King Solomon Did Not Sin

Rabbi Moshe Ben-Chaim

Reader: Dear Rabbi, In reading the Jewish Times for October 10, 2025 about Koheles and King Solomon, I beg to differ slightly in your opinion of King Solomon and his referencing of “futilities” and “futilities of futilities.”

Yes, King Solomon asked God for wisdom and he was given it, using his wisdom righteously for his people and kingdom. However gifted, he still had to address—within himself—desires and their potential influence on his behavior. While speaking of these [in Koheles], I do not agree that he was simply giving voice to common man’s feelings, [as you suggested]. Here is a brilliant man, son of King David, who has amassed a great fortune and fulfilled every apparent desire (futility) and yet, this great man succumbs to the futilities of futilities by engaging in his love for foreign women who not only brought their gods with them but eventually turned Solomon's heart astray from only worshipping the God of Israel. These included the daughter of Pharaoh, Moabite, Amonite, Edomite, Sidonian and Hittite women from the nations that God had warned the Israelites not to join with them. Solomon did so anyway in fulfillment of his love of foreign women. To marry, bringing these women with foreign gods into the King's household, was a huge violation of the first commandment against worshipping other gods and the other was Solomon's refusal to heed God's warning about foreign women. These two are King Solomon's futilities of futilities for in doing so, he made the fulfillment of his temporal desires more important to him than God. 

One can only imagine the genuine remorse he must have felt when finally facing himself. God had given him rulership of his kingdom, wanting for nothing, and yet it wasn't enough.

If anything, in reading Koheles over Sukkot, it seems that Solomon was also a man who related intimately to the human tendency of allowing futilities to saturate the mind and heart until those obsessions slowly remove God from relational primacy.

God did not choose men of perfection, He chose men, some of whom would face themselves and repent before God setting a powerful example for all of us throughout the generations.

Shalom,

Gabrielle

Rabbi: The rabbis teach that Solomon did not serve idols (Tal. Shabbos 56b). Metsudas Dovid states that Solomon’s failure to deter his wives’ from idolatry is what is meant by “Solomon building Ashtoreth, the abomination of the Sidonians” (II Kings 23:13). But King Solomon never built idolatrous structure. Why then does the verse depict history as thought he did? This is because God is more exacting with great people and considers their deviations more severe: “The righteous are judged within a hairsbreadth” (Rashbam, Numbers 20:10). This is because God wishes to refine people dedicated to the proper path, as He did with His 10 trials of Abraham. Certain areas of greater perfection are beyond man’s capabilities, and even his knowledge. So God assists great men and women. Chazal say all the matriarchs and Chana were barren because "God's loves the prayers of the righteous." This means God loves the reflection and perfection (i.e., tefilah) of the righteous (matriarchs). God “loving” such an action means God's desire is human perfection. So too here, God is more exacting when the righteous person deviates, i.e., calling Solomon a “builder of idols” even when he did not build them. When one is on the path towards perfection, God assists him or her even further. “On the path one desires to follow, he is led further” (Makkos 10b). One who wants perfection is following God's will, so he has assisted. And one who wants to sin is not prevented so he cannot complain that he could not attain his free will desires. If a person is prevented from sin, he never comes to the realization of the dissatisfaction with that life, and he will always long for it. To help a person discover that fantasies do not satisfy a person in reality, God allows a person to achieve his fantasies. And King Solomon performed this experiment on himself to teach the world this very lesson.

Regarding King Solomon’s experimentation with drunkenness, wealth, servants and luxuries, it was not a weakness of succumbing, but a controlled study of his emotional reactions to share with mankind how empty are the physical pleasures and the chase of ambition and wealth. He used himself as an example of the human failure to attain happiness through all the popular lives common man seeks. He even starts Koheles by stating this experiment:

“I said to myself, “Come, I will treat you to merriment. Taste mirth!” That too, I found, was futile. Of revelry I said, “It’s mad!” Of merriment, “What good is that?” I ventured to tempt my flesh with wine, and to grasp folly, while letting my mind direct with wisdom, to the end that I might learn which of the two was better for men to practice in their few days of life under heaven. I multiplied my possessions. I built myself houses and I planted vineyards. I laid out gardens and groves, in which I planted every kind of fruit tree….Then my thoughts turned to all the fortune my hands had built up, to the wealth I had acquired and won—and oh, it was all futile and pursuit of wind; there was no real value under the sun! (Koheles, chap. 2)

The inclusion of Koheles into Holy Writings teaches that Solomon’s words were divine, and therefore truths. Thus, his experimentation with wealth and pleasures was a proper experiment with which to educate mankind.  As Rabbi Israel Chait taught, Solomon was the only human capable of being both the observer, and the subject of experiment.

It is crucial that we don’t read Scripture divorced from studying Oral Law and the rabbis commentaries, as both are vital explanations, without which, we assume wrong conclusions. The study of Scripture alone will lead a person to incorrect ideas.