The wisest man on earth. The greatest fool in history.

King Solomon has built a golden age. The mighty Temple of Yahweh gleams on Mount Moriah, silver is as common as stones in the streets of Jerusalem, and the borders of Israel are secured by an intricate, flawless web of international treaties. He is the master of the known world, a philosopher-king ruling with an unparalleled, divine intellect.

But peace has a price, and Solomon is paying for it with the soul of his nation.

To maintain his geopolitical empire, Solomon takes a thousand foreign wives and concubines into his court. Among them are Siti, the haughty daughter of Pharaoh, and Naamah, a fiercely ambitious Ammonite princess. To keep the peace within his sprawling household, the king begins to grant minor concessions—a hidden shrine here, a quiet altar there.

Convinced that his transcendent wisdom can manage the darkness, Solomon falls into a terrifying intellectual trap. As the smoke of foreign sacrifices begins to rise opposite the holy mountain, the orthodox priesthood recoils in horror, and the northern tribes, crushed under the weight of Solomon’s relentless labor quotas, are pushed to the brink of rebellion by a brilliant, bitter foreman named Jeroboam.

When the ancient prophet Ahijah delivers a devastating curse upon the House of David, Solomon’s legendary mind fractures into paranoid tyranny. King Solomon: The Wisdom That Ruined Israel is a sprawling historical tragedy of power, compromise, and the devastating realization that a mind capable of managing the world is entirely useless when it loses its soul.

He built the house of God. Then, he provided the fire to burn it down.