Did Solomon actually sleep with his 700 wives, or were they mostly political marriages?

Solomon had three hundred wives and seven hundred concubines, a thousand in all, and like David and Bathsheba there are several layers of truth behind the story. Three hundred wives alone would boggle the mind, and a thousand is simply not physically believable; that would be nearly three occasions a day every day of the year, and he was about forty when he began to reign, not nineteen. So the easier answer is that almost all of these were political marriages. That is what was done in those days: to keep peace with a neighboring country you exchanged wives, marrying your sons to their women and their sons to yours, which produced an almost forced peace because you would not go to war against a nation whose grandchildren were now yours. So Solomon, constantly courted by these nations through their daughters to show them favor, grew weak spiritually, because most of these peoples worshiped gods other than the God of Israel, and God had warned him precisely about that danger. Just as David sinned by taking a census, showing he trusted his own numbers rather than God his protector, Solomon sinned by leaning on these political marriages for security instead of on God. And these were among the good kings of Judah, so you can imagine the others. This shows the Bible is real; it took real men in real circumstances to produce it.