A preacher! This Israelite was a man of exhortations. Queen Bilkis smiled openly at the passion of his delivery. He was persuading her. Nevertheless, she leaned near Solomon and whispered, “My lord, the words of the wise heard in quiet are better than the shoutings of rulers to fools.”
King Solomon grinned at her wit. “Yes!” he countered: “As one dead fly makes a vat of perfume stink, so one word of folly outweighs a lifetime of wisdom. Should I hold my peace now?”
Bilkis said, “He who digs a pit will fall into it.”
Solomon answered, “If the serpent bites before she is charmed, what good is the charmer?”
Bright as an onyx, Sheba beamed at Israel. “Ah, the charmer has done well,” she said, “very well indeed. There is no serpent here to bite him, nor an enemy to attack.” Queen Bilkis rose and faced the people. “Happy are you, O Israel,” she said, “for your king is the son of free people. He feasts at the proper times, for strength and not for drunkenness! The report which I heard in my land concerning his wisdom and prosperity are true. Blessed be the Lord your God, who has delighted in this son of David! It is because the Lord loves you, Israel, that he has made Solomon your king, to execute justice and righteousness throughout the land!”
In the days of her visitation, Solomon gave the queen of Sheba all that she desired. Likewise, she made him a gift of one hundred and twenty talents of gold, together with precious stones and a quantity of spices so great that never again came such an abundance of spices into Jerusalem. She stayed in Solomon’s city for the length of a season. During that time she observed the building of a new house not far from the palace of the king, a small house by comparison, but one of unparalleled luxury. A jewel.
Shortly before her departure she happened to ask Solomon who was of such importance as to receive a house like that. The king colored and didn’t answer. But the queen mother did. It was the only time Bilkis heard her speak—and though the woman seemed otherwise patient and generous, the comment sounded caustic. “Egypt requests a house of her own,” the queen mother said, “and Israel obeys.”
IV
THE DAUGHTER OF PHARAOH, the wife of Solomon, has made herself known in Jerusalem. She does not mix with the people. She remains aloof from the court of the king. But she is not ashamed to sing boldly from the high windows of her new house:
What is that coming from the wilderness
like a column of smoke,
perfumed with myrrh and frankincense
the fragrance of merchants?
Behold, it is the litter of Solomon,
surrounded by sixty,
mighty men all girt with swords
against the alarms by night!
Go forth, O daughters of Jerusalem!
Behold King Solomon,
crowned with the crown his mother gave
on the day of our wedding, go!
BATHSHEBA IS STRIDING THROUGH the private apartments of the palace, looking for her son. There is something she has to tell him. It cannot wait any longer. She must confront him now.
But he is not in his chambers. He is not in any of the officers’ rooms, nor in the room where he writes, nor in the places of prayer. Unless he has gone to the temple. It is evening. Perhaps he is in the temple.
Bathsheba walks through the dusk across the great court into the inner court.
IN HER LITTLE COTTAGE, Tamar holds up a mirror of polished bronze. It is one of the few luxuries preserved from her past, when she was a princess.
She has lit four oil lamps, all in a row on a rough wooden table. She is kneeling at the table and gazing at her face in the mirror.
She pulls an ivory comb through her hair. “It was red once,” she whispers to the mirror. “Like my father’s.” But her hair is straw-colored now, dry and thin. The comb scarcely notices as it passes over her scalp. Tamar’s face is long and tired. She has washed it, preparing for sleep. The eyes that stare back at her—who could love such doleful eyes?
“Dark, dark,” she whispers, as if accusing the visage in polished bronze. “O daughters of Jerusalem, I am as black as goat’s hair, black as the knotty weave of the tents of Kedar. I wish it were the curtains of Solomon.”
Solomon! She said “Solomon,” and the eyes in the mirror are immediately startled. They gape, and she cannot soften them again.
“Do not gaze at me,” Tamar hisses between her teeth. She lays the mirror down. “I am swarthy! The sun has scorched me! My brothers were angry with me. They made me the keeper of their vineyards. But my own vineyard—” Tamar covers her face with her hands. “My own vineyard I have not kept!”
So then she snuffs the four lamps in her cottage. A little moonlight falls through a narrow slot in the wall. She rises and goes to the bed-mat already unrolled in the corner farthest from the door. She lies down and stares up into the darkness.
She doesn’t think that she will sleep this night either.
THE DAUGHTER OF THE PHARAOH has a truly, breathless voice, a baby voice, though the words are a woman’s. Passionate.
Even when she sings within her house the sound flies out the windows. She is not ashamed to let Jerusalem hear her business. Such a woman doesn’t give a fig for the opinions of the daughters of Jerusalem. Or perhaps she cares very much what they think.
She sings into the fresh dark of the evening. She emits little cries as she sings, overcome, perhaps, by the sentiment of her song:
The voice of my lover!
Behold, he comes
leaping on mountains,
bounding the hills!
My lover is
a young gazelle!
He dunces like
the large-eyed stag!
Behold, he stands
behind my wall
looking through lattices,
gazing in windows!
“Arise!” he calls.
“My fair one, come!
The winter is past,
the rains are gone.
The flowers appear
and singing bursts forth.
Arise, my love,
and come away!
O my white dove,
in clefts of rock
let me see your face:
your face is comely!
Oh, catch us the foxes,
the little foxes,
that plunder the vineyards:
Our vines are in blossom—come!”
THE QUEEN MOTHER has found her son. He is sitting alone in the throne hall, upon his great throne of ivory.
“Do you hear it?” Tonight Bathsheba cannot control herself. Finally her patience is gone and the words shoot from her mouth like arrows. “Yes, you hear it! You are in here listening to it, and before you return to your chambers you will visit Egypt, and she will do some little thing for you and then you will promise some majestic thing in return. And this is the evil, Solomon: not that you go to her, nor even that you promise extravagantly, but that to this woman you keep your promises! You hear her, don’t you?”
The king neither answers nor looks at his mother.
His throne rests on a dais which is mounted by six steps, each step guarded by carved lions. The throne itself is shaped like a high-backed chair with wide armrests. On the back a bull’s head is carved, power! On either side stand two terrible lions with wings extended backward, as if in flight. An ivory inlay adorns the whole, together with gold leaf hammered into intricate designs.
The king is both glorious and small in such a chair. Just now he offers no acknowledgement that his mother is even in the room. There is no expression on his delicate face. Nothing but a kind of vacuity in listening, as some people use music to rest from thinking.
Bathsheba tempers her anger. With the language of an intelligent advisor she says, “My son, I must in love and good reason speak. No one else will speak as forthrightly as I. It is good that the people fear you, but not if all the people fear you. I am the one who does not fear.
“And I would not be speaking now if you had never
built a house for her. That gift teaches me your weakness, Solomon.
“Your weakness. It is not that you make love to many women, but that you let women instruct you, and you obey. God appointed you to decide for Israel. Not your wives, no matter how powerful their fathers are. But those whom you love are controlling you. Women are controlling Israel!”
King Solomon turns his head and says one thing: “Mother, you are a woman.”
As if a bowstring snapped, Bathsheba begins to shout at her son. “A woman!” she cries. “Your mother is a woman. Is she also Egyptian? Does she look like a Moabite? An Ammonite? An Edomite? Is your mother an iron Hittite, Solomon? There are hundreds of those, all wives to you, and every one of them worships a god who is not our God, and what shall I say in the name of your father David when I see you prostrate yourself before the pagan goddess Ashtoreth? Ho, the king of Israel has gone after Milcom the abomination of the Ammonites—”
Solomon arises from his throne and begins to descend the steps.
Bathsheba cannot stop. She knows she’s shrieking. She knows her face is twisted in fear—not o/the king but for him. Yet she follows him to the door of the throne hall, crying, “The king has built a high place for Chemosh the abomination of Moab, and for Molech the abomination of the Ammonites, on the mountain east of Jerusalem—”
But then her son is no longer here. He has departed by the side door, into the night.
Bathsheba snaps her jaw shut. She bites her words off as a woman bites thread. She stands trembling for a long time. She is considering what sort of prayer to pray.
TAMAR IS DREAMING.
It seems to her that her beloved is knocking at the door.
He is calling, “Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my perfect one, open the door! My head is wet with dew.” Tamar is smiling. Her cheeks ache with the smiling. “My locks drip with the drops of the night,” calls her beloved.
But her garment has been laid aside, and she has bathed her feet for sleeping. She hesitates an instant.
She thinks she hears his hand to the latch. Her heart jumps within her. Yes! She will go!
She rises to open the door. Her lovely hands drip myrrh. Her fingers are moist with the myrrh. She puts them to the handle and opens—But her beloved is gone! Because of her hesitation he is gone.
Perhaps Tamar is no longer dreaming. She is a gaunt woman in bedclothes, running barefoot through Jerusalem, whose stones are cold. This cold is not a dream. She is running among the houses, seeking her beloved, calling to him. But he gives her no answer.
Far ahead she hears the quavering voice of a night bird, singing. As fast as she can, Tamar runs toward the voice.
My beloved is radiant and ruddy.
That is the song she hears. It descends from a high place, from on a hill and yet higher than the hill. Tamar runs through the dark night, listening:
His head is the finest gold;
his locks are waves,
black as the raven.
His eyes are like doves
by rivers of water,
bathed in milk
and fitly set—
Suddenly three men block Tamar’s way.
Watchmen, whose duty it is to defend the king’s palace, have heard a disturbance between the palace and the newly built house of the daughter of Pharaoh. They see a woman dancing there. She is dancing with her arms stretched out and her head thrown back, as if she were catching rain on her face.
When the watchmen touch her, the woman screams and dashes toward the palace door. So they hit her. But she keeps running, oblivious of pain. They chase her, beating her until she falls in the street and covers her head. They strip her even of her bedclothes.
Then the watchmen pick her up and carry her down to the gates of the city.
As she goes, the woman cries out at the top of her lungs, “I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem, if you find my beloved, tell him—tell him that I am sick with love.”
And so they put her outside the city in darkness. They close the city gates.
Yet in the jewel-bright house of Egypt, all lit with candles and lamplight, a song is heard, a nasal voice in childlike confidence:
His cheeks are beds of spices
breathing sweetness;
his lips are lilies,
distilling a liquid myrrh.
His arms are rounded gold
set with beryl;
his body bright ivory
encrusted with sapphires.
His legs are alabaster columns
on buses of gold.
His countenance like the slopes of Lebanon,
forested of cedars.
His speech is a dear milk,
and he is altogether lovely.
This is my beloved. This is my friend,
O daughters of Jerusalem.
V
Now, THE WEIGHT of the gold that came to Solomon in a single year was six hundred and sixty-six talents. This was tribute from the nations, and more besides that came from traders and merchants.
King Solomon made two hundred large shields of beaten gold, each shield worth six hundred shekels of gold. He also made three hundred smaller shields—all to be used in ceremonial display by his bodyguard. He kept these ritual weapons in the House of the Forest of Lebanon. All his drinking vessels were of gold; none was of silver; for the king had a fleet of ships at sea. Once every three years the fleet would come bringing gold, silver, ivory, apes, and peacocks. Solomon made silver as common as stone in Jerusalem. He made cedar as plentiful as the sycamore of the Shephelah. And he gathered together chariots and horsemen. The king had fourteen hundred chariots and twelve thousand horsemen, whom he stationed in the fortress cities, as well as in Jerusalem. He imported his horses from Egypt. One mare cost a hundred and fifty shekels of silver, and a chariot six hundred. These he exported again to kings both north and east of Israel, the kings of the Hittites and of Syria.
It was a lucrative trade.
But it was supported upon the backs of Israelites, since the king maintained a labor tax not just among foreigners but among the men of Israel as well. The men of his own tribe, Judah, he did not burden with difficult tasks. The southern portion of Solomon’s kingdom experienced his favor, while the north suffered.
Of those working in Jerusalem to build its strength and its sanctuaries, many were Amorites and Hittites and Perizzites and Hivites and Jebusites. But thirty thousand men were levied also from Israel, and taskmasters were placed over them as over any gang of workmen.
David had never done such a thing!
And Saul had lived in a rough fortress not much larger than any laborer’s house.
One of the taskmasters heard the complaints of the Israelites and never forgot them. He saw their faces grimed with the king’s sweat, lonely for their families, angry that their farms were lying fallow—and he read there an outrage that would not soon pass away. These men were Ephraimites. So was he—and it was only by the fortune of the king’s appointment that he was himself an overseer and not doubled down like his brothers beneath the heavy stones of the houses of Egyptian princesses.
The taskmaster’s name was Jeroboam, the son of Nebat. One day when Jeroboam was walking outside Jerusalem, the prophet Ahrjah found him and led him out to open country.
Ahrjah was wearing a new garment. When he was alone with Jeroboam, he took hold of the cloth and tore it into twelve separate parts. Then he said to Jeroboam, “Take for yourself ten pieces. For thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: I am about to tear the kingdom from the hand of Solomon, and ī will give you ten tribes. For the sake of my servant David and for the sake of Jerusalem, I shall leave yet one tribe to Solomon’s offspring. He shall himself reign over Israel all the days of his life. But I will take the kingdom out of his son’s hand and will give it to you, ten tribes.”
That day Jeroboam fled to Egypt. He stayed in Egypt until the death of Solomon.
VI
THE TIME THAT Solomon reigned over Israel and Juda
h was forty years. Then he who had been splendid in living became most plain in dying.
In the same day that he died, King Solomon’s body was carried on a wooden bier to a tomb outside the city. A door that had sealed a small cave was cracked along its stony seams, and the stones were set aside. Then two men bowed down and bore the king’s body through the low entrance, one stepping backward and one forward.
So the king in white linen, wearing no adornment, was laid on rock inside the cave where the bones of his father David lay.
Immediately the stones were mortared in place again, the door closed, and the tomb was sealed. The shadows of the people grew longer and longer. The day-wind ceased. Briefly, the evening kindled cold fire in the western sky. But the east breathed grey over the whole earth. Then the night came and swallowed everything in darkness. The crowd turned and went back into the city.
But when the hard moon appeared and cast pale light on the hills outside Jerusalem, two figures became visible. Two women still stood near Solomon’s tomb. One was so gaunt that the darkness pooled in her eyes and her cheeks, making a skull of her vigil. She was bowed down and abjectly poor. The other stood rich, erect, and proud—but aging.
The Book of God: The Bible as a Novel Page 35
