WHAT THE BIBLE REALLY SAYS
By: J. R. Hyland
In 961 B.C., Solomon, the son of David and
Bathsheba, became the third king of Israel and under his leadership the wealth
and prestige of his country steadily increased. He ruled a kingdom whose borders
stretched from the River Euphrates to Philistia and the Egyptian border.
Historians refer to this time as the high point of the Golden Age of Israel.
The Bible characterizes Solomon as being
richer and wiser than any other king and the story of how he came to be so wise
is repeated in every generation. Solomon had a dream in which he said the Lord
appeared to him and asked “What would you like me to give you?”[1]
After thanking God “for letting me succeed my father, David,”[2]
he said “give me wisdom I need to rule your people with justice and to
know the difference between good and evil.”[3]
This request shows a certain degree of
self-awareness and good sense on the part of the young Solomon. Up to this
point, he seems to have had a problem distinguishing between good and evil. It
was not the Lord who allowed him to succeed his father; it was the crime of
fratricide that insured his reign. He had ordered the murder of his brother,
Adonijah, who as David’s eldest son had a legitimate claim to the throne.
Although it was not the custom to debate the
merits of heredity versus environment in biblical times, a retrospective
evaluation of Solomon’s life makes a good case for both points of view. He
secured the throne by having another man murdered, just as his father acquired
Bathsheba by having her first husband killed. For King Solomon, killing those
who got in your way may well have been a learned behavior.
Like his father, Solomon maintained a harem.
But David’s collection of women had been a modest establishment; he kept only
ten women there. By contrast, Solomon’s harem was a model of conspicuous
consumption, housing 300 women. He also had 700 wives, a definite breach of
Mosaic Law which said that the King was not to have many wives.[4]
Some commentators try to attribute this surfeit of females to the need for
political alliances, but the scriptures, quite frankly, report that “Solomon
loved many foreign women.”[5]
And although the Bible accepts the scribal claim that Solomon had a God-given wisdom which exceeded
that of all other men, they later blamed the women in his life for “turning
his heart to other gods.”[6]
In our own generation, when all religious
paths are supposed to lead to the same Divinity, Solomon’s worship of other gods
may not seem problematic. However, in his own time it was considered idolatrous:
a violation of the first commandment. But even his contemporaries do not seem to
have been particularly disturbed by his religious practices. This laissez-faire
attitude towards the King of Israel is all the more surprising since his worship
of other gods included Chemosh and Molech. They were deities who were especially
pleased by the sacrifice of children. Solomon built shrines to these gods
“east of Jerusalem”[7]
and there he offered “incense and sacrifices.”[8]
But when the story of Solomon is told, his practice of pagan sacrificial rites
is ignored although he set in motion a renegade practice among the Jewish people
that took hundreds of years to eradicate.
Once again, Solomon had followed in the
footsteps of his father, only on a much grander scale. Although David did not
build altars to other gods; he did have several men killed as a sacrificial
offering to the God of Israel, hoping that those deaths would end a disastrous
drought that was plaguing the land.[9]
(The Bible reports that those human sacrifices brought about the desired result.)
Building altars to worship foreign God’s was
not Solomon’s only questionable activity. His policy of forcing his own people
into slave labor camps eventually led to civil war. The King’s ongoing building
projects necessitated a huge working force and for the most part, Solomon‘s was
a peaceful reign. Consequently, large numbers of captives, the usual source of
such workers, were not available. So the King began to conscript long-term
laborers from his own tribe, the tribe of Judah: he conscripted them from the
northern tribes.
Had he used those slave laborers only for the
construction of the Jerusalem Temple, his policies might not have caused so much
bitterness among the northern tribes. But Solomon used forced labor teams to
construct lavish palaces for his wives and himself and to erect the temples for
Chemosh and Molech. For thirteen years, laborers worked to complete a palace for
the king; it had taken only seven years to build the Temple of the Lord. The
king’s fabled copper and iron mines also necessitated enormous numbers of workers.
Of course, all those building projects were
costly. So were the retinues of courtiers and servers who attended the thousand
women that Solomon supported, in varying degrees of opulence. All this
necessitated the levying of enormous taxes, which also contributed to a growing
dissatisfaction among the Hebrews. Those whose taxes and slave labor supported
the lavish lifestyle of their king would have been astonished to know that the
men who later wrote the record of that time, would attribute Solomon’s great
wealth to God’s special favor rather than to the crushing burdens he laid upon
his own people.
The king’s extravagant lifestyle ended only
with his death. As soon as he died men from the northern tribes came to his son,
King Rehoboam, asking for some relief from massive taxes and the harsh life of
slave labor gangs. They said to him, “Your father gave us a heavy burden to
bear; lighten your father’s harsh tyranny now, and the weight of the burden he
laid on us, and we will serve you.” [10] The
new king asked for three days in which to consider this request. Then he gave
his answer: “My father made you bear a heavy burden, but I will make it
heavier still. My father beat you with whips; I am going to beat you with loaded
scourges.”[11]
He never got the chance to put a heavier
burden on the people. The Northern tribes withdrew all support from the king and
formed the separate kingdom of Israel. And when Rohoboam still tried to force
the people into subjection, it caused a civil war that lasted for decades and
created a separation between the Northern and Southern tribes that was never
resolved. The United Kingdom had become the separate nations of Israel and
Judah. Each had their own king and each had their own Temple of worship and sacrifice.
For those who read the stories of men like
Solomon only in the abridgements of Sunday school lessons or in the popular and
sanitized rewrites that are endlessly churned out by religious presses,
ignorance of the facts is a bulwark against confusion. A book of Bible stories
for young readers typifies the redeemed-by-rewrite approach to the life of
Solomon. “King Solomon exceeded all the kings of the earth for riches and
wisdom and all the earth sought him to hear the wisdom which God had put in his
heart . . .When they came they brought him presents. Each year the presents grew
in size. And Solomon gave freely to the people so that everyone prospered.”[12]
It is not just the Protestant press that
revises and sanitizes the story of Solomon; the Catholic Encyclopedia gives this
version his life. His successful reign of forty years speaks well for his
intelligence, ability and statesmanship. “His successful reign of forty years
speaks well for his intelligence, ability and statesmanship . . . It was almost
entirely devoid of incident and was marked by none of the vicissitudes of
fortune which were so notable a feature in the career of David . . . (Solomon)
gave much attention to the administration of justice, the development of trade
and the erection of a national temple to the Almighty.”
These revised versions of Solomon’s life are
written by those men, past and present, who are so impressed by the king’s
wealth and power that they are willing to overlook his many sins: “Solomon
bought much glory, honor, influence and fame to the kingdom of Israel.”[13]
However, many commentators do find one aspect
of his reign worthy of censure: generations of ministers have felt it their
Christian duty to remind the members of their congregations how Solomon fell
prey to the wiles of women. And they warn the faithful to be on their guard lest
they, like the king, succumb to the evil influence of females who “led him
astray.” His admirers quote the biblical scribe who wrote “As Solomon
grew old his wives turned his heart after other gods, and his heart was not
fully devoted to the Lord his God.”[14]
Of course, in order to perpetuate this fantasy
of the female as the cause of Solomon’s sinfulness, religious teachers have to
ignore the many vices he managed to indulge before he grew old and was
influenced by his wives. But modern commentators, like their ancient counter
parts, are equal to the task: they uphold a narrow tradition that defines
sinfulness in sexual terms. By those standards, they are able to ignore
Solomon’s sins of fratricide, the enslavement of his people and the offering of
human sacrifices.
C. H. Spurgeon, a Baptist preacher of great
renown, revered by men like Billy Graham and a host of other religious
luminaries, had this to say about King Solomon: “He was a marvelous man. Earth
has not seen his like.” Of course every person is entitled to the kind of
subjective evaluation that allows him to decide who his heroes will be. But the
Reverend Spurgeon, like so many other religious leaders, goes beyond that subjectivity and
misrepresents historical facts in order to bolster his position. The biblical
records of the crushing burdens that Solomon placed on the people of his kingdom
are purged from consciousness and another scenario takes its place. This allows
someone like Spurgeon to write that King Solomon was “the prince of peace” and
during his reign “every man throughout Israel sat under his own vine and fig
tree and no man was afraid. Those were the halcyon days for all Israel when
Solomon reigned.”[15]
The kind of censorship that lauds Solomon for
being a great man by ignoring the excesses and injustices of his reign and
blaming his failings on women, also finds a voice in the Evangelical Commentary
on the Bible, “Solomon brought much glory, honor, influence and fame to the
kingdom of Israel . . . His incomparable wisdom, as well as the heritage of his
father David, and the messages he received directly from the Lord, however, were
not sufficient to offset his love for idolatrous women and his desire to please
them.”[16]
The Concise Commentary on the Whole Bible also
applauds Solomon’s reign, going so far as to say that “his kingdom was a type of
the Messiah’s in which all its subjects would enjoy a “holy security.”[17]
Solomon is variously described as being a type of Christ, the wisest man whoever
lived and the anointed of God. Paeans to his great-ness seem inexhaustible and
his life validates the cliché that nothing succeeds like success: “no descendant
of Sarah and Abraham was richer or more powerful than Solomon.”[18]
His life and accomplishments continue to be
celebrated by those who regard his enormous wealth and power as God’s
seal-of-approval on his reign. But in order to maintain that belief they must
overlook the kind of policies Solomon implemented in his pursuit of greatness
and that can be done only if the reader has no moral compass by which to judge
those actions. It can only be done if the claim of each biblical scribe is
accepted at face value, without reference to Mosaic Law, the oracles of the
Latter Prophets or the teachings of Christ. When that kind of moral vacuum is
created things like hiring contract killers to dispose of enemies or family and
the enslavement of your own people, can be viewed as regrettable or necessary
evils - - or even as the foibles of an otherwise great man.
[1]
I Kings 3:5 TEV
[2]
I Kings 3:7 TEV
[3]
I Kings 3:9 TEV
[4]
Deut. 17:17 TEV
[5]
1 Kings 11:1 TEV
[6]
1 Kings 11:4 NIV
[7]
1 Kings 11:7 NIV
[8]
1 Kings 11:8 NIV
[9]
2 Saml 21:9 NIV
[10]
1 Kings 12:4 JB
[11]
1 Kings 12:14 JB
[12]
A Child’s Bible. Anne Edwards, Paulist Press, NY 1978
[13]
Evangelical Commentary on the Bible, p. 243
[14]
1 Kings 11:4 NIV
[15]
Christ In The Old Testament, C.H. Spurgeon, AMG Publishers.
Chattanooga, TN 1994, p. 112
[16]
Evangelical Commentary on the Bible, Ed. Walter A. Elwell. Baker Book
House Co. 1989, p. 243
[17]
Concise Commentary on the Whole Bible. Matthew Henry, Moody Press,
Chicago, IL 1992, p. 254
[18]
Do note re: 2 Chronicles 9:13 - 28 which lists many of his assets,
including about 25 tons of gold.
Go on to: THE VIOLENT PROPHETS
Return to: WHAT THE BIBLE REALLY SAYS
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