In his dream Solomon asked for a discerning mind, to distinguish right from wrong (1 Kings 3:6-9 NET).

You demonstrated great loyalty to your servant, my father David, as he served you faithfully, properly, and sincerely.  You have maintained this great loyalty to this day by allowing his son to sit on his throne.  Now, O Lord (y^ehôvâh, יהוה) my God (ʼĕlôhı̂ym, אלהי), you have made your servant king in my father David’s place, even though I am only a young man and am inexperienced.  Your servant stands among your chosen people; they are a great nation that is too numerous to count or number.  So give your servant a discerning mind so he can make judicial decisions for your people and distinguish right from wrong.  Otherwise no one is able to make judicial decisions for this great nation of yours [Table].

In response God promised Solomon a wise and discerning mind superior to that of anyone who has preceded or will succeed you¹—in the dream.  But Solomon broke every law God gave the kings of Israel while wide-awake.  Surely Solomon’s alleged wisdom was grossly overstated!

Okay, enough of this self-righteous snit.  You notice what just happened.  I’m all up in arms because the wise and discerning mind God allegedly gave Solomon was neither wise enough nor discerning enough to protect Solomon from falling afoul of the laws God gave the kings of Israel.  I reasoned that God-given discernment at a minimum should have made the king wise enough to follow God’s rules for kings, or God-given discernment can’t be discernment given by God.  It must have been only a dream.

Now faith becomes an act of self-denial, denying my reasoning to accept the difficult proposition that God-given discernment to know right from wrong was not sufficient to keep Solomon, the one given a wise and discerning mind superior to that of anyone who has preceded or will succeed him, from falling afoul of God’s law.  (And reasoning may be over or under stating the case a bit.  The premise that God-given discernment at a minimum should have made the king wise enough to follow God’s rules for kings seemed obvious, intuitive, even axiomatic to me.)

I want to review what has happened to me here.  First when I focused only on the passage titled Solomon’s Wealth, I understood that Solomon was rich, powerful and wise.  Faith was fairly easy, requiring little of me.  When I expanded the context to include Solomon’s dream, faith became more demanding.  I needed to confront and either ignore or deny the wisdom of scholarly historians.  When I expanded the context to include God’s law faith, holding all three of these passages simultaneously in a state of equilibrium I call true, requires me to deny my intuition, my reason and my wisdom.  This is the most difficult demand of all.  Is this what God meant by the passage titled Solomon’s Wealth?

I said I don’t believe in God because Solomon was richer than all his contemporaries.  Why do I believe?

I would like to elevate the tip of my nose a few degrees above the horizon and say that years of Bible study have persuaded me that the Bible is true and therefore the God revealed in its pages is also true and my God.  But that’s not true.  The Bible has been a source of inspiration, irritation and frustration ever since I was old enough to read it.  It’s not the reason I believe God.  It may be what I believe about God, but my reasons for believing are more personal.

I remember what my life was like when I believed God was evil, at least devious and misleading.  I told him I understood his silly little game and I would beat him at it.  I remember what I meant by “silly little game.”  I don’t have a clue how I intended to beat him at it.  That might have been youthful bravado rather than a seriously considered point of view.

Believing in an evil God was more than I could do for the long haul.  Eventually, I didn’t believe in Him at all, or didn’t believe that He existed at all.  I remember what my life was like as an atheist.

I’ll use the term atheist from time to time, but don’t think I was a happy, relieved or content atheist.  I was pissed off that I’d wasted so much of my life believing in “dog spelled backwards.”  Though I didn’t go quite so far in my own thinking I can certainly appreciate Nietzsche’s dilemma revealed in his later writings (Ecce Homo especially), the atheist who absolutely needed God to exist just so he could justify hating him so much.

I remember what my life was like as a naïve and religious child.  I remember what my life was like as a philosophical and legalistic young man fighting his way back from atheism.  And I certainly know my life as an older man with a, by and large, open-ended confidence in the goodness of God.  And I’m not going to throw that away because I’m having some difficulty wrapping my mind around a couple of passages in the Bible.

I’ve already acknowledged that I am rarely, if ever, working with something so concrete as “God said it.”  I’m always working with my understanding, my interpretation of what God said.  I might even put words in God’s mouth sometimes.  So when I’m having a rational problem with passages in the Bible, the first place to look for something squeegee is in my understanding, my interpretation and the words I’ve put in God’s mouth.  I’ve learned to give God and the Bible the benefit of the doubt.  It comes at the sacrifice of some certainty and peace of mind, changing my mind periodically, what I think I know.  But it keeps an old man nimble and light on his feet.

Addendum: April 15, 2020
Tables comparing 1 Kings 3:6; 3:7 and 3:8 in the Tanakh, KJV and NET, and 1 Kings (3 Kings, 3 Reigns) 3:6; 3:7 and 3:8 in the Septuagint (BLB and Elpenor) follow.