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What you get in the 1 Kings Maps
Atlas of 31 high resolution maps about the stories in 1 Kings, of Solomon and rulers who followed him for several generations, until the death of King Ahab, of Queen Jezebel fame.
Sample original map in the 1 Kings Bible Map collection
King David old and dying
Israel’s most revered king, David grows old. And on cold nights he sleeps with a young woman for nothing but her body heat.
Deathly sick, he declares Solomon king instead of the oldest son—Adonijah—the one everyone expected to be king. One of Solomon’s first-reported acts as king was to secure his position by executing the competition. He ordered Adonijah killed.
King David secured peace in the region by defeating neighboring armies. Solomon inherited that peace and power. And he expanded it by adding subordinate nations as far north as the Euphrates River, on Turkey’s southern border.
Israel’s gilded age
This was Israel’s golden age—40 years of peace and prosperity for everyone but those commoners Solomon drafted. He didn’t draft them for the army. He drafted them for building projects like hauling rocks and timber for his palace and for building cities to help fortify and defend the kingdom.
That’s what doomed his son. People asked King Rehoboam for a breather—some relief from the forced labor and high taxes. He said, “You think my father was heavy-handed. Compared to my heavy hand, my father was a pinky finger” (1 Kings 12:10).
Israel splits into two kingdoms
All the northern tribes left and crowned their own king.
Most kings—north and south—didn’t measure up to God’s lowest bar of acceptance. No kings in the north made the cut. In the south, godly kings included Asa and Jehoshaphat in 1 Kings and Jotham, Hezekiah, and Josiah in 2 Kings.
Two of the worst were Ahab and his Queen Jezebel. Ahab’s death ends the book of 1 Kings. But Jezebel lives to die another day, as dog meat outside her Jezreel getaway palace (2 Kings 9). Instead of looking out the upstairs window at the chariot corps commander who had just assassinated her son, the king, she should have run home to Lebanon.
