The Wisest Man’s Worst Decade

Section 1 · Hook

A Pantry Shelf Never Tells You How Things Arrived

I bought two cans of albacore last Saturday, the ordinary kind stacked by the dozen near the peanut butter, and gave them no further thought until Thursday morning. That day, Global Labor Justice, a Washington-based worker-rights organization, released a report on the fishing boats that supply StarKist’s Pacific albacore, the product of a two-and-a-half-year investigation (Washington Post, 2026).¹

The report rests on interviews with 92 Indonesian fishers who had worked aboard 37 Taiwan-flagged or Taiwan-owned vessels. According to the investigators, every fisher described at least one recognized indicator of forced labor, and all 92 said their passports had been taken from them (SeafoodSource, 2026).² For a narrower group, the report reached a firmer conclusion. Roughly two-thirds of the men, spread across 27 vessels, faced conditions the investigators judged sufficient to qualify as forced labor under U.S. Customs and Border Protection standards.

The testimonies arrived quietly, the way a cold can settles into your palm. Fishers described workdays stretching sixteen to twenty-two hours, recruitment debts that made leaving impossible, and months at sea without a port call (Newser, 2026).³ One of them, a 25-year-old named Masruhki, said his boat carried Starlink satellite internet that the crew was not allowed to use. StarKist, owned by South Korea’s Dongwon Industries, declined to answer specific questions. It pointed instead to an industry statement opposing labor abuse and directing complaints to authorities.

I’ll admit what I did next. I opened the cupboard and looked at the cans for a while. They looked exactly as they had on Saturday. Nothing on a shelf announces the conditions under which it came to be there.

Scripture keeps a portrait of this kind of silence, and its subject is not a tyrant. He is a sage, the king whom the Bible portrays as possessing wisdom without equal before or after him (1 Kings 3:12). He began his reign by asking God for a heart that could hear. He ended it, by the text’s own account, as an old man whose heart had turned (1 Kings 11:4), presiding over a kingdom whose people would soon beg his son for relief. In the previous installment, we examined [직전 편 핵심 한 줄]; this time the question presses closer: how a man so wise could end his reign hearing so little of what his own kingdom was saying.

Section 2 · Historical Case

Every Monument Has a Quarry Behind It

Work on the Suez Canal began in 1859, and much of its early excavation depended on an instrument older than the pharaohs. The corvée was the state’s claim on its peasants’ labor for public works. Egyptian villagers were conscripted in large numbers and rotated through the desert to dig by hand, often for little or no pay, until international pressure curtailed the practice on the project in the mid-1860s (Karabell, 2003).⁴ When the canal opened in 1869, the celebrations belonged to emperors and financiers. The men who had moved the earth barely appeared in them.

The pattern is old and stubborn. A ruler of genuine vision conceives something magnificent. The magnificence requires hands, and the hands come from those least able to refuse.

Solomon’s building years reveal a remarkably similar tension, though the Bible tells that story with more candor than any opening ceremony. The temple took seven years to complete; Solomon’s own house took another thirteen (1 Kings 6:38; 7:1). To supply the work, 1 Kings describes a levy of 30,000 men drawn from all Israel and sent to the forests of Lebanon in rotations of ten thousand, one month away and two months home (1 Kings 5:13–14). The same chapter gives the striking figures of 70,000 burden-bearers and 80,000 stonecutters in the hills. Commentators have long debated those numbers, but they leave no doubt about the scale the writer wanted readers to feel.

Then, in chapter 9, the text draws a line. The permanent labor force, it says, was raised from the Canaanite peoples who remained in the land, while Israelites served as soldiers, officials, and commanders rather than slaves (1 Kings 9:20–22). It is a real distinction, and it deserves to be taken seriously. Yet the narrative will not let it stand alone. Israelites had felled cedar in Lebanon. Two chapters later, a capable young administrator named Jeroboam is placed over the forced labor of the house of Joseph (1 Kings 11:28), one of Israel’s own tribal houses. The text gives us a distinction, but it does not give us an easy escape from the burden behind it.

Section 3 · Biblical Lens

The Heart He Asked For

At Gibeon, God invites the young king to ask for whatever he wishes. Solomon passes over long life, riches, and the defeat of his enemies.

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 (KJV)

The Hebrew phrase behind “understanding heart,” lev shomea, is more literally a hearing heart. Wisdom in this first portrait is not cleverness but attentiveness, the capacity to receive a case fully before judging it. The story that follows proves the point. Two women arrive with one living infant between them, and Solomon finds the true mother by listening for which of them would rather lose the child than see him harmed.

It is worth remembering whose ear that prayer imitates. Israel’s life as a people began when God heard the groaning of laborers in Egypt (Exodus 2:23–24). A hearing heart on Israel’s throne was meant to be a small, human reflection of that divine attentiveness, bent toward those with the least voice.

Eight chapters later, the word heart returns with a different weight.

For it came to pass, when Solomon was old, that his wives turned away his heart after other gods: and his heart was not perfect with the LORD his God, as was the heart of David his father.

— 1 Kings 11:4 (KJV)

The turning is dated, pointedly, to his old age. The writer does not describe a young king seduced overnight but a long reign, forty years by the text’s count (1 Kings 11:42), whose final stretch bent away from its first prayer. The same chapter notes that the Lord had appeared to Solomon twice (1 Kings 11:9). By the end, the voice that met him at Gibeon and the voices beneath the yoke were going unheeded together. After his death, the northern tribes gather before his son Rehoboam and put into words what the palace had stopped registering.

Thy father made our yoke grievous: now therefore make thou the grievous service of thy father, and his heavy yoke which he put upon us, lighter, and we will serve thee.

— 1 Kings 12:4 (KJV)

Read together, the three passages trace an arc: a heart that asks to hear, a heart turned elsewhere, and a people who must finally say aloud what the king’s system no longer took in. Solomon never stopped hearing altogether. He heard ambassadors, riddles, and the Queen of Sheba’s praise. What faded was his ear for one particular sound, the sound his own kingdom made under load.

None of this licenses us to read every collapse as a verdict issued from heaven. What the text will not let us avoid is quieter and more searching: a people’s arrangements, who carries and who is carried, eventually surface as the truest account of what they valued.

Section 4 · Pattern Insight

The Drift Is Written in Small Entries

Solomon’s story is ancient. The mechanism it exposes is not. The International Labour Organization estimates that on any given day in 2021, some 27.6 million people were in forced labor worldwide (ILO, Walk Free & IOM, 2022).⁵ A later ILO study put the illegal profits from that labor at roughly $236 billion a year (ILO, 2024).⁶ Almost none of it reaches the evening news. It reaches a supply chain instead, and eventually a shelf.

Figures that large resist the imagination, which is why the Solomon narrative repays slow reading. The writer of Kings does not present the king’s fall as a single catastrophe. He records it as a ledger, each entry defensible on its own terms.

The first entry appears almost unnoticed. Before the Gibeon prayer, before a single cedar is felled, the text mentions that Solomon made a marriage alliance with Pharaoh (1 Kings 3:1). It was sound statecraft. It was also the opening thread of a pattern Deuteronomy had anticipated. The royal law of Deuteronomy 17:16–17 lays three warnings on any future king: do not multiply horses or send the people back to Egypt to acquire them, do not multiply wives, and do not greatly increase silver and gold.

The writer of Kings sets Solomon’s record against those warnings like exhibits in a quiet courtroom. Gold arrives at 666 talents in a single year (1 Kings 10:14). Horses come up out of Egypt (1 Kings 10:28). The royal household swells to 700 wives and 300 concubines (1 Kings 11:3). The wisest man in Israel violated the three warnings written specifically for kings, and he did so one reasonable decision at a time. None of the entries required Solomon to think of himself as abandoning wisdom. Alliances kept borders quiet, horses meant defense, and gold looked like the visible blessing of a prosperous reign.

A subtler echo runs beneath the ledger. When 1 Kings 9:19 lists Solomon’s “store cities,” it uses the same phrase Exodus 1:11 used for Pithom and Raamses, the cities Hebrew slaves built for Pharaoh. The word for the labor levy, mas, appears in both accounts. The narrator never accuses Solomon of becoming Pharaoh. He lets the vocabulary do its work, until the story of the temple begins to echo the very system from which Israel’s story had begun by being delivered.

Walter Brueggemann has given this tension a memorable theological vocabulary. In The Prophetic Imagination, he described the Solomonic order as a “royal consciousness,” a settlement in which abundance for some and burden for others coexist comfortably, with God domesticated inside the royal precincts (Brueggemann, 2001).⁷ In a later study, he called Solomon an ironic icon of human achievement, a figure whose accomplishments and failures cannot be separated because they grew from the same root (Brueggemann, 2005).⁸

Such a settlement does not need cruelty at the top. It needs distance. Solomon’s twelve district officers, each provisioning the court for one month of the year (1 Kings 4:7), made sure the palace received its bread without ever standing in the fields that grew it. A modern supply chain achieves a similar insulation through sheer length. Boat, broker, cannery, distributor, and shelf can each say truthfully that they saw only the next link.

That is the unsettling insight. Solomon’s splendor and Solomon’s yoke were not two stories; they were one story told from two ends of the chain. The narrative proves it through its own plot, by way of Jeroboam. A prophet named Ahijah meets the young overseer on the road outside Jerusalem, tears a new garment into twelve pieces, and hands him ten (1 Kings 11:29–31). Solomon seeks his life, and Jeroboam flees to Egypt, of all places, to wait (1 Kings 11:40). When Solomon dies, the assembly that comes to Rehoboam asking for a lighter yoke brings Jeroboam with it (1 Kings 12:2–3). The man who once administered the burden returns as the voice of those who carried it.

Section 5 · Closing

Wisdom Is Measured by Who It Can Still Hear

The chain completes itself within a single chapter. Rehoboam first consults the elders who had served his father. They counsel him to serve the people for a day and speak gently to them, promising that such a king would be followed for good (1 Kings 12:6–7). Then he turns to the young men raised beside him in the palace and takes their counsel instead: a heavier yoke. Ten tribes walk away. When he sends Adoram, the official over the forced labor, to restore order in the north, Adoram never makes it back to Jerusalem (1 Kings 12:18). The text records this without comment.

I have read 1 Kings 11 more times than I can count, and it has never once felt like ancient history. What unsettles me is not that Solomon was wicked. It is that he was capable, faithful for a season, and admired by queens, and still came to preside over a system that heard nearly everything except the one sound it most needed to hear.

Envoys from every nation came to hear Solomon’s wisdom (1 Kings 10:24); the quarries sent no delegation. A signal capable of crossing oceans passed over those fishers’ heads every hour of every shift. The men beneath it were not permitted to use it.

The cans are still in my cupboard, but the question they raise is no longer about tuna. It is closer to asking what I have learned to enjoy without ever learning to see. A person need not own a quarry or a fishing fleet to live inside Solomon’s arrangement; it is enough to enjoy the cedar and never ask about the forest. Systems rarely announce the moment wisdom becomes accommodation. They accumulate one reasonable decision at a time, until the people carrying the weight must say out loud what the builders stopped hearing.

The elders’ counsel still stands in the text, unused, like a road the kingdom never took: serve them, and speak to them kindly. Centuries later another son of David would stand among the weary and offer a yoke that was easy and a burden that was light (Matthew 11:28–30). The alternative to Solomon’s arrangement was never a smarter king. It was a humbler one.

Notes

1. “StarKist’s tuna supply chain partly relies on forced labor, report finds.” The Washington Post, September 17, 2026. ↩
2. “Migrant fishers call out StarKist in ‘Freedom for Fishers Campaign.'” SeafoodSource, September 18, 2026. ↩
3. “Rights Group Links StarKist Supply Chain to Forced Labor.” Newser, September 18, 2026 (summarizing The Washington Post reporting). ↩
4. Karabell, Zachary. Parting the Desert: The Creation of the Suez Canal. New York: Knopf, 2003. ↩
5. International Labour Organization, Walk Free, and International Organization for Migration. Global Estimates of Modern Slavery: Forced Labour and Forced Marriage. Geneva: ILO, 2022. ↩
6. International Labour Organization. Profits and Poverty: The Economics of Forced Labour. Geneva: ILO, 2024. ↩
7. Brueggemann, Walter. The Prophetic Imagination. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001. ↩
8. Brueggemann, Walter. Solomon: Israel’s Ironic Icon of Human Achievement. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005. ↩