By Joe Bob Briggs

"And he had seven hundred wives, princesses, and three hundred concubines: and his wives turned away his heart."
 — I Kings 11:3

"And whatsoever mine eyes desired I kept not from them, I withheld not my heart from any joy; for my heart rejoiced in all my labour; and this was my portion of all my labour.

"Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and on the labour that I had laboured to do: and, behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun."      — Ecclesiastes 2:10-11 (Solomon talking about himself.)

This is Joe Bob "The Exegete" Briggs with a special Valentine’s Day edition of our online Bible study, and we're going into one of my favorite areas—King Solomon's sex life.

One thousand women.

Please let this sink in for a minute.

One thousand legal women. Because, when you're the King of Israel, there's no such thing as jailbait, and there's no such thing as bigamy, and there's no such thing as having too many women in bed at the same time.

I like the way he puts it here: His eyes desired something, he just took it. He trusted his eyes.

Now. Any guy past the age of about, oh, 19, knows what happens when you trust your eyes. One day you wake up next to Miss Supermodel-On-The-Outside and discover that she's really Miss Demonic-Gargoyle-On-The-Inside. But the amazing thing about most of us is that we continue to go skulking around after supermodels, instead of doing the sensible thing and maybe asking a few questions, like, "Do you ever take a picture of your boyfriend, paint a pentagram around it, set it on fire, and chant 'You're a loser!' before you go to bed at night?"

One thousand women is a good solid number, though. That's about how many it takes to get to the point where you say, "Aha! We males want one thing, but maybe they want something else!"

King Solomon was a righteous dude. We know this because he constantly tells us how unrighteous he was. I never trust anybody who's righteous unless they've been extremely unrighteous for a long long time. The other reason I trust King Solomon is that he never says, "I'm a reformed sexaholic." He says, "I loved it. I did it all. I had every woman I wanted." He didn't decide it was empty and meaningless. He just did it until he got sick of it. Seven hundred of the women were princesses, which means he might have married them for some political reason, but 300 of them were just for funsies.

But the anonymous prophet who wrote Kings didn't even particularly care about the thousand wives and concubines. He only gives us this information for one reason—to show us that "his wives turned away his heart."

I think any guy who's ever found himself at a Michael Bolton concert knows exactly what the prophet is saying. These women had Solomon building temples to earth goddesses and star queens and the god of the Chippendale Dancers, until he had altars all over Jerusalem, offering all kinds of female self-fulfillment seminars and fertility rites and peyote dancing and every other "me first" religion that always pisses God off.

Solomon didn't mean to do it. He really didn't. He just got tired of being nagged about it, and so one day he said, "Oh, hell, I'm the King of Israel, I know who God is. What the flip difference does it make if I give Mildred one little temple to Ashtoreth? It's cheaper than redecorating her country house."

My personal guess is that this kind of thing would generally happen while Solomon was having great sex with Mildred. Just a guess.

Okay, but then the problem becomes, "Who builds it? How do you pay for it? Who's gonna work there?" And the only resources Solomon has is what God gave him. I mean, it would be different if he had this slush fund from the Ammonites, and he could build the thing 3,000 miles away and send Mildred off with a bunch of chiffon-robed attendants to run it as a for-profit ashram. But he had to go into the actual treasury to get the moolah.

God was steamed. I can hear the conversation now.

"I told you not to do this."

"But I'm not worshipping the other gods. It's a woman thing. You know how they love that astrology stuff."

"I told you not to do this."

"I'll talk to the wives tonight."

"I told you not to do this."

"I'd pull em all down, if it was up to me, but you have no idea what it's like living with a thousand women."

"I told you not to do this."

"I guess I screwed up, huh?"

All this happens at the beginning of I Kings 11. By the end of that chapter it's Chaos City in Israel.

All this happens at the beginning of every relationship. And every relationship turns into Chaos City as soon as the guy starts violating who he is to give something to the gal. It can work the other way around, too; the gal can chase false gods, too, like pretending she actually enjoys the NBA, in order to nail the guy. But I think it usually happens when the guy denies what he really believes because it conflicts with something the girl wants.

But, guys, I challenge you to try this. Walk up to Miss April and say, "Hey, honey, I think you're cool. I wonder if we believe in the same God."

If Miss April says, "Hey, cool, I'm very spiritual, too. Have you read the book of Eckankar?"

I think we all know what you're gonna say, right?

"Close enough."

That's all Solomon did. He said "Close enough."

God beat his butt, though. That's why it's still okay to mess around with Miss April. Just expect God to beat your butt when you do it.

The apostle Peter knew this. That's why he wrote, "Dearly beloved, I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul ..." (1 Peter 2:11)

"Abstain from fleshly lusts." Good advice, but impossible advice for most guys—until you look up the Greek word for "abstain." It's actually the word "apechomai," which means "be fed up with," "receive in full," "become sated."

Solomon couldn't write Ecclesiastes until he was sated. Until he received in full. And then he could write "All is vanity." Because he was fed up.

Are you following this?

I hope so.

You can't challenge me on this one. I've lived it.