Let's walk through Solomon's life the way it deserves — not as a simple morality tale about wisdom or excess, but as a single reign that manages to contain both the highest and one of the saddest turns in the whole Old Testament, often within a few chapters of each other. We'll take it in order. Where the New Testament picks something up, that gets pointed to as we go, and where a voice worth hearing has something to add, it's brought in by name.
Here's the shape of the whole reign first, so you can hold the clock in your head. Solomon becomes king as a young man, likely still in his teens or early twenties, following the near-coup of his half-brother Adonijah. He reigns forty years — the same length as his father David's reign — building the Temple in the fourth year and finishing his own palace complex thirteen years after that. Wisdom, wealth, and international fame define the middle of his life. By the end, foreign wives and the gods they brought with them have pulled his own heart away from the God who gave him everything, and the kingdom that took his whole reign to build and consolidate is torn in two within a single generation of his death. Hold both halves of that story at once as we go, because the text refuses to let you resolve Solomon into either a hero or a cautionary tale alone. He's both, in the same life.
Solomon doesn't come to the throne cleanly. While David is old and failing, his son Adonijah — Absalom's younger brother, next in line by simple seniority — declares himself king with the support of Joab, David's own general, and Abiathar, a senior priest (1 Kings 1:5–7). It's Bathsheba, Solomon's mother, who goes in to remind David of an earlier promise that Solomon would succeed him, and David acts decisively at the last possible moment, having Solomon anointed and enthroned immediately, before Adonijah's coup can consolidate (1 Kings 1:32–40). Notice what's actually happening structurally here: the woman at the center of David's worst chapter becomes, decades later, the reason his throne passes correctly to the son of the covenant promise rather than to a rival with an army of supporters already gathered. Grace running backward through consequence is a pattern you've already met more than once in this family.
Solomon's early reign involves consolidating power in ways that read uncomfortably to a modern eye and are worth being honest about rather than softening — Adonijah is eventually executed for a request Solomon reads as a renewed claim on the throne, and Joab is killed for his earlier crimes and his support of the coup (1 Kings 2:23–25, 34). The text doesn't editorialize much on the morality of these acts; it simply records a young king securing a kingdom the way ancient kings did, for better and worse, and then moves on to what actually makes Solomon's reign remarkable.