How many wives did Solomon have?

The verse

The count comes at the turning point of Solomon’s story, right after the gold, the horses and the visit of the Queen of Sheba.

He had seven hundred wives, princesses, and three hundred concubines. His wives turned his heart away.

Two words matter. The wives are princesses, daughters of ruling houses, not women chosen one by one. And a concubine was a recognized partner of lower rank than a wife. Two verses earlier, the text lists where the women came from: Moab, Ammon, Edom, Sidon and the Hittite lands, besides Pharaoh’s daughter (1 Kings 11:1).

Marriage as foreign policy

Early in his reign, Solomon marries for politics. He makes a marriage alliance with Pharaoh and brings his daughter to the City of David (1 Kings 3:1). Pharaoh even gives a dowry, the town of Gezer, which he had captured and burned (1 Kings 9:16), and Solomon builds her a house of her own (1 Kings 7:8).

That was a remarkable match. In the Amarna letters, about four centuries earlier, a king of Babylon complains that Pharaoh refused him an Egyptian princess, and quotes the reply: from time immemorial no daughter of the king of Egypt has been given to anyone (Amarna letter EA 4).

Many of the others, the text implies, came the same way: a treaty, a princess, a household. Yet the only wife the Bible names is Naamah the Ammonite, mother of Rehoboam, who inherited the throne (1 Kings 14:21). We know more names among his daughters: Taphath and Basemath, married to two of his district governors (1 Kings 4:11, 15).

What the law had said

Deuteronomy has a rule for Israel’s kings that reads almost like a warning written for Solomon.

He shall not multiply wives to himself, that his heart not turn away. He shall not greatly multiply to himself silver and gold.

Solomon breaks both halves. In his old age, 1 Kings says, “his wives turned away his heart after other gods” (1 Kings 11:4). He builds shrines for Chemosh of Moab and Molech of Ammon on the hill facing Jerusalem. King Josiah defiled them some three centuries later, on what the text calls the mountain of corruption (2 Kings 23:13). Five centuries after Solomon, Nehemiah still pointed to him as the classic case: “foreign women caused even him to sin” (Nehemiah 13:26).

Can the number be real?

Readers have asked for centuries. Solomon’s numbers run large everywhere: a thousand burnt offerings at Gibeon (1 Kings 3:4), 666 talents of gold a year (1 Kings 10:14), forty thousand stalls of horses, which the parallel in Chronicles gives as four thousand (1 Kings 4:26; 2 Chronicles 9:25). His son Rehoboam had a more modest eighteen wives and sixty concubines (2 Chronicles 11:21). The Song of Songs, which tradition links to Solomon, speaks of sixty queens and eighty concubines (Song of Songs 6:8).

Many historians read the thousand as a figure of royal splendor rather than a census, the way the text measures everything about him. Chronicles, retelling his reign, leaves out the foreign wives and their gods entirely, apart from Pharaoh’s daughter. Whether any of it happened as told belongs to a larger question: Was King Solomon a real person?