Solomon held splits into Israel in the north and Judah in the south, never to be one again under one crown. Jeroboam, to keep his people from going up to Jerusalem to sacrifice, sets up two golden calves at Dan and Bethel and an alternative priesthood — the founding sin that the book will charge against every northern king who walks in it.

From here the book settles into a paired chronicle of two realms, weaving back and forth between the parallel lines of kings and synchronizing each accession to the regnal year of the rival kingdom. A formula governs the entries: a king’s accession dated against the other throne, the length of his reign, his mother’s name in the case of Judah, a one-line verdict on whether he did what was right in the sight of the Lord, and a closing notice referring the reader to a written source for the rest of his acts. The standard is single and explicit. Northern kings are condemned without exception for the sin of Jeroboam; southern kings are weighed against David and against the demand that worship be centralized, most failing to remove the high places even when otherwise approved. The book is keeping a ledger, and the ledger has one column.

Elijah the Tishbite

Out of that framework rises the figure who dominates the book’s last third: Elijah the Tishbite. He appears without introduction in the reign of King Ahab of Israel, who has married Jezebel, a princess of Sidon, and raised an altar to Baal in Samaria. Elijah announces a drought — no rain except by his word — and vanishes, fed by ravens at a wadi and then by a widow of Zarephath whose jar of meal and cruse of oil do not fail through the famine, and whose dead son he revives. In the third year he returns to force the issue. On Mount Carmel he gathers the people and the prophets of Baal to a contest of fire: two bulls laid on two altars, and the god who answers with fire is God. The prophets of Baal call from morning to noon and cut themselves and get no answer; Elijah drenches his altar with water, prays once, and fire falls and consumes the offering, the wood, the stones, and the water in the trench. The people fall on their faces. The slaughter of the prophets of Baal follows, and then the rain.

Jezebel swears to have his life, and Elijah, who has just called down fire, flees into the wilderness and asks to die. An angel feeds him, and he walks forty days to Horeb, the mountain of the covenant, and lodges in a cave. There the book reaches its quietest and most often-quoted moment. A great wind tears the mountains, but the Lord is not in the wind; an earthquake, but not in the earthquake; a fire, but not in the fire; and after the fire a sound — the King James translators rendered it a still small voice, the Hebrew phrase carrying the sense of a low murmur, a sound of thin silence. In it Elijah is sent back to his work: to anoint Hazael over Aram, Jehu over Israel, and Elisha as prophet in his own place, and told that seven thousand in Israel have not bowed to Baal. The book’s last chapters give the war with Aram, the judicial murder of Naboth for his vineyard and Elijah’s sentence on the house of Ahab for it, and the death of Ahab in battle, an arrow finding him between the joints of his armor exactly as a prophet had foretold. First Kings ends with the brief reigns of Ahaziah of Israel and Jehoshaphat of Judah — the story handed across the editorial seam to Second Kings, where Elijah is taken up in a whirlwind and his mantle falls to Elisha.

Composition, sources, and the Deuteronomistic History

Critical scholarship reads Kings as the close of a larger composition, the Deuteronomistic History running from Joshua through Kings and including Judges and Samuel — a continuous narrative of Israel in its land, from the conquest to the loss of it. The framework is the theology of Deuteronomy: worship is owed to one God in one place, the covenant carries blessing for obedience and ruin for apostasy, and history is the working-out of that contract. The hypothesis, given its classic form by Martin Noth in 1943, holds that a single exilic author shaped older materials into one work to explain the destruction of Judah as deserved judgment. Later scholars revised the single-author picture toward a double redaction — a first edition composed under King Josiah in the late seventh century BCE, when his reforms made the program of one God and one sanctuary look like prophecy fulfilled, and a second edition revised after the fall of Jerusalem to the armies of Babylon in 587 BCE, to account for the disaster the first edition had not foreseen. The book in its finished form thus speaks across the exile to the community that would rebuild in Second Temple Judaism, holding up the lost First Temple and the broken covenant as the measure of what had gone wrong and what must not be repeated. Mordecai Cogan’s commentary on First Kings sets out the regnal framework and the layered growth of the book in detail; Marvin Sweeney and Gary Knoppers have mapped the seams between the editions.

On this view the book is less a neutral chronicle than a theological reckoning: an account of why the kingdoms fell, written by editors who measured every reign against the law of Deuteronomy. The standard critical edition in English is Mordecai Cogan’s I Kings in the Anchor Yale Bible series (Yale University Press), which sets the regnal chronology against the Assyrian and Babylonian king-lists and lays out the layered redaction. Marvin A. Sweeney’s I and II Kings: A Commentary in the Old Testament Library (Westminster John Knox / Presbyterian Publishing) reads the book through the double-redaction model, and the underlying Deuteronomistic-History hypothesis derives from Martin Noth’s 1943 Überlieferungsgeschichtliche Studien, translated as The Deuteronomistic History (Sheffield Academic Press / Bloomsbury). The Hebrew text and the traditional versification can be read against the translation at Sefaria.

The book is built, too, on documentary sources it names but does not preserve. The closing formulas point the reader again and again to the Book of the Acts of Solomon, the Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Israel, and the Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Judah — royal annals, now lost, from which the regnal data and many of the reported events appear to be drawn. These are not the biblical books of Chronicles, which are a much later retelling; they are the archival records that stood behind the narrative, and their citation gives the book the texture of a work assembled from documents rather than composed from memory. (The later Books of Chronicles retell the same monarchy from a post-exilic, Temple-centered vantage; see First Book of Chronicles.)

Kings stands among the Former Prophets in the Hebrew arrangement of the Tanakh, and among the historical books in the Christian Old Testament; both Torah and the surrounding scriptures supply the legal and covenantal vocabulary it applies. Jewish and Christian tradition received it as scripture and as prophecy. The deeds of Elijah in particular fed a long expectation: the book of Malachi names him as the one to come before the day of the Lord, the rabbinic tradition seats him at every covenant and Passover table, and a cup is poured for him at the seder. 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 · David · Books Of Samuel · Deuteronomy · Joshua · Tanakh · Old Testament · Temple Mount · Second Temple Judaism · Torah · Baal