Hays on 1 Kings 1-11

The JSOT also includes an article by Daniel Hays arguing that 1 Kings 1-11 portrays Solomon in a very negative light. It is not merely that Solomon falls in 1 Kings 11; there are hints throughout these chapters that Solomon has gone badly wrong. I don’t agree with everything in Hays’s article (he criticizes Solomon, for instance, for not offering sacrifice before the ark, but in this criticism he misses the fact that the tabernacle has been disrupted and separated since the battle of Shiloh, 1 Sam 4-6). Yet, Hays does point out a number of places where Solomon’s reign is being compared to Israel’s slavery in Egypt: Forced labor, storage cities, the Red Sea and chariots, and a relationship with Pharaoh are all mentioned in ch 9. This implies that from the time of Solomon Israel was itself becoming an Egypt (with Jeroboam as a kind of Moses), and this prepares the large background to the exile, which is construed by some of the prophets as an exodus from Egypt into the wilderness purgation in Babylon. And this in turn initiates Israel-Egypt analogies that are found throughout the NT (Mat 2; Rev 11).