1 Kings 1:1

THE FIRST BOOK OF THE KINGS

-Year from the Creation, according to the English Bible, 2989.

-Year before the Incarnation, 1015.

-Year from the destruction of Troy, according to Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 170.

-Year before the first Olympiad, 239.

-Year before the building of Rome, 262.

-Year of the Julian Period, 3699.

-Year of the Dionysian Period, 507.

-Cycle of the Sun, 3.

-Cycle of the Moon, 13.

-Year of Acastus, the second perpetual archon of the Athenians, 31.

-Pyritiades was king over the Assyrians about this time, according to Scaliger, Langius, and Strauchius. He was the thirty-seventh monarch, (including Belus,) according to Africanus, and the thirty-third according to Eusebius.

-Year of Alba Silvius, the sixth king of the Latins, 15.

-Year of David, king of the Hebrews, 40.

CHAPTER I

David, grown old, is, by the advice of his physicians,

cherished by Abishag the Shunummite, 1-4.

Adonijah conspires with Joab and Abiathar to seize on the

government, 5-10.

Nathan and Bathsheba communicate these tidings to the aged king,

11-27.

David immediately pronounces Solomon his successor, and causes

Zadok and Nathan to proclaim and anoint him king, 28-40.

Adonijah and his friends hear of it, are afraid, and flee away,

Adonijah laying hold on the horns of the altar, from which he

refuses to go till Solomon shall promise him his life; this he

does, and banishes him to his own house, 41-53.

NOTES ON CHAP. I

Verse 1 Kings 1:1. Now King David was old] He was probably now about sixty-nine years of age. He was thirty years old when he began to reign, reigned forty, and died in the seventieth year of his age, 2 Samuel 5:4, and 1 Kings 2:11; and the transactions mentioned here are supposed to have taken place about a year before his death.

But he gat no heat.] Sixty-nine was not an advanced age; but David had been exhausted with various fatigues, and especially by family afflictions, so that he was much older in constitution than he was in years. Besides he seems to have laboured under some wasting maladies, to which there is frequent reference in the Psalms.