If you went to Sunday School as a child, or if you had someone who read Bible Stories to you, there are probably two things that you heard about King Solomon. (Actually there are three now, since you heard the poem about the Ants.) The first one is what we just heard: When God asked him in a dream what he wanted from God, Solomon did not ask for riches, or for power, or for victory over his enemies; he asked for an “understanding mind.” God was so pleased by this answer that Solomon was not only granted this wish, but also all of the things that he hadn’t asked for: riches and honor and long life.
The second story you probably heard was how Solomon used his “understanding mind” to deal with two women who came to him, both claiming to be the mother of the same infant. After listening to their claims, he ordered one of his minions to take a sword and cut the baby in two. One mother cried, “Please, my lord, give her the living boy, certainly do not kill him!” The other said, “It shall be neither mine nor yours, divide it.” Solomon ruled that the first woman was the true mother, because she cared so much for the infant.
The reason I mentioned hearing these stories as a child is that they are often used as morality tales. The first one is about greed: don’t ask for too much and you might get rewarded for your humility. (Sounds rather Minnesotan, doesn’t it?) The second one is about being clever: Solomon solved the dilemma by asking the right question.
In these stories, Solomon seems to get “a wise and discerning mind” without having to put any effort into it. Most people I know who have “wise and discerning minds” have had to put quite a lot of effort into it! Helen Reddy put it this way back in 1975:
Yes, I am wise
But it’s wisdom born of pain
Yes, I’ve paid the price
But look how much I’ve gained
Solomon’s easy path reminds me of students who can do complicated statistics just by typing numbers into an Excel spreadsheet and clicking the right little icon. I, on the other hand, went to graduate school at a time when I had to enter data by punching it onto cards, putting the cards in a box, going to the computer center, and hoping that I would get a big fat printout (and not one that ended with the words, “fatal error in line 12.”
The text of First Kings doesn’t tell us whether Solomon was instantly wise (as the story of the two women suggests), or if his wisdom grew as he ruled as king. The text does, however, tell us what happened just before his famous dream:
He schemed with his mother Bathsheba to gain the throne
He had his older brother Adonijah killed
He had Joab, a supporter of Adonijah, killed
He had Shimei, another supporter of his brother, put under house arrest and later killed.
He married the daughter of the Pharaoh, king of Egypt
I am not trying to discredit Solomon by listing these things; I am trying to get a more complex, nuanced, and—well—interesting look at him. The chapters that follow our text are full of extravagant compliments to his administrative excellence, his business acumen, his astonishing wisdom, and his real estate savvy. What they are not full of are descriptions of exactly what he did that was so wise.
That shouldn’t surprise us, of course. That’s a modern question from a person who was trained in 20th-century psychology, not in the royal and religious culture of the ancient middle east.
I said earlier that the stories about Solomon are often used as morality tales: do the right thing and you will be rewarded, do the wrong thing and you will be punished. A great deal of the history reported in the Hebrew Scriptures is seen through that lens: The covenant between God and the people was an agreement, and when the people failed in their part of the bargain, God sent disaster—defeat and exile.
I find that a very difficult and troubling lens to look through. Difficult, troubling, and commonplace.
When misfortune comes, humans usually ask “why?” “What did I do?” “Why me?” Sometimes our neighbors ask us those questions in blaming and shaming ways; sometimes we would rather be responsible for our own suffering than believe the matter is entirely out of our control. Victims and survivors are blamed for their injuries, often to protect the reputations and world views of the perpetrators. All of this based on the idea that God is keeping score.
Generations of Christians have struggled to hold this characterization of God with what seems like a contrasting vision in the New Testament of healing, forgiving, reconciliation, and resurrection. More than a few have given up the struggle—usually by giving up the God they read about in the Hebrew Scriptures.
My Baptist friend and colleague, Will Healy, offered this. We hear stories like these, especially in the Hebrew Scriptures, as though they are prescriptive: The way this works is that if you sin (or misbehave or whatever) then God will punish you by destroying your community or even your nation.
Another way to hear them is as descriptive: The way this works is if that you sin (or act selfishly or greedily), the natural consequence will be that your relationships and your communities will crumble. This shift of perspective leads us to see God as aware of human foibles that undermine faithful lives and communities.
Later in his life, Solomon was confronted by God about his taking of foreign wives, building temples to the gods of their homelands, and sometimes worshipping at those temples himself. God pronounced the penalty: the breakup and loss of the kingdom after Solomon’s death. Perhaps the intrigue, violence, and displacement that followed his death can be better attributed to complicated and conflicting loyalties and alliances, rather than divine retribution.
There is a traditional belief that Solomon himself wrote Ecclesiastes and the Song of Solomon, but most scholars find this unlikely. It is slightly more likely that some of his “proverbs” may have found their way into the book of Proverbs. But most of what we know about Solomon we know from the historical account in First Kings. And though I would like to know much more about this ancient ruler—entrepreneur, architect, poet—we only know what has been saved for us in the Biblical text. And from that we do learn something important.
When Solomon was offered a gift from God, he began his reply with gratitude—gratitude for God’s favoring of David, gratitude for having ascended to the throne, gratitude for the opportunity to lead a great people. That suggests to me that maybe Solomon had some wisdom already.