King Solomon Sons: Rehoboam, Menelik and Who Ruled After Him

Quick answer: The Bible names only one of King Solomon's sons: Rehoboam, born to Naamah the Ammonite, who succeeded him and presided over the split of the kingdom. Two daughters, Taphath and Basemath, are also named. Ethiopian tradition adds a second son, Menelik I, child of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba and founder of Ethiopia's Solomonic dynasty. Later Jewish and Islamic legends mention other children, but no source gives a full list, despite Solomon's famously large household.

Related guides: who King Solomon was, how many wives Solomon had, how King Solomon died, Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, whether Solomon was a real person, the First Temple Solomon built.

How Many Sons Did King Solomon Have?

The honest answer is that nobody knows. The Hebrew Bible names exactly one son of King Solomon, Rehoboam, and two daughters, Taphath and Basemath. It names no other children at all, even though 1 Kings 11:3 credits Solomon with seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines. The silence is striking, and readers have noticed it for two thousand years.

Later traditions fill the gap in different ways. Ethiopian Christians add Menelik, the son of the Queen of Sheba. Jewish midrash tells of a daughter whose name is not given. Islamic commentators discuss an infant who died. Modern genealogical websites sometimes list additional sons drawn from medieval chronicles or from confusion with other kings, but none of these names appear in scripture.

So when someone asks about King Solomon’s sons, there are three layers to separate: the biblical record, which gives Rehoboam; the national legends, which give Menelik; and the storytellers’ additions, which give unnamed children with memorable fates. This article takes each in turn and then answers the related question of who became king after Solomon.

Rehoboam: The Son Who Inherited and Divided the Kingdom

Rehoboam is introduced in 1 Kings 11:43, where “Solomon slept with his fathers” and his son reigned in his place. First Kings 14:21 adds that he was forty-one when he took the throne, that he reigned seventeen years in Jerusalem, and that his mother was Naamah the Ammonite, one of the foreign wives whose influence the biblical author criticizes. The Chronicler repeats the details in 2 Chronicles 12:13.

His reign began with a disaster. According to 1 Kings 12, the northern tribes gathered at Shechem and asked him to lighten the forced labor and taxes his father had imposed. Rehoboam rejected the counsel of his father’s elders, followed the advice of his young companions, and answered that his little finger would be thicker than his father’s waist. Ten tribes seceded under Jeroboam and formed the northern kingdom of Israel. Rehoboam kept only Judah and Benjamin.

Second Chronicles 11:18–23 gives him eighteen wives, sixty concubines, twenty-eight sons and sixty daughters, so the family tree continues in detail precisely where Solomon’s is thin. The same book records that Shishak of Egypt raided Jerusalem in Rehoboam’s fifth year and took the Temple treasures, a moment also discussed in our article on the First Temple Solomon built.

Taphath, Basemath and the Daughters of Solomon

Solomon’s daughters appear in an unexpected place: the administrative list of 1 Kings 4. That chapter names twelve officers who each supplied the royal court for one month a year. Verse 11 says Ben-Abinadab, governor of the heights of Dor, “had Taphath the daughter of Solomon as his wife,” and verse 15 says Ahimaaz, governor of Naphtali, “took Basemath the daughter of Solomon as his wife.”

Marrying daughters to regional governors was practical politics. It bound the provinces to the throne and gave the king family in the districts that fed his household. The brief notices also tell us that the daughters were of marriageable age during Solomon’s reign and that their husbands held real power, which suggests Solomon used his children as diplomatic assets the way other Near Eastern kings did.

Jewish legend adds a third daughter with no name. In a story preserved in Midrash Tanhuma and retold in medieval collections, Solomon learns by reading the stars that his daughter will marry a poor man. He shuts her in a tower on an island to prevent it. A destitute young scholar, carried to the tower by a great bird, meets and marries her anyway, and Solomon accepts that divine decrees cannot be outwitted. The tale is about wisdom’s limits rather than history.

Menelik I and the Ethiopian Solomonic Line

The most influential addition to Solomon’s family comes from Ethiopia. The Kebra Nagast (“Glory of the Kings”), compiled in its present form in the fourteenth century from older material, tells how Makeda, Queen of Sheba, visited Solomon in Jerusalem, learned from his wisdom, and returned home carrying his child. That child, Menelik, grew up in Ethiopia, traveled to meet his father as a young man, and was anointed king. The story continues the episode told in our article on Solomon and the Queen of Sheba.

According to the Kebra Nagast, Menelik returned south accompanied by the firstborn sons of Israel’s nobles, who secretly took the Ark of the Covenant with them. Ethiopian Orthodox tradition holds that the Ark remains at Aksum. Whatever one makes of the claim, it made Solomon’s son the founder of a sacred monarchy.

The Solomonic dynasty traced its descent from Menelik and ruled Ethiopia, with interruptions, from 1270 until Emperor Haile Selassie was deposed in 1974. The 1955 constitution of Ethiopia stated the Solomonic descent of the emperor as law. No other royal house in modern times claimed Solomon as a direct ancestor so explicitly, which is why Menelik is the best-known of Solomon’s sons outside the Bible.

Solomon's Children in the Quran and Islamic Tradition

The Quran speaks of Sulayman at length as a prophet-king who commanded the wind, understood the speech of birds and ruled over the jinn, but it never names his children. Surah Sad 38:34 says, “We tried Solomon and placed on his throne a body; then he turned in repentance.” The verse does not explain what the body was, and commentators proposed several readings.

One line of interpretation, recorded by exegetes including al-Tabari, connects the verse with a story in which Solomon hopes for many sons who will fight in God’s cause and omits to say “God willing.” In this telling only one child is born, incomplete or stillborn, and its body is laid before him as a lesson in humility. Other commentators prefer a different story involving a jinn who briefly takes Solomon’s throne. The traditions are presented in the commentaries as possibilities, not as settled fact.

Later Islamic storytelling, collected in the “tales of the prophets” genre, repeats the lost-child motif and sometimes gives Rehoboam under an Arabic form of his name as the successor. These writers knew the biblical account through Jewish and Christian neighbors and treated Solomon’s dominion over the jinn, discussed in King Solomon and the jinn, as the more important theme.

Who Was King After Solomon? The Divided Monarchy

The short answer is Rehoboam, but the full answer is two kings. The split at Shechem created two states, each with its own line.

Judah (the southern kingdom)

• Rehoboam (c. 931–913 BCE): Solomon’s son; ruled from Jerusalem over Judah and Benjamin.
• Abijam (also called Abijah): Rehoboam’s son, who fought Jeroboam according to 2 Chronicles 13.
• Asa: Abijam’s son, remembered as a reformer; the Davidic line continued through him.

Israel (the northern kingdom)

• Jeroboam I: formerly Solomon’s labor overseer, who had fled to Egypt after the prophet Ahijah promised him ten tribes (1 Kings 11:26–40).
• Nadab: Jeroboam’s son, assassinated after two years, ending the family’s hold on the throne.

Why the dates are approximate

Biblical chronology for this period is reconstructed from regnal years in Kings and Chronicles cross-checked against Egyptian and Assyrian records. Most scholars put the division around 930 BCE, give or take a few years. Readers who want the background on the historical debate will find it in our discussion of whether Solomon was a real person.

Why So Few Sons? Ancient and Modern Explanations

Ancient readers found the contrast between a thousand women and one named son hard to ignore. Some rabbinic voices treated it as a judgment: the foreign wives who turned Solomon’s heart in his old age (1 Kings 11:4) also left him without a strong house. Others pointed out that the biblical narrative is interested in the line of David, not in a census of the palace, so only the heir needed naming.

Modern historians add a textual point. The books of Kings were edited long after Solomon’s time, and their authors were selective. The daughters appear only because they happened to be mentioned in a list of officials; other children may have existed and simply fallen outside the editors’ purpose. The figure of seven hundred wives is also widely regarded as hyperbole meant to signal royal grandeur and the danger of foreign alliances.

There is also the possibility that Solomon’s reign was shorter or his court smaller than the text suggests, a view connected to the archaeological debate about the size of tenth-century Jerusalem. On that reading the small number of named children is unsurprising. Either way, the question of King Solomon’s sons ends where it began: one heir in the record, and a great deal of tradition surrounding him.

What This Means for Readers Comparing the Sources

Treat the three layers separately and the picture stays clear. The Bible gives Rehoboam, Taphath and Basemath, with dates and places. The Kebra Nagast gives Menelik and a national origin story that served a real dynasty for seven centuries. Midrash and Quran commentary give unnamed children whose stories teach lessons about humility and fate. Each source answers a different question, and none pretends to be a complete family register.

When you meet a list online that names five or ten sons of Solomon, check where each name comes from. Some derive from confusion with the sons of David, who are listed at length in 2 Samuel and 1 Chronicles. Some come from medieval chronicles that padded genealogies for political reasons. A name without a chapter and verse, or without a named tradition, is probably an invention.

For the wider story of the king himself, including his reputation for wisdom and his death, start with our overview of who King Solomon was and the companion piece on how many wives he had. The sons are a small chapter in a very large legend, but they are the chapter that decided what happened to his kingdom.

Disclaimer

This article summarizes biblical, Ethiopian, Jewish and Islamic sources about Solomon's children for historical and educational purposes. Traditions are described as traditions, and the article makes no claim about their factual accuracy.