Josephus on Solomon’s Transgression

Driven mad over women and mired in the heat of sexual passion, he [Solomon] was not satisfied with the native women alone, also marrying many women among the foreign peoples: the Sidonians, Tyrians, Ammonites, and Idumeans. He thus transgressed the laws of Moses, who had forbidden marriage with those of a different race. And he began to worship their gods, obliging these women and his desire for them. Our Lawgiver had suspected this very thing and had proclaimed in advance not to marry women from foreign lands, lest by becoming ensnared in foreign ways they fall away from their ancestral customs and pay homage to the gods of those women due to their lapse in honoring their own God. But Solomon, carried away by irrational pleasures, gave no regard to these admonitions; for when he had taken seven hundred women in marriage, the daughters of rulers and eminent men, and three hundred concubines, and in addition to these the daughter of the king of Egypt, he soon was overcome by them, until he came to imitate their practices. He was also compelled to offer proof of his kindness and affection to them, to live according to their ancestral traditions.