The Lord said unto me, ‘Thou art my son;
This day have I begotten thee.’”
(It is probable that the name Jahveh was inserted in this song in place of Elohim, and in several other phrases there are indications that the original has been tampered with.) The lines—
“Kiss the son lest he be angry
And ye perish straightway.”
and others, may have originated the legendary particulars of plots caused by Solomon’s accession, recorded in the Book of Kings, but at any rate the emphatic claim to his adoption by God as His son, by the anointing received at coronation, suggests some trouble arising out of his birth. There is also a confidence and enthusiasm in the language of the court laureate, as the writer of Psalm ii. appears to have been, which conveys an impression of popular sympathy.
It is not improbable that the superstition about illegitimacy, as under some conditions a sign of a hero’s heavenly origin, may have had some foundation in the facts of heredity. In times when love or even passion had little connexion with any marriage, and none with royal marriages, the offspring of an amour might naturally manifest more force of character than the legitimate, and the inherited sensual impulses, often displayed in noble energies, might prove of enormous importance in breaking down an old oppression continued by an automatic legitimacy of succession.
In Talmudic books (Moed Katon, Vol. 9, col. 2, and Midrash Rabbah, ch. 15) it is related that when Solomon was conveying the ark into the temple, the doors shut themselves against him of their own accord. He recited twenty-four psalms, but they opened not. In vain he cried, “Lift up your heads, O ye gates!” But when he prayed, “O Lord God, turn not Thy face from Thine anointed; remember the mercies of David thy servant” (2 Chron. vi. 42), the gates flew open. “Then the enemies of David turned black in the face, for all knew that God had pardoned David’s transgression with Bathsheba.” This legend curiously ignores 1 Chron. xxii., which shows that Jahveh had prearranged Solomon’s birth and name, and had adopted him before birth. It is one of many rabbinical intimations that David, Bathsheba, Uriah, and Solomon, had become popular divinities,—much like Vulcan, Venus, Mars,—and as such relieved from moral obligations. Jewish theology had to accommodate itself ethically to this popular mythology, and did so by a theory of divine forgiveness; but really the position of Hebrew, as well as Christian, orthodoxy was that lustful David and Bathsheba were mere puppets in the divine plan, and their actions quite consistent with their being souls after Jahveh’s own heart.
[1] The name given to him in 2 Sam. xii. 25, Jedidiah (“beloved of Jah”), by the prophet of Jahveh, is, however, an important item in considering the question of an actual monarch behind the allegorical name, especially as the writer of the book, in adding “for Jahveh’s sake” seems to strain the sense of the name—somewhat as the name “Jesus” is strained to mean saviour in Matt. i. 21. Jedidiah looks like a Jahvist modification of a real name (see p. [20]).