King Solomon had 700 wives and 300 concubines

What the text says

The verse, in BSB:

He had seven hundred wives of royal birth and three hundred concubines — and his wives turned his heart away.

In the KJV (1769):

And he had seven hundred wives, princesses, and three hundred concubines: and his wives turned away his heart.

The numbers are 700 and 300, totaling 1,000 women.

The chapter’s framing

1 Kings 11 marks a turning point in the narrative of the Israelite monarchy. The first ten chapters of 1 Kings describe Solomon’s rise — his accession after David, the building of the temple, the dedication ceremony, the visit of the Queen of Sheba, the wealth, the wisdom. Solomon is presented favourably for ten chapters.

Chapter 11 changes the tone. The opening verses (BSB):

1 King Solomon, however, loved many foreign women along with the daughter of Pharaoh — women of Moab, Ammon, Edom, Sidon, and the Hittites. 2 They were from the nations about which the LORD had told the Israelites, “You must not intermarry with them, for surely they will turn your hearts after their gods.” Yet Solomon clung to these women in love. 3 He had seven hundred wives of royal birth and three hundred concubines — and his wives turned his heart away. 4 For when Solomon grew old, his wives turned his heart after other gods, and his heart was not fully devoted to the LORD his God, as the heart of his father David had been.

The framing is explicitly critical. The text quotes the Deuteronomic prohibition on intermarriage with surrounding nations (Deut 7:1-4), invokes the religious rationale (“they will turn your hearts after their gods”), and reports Solomon’s failure on exactly these terms — “his wives turned his heart after other gods.”

The 700/300 numbers are part of this critical narrative. They are not cited as a measure of Solomon’s greatness but as a measure of the scale of his religious entanglement.

What follows in the chapter

The chapter goes on (1 Kings 11:5-13) to describe Solomon building high places for foreign deities — Chemosh of Moab, Molech of Ammon, Ashtoreth of the Sidonians — and to record the LORD’s response. The LORD announces that the kingdom will be torn from Solomon’s house (with one tribe preserved for David’s sake), which sets up the splitting of the United Monarchy into the northern kingdom (Israel) and the southern kingdom (Judah) recorded in chapters 12 onward.

The 700/300 numbers are thus the hinge in the narrative. Up to chapter 11, Solomon is the wise king, the builder of the temple, the recipient of God’s favor. From chapter 11 forward, Solomon’s foreign wives are the explanation for the kingdom’s fracture.

The Deuteronomic background

1 Kings 11:2 explicitly invokes the Deuteronomic instruction. Deuteronomy 17:17 — within the law of the king — says:

[The king] must not take many wives for himself, lest his heart go astray. He must not accumulate for himself large amounts of silver and gold.

Solomon’s 700/300 wives, on this reading, is a direct violation of the Deuteronomic instruction for kings. The narrative of 1 Kings 11 reads Solomon’s downfall through that legal lens.

A note on the numbers

Some scholars suggest the round figures of 700 and 300 (totaling 1,000) may be schematic rather than statistical — fitting a pattern of stylised numbers in Hebrew Bible narrative (the 600 chariots of Pharaoh in Exodus 14, the 32,000 men of Gideon reduced to 300 in Judges 7, etc.). Whether the figures represent a literal count or a stylised total, the narrative function is the same: an enormous number, presented critically, as the explanation for what went wrong.

The text does not invite the reader to admire the count.

What this entry does not do

We do not endorse or condemn the practices the chapter describes. We document what the text reports — that the figures appear in 1 Kings 11:3, that the narrative frames them critically, and that the chapter explicitly attributes Solomon’s religious unfaithfulness to his foreign marriages. The wider biblical and modern interpretive literature on monarchy, gender, and the Solomon narrative is beyond the scope of a curiosity entry.

For the related topic on what the Bible says about marriage across tribal-religious lines, see our topic entry on interracial marriage.