Lives of Scripture

Hadad was a child of the royal family of Edom when Joab, David's army commander, came to Edom to bury Israel's slain and "struck down every male in Edom" during a prolonged military campaign (1 Kings 11:15-16). Hadad escaped the slaughter, fleeing to Egypt with a group of his father's Edomite servants while still "a young boy" (11:17). Pharaoh received him with striking generosity -- giving him a house, an allowance of food, an assignment of land, and eventually his own sister-in-law Tahpenes in marriage. Their son Genubath was raised in Pharaoh's own household "among the sons of Pharaoh" (11:18-20). Only after David and Joab were both dead did Hadad ask Pharaoh to let him return home; despite Pharaoh's reluctance to lose him, Hadad insisted, and went back to Edom (11:21-22). There, Scripture says, he became one of the adversaries "the LORD raised up" against Solomon (11:14) -- part of a pointed pattern in 1 Kings 11, where God specifically stirs up outside threats (Hadad, Rezon, and eventually Jeroboam) as consequences for Solomon's unfaithfulness in marrying foreign wives and worshiping their gods late in his reign. Hadad's decades-long path from fugitive child to adversary illustrates how thoroughly Scripture treats even foreign political trouble as under God's sovereign hand, deployed as discipline for His own covenant king's disobedience.