David desired to build a fitting shrine, a temple, in which to place the Ark of the Covenant; it should be a place wherein the people could worship; a centre of religion in which the ark should have paid it the distinction due it as the seat of tremendous majesty.

But David had been a man of war; this temple was a place of peace.  Blood must not stain its walls; no shedder of gore could be its architect.  Yet David collected stone, timber, and precious metals for its erection; and, not being allowed to erect the temple himself, was permitted to depute that office to his son and successor, “Solomon the Wise.”

At this time all the enemies of Israel had been conquered, the country was at peace; the domain of the Hebrews was greater than at any other time, before or afterward.  It was the fitting time for the erection of a great shrine to enclose the sacred ark.  Nobly was this done, and no human work of ancient or modern times has so impressed mankind as the building of Solomon’s Temple.

Solomon succeeded to the Hebrew kingdom at the age of twenty.  He was environed by designing, bold, and dangerous enemies.  The pretensions of Adonijah still commanded a powerful party:  Abiathar swayed the priesthood; Joab the army.  The singular connection in public opinion between the title to the crown and the possession of the deceased monarch’s harem is well understood.[25] Adonijah, in making request for Abishag, a youthful concubine taken by David in his old age, was considered as insidiously renewing his claims to the sovereignty.  Solomon saw at once the wisdom of his father’s dying admonition:  he seized the opportunity of crushing all future opposition and all danger of a civil war.  He caused Adonijah to be put to death; suspended Abiathar from his office, and banished him from Jerusalem:  and though Joab fled to the altar, he commanded him to be slain for the two murders of which he had been guilty, those of Abner and Amasa.  Shimei, another dangerous man, was commanded to reside in Jerusalem, on pain of death if he should quit the city.  Three years afterward he was detected in a suspicious journey to Gath, on the Philistine border; and having violated the compact, he suffered the penalty.

[Footnote 25:  I Kings, i.]

Thus secured by the policy of his father from internal enemies, by the terror of his victories from foreign invasion, Solomon commenced his peaceful reign, during which Judah and Israel dwelt safely, Every man under his vine and under his fig-tree, from Dan to Beersheba.  This peace was broken only by a revolt of the Edomites.  Hadad, of the royal race, after the exterminating war waged by David and by Joab, had fled to Egypt, where he married the sister of the king’s wife.  No sooner had he heard of the death of David and of Joab than he returned, and seems to have kept up a kind of predatory warfare during the reign of Solomon.  Another adventurer, Rezon, a subject of Hadadezer, king of Zobah, seized on Damascus, and maintained a great part of Syria in hostility to Solomon.