Solomon and Solomonic Literature

by Moncure Daniel Conway

So shall the nations praise thee, now and always.”

In this epithalamium the name of Jahveh does not occur, and Solomon himself is twice addressed as God (Elohim). This lack of anticipation was avenged by Jahvism when it arrived; the Song was put among the Psalms and transmitted to British Jahvism, which has headed it: “The majesty and grace of Christ’s kingdom. The duty of the Church and the benefits thereof.” Such is the chapter-heading to a song of bridesmaids,—described in the original as “a song of loves” and “set to lilies” (a tune of the time).

There are no indications in the Solomon legend, apart from some mistranslations, until the time of Ecclesiasticus (B. C. 180), that Solomon was a sensualist, or that there were any moral objections to the extent of his harem, which indeed is expanded by his historians with evident pride.

As to this, our own monogamic ideas are quite inapplicable to a period when personal affection had nothing to do with marriage, when women had no means of independent subsistence, and the size of a man’s harem was the measure of his benevolence. Probably there was then no place more enviable for a woman than Solomon’s seraglio.

The sin was not in the size of the seraglio but in its foreign and idolatrous wives. (Here our translators again get in an innuendo against Solomon by turning “foreign” into “strange women.”) Before a religious notion can get itself fixed as law it is apt to be enforced by an extra amount of odium. Solomon’s mother had married a Hittite, and presumably he would have imbibed liberal ideas on such subjects. The round number of a thousand ladies in his harem is unhistorical, but that the chief princesses were of Gentile origin and religion is clear. The second writer in the first Book of Kings begins (xi.) with this gravamen:

“Now King Solomon loved many foreign women besides the daughter of Pharaoh,—Moabite, Ammonite, Edomite, Zidonian, and Hittite women, nations concerning which Jahveh said to the children of Israel, Ye shall not go among them, neither shall they come among you: for surely they will turn away your heart after their gods: Solomon clave to these in love.”

The wisest of men could hardly attend to rules which an unconceived Jahveh would lay down for an unborn nation centuries later. We must, however, as we are not on racial problems, consent to a few anachronisms in names if we are to discover any credible traditions in the Biblical books relating to Solomon. As Mr. Flinders Petrie has discovered something like the word “Israel” in ancient Egypt, it may be as well to use that word tentatively for the tribe we are considering. No Israelite, then, is mentioned among Solomon’s wives, and one can hardly imagine such a man finding a bride among devotees of an altar of unhewn stones piled in a tent.

As our cosmopolitan prince had to send abroad for workmen of skill, he may also have had to seek abroad for ladies accomplished enough to be his princesses. That, however, does not explain the number and variety of the countries from which the wives seem to have come. The theory of many scholars that this Prince of Peace substituted alliances by marriage for military conquests is confirmed in at least one instance. The mother of his only son, Rehoboam, was Naamah the Ammonitess (1 Kings xiv. 31), and the Septuagint preserves an addition to this verse that she was the “daughter of Ana, the son of Nahash,”—a king (Hanum) with whom David had waged furious war. The reference in the epithalamium (Psalms xlv.) to “Tyrus’s daughter,” in connexion with 1 Kings v. 12, “there was peace between Hiram and Solomon,” suggests that there also marriage was the peacemaker.

The phrase in 1 Kings iii. 1, “Solomon made affinity with Pharaoh and took Pharaoh’s daughter” suggests, though less clearly, that some feud may have been settled in that case also. That Solomon should have espoused as his first and pre-eminent queen the daughter of a Pharaoh is very picturesque if set beside the legend of the “Land of Bondage,” but the narrative could hardly have been given without any allusion to bygones had the story in Exodus been known. Yet the words “made affinity” may refer to a racial feud in that direction. This princess brought as her dowry the important frontier city of Gezer, and her palace appears to have been the first fine edifice erected in Jerusalem.