Solomon
and
Solomonic Literature
By
Moncure Daniel Conway
Chicago
The Open Court Publishing Company
London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., Ltd.
1899
Copyright by
The Open Court Publishing Co.
Chicago, U. S. A.
1899
All rights reserved.
INSCRIBED
TO MY BROTHER OMARIANS
OF THE
OMAR KHAYYÁM CLUB
LONDON
“Seek the circle of the wise: flee a thousand leagues from men without wit. If a wise man give thee poison, drink it without fear; if a fool proffer an antidote, spill it on the ground.”
Contents
Page
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
[The Book of Proverbs and the Avesta] 59
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
[Epistle to the Hebrews (A Sequel to Sophia Solomontos)] 129
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
[The Pauline Dehumanization of Jesus] 164
Chapter XVI
[The Mythological Mantle of Solomon Fallen on Jesus] 176
Chapter XVII
[The Heir of Solomon’s Godhead] 194
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
[Postscripta] 234
Preface.
An English lady of my acquaintance, sojourning at Baalbek, was conversing with an humble stonecutter, and pointing to the grand ruins inquired, “Why do you not occupy yourself with magnificent work like that?” “Ah,” he said, “those edifices were built by no mortal, but by genii.”
These genii now represent the demons which in ancient legends were enslaved by the potency of Solomon’s ring. Some of these folk-tales suggest the ingenuity of a fabulist. According to one, Solomon outwitted the devils even after his death, which occurred while he was leaning on his staff and superintending the reluctant labors of the demons on some sacred edifice. In that posture his form remained for a year after his death, and it was not until a worm gnawed the end of his staff, causing his body to fall, that the demons discovered their freedom.
If this be a fable, a modern moral may be found by reversing the delusion. The general world has for ages been working on under the spell of Solomon while believing him to be dead. Solomon is very much alive. Many witnesses of his talismanic might can be summoned from the homes and schools wherein the rod is not spared, however much it spoils the child, and where youth’s “flower of age” bleaches in a puritan cell because the “wisest of men” is supposed to have testified that all earth’s pleasures are vanity. And how many parents are in their turn feeling the recoil of the rod, and live to deplore the intemperate thirst for “vanities” stimulated in homes overshadowed by the fear-of-God wisdom for which Solomon is also held responsible? On the other hand, what parson has not felt the rod bequeathed to the sceptic by the king whom Biblical authority pronounces at once the worldliest and the wisest of mankind?
More imposing, if not more significant, are certain picturesque phenomena which to-day represent the bifold evolution of the Solomonic legend. While in various parts of Europe “Solomon’s Seal,” survival from his magic ring, is the token of conjuring and fortune-telling impostors, the knightly Order of Solomon’s Seal in Abyssinia has been raised to moral dignity by an emperor (Menelik) who has given European monarchs a lesson in magnanimity and gallantry by presenting to a “Queen of the South” (Margharita), on her birthday, release of the captives who had invaded his country. While this is the tradition of nobility which has accompanied that of lineal descent from the Wise Man, his name lingers in the rest of Christendom in proverbial connexion with any kind of sagacity, while as a Biblical personality he is virtually suppressed.
In one line of evolution,—whose historic factors have been Jahvism, Pharisaism, and Puritanism,—Solomon has been made the Adam of a second fall. His Eves gave him the fruit that was pleasant and desirable to make one wise, and he did eat. Jahveh retracts his compliments to Solomon, and makes the naïve admission that deity itself cannot endow a man with the wisdom that can ensure orthodoxy, or with knowledge impregnable by feminine charms (Nehemiah xiii.); and from that time Solomon disappears from canonical Hebrew books except those ascribed to his own authorship.
That some writings attributed to Solomon,—especially the “Song of Songs” and “Koheleth” (Ecclesiastes),—were included in the canon, may be ascribed to a superstitious fear of suppressing utterances of a supernatural wisdom, set as an oracle in the king and never revoked. This view is confirmed and illustrated in several further pages, but it may be added here that the very idolatries and alleged sins of Solomon led to the detachment from his personal self of his divinely-conferred Wisdom, and her personification as something apart from him in various avatars (preserving his glory while disguising his name), an evolution culminating in ideals and creeds that have largely moulded Christendom.
The two streams of evolution here suggested, one issuing from the wisdom books, the other from the law books, are traceable in their collisions, their periods of parallelism, and their convergence,—where, however, their respective inspirations continue distinguishable, like the waters of the Missouri and the Mississippi after they flow between the same banks.
The present essays by no means claim to have fully traced these lines of evolution, but aim at their indication. The only critique to which it pretends is literary. The studies and experiences of many years have left me without any bias concerning the contents of the Bible, or any belief, ethical or religious, that can be affected by the fate of any scripture under the higher or other criticism. But my interest in Biblical literature has increased with the perception of its composite character ethnically. I believe that I have made a few discoveries in it; and a volume adopted as an educational text-book requires every ray of light which any man feels able to contribute to its interpretation.
Solomonic Literature.
Chapter I.
Solomon.
There is a vast Solomon mythology: in Palestine, Abyssinia, Arabia, Persia, India, and Europe, the myths and legends concerning the traditional Wisest Man are various, and merit a comparative study they have not received. As the name Solomon seems to be allegorical, it is not possible to discover whether he is mentioned in any contemporary inscription by a real name, and the external and historical data are insufficient to prove certainly that an individual Solomon ever existed.[1] But that a great personality now known under that name did exist, about three thousand years ago, will, I believe, be recognised by those who study the ancient literature relating to him. The earliest and most useful documents for such an investigation are: the first collection of Proverbs, x–xxii. 16; the second collection, xxv–xxix. 27; Psalms ii., xlv., lxxii., evidently Solomonic; 2 Samuel xii. 24, 25; and 1 Kings iv. 29–34.
As, however, the object of this essay is not to prove the existence of Solomon, but to study the evolution of the human heart and mind under influences of which a peculiar series is historically associated with his name, he will be spoken of as a genuine figure, the reader being left to form his own conclusion as to whether he was such, if that incidental point interests him.
The indirect intimations concerning Solomon in the Proverbs and Psalms may be better understood if we first consider the historical books which profess to give an account of his career. And the search naturally begins with the passage in the Book of Kings just referred to:
“And God gave Solomon wisdom and intelligence exceeding much, and largeness of heart, even as the sand on the seashore. And Solomon’s wisdom excelled the wisdom of all the children of the East, and all the wisdom of Egypt. For he was wiser than all men; than Ethan the Ezrahite, and Heman, and Calcol, and Darda, the sons of Mahol; and his fame was in all the surrounding nations. He spake three thousand parables, and his songs were a thousand and five. He spake of trees, from the cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop that springeth out of the wall: he spake also of beasts, birds, reptiles, fishes. And there came people of all countries to hear the wisdom of Solomon, and from all the kings of the earth, which had heard of his wisdom.”
This passage is Elohist: it is the Elohim—perhaps here the gods—who gave Solomon wisdom. The introduction of Jahveh as the giver, in the dramatic dream of Chapter iii., alters the nature of the gift, which from the Elohim is scientific and literary wisdom, but from Jahveh is political, related to government and judgment.
As for Mahol and his four sons, the despair of Biblical historians, they are now witnesses that this passage was written when those men,—or perhaps masculine Muses,—were famous, though they are unknown within any period that can be called historical. As intimated, they may be figures from some vanished mythology Hebraised into Mahol (dance), Ethan (the imperishable), Heman (faithful), Calcol (sustenance), Darda (pearl of knowledge).
In speaking of 1 Kings iv. 29–34 as substantially historical it is not meant, of course, that it is free from the extravagance characteristic of ancient annals, but that it is the nearest approach to Solomon’s era in the so-called historical books, and, although the stage of idealisation has been reached, is free from the mythology which grew around the name of Solomon.
But while we have thus only one small scrap of even quasi-historical writing that can be regarded as approaching Solomon’s era, the traditions concerning him preserved in the Book of Kings yield much that is of value when comparatively studied with annals of the chroniclers, who modify, and in some cases omit, not to say suppress, the earlier record. Such modifications and omissions, while interesting indications of Jahvist influences, are also testimonies to the strength of the traditions they overlay. The pure and simple literary touchstone can alone be trusted amid such traditions; it alone can distinguish the narratives that have basis, that could not have been entirely invented.
In the Book of Chronicles,—for the division into two books was by Christians, as also was the division of the Book of Kings,—we find an ecclesiastical work written after the captivity, but at different periods and by different hands; it is in the historic form, but really does not aim at history. The main purpose of the first chronicler is to establish certain genealogies and conquests related to the consecration of the house and lineage of David. Solomon’s greatness and his building of the temple are here transferred as far as possible to David.[2] David captures from various countries the gold, silver, and brass, and dedicates them for use in the temple, which he plans in detail, but which Jahveh forbade him to build himself. The reason of this prohibition is far from clear to the first writer on the compilation, but apparently it was because David was not sufficiently highborn and renowned. “I took thee from the sheepcote,” says Jahveh, but adds, “I will make thee a name like unto the name of the great ones that are in the earth;” also, says Jahveh, “I will subdue all thine enemies.” So it is written in 1 Chronicles xvii., and it could hardly have been by the same hand that in xxii. wrote David’s words to Solomon:
“It was in my heart to build an house to the name of Jahveh my God; but the word of Jahveh came to me, saying: ‘Thou shalt not build an house unto my name, because thou hast shed much blood upon the earth in my sight; behold a son shall be born unto thee who shall be a man of rest, and I will give him rest from all his enemies round about: for his name shall be Solomon [Peaceful], and I will give peace and quietness unto Israel in his days: he shall build an house for my name: and he shall be my son, and I will be his father; and I will establish the throne of his kingdom over Israel for ever.’”
In Chapter xvii. Jahveh claims that it is he who has subdued and cut off David’s enemies; his long speech is that of a war-god; but in the xxii. it is the God of Peace who speaks; and in harmony with this character all the bloodshed by which Solomon’s succession was accompanied, as recorded in the Book of Kings, is suppressed, and he stands to the day of his death the Prince of Peace. To him (1 Chron. xxviii., xxix.) from the first all the other sons of David bow submissively, and the people by a solemn election confirm David’s appointment and make Solomon their king.
Thus, 1 Chron. xvii., which is identical with 2 Sam. vii., clearly represents a second Chronicler. The hand of the same writer is found in 1 Chron. xviii., xix., xx., and the chapters partly identical in 2 Samuel, namely viii., x., xi.; the offence of David then being narrated in 2 Samuel xii. as the wrong done Uriah, whereas in 1 Chron. xxi. the sin is numbering Israel. The Chroniclers know nothing of the Uriah and Bathsheba story, but the onomatopœists may take note of the fact that David’s order was to number Israel “from Beer-sheba unto Dan.”
The first ten chapters of 2 Chronicles seem to represent a third chronicler. Here we find David in the background, and Solomon completely conventionalised, as the Peaceful Prince of the Golden Age. All is prosperity and happiness. Solomon even anticipates the silver millennium: “The king made silver to be in Jerusalem as stones.” It is only when the fourth chronicler begins (2 Chron. x.), with the succession of Solomon’s son Rehoboam, that we are told anything against Solomon. Then all Israel come to the new king, saying, “Thy father made our yoke grievous,” and he answers, “My father chastised you with whips, but I with scorpions.”
All this is so inconsistent with the accounts in the earlier books of both David and Solomon, that it is charitable to believe that the third chronicler had never heard the ugly stories about these two canonised kings.
In the First Book of Kings, Solomon is made king against the rightful heir, by an ingenious conspiracy between a wily prophet, Nathan, and a wily beauty, Bathsheba,—Solomon’s mother, whom David had obtained by murdering her husband.
It may be remembered here that David had by Bathsheba a son named Nathan (2 Sam. v. 14; 1 Chron. iii. 5), elder brother of Solomon, from whom Luke traces the genealogy of Joseph, father of Jesus, while Matthew traces it from Solomon. It appears curious that the prophet Nathan should have intrigued for the accession of the younger brother rather than the one bearing his own name. It will be seen, however, by reference to 2 Samuel xii. 24, that Solomon was the first legitimate child of David and Bathsheba, the son of their adultery having died. John Calvin having laid it down very positively that “if Jesus was not descended from Solomon, he was not the Christ,” some theologians have resorted to the hypothesis that Nathan married an ancestress of the Virgin Mary, and that Luke gives her descent, not that of Joseph; but apart from the fact that Luke (iii. 23) begins with Joseph, it is difficult to see how the requirement of Calvin, that Solomon should be the ancestor of Jesus, is met by his mother’s descent from Solomon’s brother. It is clear, however, from 2 Sam. xii. 24, 25, that this elder brother of Solomon, Nathan, is a myth. Otherwise he, and not Solomon, was the lawful heir to the throne (legitimacy being confined to the sons of David born in Jerusalem), and Jesus would not have been “born King of the Jews” (Matt, i. 2), nor fulfilled the Messianic conditions. It is even possible that Luke wished to escape the implication of illegitimacy by tracing the descent of Jesus from Solomon’s elder brother. But the writer of 1 Kings i. had no knowledge of the Christian discovery that, in the order of legal succession to the throne, the sons of David born before he reigned in Jerusalem were excluded. Adonijah’s legal right of succession was not questioned by David (1 Kings i. 6).
When David was in his dotage and near his end this eldest son (by Haggith), Adonijah, began to consult leading men about his accession, but unfortunately for himself, did not summon Nathan. This slighted “prophet” proposed to Bathsheba that she should go to David and tell him the falsehood that he (David) had once sworn before Jahveh that her son Solomon should reign; “and while you are talking,” says Nathan, “I will enter and fulfil” (that was his significant word) “your declaration.” The royal dotard could not gainsay two seemingly independent witnesses, and helplessly kept the alleged oath. David announced this oath as his reason,—apparently the only one,—for appointing Solomon. The prince may be credited with being too young to participate in this scheme.
Irregularity of succession and of birth in princes appeals to popular superstition. The legal heir, regularly born, seems to come by mere human arrangement, but the God-appointed chieftain is expected in unexpected ways and in defiance of human laws and even moralities. David, or some one speaking for him, said, “In sin did my mother conceive me,” and the contempt in which he was held by his father’s other children, and his father’s keeping him out of sight till the prophet demanded him (1 Sam. xvi. 11), look as if he, also, may have been illegitimate. Solomon may have been technically legitimate, but in any case he was the son of an immoral marriage, sealed by a husband’s blood. The populace would easily see the divine hand in the elevation of this youth, who seems to have been himself impressed with the like superstition.
Unfortunately, Solomon received his father’s last injunctions as divine commands. At the very time when David is pictured by the Chronicler in such a saintly death-bed scene, parting so pathetically with his people, and giving such unctuous and virtuous last counsels to Solomon, he is shown by the historian of Kings pouring into his successor’s ear the most treacherous and atrocious directions for the murder of certain persons; among others, of Shimei, whose life he had sworn should not be taken. Shimei had once called David what Jahveh also called him, a man of blood, but afterwards asked his forgiveness. Under a pretence of forgiveness, David nursed his vengeance through many years, and Shimei was now a white-haired man. David’s last words addressed to Solomon were these:
“He (Shimei) came down to meet me at Jordan, and I sware to him by Jahveh, saying, ‘I will not put thee to death with the sword.’ Now therefore hold him not guiltless, for thou art a wise man, and wilt know what thou oughtest to do unto him; and thou shalt bring his hoar head down to the grave in blood.”
Such, according to an admiring annalist, were the last words uttered by David on earth. He died with a lie in his mouth (for he had sworn to Shimei, plainly, “Thy life shall not be taken”), and with murder (personal and vindictive) in his heart. The book opens with a record that they had tried to revive the aged king by bringing to him a beautiful damsel; but lust was gone; the only passion that survived even his lust, and could give one more glow to this “man of blood,” was vengeance. Two aged men were named by him for death at the hands of Solomon, who could not disobey, this being the last act of the forty years of reign of King David. His dying word was “blood.” One would be glad to believe these things mythical, but they are contained in a record which says:
“David did that which was right in the sight of Jahveh and turned not aside from anything that he commanded him all the days of his life, save only in the matter of Uriah the Hittite.”
This traditional incident of getting Uriah slain in order to appropriate his wife, made a deep impression on the historian of Samuel, and suspicious pains are taken (2 Sam. xii.) to prove that the illegitimate son of David and Bathsheba was “struck by Jahveh” for his parents’ sin, and that Solomon was born only after the marriage. Even if the youth was legitimate, the adherents of the king’s eldest son, Adonijah, would not fail to recall the lust and murder from which Solomon sprang, though the populace might regard these as signs of Jahveh’s favor. In the coronation ode (Psalm ii.) the young king is represented as if answering the Legitimists who spoke of his birth not only from an adulteress, but one with a foreign name:
“I will proclaim the decree:
The Lord said unto me, ‘Thou art my son;
This day have I begotten thee.’”
(It is probable that the name Jahveh was inserted in this song in place of Elohim, and in several other phrases there are indications that the original has been tampered with.) The lines—
“Kiss the son lest he be angry
And ye perish straightway.”
and others, may have originated the legendary particulars of plots caused by Solomon’s accession, recorded in the Book of Kings, but at any rate the emphatic claim to his adoption by God as His son, by the anointing received at coronation, suggests some trouble arising out of his birth. There is also a confidence and enthusiasm in the language of the court laureate, as the writer of Psalm ii. appears to have been, which conveys an impression of popular sympathy.
It is not improbable that the superstition about illegitimacy, as under some conditions a sign of a hero’s heavenly origin, may have had some foundation in the facts of heredity. In times when love or even passion had little connexion with any marriage, and none with royal marriages, the offspring of an amour might naturally manifest more force of character than the legitimate, and the inherited sensual impulses, often displayed in noble energies, might prove of enormous importance in breaking down an old oppression continued by an automatic legitimacy of succession.
In Talmudic books (Moed Katon, Vol. 9, col. 2, and Midrash Rabbah, ch. 15) it is related that when Solomon was conveying the ark into the temple, the doors shut themselves against him of their own accord. He recited twenty-four psalms, but they opened not. In vain he cried, “Lift up your heads, O ye gates!” But when he prayed, “O Lord God, turn not Thy face from Thine anointed; remember the mercies of David thy servant” (2 Chron. vi. 42), the gates flew open. “Then the enemies of David turned black in the face, for all knew that God had pardoned David’s transgression with Bathsheba.” This legend curiously ignores 1 Chron. xxii., which shows that Jahveh had prearranged Solomon’s birth and name, and had adopted him before birth. It is one of many rabbinical intimations that David, Bathsheba, Uriah, and Solomon, had become popular divinities,—much like Vulcan, Venus, Mars,—and as such relieved from moral obligations. Jewish theology had to accommodate itself ethically to this popular mythology, and did so by a theory of divine forgiveness; but really the position of Hebrew, as well as Christian, orthodoxy was that lustful David and Bathsheba were mere puppets in the divine plan, and their actions quite consistent with their being souls after Jahveh’s own heart.
[1] The name given to him in 2 Sam. xii. 25, Jedidiah (“beloved of Jah”), by the prophet of Jahveh, is, however, an important item in considering the question of an actual monarch behind the allegorical name, especially as the writer of the book, in adding “for Jahveh’s sake” seems to strain the sense of the name—somewhat as the name “Jesus” is strained to mean saviour in Matt. i. 21. Jedidiah looks like a Jahvist modification of a real name (see p. [20]).
[2] This was continued in rabbinical and Persian superstitions, which attribute to David knowledge of the language of birds. It is said David invented coats of mail, the iron becoming as wax in his hands; he subjected the winds to Solomon, and also a pearl-diving demon.
Chapter II.
The Judgment of Solomon.
It may occur to mythographers that I treat as historical narratives and names that cannot be taken so seriously; but in a study of primitive culture, fables become facts and evidences. A grand harvest awaits that master of mythology and folklore who shall bravely explore the legends of David and Solomon, but in the present essay mythical details can only be dealt with incidentally. Some of these may be considered at the outset.
It is said in 1 Kings i.:
“Now King David was old and stricken in years; and they covered him with clothes, but he gat no heat. Wherefore his servants said unto him, Let there be sought for my lord the king a young virgin: and let her stand before the king, and cherish him; and let her lie in thy bosom, that my lord the king may get heat. So they sought for a fair damsel throughout all the coasts of Israel, and found Abishag the Shunammite, and brought her to the king. And the damsel was very fair; and she cherished the king and ministered to him; but the king knew her not.”
That this story is characteristic of lustful David cannot blind us to the fact of its improbability. Whatever may be meant by “the coasts of Israel,” the impression is conveyed of a long journey, and it is hardly credible that so much time should be taken for a moribund monarch. Many interpretations are possible of the name Abishag, but it is usually translated “Father (or source) of error.” However this may be, the story bears a close resemblance to the search for a wife for Isaac. When Abraham sent out this commission he also “was old and well stricken in age,” and of Rebekah it is said, “The damsel was very fair to look upon, a virgin, neither had any man known her.” (Gen. xxiv.) Rebekah means “ensnarer,” and Abishag “father (source) of error”; and both women cause trouble between two brothers.
There is an Oriental accent about both of these stories. In ancient Indian literature there are several instances of servants sent out to search the world for a damsel fair and wise enough to wed the son and heir of some grand personage. Maya, the mother of Buddha, was sought for in the same way. This of itself is not enough to prove that the Biblical narratives in question are of Oriental origin, but there is a Tibetan tale which contains several details which seem to bear on this point. The tale is that of Viśākhā, and it is accessible to English readers in a translation by Schiefner and Ralston of the “Kah-Gyur.” (Trübner’s Oriental Series.)
Viśākhā was the seventh son of Mrgadhara, prime minister of the king of Kośala. For this youth a bride was sought by a Brahman, who in the land of Champa found a beautiful maiden whose name was also Viśākhā. She was, with other girls, entering a park, where they all bathed in a tank,—her companions taking off their clothes, but Viśākhā lifting her dress by degrees as she entered the water. Besides showing decorum, this maiden conducted herself differently from the others in everything, some of her actions being mysterious. The Brahman, having contrived to meet her alone, questioned her concerning these peculiarities, for all of which she gave reasons implying exceptional wisdom and virtue. On his return the Brahman described this maiden to the prime minister, who set forth and asked her hand for his son, and she was brought to Kośala on a ship with great pomp. The maiden then for a long time gives evidence of extraordinary wisdom, one example being of special importance to our inquiry. She determines which of two women claiming a child is the real mother. The king and his ministers being unable to settle the dispute, Viśākhā said:
“Speak to the two women thus: ‘As we do not know to which of you two the boy belongs, let her who is the strongest take the boy.’ When each of them has taken hold of one of the boy’s hands, and he begins to cry out on account of the pain, the real mother will let go, being full of compassion for him, and knowing that if her child remains alive she will be able to see it again; but the other, who has no compassion for him, will not let go. Then beat her with a switch, and she will thereupon confess the truth of the whole matter.”
In comparing this with the famous judgment of Solomon there appear some reasons for believing the Oriental tale to be the earlier. In the Biblical tale there is evidently a missing link. Why should the false mother, who had so desired the child, consent to have it cut in two? What motive could she have? But in the Tibetan tale one of the women is the wife, the other the concubine, of a householder. The wife bore him no child, and was jealous of the concubine on account of her babe. The concubine, feeling certain that the wife would kill the child, gave it to her, with her lord’s approval; but after his death possession of the house had to follow motherhood of the child. If, however, the child were dead, the false claimant would be mistress of the house. Here, then, is a motive wanting in the story of Solomon, and suggesting that the latter is not the original.
In the ancient “Mahosadha Jataka” the false claimant proves to be a Yakshini (a sort of siren and vampire) who wishes to eat the child. To Buddha himself is here ascribed the judgment, which is much the same as that of the “wise Champa maiden,” Viśākhā. Here, also, is a motive for assenting to the child’s death or injury which is lacking in the Biblical story.
Here, then, we find in ancient Indian literature a tale which may be fairly regarded as the origin of the “Judgment of Solomon.” And it belongs to a large number of Oriental tales in which the situations and accents of the Biblical narratives concerning David and Solomon often occur. There is a cave-born youth, Aśuga, son of a Brahman and a bird-fairy, with a magic lute which accompanies his verses, and who dallies with Brahmadetta’s wife. A king, enamored of a beautiful foreign woman beneath him in rank, obtains her by a promise that her son, if one is born, shall succeed him on the throne, to the exclusion of his existing heir by his wife of equal birth; but he permits arrangements for his elder son’s succession to go on until induced by a threat of war from the new wife’s father and country to fulfil his promise. A prime minister, Mahaushadha, travels, in disguise of a Brahman, in order to find a true wife; he meets with a witty maiden (Viśākhā), who directs him to her village by a road where he will see her naked at a bathing tank, though she had taken another road. This minister was, like David, lowly born; a “deity” revealed him to the king, as Jahveh revealed David to Samuel; he was a seventh minister, as David was a seventh son, and Solomon also.
Although the number seven was sacred among the ancient Hebrews, it does not appear to have been connected by them with exceptional wisdom or occult powers in man or woman. The ideas in which such legends as “The Seven Wise Masters,” “The Seven Sages,” and the superstition about a seventh son’s second-sight, originate, are traceable to ancient Indo-Iranian theosophy. It may be useful here to read the subjoined extract from Darmesteter’s introduction to the “Vendîdâd.” Having explained that the religion of the Persian Magi is derived from the same source as that of the Indian Rishis, that is, from the common forefathers of both Iranian and Indian, he says:
“The Indo-Iranian Asura (the supreme but not the only god) was often conceived as sevenfold: by the play of certain mythical formulæ and the strength of certain mythical numbers, the ancestors of the Indo-Iranians had been led to speak of seven worlds, and the supreme god was often made sevenfold, as well as the worlds over which he ruled. The names and the attributes of the seven gods had not been as yet defined, nor could they be then; after the separation of the two religions, these gods, named Aditya, ‘the infinite ones,’ in India, were by and by identified there with the sun, and their number was afterward raised to twelve, to correspond to the twelve aspects of the sun. In Persia, the seven gods are known as Amesha Spentas, ‘the undying and well-doing one’; they by and by, according to the new spirit that breathed in the religion, received the names of the deified abstractions, Vohu-manô (good thought), Asha Vahista (excellent holiness), Khshathra Vairya (perfect sovereignty), Spenta Armaîti (divine piety), Haurvatât and Ameretâot (health and immortality). The first of them all was and remained Ahura Mazda; but whereas formerly he had been only the first of them, he was now their father. ‘I invoke the glory of the Amesha Spentas, who all seven have one and the same thinking, one and the same speaking, one and the same father and lord, Ahura Mazda,’” (Yast xix. 16.)[1]
In Persian religion the Seven are always wise and beneficent. The vast folklore derived from this Parsî religion included the Babylonian belief in seven powerful spirits, associated with the Pleiades, beneficent at certain seasons, but normally malevolent: they all move together, taking possession of human beings, as in the case of the seven demons cast out of Mary Magdalene. In Egypt the seven are always evil. But neither of these sevens are especially clever. In Buddhist legends they are not so carefully classified, the seventh son or daughter manifesting exceptional powers, sometimes of good, sometimes of evil, but they are usually referred to for this wit or wisdom. In the Davidian and Solomonic legends these notions are found as if merely adhering to some importation, and without any perception of the significance of the number seven. David is an eighth son in 1 Sam. xvi. 10–13, but a seventh son in 1 Chron. ii. 16. Solomon is a tenth son in 1 Chron. iii. 1–6, but the seventh legitimate son in 2 Sam. xii. 24–25. The word Sheba means “the seven,” but the early scribes appear to have understood it as shaba, “he swears,” as in Gen. xxi. 30–31, where after the seven ewe lambs have given the well its name, Beersheba, it is ascribed the significance of an oath. Bathsheba is commonly translated “Daughter of the Oath,” but there can be little doubt that the name means “Daughter of the Seven,” and that it originated in the astute tricks by which that fair foreigner made herself queen-mother and her son king, above the lawful heir, whom she was instrumental (perhaps purposely) in getting out of the way by furthering his wishes.
Moral obliquities are little considered in these fair favorites of translunary powers. Viśākhā, in one Buddhist tale, gets herself chosen by the Brahman as bride of a great man by her care to veil her charms at the bath; in another tale she attracts a prime minister in disguise, and becomes his wife, partly by laying aside all of her clothing at a bathing tank where she knows he will see her. Bathsheba’s fame is similarly various. Her nudity and ready adultery with the king did not prevent her from passing into Talmudic tradition as “blessed among women,” and to her was even ascribed the beautiful chapter of Proverbs (xxxi.) in praise of the virtuous wife! In the “Wisdom of Solomon” she is described as the “handmaiden” of the Lord in anticipation of the Christian ideal of immaculate womanhood.
A similar development might no doubt be traced in the beautiful story of Vi[’]s[=]akh[=]a of Shravasti, the most famous of the female lay-disciples of Buddha. The queries put to her by Buddha and her explanations of her petitions, which had appeared enigmatic, are related in Carus’s Gospel of Buddha, and in form correspond with the very different questions and solutions that passed between the Brahman and the Tibetan Viśākhā, already mentioned. The name Viśākhā, from a Sanskrit root, meaning to divide, came to mean selection and intelligence, of all kinds, but in the matron of Shravastî wit becomes the genius of charity, and cleverness expands to enlightenment.
The Queen of Sheba,—“Queen of the Seven,”—is a sister spirit of this lay-disciple. Whatever truth may underlie the legends of this lady, there is little doubt of her legendary relation to the Wise Women of Buddhist parables,—to Viśākhā of the sevenfold wisdom; and of her who decided between the rival claimants to the same child; to Ambapāli, the courtesan, who journeyed to hear Buddha’s wisdom and presented to him and his disciples her park and mansion; and to the Queen of Glory, whose story belongs “to a very early period in the history of Buddhism.” Such is the opinion of Mr. Rhys Davids, whose translation of the Mahásudassana-Sutta, containing an account of the queen’s visit to the King of Glory, in his Palace of Justice, attended by her fourfold army, may be read in Vol. XI., p. 276, of Sacred Books of the East.
This exaltation of human knowledge and wisdom, travelling to find it, testing it with riddles and questions, belongs to the cult of the Magus and the Pundit.
With reference to the seventh son Viśākhā (all-potential) and his all-wise bride Viśākhā, a notable parallelism is found in the substantial identity of “Solomon” and “the Shunnamite,” on account of whom he slew his brother Adonijah. Shunnamite is equivalent to Shulamite, substantially the same as Solomon (peaceful), but here probably meaning that she was a “Solomoness,” a very wise woman. That such was her reputation appears by the “Song of Songs.”
An equally striking comparison may be made between the naming of Solomon and the naming of Mahaushadha, the Tibetan “Solomon” already mentioned as having married a wise Viśākhā. Among the many proofs of wisdom given by this village-born youth was the discovery of the real husband of a woman claimed by two men. One of the men being much the weaker, there could be no such trial as that proposed in the child’s case by Viśākhā. Mahaushadha questioned the two men as to what they had last eaten, then made them vomit, and so found out which had told the truth. Let us compare this Tibetan minister’s birth with that of Solomon:
“When the boy came into the world and his birth-feast was celebrated, the name of Mahaushadha (Great Remedy) was given to him at the request of his mother, inasmuch as she, who had long suffered from illness, and had been unable to obtain relief from the time of the boy’s conception, had been cured by him.” (Tib. Tales, p. 133)
“And Jahveh struck the child that Uriah’s wife bare unto David, and ... on the seventh day [it was the seventh son] the child died.... And David comforted Bathsheba his wife, and went in unto her, and lay with her; and she bare a son, and she called his name Solomon. And Jahveh loved him; and he sent by the hand of Nathan the prophet, and he called his name Jedidiah [Beloved of Jah] for Jahveh’s sake.” (2 Sam. xii.)
In the Revised Version “she called” is given in the margin as “another reading,” but that it is the right reading appears by the context: it was she that was “comforted,” and in her babe she found “rest”—which “Solomon” strictly means. Among the Hebrews the naming of a child was an act of authority, and it is difficult to believe that in any purely Hebrew narrative a woman would be described as setting aside the name given by Jahveh himself. But the high position of woman in the Iranian and the Buddhist religions is well known.
In comparative studies the questions to be determined concerning parallel incidents are—whether they are trivial coincidences; whether they are not based in such universal beliefs or simple facts that they may have been of independent origin; whether the historic conditions of time and place admit of any supposed borrowing; if borrowing occurred, which is the original? With regard to the above parallelisms I submit that one of them, at least,—the Judgment of Solomon,—is neither trivial nor based in simple facts, and could not have originated independently of the Indian tale; that the others, though each, if it stood alone, might be a mere coincidence, are too numerous to be so explained; that the time and conditions which rendered it possible that the names of the apes and peacocks (1 Kings x. 22) imported by Solomon should be Indian proves the possibility of importations of tales from the same country. (See Rhys David’s Buddhist Birth Stories, p. xlvii.)
The question remaining to be determined—which region was the borrower—cannot be settled, in the present cases, by the relative antiquity of the books in which they are found; not only are the ages of all the books, Hebrew and Oriental, doubtful, but they are all largely made up of narratives long anterior to their compilation. The safest method, therefore, must be study of the intrinsic character of each narrative with a view to discovering the country to whose intellectual and social fauna and flora, so to say, it is most related, and which of the stories bears least of the faults incidental to translation. I have applied this touchstone to the above examples, and believe that the Oriental stories are the originals. The Judgment of Solomon appears to me to have lost an essential link, a motif, which it retains in Buddhist versions. And I do not believe that any Hebrew Bathsheba could have set aside a name given her child by a prophet, in the name of Jahveh, in order to celebrate by another name the “rest” she found from her sorrows.
On the other hand, the borrowings by other countries from the legend of Solomon appear much more numerous. In some cases, as the legend of Jemshîd, there appear to have been exchanges between the two great sages, but the Solomonic traditions seem preponderant in Vikramadatsya, the demon-commanding hero of India. Solomon became a proverb of wisdom and liberality in Abyssinia, Arabia, and Persia. Ideal Sulaimans and Solimas abound. Solomon has influenced the legends of many heroes, such as Haroun-Alraschid and Charlemagne, and I will even venture a suspicion that the fame, and perhaps the name, of Solon have been influenced by the legend of Solomon. Lexicographers give no account of Solon’s name; he is assigned to a conjectural period before written Greek existed; his interviews with Crœsus, given in Herodotus, are hopelessly unhistorical, and his moralisings to the rich man recall the book of Proverbs. The Solon of Plato’s Critias is already a mythological voyager, a Sindebad-Solomon, and his romance of the lost Atlantis is like an idealised rumour of the Wise Man’s Kingdom. Solon’s “history” was developed by Plutarch, seven centuries after the era assigned to the sage, out of poetical fragments ascribed to him, and he is represented as a great trader and traveller in the regions associated with Solomon. It is doubtful whether this chief of the Seven Sages, whose Solomonic motto was “Know Thyself” (cf. Prov. xiv. 8), could he reappear, would know himself as historically costumed by writers in our era, from Plutarch to Grote.
At any rate there is little doubt of a reference to the Seven Spentas or to the Seven Sages in Proverbs ix. 1:
“Wisdom hath builded her house,
She hath hewn out her seven pillars.”
[1] Sacred Books of the East. Edited by F. Max Müller. Vol. IV. The Zend-Avesta. Part I. The Vendîdâd. Translated by James Darmesteter. P. lix., et seq.
Chapter III.
The Wives of Solomon.
According to the first book of Kings, Solomon’s half-brother, Adonijah, after the defeat of an alleged (perhaps mythical) effort to recover the throne of which he had been defrauded, submitted himself to Solomon. He had become enamored of the virgin who had been brought to the aged King David to try to revive some vitality in him; and he came to Bathsheba asking her to request her son the king to give him this damsel as his wife. Bathsheba proffered this “small petition” for Adonijah, but Solomon was enraged, and ironically suggested that she should ask the kingdom itself for Adonijah, whom he straightway ordered to execution. The immediate context indicates that Solomon suspected in this petition a plot against his throne. A royal father’s harem was inherited by a royal son, and its possession is supposed to have involved certain rights of succession: this is the only interpretation I have ever heard of the extreme violence of Solomon. But I have never been satisfied with this explanation. Would Adonijah have requested, or Bathsheba asked as a “small” thing, a favor touching the king’s tenure?
The story as told in the Book of Kings appears diplomatic, and several details suggest that in some earlier legend the strife between the half-brothers had a more romantic relation to “Abishag the Shunammite,” who is described as “very fair.”
Abishag is interpreted as meaning “father of error,” and though that translation is of doubtful accuracy, its persistence indicates the place occupied by her in early tradition. According to Yalkut Reubeni the soul of Eve transmigrated into her. She caused trouble between the brothers, whose Jahvist names, Adonijah and Jedidiah,—strength of Jah, and love of Jah,—seem to have been at some time related. However this may be, the fair Shunammite, as represented in the Shulamite of the Song of Songs, fills pretty closely the outlines set forth in the famous epithalamium (Psalm xlv.) which all critics, I believe, refer to Solomon’s marriage with a bride brought from some far country. I quote (with a few alterations hereafter discussed) the late Professor Newman’s translation, in which it will be seen that several lines are applicable to the Shunammite, whose humble position is alluded to, separated from her “people,” and her “father’s house”:
“My heart boils up with goodly matter.
I ponder; and my verse concerns the King.
Let my tongue be a ready writer’s pen.
“Fairer art thou than all the sons of men.
Over thy lips delightsomeness is poured:
Therefore hath God forever blessed thee.
“Gird at thy hip thy hero sword,
Thy glory and thy majesty:
And forth victorious ride majestic,
For truth and meekness, righteously;
And let thy right hand teach the wondrous deeds.
Beneath thy feet the peoples fall;
For in the heart of the king’s enemies
Sharp are thy arrows.
“Thy throne, O God, ever and always stands;
A righteous sceptre is thy royal sceptre.
Thou lovest right and hatest evil;
Therefore, O God, thy God hath anointed thee
With oil of joy above thy fellow-kings.
Myrrh, aloes, cassia, all thy raiment is.
From ivory palaces the viols gladden thee.
King’s daughters count among thy favorites;
And at thy right hand stands the Queen
In Gold of Ophir.
“O daughter, hark! behold and bend thy ear:
Forget thy people and thy father’s house.
Win thou the King thy beauty to desire;
He is thy lord; do homage unto him.
So Tyrus’s daughter and the sons of wealth
With gifts shall court thee.
“Right glorious is the royal damsel;
Wrought of gold is her apparel.
In broidered tissues to the King she is led:
Her maiden-friends, behind, are brought to thee.
They come with joy and gladness,
They enter the royal palace.
“Thy fathers by their sons shall be replaced;
As princes o’er the land shalt thou exalt them.
So will I publish to all times thy name;
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.
The commercial régime established by Solomon could hardly have been possible but for his intermarriages. Perhaps if the Christian ban had not been fixed against polygamy, and European princes had been permitted to marry in several countries, there might have been fewer wars, as well as fewer illicit connexions. The intermarriages of the large English royal family with most of the reigning houses of Europe, have been for many years a security of peace, and it is not improbable that our industrial and democratic age, wherein the working man’s welfare depends on peace, may find in the undemocratic institution of royalty a certain utility in its power to be prolific in such ties of peace.
Chapter IV.
Solomon’s Idolatry.
Bathsheba’s function at Solomon’s marriage is celebrated in the Song of Songs:
“Go forth, O ye daughters of Zion, and behold King Solomon,
With the crown wherewith his mother crowned him in the day of his espousals.”
Bathsheba, as we have seen, was said to have written Proverbs xxxi. as an admonition or reproof to her son on his betrothal with the daughter of Pharaoh. The words of David, “Send me Uriah the Hittite” (2 Sam. xi. 6), and the emphasis laid on Uriah’s being a Hittite (a race with which intermarriage was prohibited, Deut. vii. 1–5) might have been meant as some legal excuse for David’s conduct. He rescued Bathsheba, Hebraised (1 Chr. iii. 5), from unlawful wedlock, it might be said, and her exaltation in Talmudic tradition may have been meant to guard the purity of David’s lineage. But the ascription to Bathsheba of especial opposition to her son’s marriage with the daughter of Pharaoh indicates that the gravamen in Solomon’s posthumous offence lay less in his intermarriage with foreigners than in building for them shrines of their several deities,—Istar, Chemosh, Milcom, and the rest. Against Pharaoh’s daughter the Talmud manifests a special animus: she is said to have introduced to Solomon a thousand musical instruments, and taught him chants to the various idols. (Shabbath, 56, col. 2.)
There is a bit of Solomonic folklore according to which the Devil tempted him with a taunt that he would be but an ordinary person but for his magic ring, in which lay all his wisdom. Solomon being piqued into a denial, was challenged to remove his ring, but no sooner had he done so than the Devil seized it, and, having by its might metamorphosed the king beyond recognition, himself assumed the appearance of Solomon and for some time resided in the royal seraglio. The more familiar legend is that Solomon was cajoled into parting with his signet ring by a promise of the demon to reveal to him the secret of demonic superiority over man in power. Having transformed Solomon and transported him four hundred miles away, the demon (Asmodeus) threw the ring into the sea. Solomon, after long vagrancy, became the cook of the king of Ammon (Ano Hanun), with whose daughter, Naamah, he eloped.[1] One day in dressing a fish for dinner Naamah found in it the signet ring which Asmodeus had thrown into the sea, and Solomon thus recovered his palace and harem from the demon.
The connexion of this fish-and-ring legend,—known in several versions, from the Ring of Polycrates (Herodotus III.) to the heraldic legend of Glasgow,—with the Solomonic demonology, looks as if it may once have been part of a theory that the idolatrous shrines were built for the princesses while the Devil was personating their lord. In truth, however, all of these animadversions belong to a comparatively late period. Many struggles had to precede even the recognition of the idolatrous character of the shrines, and to the last the Jews were generally proud of the “graven images” in their temple,—including brazen reproductions of the terrible Golden Calf. At the same time there were no doubt some old priests and soothsayers to whom these new-fangled things were injurious and odious, and superstitious people enough to cling to their ancient unhewn altar rather than to the brilliant cherubim, just as in Catholic countries the devotees cannot be drawn from their age-blackened Madonnas and time-stained crucifixes by the most attractive works of modern art.
Although there is no evidence that the God of Israel was known under the name of either Jah or Jahveh in Solomon’s time, there is little doubt that the rudimentary forces of Jahvism were felt in the Solomonic age. The furious prophetic denunciations of the wise and learned which echoed on through the centuries, and made the burden of St. Paul, indicate that there was from the first much superstition among the peasantry, which might easily in times of distress be fanned into fanaticism. The special denunciation of Solomon by Jahveh, and his suppression during the prophetic age, could hardly have been possible but for some extreme defiance on his part of the primitive priesthood and the soothsayers. The temple was dedicated by the king himself without the help of any priest, and the monopoly of the prophet was taken away by the establishment of an oracle in the temple. And the worst was that these things indicated a genuine liberation of the king, intellectually, from the superstitions out of which Jahvism grew. This was especially proved by his disregard of the sanctuary claimed by the murderer Joab, who had laid hold of the horns of the altar. The altar was the precinct of deity, and beyond the jurisdiction of civil or military authority; yet when the “man of blood” refused to leave the altar our royal forerunner of Erastus compelled the reluctant executioner to slay him at the altar,—even the sacred altar of unhewn stone. As no thunderbolt fell from heaven on the king for this sacrilege, the act could not fail to be a thunderbolt from earth striking the phantasmal heaven of the priest. The Judgment Day for settlement of such accounts was not yet invented, and injuries of the gods were left to the vengeance of their priests and prophets.
There is an unconscious humour in the solemn reading by English clergymen of Jahvist rebukes of Solomon for his tolerance towards idolatry, at a time when the Queen of England and Empress of India is protecting temples and idols throughout her realm, and has just rebuilt the ancient temple of Buddha at Gâya; while the sacred laws of Brahman, Buddhist, Parsee, Moslem, are used in English courts of justice. If any modern Josiah should insult a shrine of Vishnu, or of any Hindu deity, he would have to study his exemplar inside a British prison.
[1] “Ammon” probably developed the name “Amîna,” given in the Talmud as the name of a favorite concubine of Solomon, to whom, while he was bathing, he entrusted his signet ring, and from whom the Devil, Sakhar, obtained it by appearing to her in the shape of Solomon. This is the version referred to in the Koran, chapter xxxviii. (Sale.)
Chapter V.
Solomon and the Satans.
When Solomon ascended the throne, Jerusalem must have been a wretched place, without any art or architecture, with a swarming mongrel population, mainly of paupers. The holy ark was kept in a tent, and the altar of unhewn stone accurately symbolised the rude condition of the people, among whom Solomon could find no workmen of skill enough to build a temple. It is not easy to forgive him for compelling a good many of them into the public works; but it was probably no more than a national conscription of the unemployed paupers in Jerusalem, chiefly on fortifications for their own defence. There was apparently no slave-mart, and it seems rather better to conscript people for public industries than, in our modern way, for cutting their neighbors’ throats. Most of them were the remnants of tribes that once occupied the region, much despised by the Israelites, and probably they looked on Solomon’s plan of building Jerusalem into a city of magnificence, giving everybody employment and support, as a grand socialistic movement. An Ephraimite, Jeroboam, who tried to get up a revolt in Jerusalem does not seem to have found any adherents. The only people who complained of any yoke—and their complaint is only heard of after some centuries—were the priest-ridden and prophet-ridden Israelites who had become fanatically excited about the strange shrines built for the king’s foreign wives, and the splendid carvings and forms in the temple itself. Probably the first two commandments in the decalogue were put there with special reference to some Solomonic cult with an æsthetic taste for graven images and foreign shrines.
There can be little doubt that Solomon, by his patronage of these foreign religions, detached them from the cruel rites traditionally associated with them. Among all the censures pronounced against him none attributes to him any human sacrifices, though such are ascribed to David and Samuel, (1 Sam. xv. 33, 2 Sam. xxi. 9). The earliest rebukes of sacrifice in the Bible are those attributed to Solomon. “To do justice and judgment is more acceptable to the Lord than sacrifice” (Prov. xxi. 3). “By mercy and truth iniquity is atoned for” (Prov. xvi. 6). “Mercy and truth preserve the king; he upholdeth his throne by mercy” (Prov. xx. 28). “Deliver them that are carried away to death: those that are ready to be slain forbear not thou to save” (Prov. xxiv. 11). “Love covereth all transgressions” (Prov. x. 12).
Solomon may not indeed have written these and the many similar maxims ascribed to him, but they are among the most ancient sentences in the Bible, and they would not have been attributed to any man who had not left among the people a tradition of humanity and benevolence. Had the royal “idolator” or his wives stained their shrines with human blood the prophets would have been eager to declare it. Two acts of cruelty are ascribed to Solomon’s youth, in the book of Kings: one of these, the execution of Shimei, carried out his father’s order, but only after Shimei had been given fair warning with means of escape; while the other, the execution of Adonijah (Solomon’s brother), if true, is too much wrapped up in obscurity to enable us to judge its motives; but it cannot be regarded as historical.
The second historiographer of Kings, setting out to record Jahveh’s anger about Solomon’s foreign wives and shrines (1 Kings xi) says, with unconscious humour, that Jahveh raised Satan against him,—two Satans. One of these was Hadad, an Edomite, the other Rezon, a Syrian. The writer says that this was when Solomon was old, his wives having then turned away his heart after other gods. Fortunately, however, this writer has embodied in his record some items, evidently borrowed, which contradict his Jahvistic legend. One of these tells us that Hadad had been carried away from Edom to Egypt, when David and his Captain Joab massacred all the males in Edom; that he there married the sister of Pharaoh; and that he returned to his own country on hearing of the death of David and Joab. When this occurred, Solomon, so far from being old, was about eighteen. The Septuagint (Vatican MS.) says that Hadad “reigned in the land of Edom.” We may conclude then that on the return of this heir to the throne Edom declared its independence, nor is there any indication that Solomon tried to prevent this. Another contradiction of this writer is a note inserted about Rezon the Syrian,—“He was an adversary of Israel all the days of Solomon.” Not, therefore, a Satan raised up by Jahveh against Solomon when in old age he had turned to other gods. Rezon “reigned over Syria,” and there is no indication of any expedition against him sent out by Solomon. Bishop Colenso (Pentateuch, Vol. III., p. 101), in referring to these points remarks that we do not read of a single warlike expedition undertaken by Solomon.[1]
The remark (1 Kings xi.) about the Satans set against Solomon is more applicable to the Shiloh traitors, Ahijah and Jeroboam. Jeroboam,—a servant whom Solomon had raised to high office,—was instigated by Ahijah, a “prophet” neglected by Solomon, to his ungrateful treason. Ahijah pretended that he had a divine revelation that he (Jeroboam) was to succeed Solomon on account (of course!) of the king’s shrines to Istar, Chemosh, and Milcom. If the narrative were really historic nothing could be more “Satanic” than the lies and treacheries related of those self-seekers. Were the story true, the failure of these divinely appointed “Satans” to overthrow the kingdom of Solomon, who did not arm against them, must have been due to his popularity. In after times this impunity of the glorious “idolator” would have to be explained; consequently we find Jahveh telling Solomon that, offended as he was by the shrines, he would spare him for his father’s sake, but would rend the kingdom, save one tribe, from his (Solomon’s) son. That this should be immediately followed by the raising up of “Satans” to harass Solomon and Israel, Jahveh having just said the trouble should be postponed till after the king’s death, suggests that the whole account of these quarrels (1 Kings xi. 14–40) is a late interpolation. Up to that point the old record is unbroken. “He had peace on all sides round about him. And Judah and Israel dwelt safely, every man under his vine and under his fig-tree, from Dan to Beersheba, all the days of Solomon” (1 Kings iv. 24–25).
Jahveh, in his personal interview with Solomon (1 Kings xi. 11–13), said, “I will surely rend the kingdom from thee and will give it to thy servant.” That is, as explained by the “prophet” Ahijah, to Jeroboam. As a retribution and check on idolatry the selection, besides violating Jahveh’s promise to David (1 Chron. xxii), was not successful: after the sundering of Israel and Judah into internecine kingdoms, Jeroboam, King of Israel, established idolatry more actively than either Solomon or his son Rehoboam. On Jeroboam, his selected Nemesis, Jahveh inflicted his characteristic punishment of visiting the sins of the fathers on the children; as David was left the seduced wife whose husband he had murdered, while his son was executed; as Solomon was left in peaceful enjoyment of his kingdom and none of the sinful shrines destroyed, while his son bore the penalty; so now Jeroboam, elect of Jahveh, built golden calves, surpassed Solomon’s offences, and vengeance was taken on his son Abijah, who died. This Abijah left a son, Baasha, who, undeterred by these fatalities, continued the “idolatries” with impunity for the twenty-four years of his reign, the punishment falling on his son Elah, who was slain after only two years’ reign by his military servant, Zimri. And this Zimri, who thus carried on Jahveh’s decree against idolatry, himself continued “in the ways of Jeroboam,” the shrines and idols themselves being meanwhile unvisited by any executioner or iconoclast until some centuries later.
In Josiah there arrived a king, of the line of David, who might seem by his fury against idolatry to be another “man after God’s own heart.” He pulverised the images and the shrines, he “sacrificed the priests on their own altars,” he even dug up the bones of those who had ministered at such altars and burnt them. He trusted Jahveh absolutely. He went to the prophetess, Hulda, who told him that he should be “gathered to his grave in peace.” He was slain miserably, by the King of Egypt, to whom the country then became subject.
Josephus ascribed the act of Josiah, in hurling himself against an army that was not attacking him, to fate. The fate was that Josiah, having exterminated the wizards and fortune-tellers, repaired to the only dangerous one among them, because she pretended to be a “prophetess,” inspired by Jahveh. Her assurances led him to believe himself invulnerable, personally, and that in his life-time Jerusalem would not suffer the woes she predicted. Josiah, “of the house of David,” seems to have thought that his zeal in destroying the shrines which his ancestor Solomon had introduced, mainly Egyptian, would be so grandly consummated if he could destroy a Pharaoh, that he insisted on a combat. Pharaoh-Necho sent an embassy to say that he was not his enemy, but on his way to fight the Assyrian: “God commanded me to hasten; forbear thou from opposing God, who is with me, that he destroy thee not.” Here, however, was the fanatic’s opportunity for an Armageddon: Pharaoh had appealed to what Solomon would have regarded as their common deity, but which to Josiah meant a chance to pit Jahveh against the God of Egypt. On Jahveh’s invisible forces he must have depended for victory. So perished Josiah, and with him the independence of his country.
Solomon, the Prince of Peace, had made the house of Pharaoh the ally of his country. Josiah carries his people back under Egyptian bondage. Solomon had built the metropolitan Temple, whose shrines, symbols, works of art, represented a catholicity to all races and religions,—peace on earth, good will to man. Josiah, panic-stricken about a holy book purporting to have been found in the Temple, concerning which the king by his counsellors consulted a female fortune-teller, makes a holocaust of all that Solomon had built up.
[1] The marriage of Hadad with Pharaoh’s sister and that of Solomon shortly after with Pharaoh’s daughter might naturally, Colenso says, lead to some amicable arrangement between these two young princes, representing respectively the ancient domains of Jacob and Esau, and the Bishop adds the pregnant suggestion: “Thus also would be explained another phenomenon in connexion with this matter, which we observe in the Jehovistic portions of Genesis—viz., the reconciliation of Esau and Jacob” (Gen. xxxiii). That Solomon was on good terms with Edom appears by the fact that his naval station was in that land (1 K. ix. 26).
Chapter VI.
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,
A place for thee to dwell in forever.
Lo, is it not written in the book of Jasher?”[1]
This suppression of the opening line of the Dedication, at cost of a grand poetic antithesis, reveals the hand of mere bigoted ignorance. How many other fine things have been eliminated, how many reduced to commonplaces, we know not, but the additions and interpolations in the Old Testament have been nearly all traced. Many of these are novelettes more prurient than the tales forbidden in families when found in the pages of Boccaccio and Balzac, and it is a notable evidence of the mere fetish that the Bible has become to most sects, that a chorus of abuse instead of welcome still meets the scholars who prove the quasi-spurious character of the most odious stories in Genesis.
Bishop Colenso seems to have found in such tales only the work of a Jahvist with a taste for obscene details, but too little attention has been paid to the investigations of Bernstein, who discovers in many of these legends a late Ephraimic effort to blacken the character of the whole house and line of Judah.[2] Bernstein does not deal with the story of Adonijah and Jedidiah (Solomon), whose relative antiquity is shown, I think, in the fact that no shameful action is ascribed to the elder brother to account for the deprivation of his primogenitive right. After Solomon’s accession, however, Adonijah proposed to marry the maiden Abishag, who technically belonged to his father’s harem, and probably this tradition gave a cue to the inventor of the story of Absalom’s having gone to his father’s concubines in order to base on the act a claim to the kingdom while his father was yet alive.
Absalom’s shameful action is supposed to be a fulfilment of the sentence pronounced against David because of his crime against Uriah. A close examination of that passage (2 Sam. xii. 10–14) must suggest doubts about verses 11, 12, but at any rate the sentence is not fulfilled by Absalom’s alleged act: David’s “wives” were not taken away “before his eyes,” and given “unto his neighbor,” but some of his concubines were appropriated by his son. Absalom’s act (2 Sam. xvi. 20–23) and that of David’s consigning the concubines to perpetual isolation or imprisonment (2 Sam. xx. 3) are not alluded to in David’s mourning for Absalom, nor in Joab’s rebuke of this grief. In these strange incoherent items one seems to find the debris, so to say, of some masterly work, picturing a sort of Nemesis pursuing David and his family for the crime against Uriah. Ahithophel, who is described as “the word of God,” was the grandfather of Bathsheba and the chief friend and counsellor of David, yet it was he who suddenly becomes a traitor to the King, foreshadowing Judas—as his sinister name (“brother of lies”) implies—even to the extent of hanging himself. It was Bathsheba’s grandfather who moved Absalom to dishonor his father’s concubines. But were they only concubines in the original story, or were they David’s wives, as predicted in the verses 11, 12 (2 Sam. xii.) which seem misplaced and unfulfilled? It may have been that some of the details of the story were too gross for preservation, or too disgraceful to David, but I cannot think that we possess in its original form the tragedy suggested by the presence of an ancestor of seduced Bathsheba,—the sinister “word of God” Ahithophel,—and the death of the child of that adultery, the deflowering of Tamar, David’s daughter, the disgrace and violent death of Amnon, Absalom, apparently of Daniel also, and finally of Adonijah. What became of the eight wives of David? Was that prediction ascribed to Nathan, of their defilement, without any corresponding narrative?
In a previous chapter I have pointed out the improbability that the fatal wrath of Solomon against Adonijah could have been excited by his brother’s proposal of honorable wedlock with the maiden Abishag, and conjectured that there may have been a story, now lost, of rivalry between the brothers for this “very fair” damsel. Whatever may have been the real history there is little doubt that there was substituted for it some real offence by Adonijah, perhaps such as that afterwards ascribed to Absalom. Bathsheba herself is here the Nemesis, as her grandfather is in the case of Absalom.
It must be borne in mind that we are dealing with the age which produced the thrilling story of Joseph and his brothers, and Potiphar’s wife, and the contrast with his chastity represented in the profligacy of Judah. Indications have been left in Gen. xxxv. at the end of verse 22 of the suppression of a story of Reuben and Bilhah, and no doubt there were other suppressions. How very bad the story of Reuben was we may judge, as Bernstein points out, by the severity of his condemnation by Jacob (Gen. xlix.) and by the shocking things about Judah (Gen. xxxviii.) allowed to remain in the text. In the latter chapter Bernstein finds the same personages,—David, Bathsheba, Solomon,—acting in a similar drama to that presented in the Samuel fragments, and under their disguises may perhaps be discovered some of the details suppressed in the Davidic records. Bernstein says:
“In Genesis xxxviii. Judah, the fourth son of the patriarch, is shown in a light which is to lay bare the stain of his existence. Judah went to Adullam, where lived his friend ‘Chirah.’ He married a Canaanite, the daughter of Shuah.[3] His eldest son was called Er. He (Er) was displeasing in the eyes of Jahveh, therefore Jahveh slew him. His second son was called Onan: he died in consequence of his sexual sins. The third son’s name was Shelah, and, as it is mysteriously stated after his name, ‘he was at Chezib when his mother bare him.’ Chezib is certainly the name of a place, and the addition may therefore signify that the mother had named the boy Shelah because the father happened to be in Chezib at the time, absent from home. Chezib has, however, a second meaning.... Chezib means ‘deception, lie,’ and is used by the prophet Micah in this sense (i. 4). Now as Shelah, in our narrative, serves to deceive Tamar’s hopes, held out by Judah, the allusion to Chezib is appropriate. However this may be, Judah’s sons are all represented as despicable. Even Judah himself fell into bad ways and was trapped into the snares laid by his daughter-in-law Tamar, who played the prostitute. Thus only did Judah found a generation, from which King David is said to descend, from a son of Judah called Paretz, meaning ‘breaking through,’ in which manner he is supposed to have behaved towards his brother at his birth.
“Veiled as the libel is here, it becomes apparent as soon as we cast a glance upon David’s family. The picture which this libel draws of Judah hits David himself sharply. The ‘Canaanite’—namely, whom Judah marries [?]—is no other than the wife of Uriah the Hittite (murdered at David’s command) whom David himself married adulterously. This wife of Judah is said to have been the daughter of a man named Shuah. Therefore she is a Bath-shua, and is thus called (verse 12). But Bathshua is also Bathsheba herself, as one may conclude from 1 Chron. iii. 5. The eldest son died, hateful in the sight of God, just like the first son of Bathsheba (2 Sam. xii. 15). The son of Judah is alleged to have been called Er (עֵר); why? because reading it backwards (רֵעַ, wrong) it means ‘bad,’ ‘wicked.’ The second son is called Onan (אוֹנָנ), and dies for sexual sins. He is no other than David’s son Amnon (אַמנוֹנ), who meets his death on account of his sexual sins (2 Sam. xiii). The Tamar of Judah’s story is the same as the Tamar dishonored by Amnon,—the daughter of David, who, in spite of her misfortune and her purity, is, to the entire ruin of her good name, humiliated to a person who plays the prostitute. And Shelah (שֵׁלָה) who does not die,—add to his name only the letter מ, and you have שְׁלֹמה, Solomon.”
If in the light of these facts, which reveal the mythical character of some of the worst things told of Judah and David, the blessings of Jacob (Gen. xlix.) be carefully read, the blessing on Judah will be found rather equivocal. Colenso translates:
“A lion’s whelp is Judah,
Ravaging the young of the suckling ewes.”
Is this couplet related to Nathan’s parable of the rich man taking away the poor man’s one little ewe lamb which smote the conscience of David?
“The staff shall not depart from Judah,
Nor the rod from between his feet
Until Shiloh come.”
Is this merely a device of the Ephraimite rebels, Jeroboamites, pretending to find in a patriarchal prophecy a prediction that Judah is to be superseded by the descendants of Joseph (on whom Jacob’s encomiums and blessings are unstinted)? Shiloh was always their headquarters.
It is probable, however, that there is here a play upon words. The words “Until Shiloh come” are rendered by some scholars “Till he (Judah) come to Shiloh,” and interpreted as meaning “Till he come to rest.” The Samaritan version (”donec veniat Pacificus”) seems to identify Shiloh with Solomon. (Colenso, Pent. iii. p. 127.) But this is transparently Shelah over again. Shelomoh (Solomon), Shelah, and Shiloh are substantially of the same etymological significance. It will be observed that in Gen. xxxviii. Shelah is the only person whose character is not blackened. The Ephraimic poem, the “Blessings of Jacob,”—each blessing a vaticinium ex evento,—could well afford a half-disguised compliment to Solomon who had made no attempt to suppress the rebels of Shiloh,—the city of Abijah, who originated the Jeroboamic revolution which divided the Davidic kingdom. Jacob’s blessing on Joseph is of course a blessing on Ephraim: it closes with a transfer of the crown (from Judah) to “him that is a prince among his brethren.” This is “rest” from the arrows of David, this is the coming of Shiloh; it occurred under the reign of the Prince of Peace, Solomon, and it could not be undone by Solomon’s son Rehoboam.
[1] The Bible, the Church, and the Reason, p. 137, n. Dr. Briggs points out citations from the book of Jasher in Num. xxi., Jos. x., and 2 Sam. 1, where a dirge of David is given, and adds: “The book of Jasher containing poems of David and Solomon could not have been written before Solomon.” The bearing of this on the age of the Hexateuch, in its present form, is obvious.
[2] Ursprung der Sagen von Abraham, Isaak und Jakob. Kritische Untersuchung von A. Bernstein. Berlin. 1871.
[3] The marriage is doubtful: “He took her and went in to her” (Gen. xxxviii. 2).
Chapter VII.
Solomonic Antijahvism.
The ferocities of Josiah and his Jahvists indicate the presence of an important Solomonist School. Their culture and tendencies are reflected, as we have seen, in the rage of prophets against them, and the continuance of their strength is shown in the preservation of Agur’s Voltairian satire on Jahvism, and Job’s avowed blasphemies:
“If indeed ye will glorify yourselves above me,
And prove me guilty of blasphemy—
Know then, that God hath wronged me!”
This translation from Job, quoted from Professor Dillon, need only be compared with that of the authorised and the revised versions to show us the causa causans to-day which of old added four hundred interpolations to the Book of Job to soften its criticism.
It appears strange, however, that Professor Dillon has not included among The Sceptics of the Old Testament three writers in the composite eighty-ninth Psalm, nor remarked its relation to the Book of Job. At the head of this wonderful composition the mythical wise man of 1 Kings iv. 31, Ethan, rises (“Maschil of Ethan the Ezrahite,” perhaps meaning Wisdom of the Everlasting Helper) to attest the divine mercies and faithfulness in all generations. This is in two verses, evidently ancient, which a later hand, apparently, has pointed with a specification of the covenant with David. After the “Selah” which ends these four verses come fourteen verses of sermonising upon them, in which nearly all of the points made by Job’s “comforters” are put in a nutshell. The sons of God who presented themselves, Satan among them, in his council (Job i. 6) appear here also (Ps. lxxxix. 6):
“Who among the sons of the gods is like unto Jahveh,
A God very terrible in the council of the holy ones.”
After the mighty things that “Jah” had done to his enemies have been affirmed an Elohist takes up the burden and a “vision” like that of Eliphaz (Job iv. 13) is appealed to:
“Then thou spakest in vision to thy holy ones.”
The vision’s revelation (Job v. 17) “Happy is the man whom God correcteth” is also in this psalm (32, 33): “Then will I visit their transgression with the rod, and their iniquity with stripes, but my mercy will I not utterly take from him.” And Eliphaz’s assurance “thy seed will be great” (v. 25) corresponds with that in our psalm (verse 36), “His seed shall endure forever.”
When the psalmist of the vision has pictured, as if in dissolving views, the military renown of David, God’s “servant,” and his “horn,” pointing to Solomon, God’s “first-born,” the transgressions of the latter are intimated (30–33), but the seer continues to utter the divine promises:
“My covenant will I not break,
Nor alter the thing that has gone out of my lips.
One thing have I sworn by my holiness;
His seed shall endure forever,
And his throne as the sun before me;
As the moon which is established forever:
Faithful is the witness in the sky. Selah.”
Then breaks out the indignant accuser:
“But thou hast cast off and rejected!
Thou hast been wroth with thine ‘anointed’;
Thou hast broken the covenant with thy ‘servant,’
Thou hast profaned his crown to the very dust;
Thou hast broken down all his defences;
Thou hast brought his strongholds to ruin!
All the wayfarers that pass by despoil him;
He is become a reproach to his neighbors.
Thou hast exalted the right-hand of his adversaries,
Thou hast made all his enemies to rejoice.
Yea, thou turnest back the edge of his sword,
And hast not enabled him to stand in battle.
Thou hast made his brightness to cease,
And hurled his throne down to the ground.
The days of his youth thou hast shortened:
Thou hast covered him with shame! Selah.”
A sarcastic “Selah,” or “so it is!”—if Eben Ezra’s definition of Selah be correct.
Then follow four verses by a more timid plaintiff, who, almost in the words of Job (e.g., x. 20), reminds Jahveh of the shortness of life, and the impossibility of any return from the grave, and asks how long he intends to wait before fulfilling his promises. He also supplies Koheleth with a text by the pessimistic exclamation, “For what vanity hast thou created all the children of men”!
After this writer has sounded his “Selah,” another rather more bitterly reminds Jahveh, in three verses, that not only his chosen people are in disgrace, but his own enemies are triumphant.
(These two are much like the writer of Psalms xliv. 9–26, who almost repeats the points made by the above three remonstrants, and asks Jahveh, “Why sleepest thou?”)
Finally a Jahvist doxology, fainter than any appended to the other four books, completes this strange eighty-ninth psalm:
“Praised be Jahveh for evermore!
Amen, and Amen!”
Great is Diana of the Ephesians! Or is this the half-sardonic submission of Job under the whirlwind-answer, which extorted from him no tribute except a virtual admission that when the ethical debate became a question of which could wield the loudest whirlwinds, he surrendered!