1 Kings 9:24 appears to be rather straightforward. It notes that the daughter of Pharaoh, Solomon’s wife, moved from the city of David to her own house that Solomon had built for her. Yet its placement here is somewhat mystifying, because it does not seem to have any connection with what goes before or with what immediately follows. The writer had already told us that Solomon built the Millo, which he repeats here. Coupled with this mystery is a question of grammar. Different translations translate the first word in different ways. For example, the NASB renders the first part of the verse, now Pharaoh’s daughter.
We see, however, that the ESV translates the first word as but.
According to English grammar, the word but
is a conjunction, while the word now
is an adverb. In the Hebrew Bible, the opening word is an adverb, but that doesn’t give us the answer to the translation problem. This is because the adverb can be used as if it were an adversative conjunction, calling for a contrast between what is being said and what has gone before. In addition to this, the non-adversative use of the adverb does not seem to fit the meaning now,
because it is used as a mark of emphasis, and it is not clear what would be emphasized in the language that follows about Pharaoh’s daughter moving from one place of residence to the other.
If we could read these words as an addition to 1 Kings 3:1, the mystery would disappear. Then we would read, Solomon made a marriage alliance with Pharaoh king of Egypt. He took Pharaoh's daughter and brought her into the city of David until he had finished building his own house and the house of the Lord and the wall around Jerusalem. But Pharaoh's daughter went up from the city of David to her own house that Solomon had built for her. Then he built the Millo.
Yet, six chapters of words lie between the two sentences.
When used with a particular form of the verb (the infinitive absolute), the word can be used as an adverb of time. Yet, this only occurs twice in the Old Testament, and in this verse there is no such connection. One authority, however, (the Englishman’s Hebrew concordance) does translate the word as if it were a marker of time, using the translation as soon as,
which seems to interpret the writer to mean that Solomon’s construction of the Millo had that relationship to Pharaoh’s daughter taking up residence in the house Solomon constructed for her. This use of the adverb does not appear in the standard Hebrew lexicons.
How are we to understand this? A possible explanation is that the writer is again preparing us for Solomon’s later defection from the worship and service of Yahweh. The connection between the city of David, where Pharaoh’s daughter originally was placed, and the mention of the building of the Millo, which as we have seen has to do with the filling in of a valley into a causeway connecting to hills in Jerusalem, raises the question as to where Solomon built the residence for his wife. And it seems to be on the same hill where both his own palace and the temple of God were located. Does there not seem to be something disproportionate in erecting a house for a foreign queen near the temple of Israel’s God?
24 But Pharaoh’s daughter went up from the city of David to her own house that Solomon had built for her. Then he built the Millo.