Solomon in the Hexateuch.
“And when they brought out the money that was brought into the house of Jahveh, Hilkiah the priest found the book of the law of Jahveh given by Moses. And Hilkiah answered and said to Shaphan the scribe, I have found the book of the law in the house of Jahveh.” (2 Chron. xxxiv. 14, 15.) The Chronicler adds to the earlier account (2 Kings xxii. 8) the words “given by Moses,” which looks as if the authenticity of the book (Deuteronomy) had not been without question. The finding of the Book is set forth in a sort of picture, wherein are grouped the priest, the theologian, the phantom prophet, the deity, the temple, and the contribution-box. Every part of the ecclesiastical machine is present.
One is irresistibly reminded of the finding of the Book of Mormon by Joseph Smith, although it would be unfair to ascribe Deuteronomist atrocities to the revelations of the American phantom, Mormon. Nor is this a mere coincidence. There are lists of the early Mormons which show a large proportion of them to have borne Old Testament names, derived from Puritan ancestors. When Solomon set up his philosophic throne at Harvard University, and the parishes of the Pilgrims became Unitarian, and Boston became artistic, literary, and worldly, the Jahvists began to migrate, carrying with them their Sabbatarian Ark, in which so many frontier communities are imprisoned “unto this day.” Some of them have become conquerors of Hawaiian “Canaanites,” appropriating their lands. But the Vermont Hilkiah, Joseph Smith, discerned that a new Deuteronomy was needed to deal with the many American sects, and was guided by an Angel of the Lord to a spot in Ontario County, New York, where the Book was found (1827), which he was enabled to translate by the aid of his “Urim and Thummim” spectacles, found beside the Book. In the Book were discussed the principles of all the sects, though not by name, as in Deuteronomy Moses is made to deal with the conditions which had arisen since the time of Solomon. Unfortunately for these American Jahvists, they had left the New English brains behind, with Channing and Emerson, and had not carried with them enough to produce a western Jeremiah to save their movement from ridicule and popular hatred.
“Thy words were found and I did eat them,” says Jeremiah (xv. 16). Whether, as some scholars think, Jeremiah had any part in the composition of the Book “found,” or not, his rage attests the existence at the time of an important Solomonic School. “How say you, We are wise, and the law of the Lord is with us? Behold the lying pen of the scribes has turned it to a fiction.” (viii. 8.) “They are grown strong in the land but not for the faith.” (ix. 3.) “Thus saith the Lord, Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom, neither let the mighty man glory in his might.” (ix. 23.)
The Deuteronomist especially aims at suppression of the Solomonic cult and régime. The law, not found in Exodus, against marriage with foreigners (Deut. vii. 3) is especially turned against Solomon’s example by the addition that such a marriage will “turn away thy son from following me, that they may serve other gods.” The wife, or other member of a man’s family, who entices him to serve other gods, is to be stoned to death. (xiii. 6–11.) Moses is represented as anticipating the setting up of kings, and even the particular events of Solomon’s reign. Solomon’s “forty thousand stalls of horses” (1 Kings iv. 26), his horses brought out of Egypt (1 Kings x. 28), his wives, his silver and gold, are all foreseen by the ancient lawgiver, who provides that: “He [your king] shall not multiply horses to himself, nor cause the people to return to Egypt to the end that he should multiply horses ... neither shall he multiply wives to himself, that his heart turn not away; neither shall he greatly multiply to himself silver and gold.” (Deut. xvii. 16, 17.)
This Deuteronomist Moses foresaw, too, that some check on the divine appointments to the throne would be needed. “Thou shalt in any wise set him king over thee whom thy God shall choose: one from among thy brethren shalt thou set over thee: thou mayest not put a foreigner over thee.” As all of these commandments were received by Moses from Jahveh himself (Deut. vi. 1, and elsewhere), it is worthy of remark that there should be no trace of that anger with which Jahveh met the proposal for a monarchy: “they have rejected me, that I should not be king over them.” (1 Sam. viii.) In 1776 Thomas Paine, in his Common Sense, used this scriptural denunciation of kings with much effect, and it no doubt contributed much to overthrow British monarchy in America.
The special denunciations of sun-worship in Deuteronomy (iv. 19, xvii. 3) suggest a probability that Solomon’s allusion to the sun, when dedicating the temple, may have been popularly associated with the punishable practice alluded to in Job xxxi. 26, of kissing the hand to the sun and moon. The words of Solomon are cancelled in the Massoretic text, and do not appear in any English version, but they are preserved by the LXX., and there declared to be in the book of Jasher. “They are,” says Dr. Briggs, “recognised by the best modern critics as belonging to the original text [of 1 Kings viii. 12, 13] which then would read:
“The sun is known in the heavens,
But Jahveh said that he would dwell in thick darkness.
I have built up a house of habitation for thee,