1 Kings 11:41

"Now the rest of the acts of Solomon, and all that he did, and his wisdom, are they not written in the book of the acts of Solomon? And the time that Solomon reigned in Jerusalem over all Israel was forty years. And Solomon slept with his fathers, and was buried in the city of David his father: and Rehoboam his son reigned in his stead."

The Holy Bible has devoted a great deal of space to this particular ruler, no doubt because of his building the Temple which was so dear to the hearts of the people. Much less space will be allocated to the subsequent kings of the divided kingdom, every one of them being judged by the author of Kings as one who either did or did not do the will of God. On that standard of evaluation, we must assign Solomon to the category of those who did not obey God. It is pitiful that one so talented and so worldly-wise should have failed, in the last analysis, to understand and appreciate Jehovah as the true and only God of heaven and earth.

Dentan has this summary of Solomon's inadequacy in his religious behavior:

"For Solomon, as for many other ordinary Israelites, both in his times and later, Yahweh was not the sole God of heaven and earth, the majestic Creator of the cosmos and the giver of the moral law, but merely the God of Israel, a national deity like the gods of other peoples."[16]

In Solomon's dedicatory prayer and in the Psalms ascribed to: him, he rose to a very high theological plane, but his religious behavior failed to measure up to the lofty standard of his words. Like many another person, he preached a much better life than he lived! His sensual and materialistic life and his construction of pagan shrines and high places in Jerusalem itself had the practical effect of demoting (at least in the popular mind) the true and only God Jehovah to a parity with the pagan gods and goddesses of his harem. That was the popular religion of Solomon's day, and there is no evidence that he was able, actually, to rise above it. It was for that that God was angry with him.