⁹ Intermarry with us; give your daughters to us, and take our daughters for yourselves. ¹⁰ Thus you can live among us. The land is open before you. Settle and move about freely in it and acquire holdings here.”^[a]

¹⁶ And when you take their daughters as wives for your sons, and their daughters prostitute themselves with their gods, they will make your sons do the same.

¹² For if you ever turn away from him and join with the remnant of these nations that survive among you, by intermarrying and intermingling with them,^{(A) 13} know for certain that the Lord, your God, will no longer dispossess these nations at your approach. Instead they will be a snare and a trap for you, a scourge for your sides and thorns for your eyes, until you perish from this good land which the Lord, your God, has given you.^(B)

⁵ So the Israelites settled among the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites.^{(A) 6} They took their daughters in marriage, and gave their own daughters to their sons in marriage,^(B) and served their gods.

Chapter 11

The End of Solomon’s Reign.^{[a] 1 (A)}King Solomon loved many foreign women besides the daughter of Pharaoh—Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Sidonians, Hittites— ^2 (B)from nations of which the Lord had said to the Israelites: You shall not join with them and they shall not join with you, lest they turn your hearts to their gods. But Solomon held them^[b] close in love. ³ He had as wives seven hundred princesses and three hundred concubines, and they turned his heart.

⁴ When Solomon was old his wives had turned his heart to follow other gods, and his heart was not entirely with the Lord, his God, as the heart of David his father had been. ⁵ Solomon followed Astarte, the goddess of the Sidonians, and Milcom, the abomination of the Ammonites. ⁶ Solomon did what was evil in the sight of the Lord, and he did not follow the Lord unreservedly as David his father had done.