1 Kings 9:22

No bondmen. — This exemption, however it may have continued in theory, must virtually have been set aside in the later days of Solomon. (See 1 Kings 12:4.) They are here described as occupying the position of a dominant race — as warriors, servants about the person of the king, princes, and officers in the array — like the free vassals under a feudal monarchy. But as the absolute power of the king increased, and with it, perhaps, the wealth and arrogance of his favourites and greater officers, the condition of the Israelites at large might be removed from serfship more in name than in reality. Even the subject races might be played of against them, as against the Macedonians in the later years of Alexander the Great, when his royalty passed into something like a true Oriental despotism. Certainly, in later times we find, both from the history and the prophetical books, that there was such a thing as serf ship of the poor to the princes. (Jeremiah 34:8; Nehemiah 5:11.)