Today, I am reading and commenting on 1 Kings 9-10.

I have a Youtube video of me reading the Scripture passage and my comments. Please check it out and let me know your thoughts.

Also, here is the link for my Patreon page

At several points while I was reading this I debated interjecting a minor thought, but I decided to wait until I was done reading to include those thoughts here.   Hopefully I will remember all of those thoughts because I think they better understanding of Scripture.  The first thing I noted was the phrase, “All the people who were left of the Amorites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, who were not of the people of Israel…”  My first thought when I read that was that it said that there were people who were left of those groups who had become part of the people of Israel.  Perhaps, that is not the correct.  When I thought more about it, I realized that it could also be interpreted as saying that the people listed were not of the people of Israel.  Nevertheless, I am inclined to think that the writer is suggesting that many of the peoples of the land assimilated into the people of Israel.  I would even say that Solomon’s practice of enslaving those peoples who did not do so accelerated that process.

Then I noticed that the account about the queen of Sheba hearing about Solomon and coming to Jerusalem to investigate comes immediately after it mentions that Solomon built a fleet of trade ships on the shore of the Red Sea which brought back gold from Ophir.  That led me to conclude that the queen of Sheba heard about Solomon because of those trade ships.  A little bit of investigation showed me that Sheba was about where Yemen is now and that it was a civilization which traded by sea with India and East Africa.  In fact, it seems to me that Sheba filled a role in the Arabian Sea similar to the role Tyre filled in the Mediterranean Sea.  So, when a new power began trading in her area of influence, the queen of Sheba went to check them out.  The queen of Sheba’s visit to King Solomon was that of the head of one trading empire checking out a competitor.  She appears to have concluded that attempting to destroy this competitor was futile.  Fortunately for Sheba, Solomon’s son did not have the wisdom to successfully continue his trade practices into the next generation.  I am sorry that I have no spiritual insights for today.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.