Solomons Northern Conquests and the Building of Tadmor

During the second half of his forty-year reign, King Solomon launched a major campaign northward into the territory Aramean Hadadezer had once held — Solomon "went to Hamath-zobah, and took it, and he built Tadmor in the wilderness, and all the store-cities that he built in Hamath. He also built Upper Beth-horon and Lower Beth-horon, fortified cities with walls, gates, and bars, and Baalath, and all the store-cities that Solomon had and all the cities for his chariots and his horsemen" (2 Chronicles 8:3-6). The campaign extended Davidic dominion to the entire territory from the Wadi of Egypt to the Euphrates, fulfilling the ideal borders God had promised Abraham (Genesis 15:18). Tadmor — later the great oasis city of Palmyra — became the key desert way-station for caravan trade across the Syrian desert. The store-cities and chariot cities Solomon built were the infrastructure of an empire at its zenith, even though the unsustainable cost of all this expansion was already beginning to plant the seeds of the rebellion that would split the kingdom under his son Rehoboam.

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