Seven hundred, of royal birth? And three hundred concubines? Do the math: he must have had a wedding a week, unless he married them a dozen at a time. It seems so unlikely many commentators have dismissed the figures as political spin. Fake news. But the Bible isn’t fake.
Solomon reigned for forty years. According to 1 Kings 14:21, his son Rehoboam was forty-one years old when he became king… His mother’s name was Naamah; she was an Ammonite.
Therefore Solomon married his first wife, Naamah, at least two years before he was crowned. Why?
Cheaper than war
The Ammonites had dishonored Solomon’s father, King David. Rather than sue for peace, they waged a war that they lost―badly. Did David arrange the marriage of his son to an Ammonite as a political expedient to patch up relations? If so, it set a precedent.
Next, Solomon married Pharaoh’s daughter. This was rare. Pharaohs didn’t marry off daughters to their neighbors. There must have been a huge carrot. There was. Sinai.
David had conquered territory as far as the “Shur of Egypt” (1 Samuel 27:8), the wall beside the Nile. However, Solomon only reigned to the Wadi of Egypt, near modern-day Gaza (1 Kings 4:24–5). The Sinai lay between the two.
Solomon must have traded it away for Pharaoh’s daughter, another political alliance, and for the city of Gezer that Pharaoh gave him as a dowry.
Strategic Sinai has been subject to negotiation for thousands of years!
Once Solomon fell for the ruse of matrimonial alliances, the rest became obvious. After all, keeping wives would have been cheaper than war.
They might have bought peace, but at what cost? Their gods came with them, and the slippery slope of compromise began.