“While the King sat at his table,
My spikenard sent forth its fragrance.”
It is not impossible, by the way, that it was from chaste Shulamith of the Song ascribed to Solomon that a bad reputation was fixed on Mary Magdalene, against whose virginal purity no word is said in the Bible, the chapter heading to Luke vii. alone identifying her, in contradiction to John xi. 2, as the woman who anointed Jesus. This libel seems to come from a far antiquity,—as far probably as the Talmudic “Miriam Magdala” (i. e., Braided-hair Mary); and this epithet might have been derived from Shulamith’s “ringlets” which were “tied up in folds,” and whose spikenard sent forth its odours while Solomon was at the table. The later Jahvism must have considered such attention by ladies to their hair as an evidence of wickedness. Paul, while recognizing that long hair is a woman’s “glory” (1 Cor. xi.) dangerously fascinating even to the angels, testifies against “braided hair” (1 Tim. ii.), an instruction repeated in 1 Peter iii. Whether this lady of means who helped to support Jesus was from Magdala or not, it is nearly certain that her legend was derived from another sense of “Magdalene,” and it is not improbable that the friendship of Jesus for her was in keeping with his Solomonic defiance of the Pharisaic.
The Eastern tales of monarchs in disguise, derived from a legend of Solomon, may have prepared the popular mind for the double rôle performed by Jesus in the Gospels, for the earlier writers do not suggest any lowliness in his position beyond the humiliation of taking on human flesh and dying. In the Gospels we find him now an hungered, now dining with the Pharisee and anointed with precious ointment, again multiplying food; an humble-son of man who has not where to lay his head, a son of God with legions of angels at his command; purifying the temple with violence, and predicting its destruction; a peacemaker bringing a sword; telling his disciples to resist not evil, and arming them; enjoining secrecy about his miracles, presently parading them; prostrate with anguish in a garden, presently shining with unmasked splendour. Solomon never arrayed himself in any such brilliant raiment as that of the transfiguration, nor was his environment finer than the scenes imaged in some of these parables,—the prodigal’s ring and robe, the king going to war and sending his ambassadors, the masters of fields and vineyards, the momentous wedding dress, the importance of rank and precedence at a feast. In miracles, too, we have the grand wedding at Cana, and the homage of the centurion deferentially rewarded.[5]
In the Hebrew Gospel Jesus says, “I will that ye be twelve apostles for a testimony to Israel”; with which we may compare the “twelve officers over all Israel” appointed by Solomon (1 Kings iv. 7). In Mark the first bestowal on Jesus of his Solomonic title “Son of David” (x.) is immediately followed by his Solomonic entry into Jerusalem. In Matthew the blind man’s tribute is followed by the cry of multitudes, “Hosanna to the Son of David”; and the whole scene is obviously from the narrative in 1 Kings i. of the procession of Solomon, seated on David’s mule, on the occasion of the anointing which made him the model Messiah, in virtue of which he was King and Priest in combination. Solomon dedicated the temple himself, as High Priest, and to him, as King-Priest, the privilege of sanctuary was subordinate. Wherefore he had an offender executed while holding the horns of the altar. The titular Son of David, on the morrow of his triumphal entry, assumes authority in the temple, and scourges out of it the sellers of things used in the sacrifices,—especially Doves. These his human mother had sacrificed after his birth for purification, but by this time they symbolized his divine mother, the Holy Spirit, and were not to be sold.
Who can suppose that this violence, which were as if one assaulted those who sell holy candles and pictures in a church vestibule, really occurred? At Oberammergau the whole tragedy of the Passion Play hinges on the resentment of these merchants, who appeal to the Sanhedrim for protection from the violence of one man armed with a whip! The story (John ii.) is an epitaph of the primitive Christ, the value of whose blood was its proof that his victory over the Adversary was that of a Man, unaided by a divine, unblemished by a carnal, weapon: triumph by either would have been defeat.
The bread and wine offered to Abraham by the mythical king-priest of Salem (Solomon disguised as Melchizedek) may have been suggested by the bread and wine offered by Wisdom to her guests, in Proverbs ix. However this may be, there is clearly discoverable at the Last Supper of Jesus the Satan that Jahveh raised up against Solomon in the presence of mythical Judas (“Satan entered into him,” says John), and in the whole scene the table of Wisdom. “She hath mingled her wine, she hath furnished her table,” and cries—
“Come, eat ye of my bread,
And drink of the wine which I have mingled.”
That Jesus supped with his disciples, at the Passover time, is very probable, but that the bread and wine alone should have been selected for symbolical usage (a point unknown to the fourth gospel) conforms too closely with the Solomonic prologue to be a mere coincidence. The words “Take, eat,” “Drink ye all of it,” recall also the Song of Songs—