How did Solomon’s life end?

“When Solomon was old”

1 Kings tells Solomon’s life as a rise and a long slide, and the hinge is a single phrase.

When Solomon was old, his wives turned away his heart after other gods; and his heart was not perfect with Yahweh his God, as the heart of David his father was.

He went after Ashtoreth of the Sidonians and Milcom of the Ammonites and built shrines on the hill facing Jerusalem (1 Kings 11:5–8); his wives have a page of their own. What makes the fall heavy in the text is what came before it. God, the narrator says, “had appeared to him twice” (11:9): first in the dream at Gibeon, when he asked for wisdom (what Solomon asked for), and again after the Temple’s dedication, with a warning. Serve other gods, and Israel would lose its land, and passers-by would stare at the ruined house and ask why (1 Kings 9:6–9).

Three adversaries

Then the story of splendor stops, and the narrator lists the king’s enemies.

• Hadad the Edomite. A boy of Edom’s royal house who fled to Egypt when Joab put the men of Edom to the sword. He grew up at Pharaoh’s court and married the sister of Queen Tahpenes. When he heard that David and Joab were dead, he asked to go home. What have you lacked here? Pharaoh asked. “Nothing,” he answered, “however only let me depart” (1 Kings 11:14–22).
• Rezon son of Eliada. He had fled from his master, the king of Zobah. He gathered a band, took Damascus and “was an adversary to Israel all the days of Solomon” (11:23–25).
• Jeroboam son of Nebat. Solomon’s own foreman over the labor gangs of the north. A prophet promised him ten tribes, Solomon tried to kill him, and he fled to Pharaoh Shishak until the king died (11:26–40). The split that followed has its own page.

Death and burial

The end itself takes three verses: a pointer to “the book of the acts of Solomon,” a lost source (11:41), the length of the reign, and the burial.

Solomon slept with his fathers, and was buried in his father David’s city; and Rehoboam his son reigned in his place.

There is no deathbed scene, no last words and no age at death. He reigned forty years, as long as David (1 Kings 2:11; 11:42). Josephus, in the first century AD, stretches that to eighty years on the throne and a life of ninety-four, far beyond anything in the Bible. Most historians date his death around 931 BC. Others say 930 or 922 BC, because the reigns of Israel’s kings have to be rebuilt from cross-references to Assyrian and Egyptian records. His tomb, somewhere in the City of David, has never been found.

Did he repent?

The Bible does not say, and readers have argued ever since. Chronicles, retelling his reign, leaves out the foreign gods entirely and closes with forty years and a burial (2 Chronicles 9:30–31). Ben Sira, around 180 BC, praises his youth as a river of understanding, then mourns that he gave himself to women, stained his honor and left the kingdom divided (Sirach 47:14–21).

Jewish tradition found a gentler ending in his books. A midrash says he wrote the Song of Songs as a young man, Proverbs in his prime and Ecclesiastes in old age, when everything had turned to breath (vanity of vanities). Most scholars date Ecclesiastes centuries after him. Still, the old reading explains why so many hear in it a king looking back on a life that went wrong. Soon after his burial, his son Rehoboam went to Shechem to be crowned and lost ten of the twelve tribes.