When the Wisdom of Jesus the Son of Sirach proposes to “praise famous men,” it dwells upon Solomon’s temple and his wealth, and especially upon his wisdom; but it does not forget his failings.(197) Josephus celebrates his glory at great length. The New Testament has comparatively few notices of Solomon; but these include references to his wisdom,(198) his splendour,(199) and his temple.(200) The Koran, however, far surpasses the New Testament in its interest in Solomon; and his name and his seal play a leading part in Jewish and Arabian magic. The bulk of this literature is later than the chronicler, but the renewed interest in the glory of Solomon must have begun before his time. Perhaps, by connecting the building of the Temple as far as possible with David, the chronicler marks his sense of Solomon’s unworthiness. On the other hand, there were many reasons why he should welcome the aid of popular sentiment to enable him to include Solomon among the ideal Hebrew kings. After all, Solomon had built and dedicated the Temple; he was the “pious founder,” and the beneficiaries of the foundation would wish to make the most of his piety. “Jehovah” had “magnified Solomon exceedingly in the sight of all Israel, and bestowed upon him such royal majesty as had not been on any king before him in Israel.”(201) “King Solomon exceeded all the kings of the earth in riches and wisdom; and all the kings of the earth sought the presence of Solomon, to hear his wisdom, which God had put in his heart.”(202) The chronicler would naturally wish to set forth the better side of Solomon’s character as an ideal of royal wisdom and splendour, devoted to the service of the sanctuary. Let us briefly compare Chronicles and Kings to see how he accomplished his purpose.
The structure of the narrative in Kings rendered the task comparatively easy: it could be accomplished by removing the opening and closing sections and making a few minor changes in the intermediate portion. The opening section is the sequel to the conclusion of David’s reign; the chronicler omitted this conclusion, and therefore also its sequel. But the contents of this section were objectionable in themselves. Solomon’s admirers willingly forget that his reign was inaugurated by the execution of Shimei, of his brother Adonijah, and of his father’s faithful minister Joab, and by the deposition of the high-priest Abiathar. The chronicler narrates with evident approval the strong measures of Ezra and Nehemiah against foreign marriages, and he is therefore not anxious to remind his readers that Solomon married Pharaoh’s daughter. He does not, however, carry out his plan consistently. Elsewhere he wishes to emphasise the sanctity of the Ark and tells us that “Solomon brought up the daughter of Pharaoh out of the city of David unto the house that he had built for her, for he said, My wife shall not dwell in the house of David, king of Israel, because the places are holy whereunto the ark of the Lord hath come.”(203)
In Kings the history of Solomon closes with a long account of his numerous wives and concubines, his idolatry and consequent misfortunes. All this is omitted by the chronicler; but later on, with his usual inconsistency, he allows Nehemiah to point the moral of a tale he has left untold: “Did not Solomon, king of Israel, sin by these things?... Even him did strange women cause to sin.”(204) In the intervening section he omits the famous judgment of Solomon, probably on account of the character of the women concerned. He introduces sundry changes which naturally follow from his belief that the Levitical law was then in force.(205) His feeling for the dignity of the chosen people and their king comes out rather curiously in two minor alterations. Both authorities agree in telling us that Solomon had recourse to forced labour for his building operations; in fact, after the usual Eastern fashion from the Pyramids down to the Suez Canal, Solomon’s temple and palaces were built by the _corvée_. According to the oldest narrative, he “raised a levy out of all Israel.”(206) This suggests that forced labour was exacted from the Israelites themselves, and it would help to account for Jeroboam’s successful rebellion. The chronicler omits this statement as open to an interpretation derogatory to the dignity of the chosen people, and not only inserts a later explanation which he found in the book of Kings, but also another express statement that Solomon raised his levy of the “strangers that were in the land of Israel.”(207) These statements may have been partly suggested by the existence of a class of Temple slaves called Solomon’s servants.