1. And Solomon was king over all Israel. This declaration of his sovereignty over the entire nation prefaces the catalogue of his royal bureaucracy.

2. And these are the names of the officials he had. Everything that follows in this chapter is another indication of the composite character of the Solomon narrative. First we have the story of his ascent to the throne, which is actually the last episode of the David story and manifestly written by its brilliant author. Then we are given the report of Solomon’s dream-vision in which he asks for the gift of wisdom, which is followed by the folktale of Solomon’s Judgment, illustrating the exercise of that wisdom. Now we are presented with two documents listing the royal bureaucracy. The first lists the members of his cabinet in the Jerusalem court, and the second the prefects overseeing the sundry regions of the country and making sure each supplies its due provision—a form of taxation—to the royal court. Both these sections may be old documents, though there are at least a few seemingly scrambled entries and probably some later additions.

son of Zadok. Zadok is the priest who sided with Solomon in his struggle for the throne. Not surprisingly, several of the members of the king’s inner circle listed here are either his supporters, or the sons of his supporters, in that struggle.

4. Benaiah. He is the man Solomon sent to kill Joab.

6. forced labor. Conscripted labor on behalf of the king was another instrument of taxation.

8. Ben-Hur. An oddity of the list of prefects is that many names are given with patronymic only and no first name.

19. And one prefect who was in the land of Judah. The Masoretic Text reads “And one prefect who was in the land.” The next verse then begins “Judah and Israel were multitudinous.” That division of the text is problematic for two reasons: it is unclear what a prefect “in the land,” with no specified territory to supervise, would be doing; beginning a new sentence without an introductory “and” (simply, “Judah”) diverges from the norm of biblical narrative style. The assumption of this translation is that in addition to the twelve prefects named, there was to be a thirteenth prefect, perhaps designated ad hoc by the king, over the king’s own tribal territory, which would also be obliged to make an annual contribution to the court.

20. eating and drinking and rejoicing. The last term of this series could also mean “making merry.” Although all the regions of the country have to make annual contributions to the court, the implication of this verse is that the prosperity—contrary to Samuel’s dire warnings about the monarchy in 1 Samuel 8—was shared by the entire country as its population swelled.