“Wisdom hath builded her house,
She hath hewn out her seven pillars.”
[1] Sacred Books of the East. Edited by F. Max Müller. Vol. IV. The Zend-Avesta. Part I. The Vendîdâd. Translated by James Darmesteter. P. lix., et seq.
Chapter III.
The Wives of Solomon.
According to the first book of Kings, Solomon’s half-brother, Adonijah, after the defeat of an alleged (perhaps mythical) effort to recover the throne of which he had been defrauded, submitted himself to Solomon. He had become enamored of the virgin who had been brought to the aged King David to try to revive some vitality in him; and he came to Bathsheba asking her to request her son the king to give him this damsel as his wife. Bathsheba proffered this “small petition” for Adonijah, but Solomon was enraged, and ironically suggested that she should ask the kingdom itself for Adonijah, whom he straightway ordered to execution. The immediate context indicates that Solomon suspected in this petition a plot against his throne. A royal father’s harem was inherited by a royal son, and its possession is supposed to have involved certain rights of succession: this is the only interpretation I have ever heard of the extreme violence of Solomon. But I have never been satisfied with this explanation. Would Adonijah have requested, or Bathsheba asked as a “small” thing, a favor touching the king’s tenure?
The story as told in the Book of Kings appears diplomatic, and several details suggest that in some earlier legend the strife between the half-brothers had a more romantic relation to “Abishag the Shunammite,” who is described as “very fair.”