Book Review: The Heart of a King

By Jill Eileen Smith
Revell, 2019
432 pages

Known among nations as the mighty king of Israel, Solomon is wealthy beyond measure and wise beyond compare. For this reason, rulers and ambassadors from many nations bring him gifts and daughters, hoping to forge peaceful alliances. But out of the hundreds of wives and concubines in his harem, four women stand out.

Naamah is an Ammonite princess, Solomon’s first wife, and the mother of his heir, earning her a place of honor in his heart. The Hebrew shepherdess Abishag served his father David faithfully before becoming Solomon’s second wife. A princess from Egypt, Siti is reluctant to embrace the Hebrew faith, and challenges the wisdom her husband is known for with her questions. And Nicaula is the queen of Sheba, who travels to form an alliance with Solomon with no intention of falling in love in the process.

Each of these women, along with Solomon’s beloved mother Bathsheba, influence his reign in different ways. Their contrasting relationships with him show that even the most wise man in the world is not immune to a woman’s love and help their husband and king learn the importance of putting God first above all things.

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Thanks to Revell for sending me a copy of The Heart of a King to review. All thoughts and opinions in this post are my own.

I was blown away by The Heart of a King. The thing I often love about biblical fiction that I think this book did really well is give you a different perspective on an event or person that you might not have a lot of details about from the Bible. Even if you’ve read about Solomon and his rise and rule over Israel dozens of times as I have, I know that I have never stopped to consider the underlying thoughts and emotions of him or the people around him.

The relationships between Solomon and the four wives that are portrayed in this book are very much fictional accounts based on the small amount of facts available about them. Even still, I feel like I have a better understanding of what was behind the writing of Song of Solomon and Ecclesiastes. The author made me care about each of these women as a person and it’s hard not to empathize with a woman forced to share her husband, even if that was the cultural norm of the time period.

Along those same lines, I was surprised at how much compassion I felt for Solomon even as my heart ached for what these women were going through. It has left me feeling encouraged to go back and study my Bible more, to try to determine for myself if the admirable, if somewhat misguided, motives attributed to him in The Heart of a King could be accurate.

Overall, I really enjoyed The Heart of a King and would recommend it highly. If you already know you enjoy biblical fiction another book I recently read in that genre is Of Fire and Lions, the account of Daniel and his wife Belili. I think these would be really good companion reads.