Solomon: Israel’s Wisest King (33): Solomon’s Many Women (I Kings 11:1-3) by Rev. Angus Stewart
I. The Massive Number
II. The Foolish Behaviour
III. The Failing Type
Philip Ryken: "In those days it was customary for kings to take many wives, but Solomon took more than most. He was called to be a one-woman man, just as Christian husbands today are called to give all of their affection to the one woman that God has called them to love by sacrifice (Eph. 5:25-31). In a godly marriage, there is only room for one main emotional connection, one overriding passion, one sexual bond. Instead, Solomon foolishly squandered his affections on women he was forbidden to touch. Obviously he could not truly love these women in any meaningful sense of the word love. When the Bible says that he ‘clung to these [women] in love’ (I Kings 11:2), the connotation is frankly sexual. This was a foolish sin of marital infidelity" (King Solomon: The Temptations of Money, Sex, and Power, pp. 176-177).
Arthur Penrhyn Stanley: “Of all the institutions of an Oriental monarchy, the most characteristic and the most fatal is polygamy. It is not on Solomon, but on David, that the heavy responsibility rests, of having first introduced polygamy on an extended scale into the court of Israel. But Solomon carried it out to a degree unparalleled before or since, and his wider intercourse with foreign nations gave him a wider field for selection. The chief Queen, no doubt, was the Egyptian Princess. But she was surrounded by a vast array of inferior wives and concubines, all of them, as far as appears, of foreign extraction; from Moab, Ammon, Edom, Phoenicia, and the old Canaanitish races” (Lectures on the History of the Jewish Church: Samuel to the Captivity, pp. 249-250).
John G. Butler: “Some like to be clever and spread out their multiplicity of wives by using divorce as a means of having more than one wife. But Paul condemned that practice when he said, ‘For the woman which hath an husband is bound by the law to her husband so long as he liveth ... So then if, while her husband liveth, she be married to another man, she shall be called an adulteress; but if her husband be dead, she is free from that law so that she is no adulteress, though she be married to another man’ (Romans 7:2, 3). One wife (or husband) is the limit unless she (or he) dies. That is God’s rule and God’s rule is for man’s best. Those who ignore this rule do so to their own confusion and condemnation. The rules have not changed since creation. Solomon did what was a popular practice but that did not make it right. His father, David, had a number of wives and some concubines, too, but that did not make it right nor help his morals. Adding wives only added more woes for David” (Solomon: The King of Splendour, pp. 268-269).