The answer that immediately comes to mind to the question in the title is Manasseh, the son of Hezekiah. He was conceived during the extension of life that God granted Hezekiah in response to his ardent prayer on his sick bed (2 Kings 20:1-11, 21:1). His reign is summarized in 2 Kings 21:1-18 as a regime of pagan bloodshed, including human sacrifice and filicide. The Chronicles account tells us that he repented before his death (2 Chronicles 33:10-13). But his reign was the point of no return for Judah. The nation was doomed to exile (see also 2 Kings 23:26; 24:3).
But is there another king in Jerusalem who might have been worse than Manasseh?
When King Josiah later learned of how and why the wrath of God was going to be poured out on Judah (2 Kings 22), he instituted some great reforms. These are too late to stop what is to come, but they are thorough. Manasseh’s name is explicitly mentioned:
“And the altars on the roof of the upper chamber of Ahaz, which the kings of Judah had made, and the altars that Manasseh had made in the two courts of the house of the LORD, he pulled down and broke in pieces and cast the dust of them into the brook Kidron” (2 Kings 23:12 ESV).
But that was not Josiah’s final reform. Before moving to the former Northern Kingdom to destroy their idols, he had more to do in Judah:
“And the king defiled the high places that were east of Jerusalem, to the south of the mount of corruption, which Solomon the king of Israel had built for Ashtoreth the abomination of the Sidonians, and for Chemosh the abomination of Moab, and for Milcom the abomination of the Ammonites. And he broke in pieces the pillars and cut down the Asherim and filled their places with the bones of men” (2 Kings 23:13–14 ESV).
These were not merely unauthorized “high places” where the Judahites presumed to offer sacrifices outside the Temple. They were places dedicated to the worship of foreign gods in Judah. I assume they had not always been used in Judah’s history. It is hard to imagine them operating while Hezekiah reigned, for instance. But amid all the past reforms of righteous kings who preceded Josiah, those abominable altars remained intact. They had been built by Solomon to accommodate his pagan wives (and, no doubt, pagan alliances with Gentile dynasties).
The fact that Josiah’s reforms in Judah end with Solomon’s legacy, rather than Manasseh’s, suggest that Manasseh was merely the corrupt fruit while Solomon was the evil root. To fully purge Judah, Josiah had to go back to the beginning.
There is more to say about how Josiah’s reforms point to the greatness of Solomon’s apostasy and the folly of his son Rehoboam, recorded in 1 Kings 11-12. But, first, there is more evidence to consider in the central subject of the Kings narrative
Solomon & Ahab
A great deal of 1 & 2 Kings is taken up with the dynasty of Omri, it’s sin, and God’s judgment on it.
“And Ahab the son of Omri did evil in the sight of the LORD, more than all who were before him. And as if it had been a light thing for him to walk in the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, he took for his wife Jezebel the daughter of Ethbaal king of the Sidonians, and went and served Baal and worshiped him. He erected an altar for Baal in the house of Baal, which he built in Samaria. And Ahab made an Asherah. Ahab did more to provoke the LORD, the God of Israel, to anger than all the kings of Israel who were before him” (1 Kings 16:30–33 ESV).
In his lectures on Jonah, James Jordan suggests that Ahab is being compared to (contrasted with?) Solomon. While Ahab was more evil than all previous rulers in Israel, Solomon was wiser than all before or after him (1 Kings 3:12). This comparison is suggested by several parallels between the two king:
- Both Ahab and Solomon inherit their thrones from kings starting a dynasty.
- Both royal fathers gained their rule after the previous king committed suicide (1 Samuel 31:4; 1 Kings 16:18).
- Both royal fathers acquired a new capital city (2 Samuel 5:6-10; 1 Kings 16:24).
- Both Ahab and Solomon marry foreign wives and establish the worship of foreign gods in Israel.
It is significant that the first abomination listed as an object of Josiah’s destruction is a shrine to Ashtoreth of the Sidonians (2 Kings 23:13). The story of Solomon’s paganism in Kings also begins with Sidon (1 Kings 11:5). Jezebel was the daughter of the King Ethbaal of the Sidonians. Jordan posits that Solomon’s godly relationship with Hiram king of Tyre is being contrasted with Ahab’s relationship with Sidon (since Tyre and Sidon are typically paired).
I read the narrative differently. Ahab’s idolatrous relationship with Sidon is directly comparable to the same one that Solomon engaged in. He was following in Solomon’s footsteps. Rather that contrasting Ahab’s evil with Solomon’s wisdom, the text is pointing out Solomon’s evil in contrast to the wisdom he had and then abandoned. The fact that Solomon built an altar to Ashtoreth the goddess of the Sidonians” (1 Kings 11:5) suggests that he was responding to the influence of a wife from Sidon. If Ahab is condemned so strongly for degrading from Jeroboam’s violation of the Second Commandment to violating the First, what are we to say about Solomon who jumped directly to violating the First? The condemnation of Ahab is implicitly a condemnation of Solomon.
Perhaps we should make other inferences. For instance: Did Solomon alienate Hiram (1 Kings 9:12) leading to a break with him and an alliance with a pagan Sidonian ruler?
And what became the royal ideology for this move?
We can guess that Jeroboam, by naming his sons after Aaron’s two sons who were killed by God for offering strange fire, was engaged in a revisionist mythology. He was probably pretending to be restoring the primal true worship of Israel before Moses suppressed it. But, before that, Solomon must have propagandized some sort of rationalization for why he was using forced labor and taxes to construct pagan temples. With this in mind, it is noteworthy that his efforts to flood all Israel with a false religious pluralism appear to be completely successful. When the elders of the tribes met with Rehoboam, they cared about tax relief and a reduction in conscription, not whether those things were used in the service of foreign gods. This may help us understand how Jeroboam could claim and perhaps even believe that he was restoring faithfulness to God instead of abandoning it. Arguably, he was more righteous than Solomon because that was a low standard.
Another question that arises is this: Why had not Hezekiah or some other righteous king already destroyed these pagan temples?
I assume their use was halted during those reigns, but they were left standing. It is intriguing to me that Hezekiah collected Solomon’s wisdom (Proverbs 25:1) but left Solomon’s folly standing. Was it considered impious to destroy Solomon’s legacy? Is it possible then that Manasseh justified himself as restoring the ways of Solomon?
The Homosexual Religion
Josiah’s reforms in Judah including purging evil from the Temple that Solomon had built. “And he broke down the houses of the male cult prostitutes who were in the house of the LORD, where the women wove hangings for the Asherah” (2 Kings 23:7 ESV). These homosexual harlots had been put down before (1 Kings 15:12; 22:46), but they kept coming back. In Josiah’s day the situation had become so bad that they were operating (what a euphemism!) in the Temple itself, not in the high places.
While Solomon is not directly involved in this religious tradition, he was not far removed from it:
“Now Rehoboam the son of Solomon reigned in Judah. Rehoboam was forty-one years old when he began to reign, and he reigned seventeen years in Jerusalem, the city that the LORD had chosen out of all the tribes of Israel, to put his name there. His mother’s name was Naamah the Ammonite. And Judah did what was evil in the sight of the LORD, and they provoked him to jealousy with their sins that they committed, more than all that their fathers had done. For they also built for themselves high places and pillars and Asherim on every high hill and under every green tree, and there were also male cult prostitutes in the land. They did according to all the abominations of the nations that the LORD drove out before the people of Israel” (1 Kings 14:21–24 ESV).
So Solomon’s folly led to the establishment of perverse practices.
“Claiming To Be Wise…”
This story of Solomon gives us another reason to doubt that Romans 1:18ff is dealing primarily with Gentile paganism. Rather, just as Israel during much of it’s history imported and exported the religion “of the nations,” Romans 1:18ff is a verdict passed on “the Jew first and also the Greek” from the very beginning. The passage does not begin with a condemnation aimed exclusively at Gentiles, to then add Jews later in chapter 2. Rather, it begins with a condemnation of all human culture, including and perhaps centered on Israel. I have argued elsewhere that Paul laces 1:18ff with language that is recognizably derived from the prophets addressing Israel. Jewish history is recognizable in Paul’s description so that he can then write, “Therefore you have no excuse, O man, every one of you who judges. For in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, practice the very same things” (Romans 2:1). Paul can tell his readers that Israel is without excuse because he has been talking about them all along, as well as the nations. If he has accurately described Israel’s heritage, they have no business boasting in being a superior nation to the rest.
Furthermore, the dynamic Paul describes as “claiming to be wise, they became fools” would be a fitting for Solomon’s fall. After all, he would be the last person to admit, probably even to himself, that he was no longer wise. He would have continued to claim wisdom as part of his descent into folly. And then Paul would not be merely describing the relationship between idolatry and homosexuality as an abstract tendency in human life but the actual religious progression in Israel’s history from Solomon’s paganism to the homosexual cult prostitutes that arose in Jeroboam’s reign. Thus, the only detail not thoroughly embedded in Israel’s cultural history as recorded in Scripture, that fits with Romans 1:18ff, is Lesbianism. Israel adopted the worship of the creature rather than the creator under Solomon and, as a part of its spreading idolatry, adopted homosexual practice.
Mark Horne is a member of the Civitas group, and holds an M.Div from Covenant Theological Seminary. He is a minister in the Presbyterian Church in America, and is the executive director of Logo Sapiens Communications and writes at www.SolomonSays.net. He is the author, most recently, of “Solomon Says: Directives for Young Men” from Athanasius Press.