Justified True Belief

(●) The king who asked God for wisdom instead of long life, built the temple, and finished his reign building shrines for other gods. + Ask most people what they know about Solomon and you get two things: he was the wisest man who ever lived, and he had a great many wives. Both come straight out of the Bible, and the odd thing is that the Bible puts them in that order on purpose. The books of Kings tell his story as a rise and a fall, and they are unhurried about both. He matters to a Christian reader for three reasons. Three books of the Old Testament come down under his name, so a large part of what Scripture says about how to live a sane life in an ordinary world comes through him. He built the temple, which fixed how Israel thought about God’s presence for the next thousand years, and which the New Testament then treats as a picture of something else. And he is the Bible’s own case study in the limits of being clever. Nothing in the record suggests Solomon ever stopped being intelligent. He simply stopped being faithful, slowly, in old age, in the ordinary way that people do. The one detail the narrator will not let a reader forget is in 1 Kings 11:9, where the account of his drift is given its aggravating circumstance: the Lord was angry with Solomon because his heart had turned away from the God "who had appeared to him twice." Not a man who had never heard. A man who had. A word about the dates, which are more modest than they look. Scripture gives no year for his birth, and the reign dates in the heading are a convention rather than a record. Kings does not keep a calendar the way a modern history does. It keeps regnal figures instead, which simply means how long each king reigned and, once the kingdom had split in two, which year of the other kingdom’s king he came to the throne in, one reign linked to the next like a chain with no measuring stick lying beside it. What historians do is find the few places where an Israelite or Judean king turns up in an Assyrian or Babylonian document that can be dated on its own, hook the chain onto one of those, and count backwards. The method works, and it works to within a few years rather than to the year, which is why one reconstruction will put Solomon a little earlier or later than another. What Scripture does state plainly is the length: forty years in Jerusalem (1 Kings 11:42). That is why every date for his life carries a "c."

(●) c. 990 BC: He was born in Jerusalem to David and Bathsheba, the second child of a marriage that began with adultery and a killing. + The story before his birth is the ugliest chapter in David’s life. David took Bathsheba, the wife of one of his own soldiers, and when she was pregnant he arranged for Uriah to die in a way that would look like the ordinary bad luck of a siege (2 Samuel 11). The prophet Nathan walked in and told him a story about a rich man stealing a poor man’s pet lamb, and when David condemned the man in the story, Nathan said, "You are the man!" The child of that pregnancy died in infancy. Solomon was the next child, and the text of 2 Samuel 12:24 is careful about him: "she bore a son, and he called his name Solomon. And the Lord loved him." Nathan came back with a second name, Jedidiah, which means beloved of the Lord. The name Solomon, Shelomoh in Hebrew, is built on shalom, the word for peace and wholeness, and it was a hopeful thing to call a son born in the wreckage of what his father had done. He was not the heir. Older brothers stood ahead of him, and two of them had already destroyed themselves: Amnon, who raped his half-sister and was murdered for it, and Absalom, who raised a rebellion against his own father and died in it. No birth year survives. The c. 990 is worked back from his age at accession, when he described himself as young and inexperienced, and it should be read as an estimate and nothing firmer.

(●) c. 971 BC: He was anointed at a spring outside the city while his older brother was holding a coronation feast half a mile down the valley. + David was old and could not get warm, and everyone at court could see what that meant. Adonijah, the eldest surviving son, did not wait. He got himself chariots and runners, secured the backing of Joab, the army commander, and Abiathar, one of the two chief priests, and threw a sacrificial banquet at En-rogel, a spring just south of the city, with his brothers and the men of Judah invited and Solomon pointedly not (1 Kings 1). Nathan and Bathsheba went to the king together, in a piece of court politics the narrator reports without a word of comment on its ethics, and reminded David of an oath he had sworn that Solomon would follow him. David acted at once. Solomon was put on the king’s own mule, taken down to the Gihon spring at the foot of the city, and anointed by Zadok the priest with oil from the tent. Then the trumpet was blown and the crowd came up after him "playing on pipes, and rejoicing with great joy, so that the earth was split by their noise" (1 Kings 1:40). Adonijah’s guests heard it from En-rogel as they were finishing dinner. They worked out what it was, and the party emptied. Adonijah himself ran for the altar and took hold of its horns, the projections at its corners, which was the ancient way of claiming sanctuary, and Solomon let him go home.

(●) c. 970 BC: He secured the throne with four hard judgments, one of them carried out at the altar itself. + 1 Kings 2 is not a comfortable chapter, and it is not written to be. David’s deathbed charge to his son was partly piety and partly a list of unfinished business: Joab, who had killed two commanders in peacetime and never answered for it, and Shimei, who had cursed David during Absalom’s rebellion. The son was told to use his wisdom and not let either of them go down to the grave quietly. Four things followed, and it is worth taking them one at a time. The first was Adonijah’s own doing. He asked, through Bathsheba, to be given Abishag, the young woman who had nursed the dying David, and to a modern ear that sounds like a defeated man asking for a wife and nothing more. Solomon read it as a move on the throne, and he was reading it the way his world read it, because taking a dead king’s woman was how a claimant announced himself. He sent Benaiah, the commander of his guard, and Adonijah was struck down. Abiathar the priest, who had backed the wrong brother, came off better than that: he was stripped of office and sent home to his fields at Anathoth, and the narrator pauses long enough to notice that putting that family out of the priesthood fulfilled the old word of judgment against the house of Eli (1 Kings 2:27). Then Joab heard what had happened. He ran to the tent of the Lord, caught hold of the horns of the altar and refused to come out, and Benaiah killed him there, still holding on. Shimei was offered terms rather than a sentence: he was confined to Jerusalem on pain of death, and for three years he kept to them. Then two of his slaves ran away, and he rode to Gath after them, and he was executed for it. The chapter ends with one flat sentence: "So the kingdom was established in the hand of Solomon" (1 Kings 2:46). Notice what the narrator does and does not do. He records the killings in detail, he lets us see that Joab died holding the altar, and he offers no verdict at all. Kings very often works this way, laying the facts down and leaving the reader to feel their weight, and a reader who wants Solomon’s reign to begin cleanly will not get it from the text.

(●) c. 970 BC: At Gibeon he was offered anything he asked for, and asked for a listening heart. + Gibeon, a few miles northwest of Jerusalem, held the great altar before the temple existed, and the young king went up and offered a thousand burnt offerings there. That night God appeared to him in a dream and said, "Ask what I shall give you." His answer is worth reading slowly, because a man in his early twenties with a newly secured throne could have asked for a great many other things. "I am but a little child," he said. "I do not know how to go out or come in." Then he asked for the one thing he thought the job required: an understanding mind to govern the people, so that he could tell good from evil (1 Kings 3:9). The Hebrew is more concrete than any English rendering. He asked for a lev shomea, a hearing heart. In Hebrew the heart is not the seat of the feelings, as it is for us, but the place where a person thinks and decides, so what he wanted was a mind that listens before it rules. God gave him that and added what he had not asked for, riches and honour, on condition that he walk in the ways of his father. The famous test case comes a few verses later. Two women who shared a house both claimed the same living baby, one of them having lost her own in the night, and there were no witnesses. Solomon called for a sword and ordered the child divided. The real mother broke first and gave the child up rather than see it killed, and that was the verdict: the woman who would rather lose the baby than have it cut in two was the woman it belonged to. Word went round the country, and people "stood in awe of the king, because they perceived that the wisdom of God was in him to do justice" (1 Kings 3:28). The gift showed up in his output as well as in his courtroom. Kings, at the end of a chapter otherwise given over to his officials and his daily provisions, mentions that he spoke three thousand proverbs and that his songs numbered a thousand and five (1 Kings 4:32). Almost none of that has survived. What did survive was kept because Israel gathered it into her scriptures, and it is the reason a man dead three thousand years is still being read on a Tuesday morning by somebody with a cup of coffee. The chapter of the dream drops in, without emphasis, the two facts that will end the story. Solomon had already made a marriage alliance with Pharaoh and taken his daughter into the city (1 Kings 3:1), and he loved the Lord and walked in his father’s statutes, "only he sacrificed and made offerings at the high places" (1 Kings 3:3). A high place is just what the name says: an open-air shrine on a hilltop, with its own altar, of the kind Israelites had used for generations because no single place had yet been appointed for sacrifice. Foreign wives and hilltop shrines. Both are mentioned here as ordinary administrative details, the sort of thing a civil servant would file without comment. Both are what he is remembered for at the end.

(●) c. 966 to 959 BC: He built the temple in seven years, and his own palace in thirteen. + The building of the temple is told at a level of detail the rest of the reign never gets. Solomon wrote to Hiram, king of Tyre on the Phoenician coast, who had supplied timber to his father, and struck a trade agreement: cedar and cypress floated down the coast in rafts, paid for in wheat and oil, with Israelite and Tyrian crews working the forests of Lebanon together. The stone was dressed at the quarry, "so that neither hammer nor axe nor any tool of iron was heard in the house while it was being built" (1 Kings 6:7). A modern reader with a building site in the neighbourhood will feel that line. The building itself was smaller than most people picture: sixty cubits by twenty by thirty, roughly ninety feet long, thirty wide, and forty-five high, which is the footprint of a large village church. Size was never the point. It was overlaid with gold and fitted with carved palm trees, open flowers and cherubim, and it took seven years. Cherubim are the winged figures that stand at the edge of God’s presence all through the Old Testament: they guard the way back into Eden in Genesis, and in the temple a pair of them stood in the inner room with their wings spread from wall to wall. Then, in a sentence placed immediately after, the narrator adds that Solomon spent thirteen years building his own house (1 Kings 7:1). He makes nothing of the comparison. He simply puts the two numbers next to each other and moves on. At the dedication the ark was carried in. The ark of the covenant was a gold-covered wooden chest carried on poles, and inside it were the two stone tablets of the law and nothing else (1 Kings 8:9); it had travelled with Israel since the wilderness, and it was the one object in the nation that marked where God had promised to meet his people. When it was set down in the inner room the cloud of the Lord’s presence filled the house, so that the priests could not stand up to do their work, and Solomon prayed the long prayer of 1 Kings 8, which is the high point of his life and, in some ways, the most theologically alert thing anyone says in the Old Testament about a building. He asks God to hear prayers made toward the house in seven kinds of trouble: defeat, drought, famine, captivity, and the rest. He assumes his people will sin, "for there is no one who does not sin" (1 Kings 8:46), and asks for mercy when they turn back. And he asks God to hear the foreigner who comes from a far country because he has heard of the name, so that all the peoples of the earth may know it (1 Kings 8:41-43). That is a striking petition to build into the dedication of a national shrine.

(●) c. 950s to 940s BC: Ships, gold, horses and a visiting queen made him the richest king of his world, and the bill was paid in other people’s labour. + Solomon sat on the land bridge between Egypt and Mesopotamia and made it pay. He put a fleet at Ezion-geber on the Red Sea and manned it with Hiram’s sailors, who knew the water; he traded in horses and chariots; he fortified Hazor, Megiddo and Gezer, the three towns that controlled the northern roads (1 Kings 9:15). The annual figure the text gives for gold coming in is 666 talents, which at the usual reckoning is something like twenty-five tons a year. Silver, the narrator says, became as common in Jerusalem as stone. Then the queen of Sheba arrived, from the incense kingdoms of southwest Arabia, with a camel train and a list of hard questions. She got answers to all of them, saw the palace, the food, the seating of his officials, the servants’ livery and the burnt offerings he made at the house of the Lord, and "there was no more breath in her" (1 Kings 10:5). What she says next is the verdict the book wants a reader to carry: the God who loved Israel had set him on the throne to do justice and righteousness (1 Kings 10:9). The other ledger runs underneath all of it, and Kings does not hide it. Somebody had to fell the cedar and drag the stone. To build on that scale Solomon raised a levy, which is the old word for labour owed to the crown and collected the way a tax is collected, except that what the crown takes is men and months: 30,000 of them went up to Lebanon in shifts, one month in the forests and two months at home, under an official named Adoniram (1 Kings 5:13-14). Alongside that, the account in 1 Kings 9:20-22 states that the permanent slave levy was taken from the surviving Canaanite peoples and that no Israelite was made a slave, and both statements sit in the same book as chapter 5, a few pages apart, with no sign that the writer felt the difficulty. However the two are reconciled, and readers have reconciled them in more than one way, the burden was real and it was felt. When Jeroboam is introduced, he is the man Solomon put "over all the forced labor of the house of Joseph" (1 Kings 11:28). And when the northern tribes finally break away, the first words out of their mouths are not about doctrine or dynasty. They are about a yoke.

(●) c. 931 BC: In old age his foreign wives turned his heart, and he died with the kingdom already promised away. + The count in 1 Kings 11:3 is seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines, which comes to a thousand women, a concubine being a secondary wife: part of the household and openly recognised as his, but without the standing a wife had or the settlement a wife brought with her. Most of them were acquired the way kings acquired women, as the human seal on a treaty with a neighbouring state. Two crowns come to terms, and a daughter goes to live in the other man’s city for the rest of her life. Each of them came with her own gods, and Solomon was not the sort of man to make a scene about it. He built them their shrines. On the ridge east of Jerusalem, in direct view of the temple he had built, he put up a high place for Chemosh of Moab and for Molech of the Ammonites, and he went after Ashtoreth of the Sidonians himself (1 Kings 11:5-7). Molech is the god the law names when it forbids child sacrifice, "You shall not give any of your children to offer them to Molech" (Leviticus 18:21). Kings does not say what was done on the platform Solomon built. It says he built it, and three centuries later, when Josiah went through Judah tearing down shrines, those hilltops were still standing and still attributed to him (2 Kings 23:13). The narrator’s indictment is exact. It was not sudden, it was not youthful, and it was not ignorant: "when Solomon was old his wives turned away his heart after other gods, and his heart was not wholly true to the Lord his God, as was the heart of David his father" (1 Kings 11:4). Adversaries appeared, as adversaries do when a reign is failing, and the prophet Ahijah met Jeroboam on the road, tore a new cloak into twelve pieces and gave him ten. Solomon tried to have Jeroboam killed, and Jeroboam went to Egypt and waited. He reigned forty years, died, and was buried in the city of David (1 Kings 11:42-43). His son Rehoboam went north to be confirmed as king, was asked to lighten his father’s heavy yoke, took the advice of the young men he had grown up with, and answered that his little finger was thicker than his father’s thighs and that he would discipline them with scorpions. The northern tribes walked out, and the kingdom his father had ruled whole never came back together.

What He Taught

(T1) Wisdom begins with the fear of the Lord, which is not the same thing as being afraid of him. + A first-year apprentice on a building site learns two kinds of things. He learns how to hold a saw, and he learns that the man who has been doing this for thirty years is worth listening to even when the instruction makes no sense yet. The second lesson is not a technique. It is a posture, and without it the techniques never get properly learned, because a man who thinks he already knows cannot be taught. That posture is what the book of Proverbs calls the fear of the Lord, and it puts the phrase at the front of the collection as the door everything else comes through. The Hebrew word covers a range from terror to reverence, and here it means something closer to the second: taking God seriously as the one who made the world and knows how it works, and therefore expecting his instruction to be right even where it cuts across what you wanted. Proverbs is emphatic that this comes first. Not last, as a religious varnish on a life of practical competence, but first, as the thing that makes practical competence possible. Everything else in the book follows from that. Proverbs is short, blunt advice about money, sex, work, speech, anger, friendship, laziness and drink, the sort of counsel a father gives a son who is about to leave home. What makes it more than a book of tips is the claim underneath it: these are not one culture’s preferences but the grain of a world God made, and going against the grain will hurt in the end whatever the short-term arithmetic says.

(Q) "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is insight." + Source: Proverbs 9:10 (English Standard Version). The same claim opens the book at Proverbs 1:7, with knowledge in place of wisdom, and closes the first main section here at the end of chapter 9. The book’s own heading is "The proverbs of Solomon, son of David, king of Israel" (Proverbs 1:1), and further collections are headed the same way at 10:1 and at 25:1 (T1).

(T2) Wisdom is not a private talent; it was there when the world was made, and it runs through the way the world is built. + Chapter 8 of Proverbs does something none of the surrounding advice prepares a reader for. Wisdom stops being a quality a person can acquire and starts speaking in the first person, as a woman standing at the crossroads and at the city gate, calling out to anyone who will listen. This is personification, the ordinary literary move of letting an idea talk (we do it when we say that justice is blind, or that the sea was in a temper), and Hebrew poetry uses it freely. What she says is the striking part. She was there before the hills, before the springs, before the earth had fields; she was beside God as he marked out the foundations, and the picture is of delight rather than labour, wisdom rejoicing in the inhabited world and taking pleasure in human beings. Proverbs 3:19 says the same thing without the personification: the Lord by wisdom founded the earth. The claim is that the order a person is being asked to live by is the same order the world was made by. Honesty and patience and restraint are not house rules imposed on a neutral universe; they fit what is actually there. Christian readers came to this chapter early and have never quite left it. The New Testament calls Christ "the wisdom of God" (1 Corinthians 1:24), and the Greek Old Testament read by the early church rendered the verb in Proverbs 8:22 as "created me," which made the verse one of the most argued texts of the fourth century. Arius, the Alexandrian presbyter who held that the Son was the highest of God’s creatures, quoted it as his proof. A presbyter is an ordained minister with charge of a congregation, roughly what a later century would call a parish priest, so the man who set the fourth century arguing was not a bishop or an emperor but a working clergyman with a text he thought settled the matter. Athanasius answered it at length in his second Oration against the Arians, arguing that the thing the verse calls created is the Word taking a human body for the work of salvation, and not the Son coming into being. Both sides took for granted that the chapter had something to do with Christ. They disagreed about what. The Hebrew verb behind it, qanah, can mean acquire, possess, or beget, and the English Standard Version renders it "possessed."

(Q) "then I was beside him, like a master workman, and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the children of man." + Source: Proverbs 8:30-31 (English Standard Version). Wisdom’s own account of the creation, the close of a speech that begins with her calling from the high places beside the road. The delight is mutual: she is God’s daily delight, and her own delight is in people (T2).

(T3) The God whom heaven cannot contain agreed to be found at one address. + Imagine a man who has just spent seven years and an unimaginable amount of gold on a building, standing in front of it on opening day with the whole nation watching. The natural speech writes itself. What Solomon actually said was that the building could not possibly do what buildings are for. That is the hinge of the dedication prayer, and it is what keeps the temple from becoming what every other national shrine in the ancient world was. In Egypt and Mesopotamia a temple housed the god, and the image inside was where the god lived; the daily service was feeding, washing and clothing him. Solomon’s prayer refuses the whole arrangement. Heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain God, so the house is not a residence. It is a meeting place, an address to pray toward, a promise that the God who is everywhere has committed himself to attend to what is said here. Two things follow that Israel’s neighbours would have found strange. First, God cannot be managed by the people who own the building, which is why the prophets could later stand in the temple courts and tell the nation that God was about to abandon it. Second, the arrangement was never meant to be exclusive: the prayer asks God to answer the foreigner who comes from a far country, precisely so that all the peoples of the earth will learn the name. Christian teaching takes both points further. The New Testament says the presence the temple pointed at came to live in a body (John 1:14), and that the people themselves are now the house (1 Corinthians 3:16). Neither move would have surprised the man who said out loud, on the day it opened, that his own temple could not hold God.

(Q) "But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you; how much less this house that I have built!" + Source: 1 Kings 8:27 (English Standard Version). Spoken at the dedication, with the ark newly installed and the cloud of God’s presence still in the room. Stephen made the same point against the temple authorities on the day he was stoned, telling them that the Most High does not dwell in houses made by hands and backing it with Isaiah’s line about heaven as God’s throne and the earth as his footstool (Acts 7:47-50) (T3).

(T4) Everything under the sun runs out, and what is left is to fear God and keep his commandments. + Ecclesiastes is the strangest book in the Old Testament and the one unbelieving readers most often like. It opens with a word the English versions usually translate "vanity," which is a poor fit for a modern ear. The Hebrew is hevel, and it means vapour, or the breath you can see on a cold morning: there, visible, and gone before you can take hold of it. Read the opening line as "breath of breaths, everything is breath" and the book stops sounding like a sulk and starts sounding like an honest man describing how quickly things slip through the fingers. The speaker calls himself Qoheleth, which the English versions render "the Preacher" and which means something like the one who convenes an assembly. He introduces himself as the son of David, king in Jerusalem (Ecclesiastes 1:1), and Jewish and Christian readers have long taken that to mean Solomon. He then describes an experiment that only a man with unlimited money could run. He built houses, planted vineyards, made pools and gardens, bought singers, gathered silver and denied himself nothing his eyes wanted, and then looked at the whole estate and found "there was nothing to be gained under the sun" (Ecclesiastes 2:11). The phrase "under the sun" runs through the book like a refrain, and it marks the boundary of the experiment: this is what life looks like measured on its own terms, with nothing beyond the horizon taken into account. What the book does with that is not despair but a stubborn, ground-level realism. Eat your bread, drink your wine, enjoy the work in front of you and the person you married, because these are gifts and you did not earn them, and none of it is permanent. Then the last two verses step outside the horizon and give the conclusion the rest of the book has been clearing space for: God is there, the accounts will be settled, and a person’s business is to fear him and keep his commandments. Christian teachers have valued Ecclesiastes for exactly this. It grants the case against meaning at full strength, in a voice a modern skeptic recognises immediately, and then declines to end there.

(Q) "The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil." + Source: Ecclesiastes 12:13-14 (English Standard Version). The last two verses of the book, arriving after twelve chapters that have refused every easy comfort. The judgment clause matters: it is the reason the vapour is not the last word, since a world where every secret thing is finally weighed is not a world where nothing counts (T4, T1).

(T5) Love between a man and a woman is strong as death, and no amount of money can buy it. + The Song of Songs is a sequence of love poems between a young woman and the man she loves, and it is frankly, unembarrassedly physical about it. She praises his body; he praises hers; they look for each other through the streets at night; the daughters of Jerusalem are told three times not to stir up love before it is ready. God is never named in the book, unless the closing description of love as the very flame of the Lord counts (Song of Solomon 8:6), and there is no law and no covenant history either. The Song sits in the middle of the Bible without apology. The title is a Hebrew superlative. "Song of Songs" means the best of songs, the way "king of kings" means the highest king, and the first verse attributes it to Solomon. At the end the poems produce the line everything has been building toward. Love is a seal on the heart, fierce as the grave, a flame that many waters cannot quench, and a man who offered everything he owned for it would be laughed at, because it is not the kind of thing that is for sale. There is an irony here sharp enough to be deliberate. The book of love that cannot be bought comes down under the name of the king who accumulated a thousand women by treaty and finance, and who lost his faith among them. Whether that irony was intended by the collectors of Israel’s scriptures or not, the two facts sit side by side in the same canon, the canon being the settled list of books a community receives as Scripture, and the Song says plainly what his own household disproved.

(Q) "Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it. If a man offered for love all the wealth of his house, he would be utterly despised." + Source: Song of Solomon 8:7 (English Standard Version). The Song’s last great word about love, in the closing chapter, following the line that gives the passage its force: "Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm, for love is strong as death" (Song of Solomon 8:6) (T5).

(Q) "Let your heart therefore be wholly true to the Lord our God, walking in his statutes and keeping his commandments, as at this day." + Source: 1 Kings 8:61 (English Standard Version). The last words of the dedication day, spoken to the assembled nation after Solomon had asked God to hear the foreigner and had said that no house could contain him (T3). The phrase comes back once more in his story, and the second time it is a verdict: "his heart was not wholly true to the Lord his God, as was the heart of David his father" (1 Kings 11:4).

What the Church Made of Him

(†) The New Testament keeps his glory in view and keeps setting something greater beside it. + Jesus mentions Solomon twice, and both times as a measuring stick that comes up short. Telling anxious people to look at wild flowers, he says that "even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these" (Matthew 6:29), which takes the most sumptuous court in Israel’s memory and puts it below a weed in a field. Then, to a generation demanding a sign, he holds up the queen who travelled from the ends of the earth to hear wisdom and says that something greater than Solomon is here (Matthew 12:42). The temple works the same way. The colonnade along the eastern side of the temple courts was still called Solomon’s Portico in the first century, and it is where Jesus walked in winter and where the first Christians in Jerusalem gathered publicly (John 10:23; Acts 3:11; 5:12). The church began its life meeting in his building. Yet the New Testament’s settled way of reading that building is as a picture of something else: Jesus said that if they destroyed this temple he would raise it in three days, "but he was speaking about the temple of his body" (John 2:19-21), and Paul tells a quarrelling congregation that they themselves are God’s temple and God’s Spirit lives in them (1 Corinthians 3:16). Stephen made the point most bluntly of all, standing before the council: Solomon built the house, and the Most High does not live in houses built by hands (Acts 7:47-50). None of this is a demotion. It is the way the New Testament handles everything in the older story that pointed forward. The house was real, and it was doing a job, and the job is finished when the thing it pointed to arrives.

(†) The church turned his three books into the curriculum of a soul. + Origen of Alexandria, the most learned Christian scholar of the third century, noticed that the three books bearing Solomon’s name fall into an order, and in the prologue to his commentary on the Song of Songs he set it out as a course of study. Proverbs teaches a beginner how to live, which the Greeks called ethics. Ecclesiastes teaches him what the created world is worth and how little of it he can keep, which they called physics, a word that then meant the study of nature rather than anything done in a laboratory. The Song is for the student who has learned both and is ready for what Origen calls the inspective, the love of God himself. On this reading Solomon wrote a primer, a second-year book and a final one, and a reader who begins with the third has skipped the first two. It is the same instinct that keeps a piano teacher from handing a new pupil a Chopin nocturne in the first week. The arrangement shaped Christian teaching for more than a thousand years. Gregory of Nyssa preached fifteen homilies on the Song in the fourth century. Bernard of Clairvaux, the Cistercian abbot whose preaching carried much of twelfth-century Europe, gave eighty-six sermons to the Song of Songs over eighteen years and had reached only the third chapter when he died in 1153. The Cistercians were one of the reforming orders of monks, committed to a plainer and harder life than the great abbeys of the day, which makes it the more striking that their most famous preacher spent eighteen years on love poetry. For most of the church’s history the Song was read as a picture of the love between Christ and his church, or between Christ and the individual soul, and that reading produced some of the warmest devotional writing Christians have ever produced. The plain reading of the Song as a celebration of married love was never absent either, though for most of those centuries it was the minority report: Theodore of Mopsuestia took the poems as love poetry in the early fifth century and was condemned long after his death at the Second Council of Constantinople in 553, partly for that and partly for a good deal else. Christian teaching has since come to hold the two together, on the grounds that human marriage was made in the first place to say something about God’s love for his people (Ephesians 5:31-32). Ecclesiastes has had a different career and a quieter one. It is the book Christians hand to people who have concluded that nothing means anything, because it says so first, at length, in a voice that has clearly earned the right.

(†) Where his own record indicts him: he broke, one by one, the three rules the law had written for a king. + Long before there was a king in Israel, the law had anticipated one and set three limits on him, plus a duty (Deuteronomy 17:16-19). The three limits amount to a short list of the standard ways a throne goes bad: cavalry, marriages, money. Set the list beside the reign. - Horses. The king must not acquire many horses, or send people back to Egypt to get them. Solomon kept 1,400 chariots and 12,000 horsemen, and Kings names Egypt and Kue as the sources of the trade (1 Kings 10:26-29). - Wives. The king must not acquire many wives, and the law gives the reason in advance: "lest his heart turn away." Solomon had a thousand women, and the narrator uses the law’s own words when the moment comes: his wives turned away his heart (1 Kings 11:3-4). - Silver and gold. The king must not acquire excessive silver and gold. Solomon took in 666 talents of gold a year and made silver as common in Jerusalem as stone (1 Kings 10:14, 10:27). - The duty. The king was to write out a copy of the law for himself and read it all the days of his life, so that he would learn to fear God. The man who wrote that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom (T1) is the one who ended up building a shrine to Chemosh on the hill facing his own temple. Two further items belong on the ledger, both from the primary record. The reign opened with killings, one of them a man struck down while he held the horns of the altar and refused to come out (1 Kings 2:28-34), and the throne was secured by them. And the building programme ran on conscripted labour heavy enough that the first thing the northern tribes asked of his son was relief from it (1 Kings 12:4), a request refused in the crudest terms available, at which the kingdom broke in half. Scripture never softens any of this, and it does not tie the story off. There is no account of Solomon repenting. Some readers have taken Ecclesiastes as an old man’s reckoning with a wasted life, which is a reasonable way to hear it, though the book itself makes no such claim. Kings simply reports that he did evil, that God was angry, that the kingdom would be torn away, and that he slept with his fathers. We are not told how it ended for him, and the silence is worth respecting. Centuries later Nehemiah, arguing with men who had married foreign wives, reached for Solomon as the standing example, and the way he framed it holds the whole tragedy: "Among the many nations there was no king like him, and he was beloved by his God, and God made him king over all Israel. Nevertheless, foreign women made even him to sin" (Nehemiah 13:26).