Solomon
Solomon, Hebrew Shlomo
(flourished 10th century bc), son and successor of David
and traditionally regarded as the greatest king of
Israel. He maintained his dominions with military
strength and established Israelite colonies outside his
kingdom’s borders. The crowning achievement of his vast
building program was the famous temple at his capital,
Jerusalem.
Background.
Nearly all that is factually known of Solomon comes
from the Bible (especially 1 Kings 1–11 and 2 Chronicles
1–9). While the latter already contains some legendary
material, it is, in the main, a wealth of historical
facts of the most prosaic and reliable nature.
Solomon’s background is
both well known and colourful. His father, David, was a
self-made king, who, against great odds, founded the
Judaean dynasty and carved out an empire from the border
of Egypt to the Euphrates River. His first and greatest
enemies were the Philistines, who controlled Palestine
and kept the Tyrians and Sidonians from prospering on
the sea. By training the Israelite infantry, especially
the bowmen, he proved more than a match for Philistine
and other foes who employed horses and chariots. In
addition, David made common cause with King Hiram of
Tyre, forming a land and sea alliance that endured into
Solomon’s reign. Solomon, accordingly, inherited a
considerable empire, along with a Phoenician ally of
prime importance for naval and merchant-marine
operations.
Solomon’s mother was
Bathsheba, formerly the wife of David’s Hittite general,
Uriah. She proved to be adept at court intrigue. David
seems to have been senile toward the close of his reign,
and one of his wives, Haggith, tried to execute a plot
in which her son, Adonijah, would be appointed as
David’s successor. Adonijah enlisted the aid of powerful
allies: David’s senior general, Joab, Abiathar the
priest, and several other court figures. It was only
through the efforts of Bathsheba, in concert with the
prophet Nathan, that Solomon, who was younger than
several of his brothers, was anointed king while David
was still alive.
Empire builder.
As soon as he acceded to the throne, Solomon
consolidated his position by liquidating his opponents
ruthlessly, one by one. Once rid of his foes, he
established his friends in the key posts of the
military, governmental, and religious institutions. In
an ancient Middle Eastern empire, this was almost the
only means of establishing stable government.
Solomon also
strengthened his position through marital alliances.
Although the astonishing harem of Solomon—700 wives and
300 concubines—recorded in 1 Kings is no doubt an
exaggeration of popular tradition, the figures do
indicate his position as a grand monarch. Such a ménage
brought prestige as well as pleasure, and the marriages
were a form of diplomacy. He wed the sisters and
daughters of kings from far and wide, cementing
alliances of arms and trade to facilitate his
establishment of a huge commercial empire. One of his
brides was the daughter of an Egyptian pharaoh; the
pharaoh captured and burned down the Canaanite city of
Gezer and gave it to his son-in-law Solomon.
Like all empire
builders, Solomon maintained his dominions with military
strength. In addition to infantry, he had at his
disposal impressive chariotry and cavalry. 2 Chronicles
8 recounts Solomon’s successful military operations in
Syria, where his targets included Tadmor-Palmyra, a
caravan oasis city in the desert, midway between Syria
and Mesopotamia. His aim was the control of a great
overland trading route. To consolidate his interests in
the province, he planted Israelite colonies to look
after military, administrative, and commercial matters.
Such colonies, often including cities in which chariots
and provisions were kept, were in the long tradition of
combining mercantile and military personnel to take care
of their sovereign’s trading interests far from home.
Megiddo, a town located at the pass through the Carmel
range connecting the coastal plain with the Plain of
Esdraelon, is the best-preserved example of one of
Solomon’s cities. The remains of stalls for 450 horses
discovered in Megiddo show that the figures of 1,400
chariots and 12,000 horses given for Solomon’s forces in
1 Kings are scarcely exaggerated. (Some scholars
question whether these are horse stalls or shop stalls.)
The network of Solomon’s far-flung trading posts
eventually formed the nucleus of the first great Jewish
Diaspora.
Palestine was destined
to be an important centre because of its strategic
location for trade by land and sea. By land, it alone
connects Asia and Africa, and, along with Egypt, it is
the only area with ports on the Atlantic-Mediterranean
and Red Sea–Indian Ocean waterways. It was Solomon who
fulfilled the commercial destiny of Palestine and
brought it to its greatest heights. The nature of his
empire was predominantly commercial—it served him and
friendly rulers to increase trade by land and sea. The
Phoenician king Hiram of Tyre, for example, needed the
port of Ezion-geber, near Elath on the Gulf of Aqaba,
which leads into the Red Sea and thence into the Indian
Ocean. The joint merchant-marine expeditions of Hiram
and Solomon sailed practically to the ends of the known
world.
A celebrated episode in
the reign of Solomon is the visit of the Queen of Sheba.
Her southern Arabian kingdom lay along the Red Sea route
into the Indian Ocean, and her terrain was rich in gold,
frankincense, and myrrh. Solomon needed her products and
her trade routes for maintaining his commercial network;
she needed Solomon’s cooperation for marketing her goods
in the Mediterranean via his Palestinian ports. Legend
makes much of a romance between the Queen of Sheba and
Solomon, for his granting her “all that she desired,
whatever she asked” (1 Kings 10:13) has been interpreted
to include an offspring.
Solomon’s Temple.
The demand for fortresses and garrison cities
throughout his homeland and empire made it necessary for
Solomon to embark on a vast building program; the
prosperity of the nation made such a program possible.
He was especially lavish with his capital, Jerusalem,
where he erected a city wall, a construction called the
Millo, the royal palace, and the famous Temple. Around
Jerusalem (but not in the Holy City itself), he built
facilities, including shrines, for the main groups of
foreigners on trading missions in Israel. Later
generations, in less secure and less prosperous times,
destroyed those shrines around Jerusalem in a parochial
spirit that could not accommodate itself to Solomon’s
ecumenical outlook. Solomon’s Temple was to assume an
importance far beyond what its dimensions might suggest,
for its site became the only central shrine for Judaism
and early Christianity.
The vigour of Solomon’s
building program made it oppressive. For example, men
had to put in one month out of every three in forced
labour. In theory, such labour was to be performed by
the Canaanites—not by the noble Hebrew tribesmen, who
were supposed to be the administrators, priests, and
fighters. But Solomon’s demands were such that there
were not enough Canaanites to go around, so that
Israelites were forced to do menial labour for the
crown.
Solomon was a vigorous
administrator, and he realized that the old division of
the nation into 12 tribes posed a threat to the unity of
the realm because the tribal feeling that was retained
was not for the good of the state. Accordingly, he
redivided the realm into 12 administrative districts,
deviating, for the most part, from the tribal
boundaries. The figure of 12 was retained because each
district was to “support the palace” (i.e., shoulder
federal obligations) for one of the 12 months in the
year. Each district had its royally appointed governor,
and a chief ruled over the 12 governors. Another
important but unpopular appointee of the king was the
chief of taxation; taxes were exacted most commonly in
the form of forced labour and in kind.
His legendary wisdom.
Solomon also became famous as a sage. When two
harlots each claimed to be the mother of the same baby,
he determined the real mother by observing each woman’s
reaction to the prospect of dividing the child into two
halves. Solomon was deemed wiser than all the sages of
Egypt and the Middle East—even wiser than some ancient
paragons of wisdom. The biblical Book of Proverbs
contains collections of aphorisms and other wise
teachings attributed to him. Solomon was also famed as a
poet who composed 1,005 songs. The biblical Song of
Solomon is (spuriously) attributed to him in the opening
verse. His reputation as a great lover, reflected in the
size of his harem, is appropriately a major theme in the
Song of Solomon. Post-biblical tradition attributed
later works to him: the apocryphal Wisdom of Solomon, on
the one hand, and the Odes of Solomon and Psalms of
Solomon, on the other, are tributes to him as sage and
poet.
Decline of the kingdom.
Solomon’s personal prestige and genius were required
to perpetuate the powerful nation he had acquired from
his father and then further strengthened. It is
suspected that the increase in Israel’s wealth was
matched by an increase in extravagance and that the
wealth was not diffused to the people. It is also
considered possible that Solomon’s treatment of the
northern tribes showed favouritism to his own tribe of
Judah. When his son Rehoboam succeeded him, the northern
tribes wanted to know his policy concerning the burdens
borne by the people. Rehoboam ill-advisedly announced a
harsher course, whereupon the northern tribes seceded
and formed their own Kingdom of Israel, leaving the
descendants of Solomon with the southern Kingdom of
Judah. Thus Solomon’s empire was lost beyond recall, and
even the homeland was split into two, often hostile,
kingdoms.
Cyrus H. Gordon
Encyclopædia Britannica
