Solomon owed a huge debt to King Hiram of Tyre, a neighbor and ally who supplied much of the materials Solomon used to build the temple and his palace. Along with paying vast amounts of olive oil and grain, Solomon gave Hiram land.

King Solomon gave twenty towns in Galilee to Hiram king of Tyre, because Hiram had supplied him with all the cedar and juniper and gold he wanted.

After visiting the towns King Hiram complained, calling them worthless. As a wealthy and powerful collaborator Hiram expected a better gift.

But Hiram’s griping doesn’t interest me as much as Solomon’s willingness to give away part of his nation’s territory—a slice of the promised land. Along with the twenty towns given to Hiram went the inhabitants living there. Solomon gave a number of the Lord’s people to Hiram.

Kings apparently traded territories on the edge of their lands back and forth as part of various treaties and agreements. Better to swap land than go to war and devastate each other. But no war threatened Solomon, and he possessed plenty of material wealth to pay off Hiram. Instead, he choose to dump some lousy land off on his friend.

Shrewd politics, perhaps, but runs counter to a king fully devoted to serving the Lord and his people. No other king of Israel gave away a chunk of the promised land in peacetime. Under duress, yes, but Solomon gave his people and their land away to settle a bill he ran up as part of creating his legacy.

This vignette from Solomon’s life barely registers among his magnificent acts and marvelous failures. But to me it appears as an early example of his playing hard and loose with the sacred responsibilities of an Israeli king.

Solomon’s devotion to the Lord took a downhill turn around this time. One of the first steps in the wrong direction, of habitually shunting aside the ways of the Lord, involved pawning a few insignificant villages off on a neighbor to settle a debt.

1 Kings 9 in reading the Bible in 2023

Photo by Alois Komenda