Ok, so today we’re on to an examination of the interconnectedness of holiness and justice during the reigns of Israel’s first three kings: Saul, David, and Solomon. The central point that inescapably emerges from a consideration of these royal narratives is that both righteousness before God and mercy toward others were prerequisites for the kind of kingship that God affirmed, and that a king’s abandonment of one inevitably brought about the loss of the other (and thus God’s condemnation).

Saul, of course, struggled to embody holiness from the early years of his reign. He twice angered God and was chastened by Samuel, first for improperly offering a sacrifice (1 Sam. 13) and then for disobeying a direct command (delivered by God through Samuel) regarding the destruction of a pagan enemy (1 Sam. 15). Following this second occasion, God rejects Saul as king altogether, and Saul’s downward spiral commences. Never again will his relationship with God seem remotely healthy, and his final days will include a consultation with a pagan medium and, ultimately, the taking of his own life. Tellingly, this tragic fall from intimacy with God goes hand in hand with an increasing inability to show justice and mercy to others. While he was initially praised and adored by his subjects (see the latter part of 1 Sam. 11), he demonstrated a troubling lack of compassion soon after his first act of disobedience against God, when he resolved to kill his own son for (unknowingly) violating a rash corporate oath that the king had imposed on all his men. Only the people’s plea for mercy for Jonathan stayed Saul’s hand (1 Sam. 14). Soon after his second act of disobedience, of course, David becomes the object of the king’s wrath, and he implacably seeks to kill David (whether directly, with a cocked spear in his hand, or indirectly, by sending David chasing after 200 Philistine foreskins) in spite of the total absence of any just cause for his anger. (Indeed, David served him faithfully both as court musician and warrior, befriended his son, married his daughter, and, most significantly, mercifully spared his life on two separate occasions when nothing could have prevented him from ending the threat that Saul posed to him.)

These two displays of mercy toward Saul on David’s part serve as clear early indications that Israel’s second king is a very different sort of man from his predecessor. Indeed, he is famously referred to in Scripture as “a man after God’s own heart” (1 Sam. 13:14, Acts 13:22), a description that reflects not only his faithful devotion to God (epitomized by his joyful and exuberant worship at the head of the parade which ushered the Ark into Jerusualem in 2 Sam. 6), but also his commitment to justice and mercy, as exemplified not only by his repeated sparing of Saul’s life, but also by his righteous anger against the man who claimed to have callously killed Saul (2 Sam. 1), his genuine grief over the wrongful murder of Abner, a man who had long been his enemy (2 Sam. 3), and his tender compassion toward Jonathan’s disabled son, Mephibosheth (2 Sam. 9).

In 2 Samuel 11, however, David’s story takes its first drastic downturn. First, he forfeits holiness by committing adultery with Bathsheba. Then, he sacrifices justice by arranging for Uriah to be killed in order to cover up his initial sin—which, of course, also constitutes a further affront to God’s holiness. (It is interesting that the condemnatory parable that the prophet Nathan tells David in 2 Sam. 12 is calculated to appeal precisely to the king’s finely-tuned sense of justice and injustice, which he has just acted against for the first time.) This sordid episode leads to many further complications and tragedies in David’s personal and family life, and while his holiness before God is reestablished through sincere repentance and divine forgiveness, the king seems to struggle to regain his grip on the faithful pursuit of justice, as illustrated in Chapter 13, when he first fails to take decisive action (either to punish his son or to defend and console his daughter) following Amnon’s rape of Tamar, and in Chapter 14, when he fails to bring his son Absalom to justice for the murder of Amnon. Even when David demonstrates heartfelt grief and compassion over the death of Absalom in spite of his son’s attempts to overthrow him (2 Sam. 18–19), his general Joab angrily asserts that David has proved that the lives of his faithful soldiers mean nothing to him, and that he would be more pleased if they had all died and the traitorous Absalom had lived. Thus, it could be argued that while David’s relationship with God was (at least in part) restored to its former degree of intimacy following the Bathsheba-Uriah affair, the king never truly recovered his ability to relate to others with appropriate justice and mercy.

The conduct of Israel’s next king, Solomon, makes him perhaps the most ambiguous major character in the entire Bible. Depending on which part of his career one focuses on, he may rightly be viewed as a paragon of godly wisdom and the faithful architect of God’s dwelling place on earth, or as a despotic overlord whose unjust practices directly led to the division of the kingdom, an incurable womanizer, and the ruler who led Israel down the path of rampant idolatry that would ultimately prove to be its undoing. Solomon’s humble prayer for wisdom, and his ingenious solution to a problem of injustice in the incident concerning the two women and the baby (both found in 1 Kings 3), are well known. However, in the very next chapter, we are told of the extravagant lifestyle enjoyed by Solomon and the other members of his royal court, a lifestyle which necessitated the imposition of burdensome requirements for tribute offerings on the rest of the people. It is also mentioned in 1 Kings 5 that Solomon drafted forced labor for his construction projects, a practice that surely demonstrates a certain disregard for justice and mercy. 

The first of these building projects, the Temple, was (at least to a certain extent) divinely ordained, and its construction may be seen both as an expression of holy obedience on Solomon’s part, and as a means of enabling holy worship and sacrifice on the part of the entire nation. Yet we are given an important insight into potential warning signs in Solomon’s character when we are told in the last verse of Chapter 6 and the first verse of Chapter 7, that he spent nearly twice as long (and we may safely assume, a great deal more of his wealth) building his own palace as he did building God’s house. Thus, the picture of Solomon that emerges from the first ten chapters of 1 Kings is deeply problematic, one in which Solomon is painted as largely faithful to God, but one in which we increasingly get the suspicion that he is unjust, more concerned with wealth, grandeur, and abundance than with the welfare of his subjects. This apparent lack of concern for justice and mercy, in turn, gives us a legitimate right to question the sincerity of his apparent devotion to God in the building of the temple. Is it possible that Solomon viewed the temple (at least in part) as another way for him to increase his glory, another jewel in his crown?

In any event, in 1 Kings 11 we are told that Solomon turned away from the Lord, taking a vast number of pagan wives, worshipping many of their gods, and leading the nation as a whole back into the kind of widespread idolatry that had characterized the period of the judges. God responded to this serious breach of holiness by announcing that He would strip the majority of the kingdom from Solomon’s descendants. Yet when the time of the rebellion that caused the division of the kingdom of Israel finally came, it was not Solomon’s idolatry or his large harem or the opulence of his lifestyle to which the people of Israel objected, but rather his injustices against the common people (1 Kings 12).

Thus, Solomon’s path may be seen as the reverse of Saul’s—whereas Saul almost immediately alienated himself from the Lord through breaches of holiness, even while he largely held the favor of the people, Solomon began by pleasing the Lord with his request for wisdom and his obedience in constructing the Temple, while simultaneously perpetuating injustices against his people. The important point, however, is that the lives of both kings illustrate that the abandonment of either a concern for holiness or a concern for justice quickly brings about the loss of both—Upon becoming estranged from God, Saul abandoned all pretense of concern for justice and mercy in his singleminded attempt to destroy David, and after years of satisfying his own appetites for food, drink, and splendor at the expense of his people, Solomon began to indulge his lusts in a way that led him into idol worship and alienated him from the God whose home he had been selected to build. Even the post-Bathsheba part of David’s career offers eloquent proof that even a “man after God’s own heart,” once he has abandoned his commitment to either holiness or justice, can find it hard to get a handle on either one again.

I hope this is all making sense. I realize it may seem a little repetitive, but I think it’s important to consider how this motif of the essential inseparability of holiness and justice is woven throughout the biblical narrative, because with each successive recurrence of this theme it becomes more difficult to explain why the post-nineteenth century Western church has so often been guilty of treating the two sets of concerns as if they were irreconcilable opposites. Next up, a look at the decline of Israel and Judah and the prophetic perspective on questions of holiness and justice.