King May Not Take Many Wives
The Torah's Specific Warning — Heart-Turning
Deut 17:17: “He shall not multiply wives to himself, that his heart not turn away.” The verse does not merely say “too many wives is administratively burdensome” or “too many wives creates household conflict.” It gives a specific reason: lest his heart turn (pen yasur levavo). The turning of the heart is the primary concern. And the specific mechanism by which royal wives turned hearts was the marriage-alliance system of the ancient Near East.
When a king made peace with a neighboring nation, he sealed it with a diplomatic marriage. The foreign princess brought her religious household: her gods, her priests, her cult objects. The king who wanted to maintain peace maintained her religion. One diplomatic wife created one pocket of foreign religion at court. Two created two. Seven hundred created a court so saturated with foreign religious presence that the king’s own covenant loyalty was inevitably compromised. The Torah does not prohibit diplomatic relationships — it prohibits the accumulation of marriage-based religious commitments that systematically dilute the king’s heart toward the God of the covenant.
Solomon — Seven Hundred Wives and the Turned Heart
1 Kgs 11:1: “King Solomon loved many foreign women, along with the daughter of Pharaoh: Moabite, Ammonite, Edomite, Sidonian, and Hittite women, from the nations concerning which the LORD had said to the people of Israel, ‘You shall not enter into marriage with them, neither shall they with you, for surely they will turn away your heart after their gods.’” The Torah’s warning uses the exact same phrase: turn away (yasiru) the heart. 1 Kgs 11:4: “When Solomon was old, his wives turned away his heart after other gods, and his heart was not wholly true to the LORD his God, as was the heart of David his father.”
Seven hundred wives, three hundred concubines. The prohibition in Deut 17:17 asks for restraint; Solomon built the largest royal harem in Israel’s history. And the Torah’s specific prediction — that multiplied wives will turn the king’s heart — was fulfilled with documentary precision. Solomon went after Ashtoreth (Sidon), Milcom (Ammon), Chemosh (Moab). Each deity corresponds to a nation in his diplomatic-marriage network. The prohibition on multiplying wives was not prophylactic caution — it was a description of a mechanism the Torah understood precisely, and which Solomon’s reign demonstrated exactly.
The King's Heart — What Covenant Loyalty Requires
Deut 17:18: “And when he sits on the throne of his kingdom, he shall write for himself in a book a copy of this law, approved by the Levitical priests. And it shall be with him, and he shall read in it all the days of his life, that he may learn to fear the LORD his God by keeping all the words of this law and these statutes.” The Torah’s answer to the heart-turning risk of multiplied wives is the daily reading of the Torah. The king’s heart is guarded not by limiting which women enter his court but by keeping which words remain at the center of his daily attention. The copy of the Torah (sefer Torah) that the king must write for himself and read all his days is the counterweight to the accumulated religious influences of a diplomatically complex court.
The prohibition on multiplying wives and the requirement to read Torah daily are not merely consecutive regulations — they address the same threat from two directions. The prohibition limits the influx of heart-turning influences from outside. The daily Torah reading maintains the covenant orientation from within. A king who obeyed both regulations would have a court with limited diplomatic-religious complexity and a personal practice that kept the covenant at the center of his attention. Solomon had the Torah — the temple he built it in — and still turned. The prohibition existed precisely because building a temple is not the same as reading the Torah every day.
- Solomon’s Seven Hundred Wives — 1 Kgs 11:1: one for each major diplomatic relationship. Each nation’s princess brought her religion; Solomon maintained all of them. The heart that the Torah said would be turned was turned — precisely, and by exactly the mechanism the prohibition named.
- The Deut 17:17 Mechanism — Deut 17:17: “that his heart not turn away.” Not a vague prohibition on excess but a precise description of a diplomatic-religious mechanism. Each wife = one foreign religion tolerated at court = one degree of heart-turning from covenant loyalty.
- The Daily Torah — Deut 17:18: the counterweight. The king who reads the Torah every day has a constant realignment of heart toward the covenant. The prohibition limits external religious influence; the daily reading maintains internal covenant orientation.
Read the source passage in the Torah reader.
Read in the Torah Reader — Deuteronomy 17:17