1 Kings 2:24, commentary and pictures

Solomon swore by the living Lord who had established him on the throne of David his father and had made him a house as promised, and on that ground declared that Adonijah would be put to death that day. The declaration records Solomon affirming that the Lord had made his dynasty secure and fulfilled the promise of a royal house to him. He gave the order after Adonijah's further offense and insult to the king.

The verse belongs to the account of Solomon carrying out David's instructions to secure his throne after David's death. It reflects the succession crisis in which Adonijah had tried to take the throne before Solomon was publicly established as king. Solomon regarded Adonijah's request for the king's concubine as a shrewd plot to gain the kingdom, since possessing her could give him a strong claim to the throne among the fickle people.

The verse falls within the larger record of David's rise to become king over all Israel after years of conflict between David and the son of Saul. That account shows that God selected the ruler of His people rather than allowing the throne to pass simply to a deceased king's son. In the same settling of accounts, Solomon had Adonijah executed after being established on his father's throne for unholy ambition in trying to take advantage of the king's old age to seize the kingdom. Nathan opposed that plan because he knew the Lord's will and the king's mind, with the result that Solomon was crowned king, while Joab was slain a little later for disloyalty to his king, as was Shimei who had cursed David and then failed to keep the conditions of his life.

Adonijah's attempt to take David's throne ended in his overthrow and death as another consequence of the sword remaining in David's house after his sin. That death was part of the retribution for David's wicked conduct toward Uriah, which continued through all the rest of David's life and fell principally on his own family alongside the history of Amnon and Tamar and the rebellion and crimes of Absalom. The verse belongs to the later history of David's house showing how Nathan's denunciation of David's sin was fulfilled in judgments upon him.

The putting to death of Adonijah by his brother Solomon was the fourth untimely death of David's sons paying David's own fourfold sentence upon the man who took the poor man's lamb. Adonijah was the beautiful son whom his father never displeased, and his being slain by Solomon even at God's altar completed the just providence by which David lost the child of Bathsheba slain by the Lord, Amnon his first-born murdered by his brother Absalom, and Absalom slain by Joab. The verse thus displays how dreadfully David was punished and the goodness and severity of God, warning readers not to repeat his well-circumstanced sin lest they share its penalty. The death for rebellion teaches that wrongdoing brings calamity and sorrow back upon the wrongdoer in the very kind of evil he caused others, that what a man sows he reaps, and that sin pays in its own kind.