Verse of the day · September 18
What is an understanding heart in 1 Kings 3:9?
Offered anything he wanted, Solomon asked for the science of government.
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Give therefore thy servant an understanding heart to judge thy people, that I may discern between good and bad: for who is able to judge this thy so great a people?
1 Kings 3:9
Solomon had lately taken his father David's throne, and went up to Gibeon to sacrifice — the great high place, where the tabernacle and the brazen altar stood. God came to him the night after that sacrifice, in a dream, while he slept and his senses were locked up, so that access to his mind might be the more free and immediate. He saw the glory of God shine about him, and heard a voice: Ask what I shall give thee.
God was not indebted to him for the sacrifices; the offer testified his acceptance of them, and Matthew Henry takes it for a trial of his inclinations and an honour put upon the prayer of faith.
What Solomon did with it, he did asleep. By our dreams we may sometimes know what our hearts are upon and how our pulse beats. That so intelligent a choice was made with the powers of reason least active showed, Henry writes, that it came purely from the grace of God.
The prayer does not begin with a request. It begins with his father, who had walked before God in uprightness of heart, and the son says so, drawing a veil over his faults. Then he turns to himself: he is a little child who does not know how to go out or come in as he should, unable to manage the common daily business of the government, much less to know what to do in a critical juncture. JFB, reading the passage, take the little child for inexperience rather than age — he had reached manhood and must have been at least twenty, but he was raw and untried in matters of government. His father had called him a wise man; he calls himself a child in understanding.
The people it was wanted for were God's own — chosen by him, to be ruled for him, and the more wisely they were ruled the more glory he would have from them.
The request was narrower than it sounds — not wisdom in general, Adam Clarke says, but the true science of government. John Gill names what it left outside — not an understanding of things spiritual, nor of things natural, though both were given him, but of things political, what related to the civil government, that he might rule the people of Israel in the best manner.
Gill has him already possessed of a discernment between moral good and evil; what he wanted was not merely that, but the ability to tell right from wrong in any case or controversy that came before him between man and man, so that he could pass a right sentence and do justice to every one.
Give me an understanding, Henry has him praying, not to please my own curiosity with, or puzzle my neighbours, but to judge thy people. He asks as a servant, pleading the relation — I am devoted to thee, and employed for thee; give me that which is requisite to the services in which I am employed — and his father had prayed the same way.
The last thing in the prayer is a question. The people are so very numerous, with so many causes to be heard and many of them intricate and difficult, that no man is equal to such arduous work unless he has more than an ordinary capacity given him by the Lord. Henry sets the question beside Paul's — Who is sufficient for these things?
The speech pleased the Lord. By this choice Solomon made it appear that he desired to be good more than great, and to serve God's honour more than to advance his own, and the prayer prevailed for more than he asked. He was given such an understanding of the law and of the cases he was to judge that he was unequalled for a clear head and a piercing eye; riches and honour came over and above into the bargain, and long life on a condition he failed, so that he did not live as long to enjoy them as he otherwise might have. Solomon had wisdom given him, Henry writes, because he did ask it, and wealth because he did not ask it.
The request sits between two admissions that he could not do the work. Before it he tells God he does not know how to go out or come in; after it he asks who could possibly judge a people that size. Men in public stations ought to be sensible of the weight and importance of their work, and of their own insufficiency for it, and it is then that they are qualified to receive divine instruction. He names what he wants the understanding for in the same clause that asks for it — to judge thy people. The sentence calls them God's twice over, and what he wants for himself is the fitness to serve them.
Drawn from Matthew Henry, John Gill, the Jamieson-Fausset-Brown commentary and Adam Clarke. How these teachings are made