1 Kings — themes & analysis

The Solomon of chapters 3 to 10 is the wisest king in the world. He asks for an understanding heart at Gibeon and is given that and everything else he did not ask for. He judges between the two prostitutes by proposing to cut the living child in half, and the narrative invites the reader, with the watching court, to recognise the move as theatre that elicits the truth. The Queen of Sheba comes to test him with hard questions and goes home stunned. He speaks three thousand proverbs and writes a thousand and five songs. He knows trees from the cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop on the wall, and beasts and fowl and creeping things and fish.

The picture is of a polymath sovereign at the height of intellectual prestige, ruling from Jerusalem at the centre of an empire that runs from the Euphrates to the border of Egypt. And then the same chapters slowly accumulate a counter-narrative the reader is expected to notice. The temple is built, but the labour is conscripted — thirty thousand men sent to Lebanon in shifts of ten thousand a month, seventy thousand bearers, eighty thousand stonecutters in the hills. The book of Deuteronomy, on which the Deuteronomistic History is theologically based, had given specific warnings against a king who multiplied horses, multiplied wives, multiplied silver and gold to himself. Solomon does each of these things in scale.

The narrative takes its time before drawing the conclusion. Chapter 11 finally states it: 'his wives turned away his heart after other gods,' and the high places of Chemosh and Milcom and Ashtoreth are built on the mount facing Jerusalem. The prophet Ahijah meets Jeroboam outside the city and tears the new cloak into twelve pieces. Solomon's wisdom did not save him. The temple, the prayer at the dedication, the visit of the Queen of Sheba — none of it saved him. The book is making a careful argument, not against wisdom, but against the assumption that wisdom is sufficient.

The same book that gives us the wisest king in the world gives us the schism that begins the day after his funeral. What 1 Kings has the courage to do is hold both pictures together and refuse to choose between them. Solomon is the wisest and the most catastrophically failed. The temple is the greatest human achievement in the narrative and the thing whose construction cost the seeds of the division. The book does not resolve the contradiction. It just shows you both sides and lets the irony do its work.

Where to follow it: 1 Kings 3 (the dream at Gibeon), 1 Kings 8 (the dedicatory prayer), 1 Kings 10 (the Queen of Sheba), 1 Kings 11 (the foreign wives; the schism foretold).

When the northern tribes secede under Jeroboam in chapter 12, the narrative gear changes. From this point through the end of 2 Kings the historian works in a tightly disciplined formula. Each king is introduced by name, with his accession year synchronised to the reign of the king of the other kingdom; his capital and the length of his reign are given; his mother is named for the kings of Judah; and a single evaluative sentence is delivered. He did that which was right in the sight of the Lord. He did evil in the sight of the Lord, and walked in the way of his father.

The formula is unyielding and it is a literary form in its own right. It compresses two centuries of history into a sequence of brief, almost identical paragraphs, broken occasionally by an extended episode when something theologically interesting happens — a war, a reform, a prophet, a foreign treaty. The cumulative effect is the slow, unsentimental documentation of a downward slope. Most northern kings are judged failures. Most southern kings are judged compromises — right in their hearts, perhaps, but the high places of local worship persist.

The historian is not interested in the kings as personalities; he is interested in them as test cases for a single thesis: whether a king kept the covenant, by which the historian means whether he walked in the law of the Lord and refused the worship of other gods. The formula is the historical engine of the Deuteronomistic vision: history is the long unfolding of the consequence of obedience and disobedience to the covenant, and the kings of Israel and Judah are the figures by whom the verdict is read.

By 1 Kings the formula is in place. 2 Kings will run it through to the destruction of Samaria in 722 BCE and the burning of Jerusalem in 586 BCE. Reading it in 1 Kings, the reader feels the rhythm beginning — the alternation of kingdoms, the synchronised years, the evaluative sentence — and understands that the historian is not telling adventure stories but running an argument. The argument will take another book to finish.

Where to follow it: 1 Kings 12 (the schism; Jeroboam's golden calves), 1 Kings 15 (the formula at full speed: Abijam, Asa, Nadab, Baasha), 1 Kings 16 (four northern kings in one chapter), 1 Kings 22 (Ahab's death; the formula closes his reign).

Chapter 17 introduces Elijah the Tishbite without preamble. The reader is given no genealogy, no court of origin, no ordination. He simply appears in the throne room of Ahab — the king who has married the Sidonian princess Jezebel and built a temple to Baal in Samaria — and announces that there will be neither dew nor rain except by his word. Then he disappears into the wilderness, fed by ravens, then by a widow at Zarephath in Sidonian territory whose oil and meal do not run out and whose son he raises from the dead.

After three years of drought he comes back. The confrontation with Ahab is wary and personal — 'art thou he that troubleth Israel?' 'I have not troubled Israel; thou hast' — and Elijah proposes the trial that gives the book its most theatrical scene. He summons all Israel to Mount Carmel, with the four hundred and fifty prophets of Baal and the four hundred prophets of Asherah. Two bullocks are prepared; no fire is set under either. Whichever god answers by fire, that one is God.

The Baal prophets cry out from morning to noon and Elijah mocks them: cry aloud, for he is a god — peradventure he sleepeth, and must be awaked. They cut themselves with knives and lancets till the blood gushes out; nothing answers. Elijah builds his altar with twelve stones, lays the wood, slaughters the bullock, and pours so much water over the offering that it fills the trench around the altar. Then he prays a prayer that takes about three sentences and the fire of the Lord falls and consumes the burnt sacrifice and the wood and the stones and the dust and licks up the water in the trench. The people fall on their faces. Elijah seizes the prophets of Baal and slaughters them at the brook Kishon. Then the rain comes.

The chapter is the high point of prophetic theatre in the Hebrew Bible — a single figure, in a hairy mantle, standing alone against a state-sponsored religion at the height of its political power, and winning. What it says about the prophetic office is what the rest of the Elijah cycle will refine: that the prophet does not work for the king; that the prophet does not need the apparatus of the state; that when the king and the official religion have abandoned the covenant, the covenant continues to make demands, and the demands will be voiced.

Where to follow it: 1 Kings 17 (Elijah appears; the drought; Zarephath), 1 Kings 18 (Mount Carmel; the fire; the rain), 1 Kings 21 (the vineyard; the second confrontation with Ahab), 1 Kings 22 (Ahab's last battle; Elijah's prophecy fulfilled).

Chapter 19 is the chapter that has saved the Elijah cycle from being read only as triumph. Immediately after Carmel, Jezebel sends a message: by this time tomorrow, your life shall be as the life of one of those prophets you slaughtered. Elijah, who stood alone against four hundred and fifty prophets the previous afternoon, runs. He goes a day's journey into the wilderness, sits down under a juniper tree, and asks to die. 'It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life, for I am not better than my fathers.' He sleeps. An angel wakes him and feeds him. He sleeps again.

The angel wakes him a second time and he travels — the text says with a deliberate echo of the Mosaic forty — forty days and forty nights to Horeb the mount of God, the mountain where Moses received the law. He goes into a cave and lodges there. The word of the Lord asks him what he is doing there. Elijah answers with the speech of a man at the end of his strength: 'I have been very jealous for the Lord God of hosts; the children of Israel have forsaken thy covenant, thrown down thine altars, and slain thy prophets with the sword; and I, even I only, am left, and they seek my life, to take it away.'

He is told to stand on the mount before the Lord, and the Lord passes by. A great and strong wind rends the mountains and breaks the rocks, but the Lord is not in the wind. After the wind, an earthquake; the Lord is not in the earthquake. After the earthquake, a fire; the Lord is not in the fire. And after the fire, a still small voice. The Hebrew is qol demamah daqqah — a sound of thin silence, the most untranslatable phrase in the chapter. Elijah wraps his face in his mantle and goes out to stand at the entrance of the cave.

The voice asks him again what he is doing there. He gives the same speech, word for word. He is told to go back, anoint Hazael over Syria, and Jehu over Israel, and Elisha to take his own place; and that there are seven thousand in Israel who have not bowed the knee to Baal. The chapter is the great Hebrew Bible meditation on the prophet's exhaustion and on the form in which God meets him afterwards. Not in the spectacular phenomena that match the prophet's mood. In something quieter, after the storm has passed. The phrase has carried for two and a half thousand years, and what carries with it is the doctrine that what is decisive is not always loud.

Where to follow it: 1 Kings 19 (Horeb; the still small voice; Elisha's call), 1 Kings 17 (the widow of Zarephath; Elijah's first low point), 1 Kings 18 (Carmel; the triumph before the collapse), 1 Kings 21 (Elijah walks back into danger against Ahab).

Chapter 21 is one of the most exact pieces of political prose in the Hebrew Bible. Ahab the king of Samaria wants Naboth's vineyard, which adjoins the royal palace, for a kitchen garden. Naboth refuses to sell because the land is the inheritance of his fathers and the Levitical law forbids the alienation of ancestral land. Ahab comes home to his house heavy and displeased and lies down upon his bed and turns away his face and will not eat. The image is precise: a king sulking like a child because the law has stood between him and what he wants.

Jezebel comes in and asks why he is sulking. He explains. She answers with the line that contains the whole chapter: 'Dost thou now govern the kingdom of Israel? Arise, and eat bread, and let thine heart be merry; I will give thee the vineyard of Naboth the Jezreelite.' She writes letters in the king's name and seals them with his seal and sends them to the elders and nobles of Naboth's city. The letters call a fast and seat Naboth at the head of the people and find two false witnesses to testify that he has blasphemed God and the king. Naboth is taken out and stoned. The vineyard falls to Ahab by escheat.

Then Elijah meets Ahab in the vineyard, and the indictment is delivered in two sentences: 'Hast thou killed, and also taken possession?' And: 'In the place where dogs licked the blood of Naboth shall dogs lick thy blood, even thine.' The chapter shows precisely how royal power, when uninterrupted, will bend the apparatus of justice — courts, witnesses, religious occasions, the seal of the king — to satisfy the desire of the moment. It shows the prophet, alone, naming the deed in the place where it happened.

Naboth's vineyard is the locus classicus for every later argument in the Western tradition that even kings are bound by the law and that even the absence of an external check does not abolish the moral one. The chapter is also the prose of the prophetic office at its sharpest: the prophet does not stand on a mountain and call down fire here. He walks into a private vineyard, speaks two sentences, and leaves. The economy is part of the point. The word is enough.

Where to follow it: 1 Kings 21 (Naboth; Jezebel's letters; Elijah's indictment), 1 Kings 22 (Ahab dies as Elijah said; dogs lick the blood), 1 Kings 20 (Ahab spares Ben-hadad; a prophet condemns him), 1 Kings 18 (Elijah confronts the king the first time: "art thou he that troubleth Israel?").