Solomon’s action in executing David’s leading general, Joab, may have been the deathbed wish of his father, angered by his disloyalty, but it certainly suited him to have a potential threat removed. His elder brother Adonijah arguably had a better claim to the throne than he did, but Solomon showed no pity when he rebelled against his rule.
AN ENIGMATIC GUEST
OF ALL THE ‘strange women’ in Solomon’s life, none has left more of a mark than the Queen of Sheba – although she is essentially a complete and utter mystery. We don’t even know where ‘Sheba’ is – although there’s a certain amount of evidence to support the suggestion that it may have been the state now known to archaeologists as ‘Saba’, in the southeastern corner of the Arabian peninsula.
As for the lady herself, apparently, having ‘heard of the fame of Solomon concerning the name of the Lord, she came to prove him with hard questions’ (10, 1). In search of spiritual guidance, perhaps? In fact, we know much more about the pomp and state in which she arrived (‘with a very great train, with camels that bare spices, and very much gold, and precious stones’) than we do about her. In the biblical account itself, her glamour and prestige, although taken as read, are only vaguely delineated – she’s much more a foil for the grandeur of Solomon’s court (10, 6):
And she said to the king, It was a true report that I heard in mine own land of thy acts and of thy wisdom. Howbeit I believed not the words, until I came, and mine eyes had seen it: and, behold, the half was not told me: thy wisdom and prosperity exceedeth the fame which I heard.
Likewise, the lavish presents she and other rulers brought serve as a sort of simile for Solomon’s greatness; an assessment of his prestige as measured in material gifts (10, 10):
And she gave the king an hundred and twenty talents of gold, and of spices very great store, and precious stones … And the navy also of Hiram, that brought gold from Ophir, brought in from Ophir great plenty of almug trees, and precious stones.
Most enigmatic of all, given the number, wealth and beauty of Solomon’s wives and paramours, is the fact that there’s no suggestion of any sexual connection between queen and king in the Bible story. That hasn’t stopped the speculation of centuries that Solomon and the Queen of Sheba simply must have been royal lovers at the very least.
‘Strange Women’
Solomon, we learn in the First Book of Kings (11, 3), had ‘seven hundred wives, princesses, and three hundred concubines’. An impressive – even alarming – total to the modern reader, but the sheer number of royal bedmates doesn’t bother the biblical narrator. What does is the fact that so many of the women whom Solomon loved were ‘strange’. The word, used here, does not of course mean ‘odd’, ‘eccentric’ or ‘unusual’, but foreign – they were literally strangers to Israel and its ways. One, we’re told, was the Egyptian Pharaoh’s daughter (11, 1); in addition there were ‘women of the Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Zidonians, and Hittites’.
Received in royal splendour, the Queen of Sheba with her retinue makes her obeisances before King Solomon. According to 1 Kings 10, she came to discuss theological questions, but it’s the opulence of her visit which has been remembered ever since.
The reign of Rehoboam was overshadowed by the disintegration of the kingdom: he ruled only Judah in the south; Israel, to the north, had seceded. Judah itself was riven by bickering over the break-up of the realm.
Such women were a threat in that, however dutiful they were towards their Jewish master, they all brought with them the culture and beliefs of their own backgrounds. And, indeed, says the Bible (11, 4):
It came to pass, when Solomon was old, that his wives turned away his heart after other gods: and his heart was not perfect with the Lord his God, as was the heart of David his father.
God, in anger, stirred up a series of adversaries against Solomon, so his was to end up an increasingly troubled reign. By the time he died, the unity of Israel had been fatally compromised. His son Rehoboam was able to inherit only the southern realm of Judah. The northern part of the kingdom, as Israel, seceded.
Whips, Scorpions and Elisha
Solomon’s relapse into paganism marked a return to the old cycle. Under Rehoboam the decline continued. His reign was inevitably overshadowed by the break-up of his father’s kingdom; his policies dominated by the desire to reunite the two realms, if necessary by force. In place of his father’s firmness, his subjects found tyranny. ‘Whereas my father did lade you with a heavy yoke,’ he told them (12, 11), ‘I will add to your yoke: my father hath chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions.’
Rehoboam’s son Abijah, and his son Asa, were no more successful in restoring David and Solomon’s kingdom. Under Jehosophat (Asa’s son), Judah tilted once again towards idolatry. A new prophet emerged – Elisha. He called on God to punish his people in their disloyalty and wickedness. God responded by burning up one of the king’s captains and his 50 men with a bolt of fire (2 Kings 1, 12). Elisha was by no means done. One day, walking by Bethel, some little children came up and mocked him for his baldness (2, 23):
And he turned back, and looked on them, and cursed them in the name of the Lord. And there came forth two she bears out of the wood, and tare forty and two children of them.
Elisha went on to condemn an insubordinate servant and all his line in perpetuity to leprosy (5, 27) and to get God to smite the entire Syrian people with blindness in punishment for their king’s refusal to see the spiritual truth.
There are times when, to the modern reader, the morality of the Bible seems simply unfathomable. Here forty-two children are torn apart by bears – for mocking Elisha’s baldness. God’s Prophet was not to be disrespected.
An Unlikely Instrument
In the northern kingdom of Israel, the pendulum-swing between pagan deities like Baal and God or Yahweh intensified. Under King Ahab, Baal became the deity of choice. Working in his mysterious ways, God made Jehosophat’s son Jehu his instrument: he ousted King Jehoram, seizing power in a coup. He murdered the king in cold blood, taking his bow and unleashing an arrow that lodged in Jehoram’s heart; Jehoram’s heir apparent Ahaziah was only wounded but died soon after. In all, Jehu had 70 princes killed (10, 7) to consolidate his power.
PAINTED LADY
FROM THE DISOBEDIENCE of Eve to the strictures of St Paul, the Bible doesn’t stint in its condemnation of the (many, various and major) faults it finds in women. Few of the fair sex, however, have been so savagely vilified over the centuries as Jezebel, the epitome of all that’s wrong with women.
Actually reading about her in the Bible, though, is anticlimactic. Not because she’s admirable in beliefs and character – far from it. Jezebel, the wife of Ahab, was a tireless advocate for paganism, encouraging her husband to abandon Yahweh for the cult of Baal.
But if this lends a certain credence to Jehu’s accusation of ‘witchcrafts’ against her (9, 22), there’s no attempt to suggest that the ‘whoredoms’ he charges her with are real. Only if we’re going to accept that any woman whose attitudes or behaviour we in any way dislike has by virtue of this fact committed ‘whoredom’.
Or if we’re going to take the view that any sort of personal adornment in a woman is sinful, for it’s true that we’re told that when she heard Jehu was approaching her palace, Jezebel ‘painted her face, and tired her head, and looked out at a window’ (9, 30). Jehu, taking possession of the palace, had her thrown from a window: he ‘trode her underfoot’ before leaving her body where it lay, to be torn apart and eaten by dogs. ‘The carcase of Jezebel shall be as dung upon the face of the field’, he swore (9, 37), ‘so that they shall not say, This is Jezebel.’
A cruel fate, although perhaps no more than she deserved as God’s sworn enemy. One thing is certain, though: Jezebel was no ‘Jezebel’.
‘Few of the fair sex have been so savagely vilified over the centuries as Jezebel, the epitome of all that’s wrong with women’.
As far as we can guess, Jehu’s embracing
of God’s work was opportunistic at best, but there is no doubt that he did much damage to the pagan cause. The House of Ahab, at whose expense he was rising, had invested heavily in the cult of Baal. It made sense for Jehu to attack the temple of the god. ‘Go in, and slay them,’ he told his troops (10, 25):
‘Let none come forth.’ And they smote them with the edge of the sword; and the guard and the captains cast them out … And they brought forth the images out of the house of Baal, and burned them. And they brake down the image of Baal, and brake down the house of Baal … Thus Jehu destroyed Baal out of Israel.
Jezebel is thrown from her window to be trodden underfoot and devoured by the dogs of the palace, on Jehu’s orders. Just punishment (apparently) for forsaking the one true God for the cult of Baal.
Fighting On
The smiting continued more or less unabated. Amaziah, King of Judah, went to war with Edom and slew 10,000 in the ‘Valley of Salt’ (14, 7). Meanwhile, Menahem of Israel attacked the rebellious town of Tiphsah (believed to have been somewhere in what is now Syria or southeastern Turkey). Menahem added a new refinement to the traditional repertoire of slaughter (15, 16): ‘All the women therein that were with child, he ripped up.’ Not to be outdone, the Angel of the Lord himself killed 185,000 Assyrians (19, 35) – although these were, in fairness, invaders threatening Jerusalem.
The Nuremberg Bible’s view of God’s vengeance on Assyria (2 Kings 19) naturally gives centre-stage to the Angel of the Lord – but what are we to make of those (Israelite?) sawyers setting to in the background?
Jerusalem, in Ezekiel’s vision, had been endowed with all the blessings a city might have had: its buildings were beautiful, its surroundings fertile. Its destruction by the Assyrians (top) was the punishment for its godlessness.
VI
THE BIBLE
EMPIRES OF OPPRESSION
In the ancient Middle East, the Jews we know from scripture had to fight for their freedom from great empires whose stories we’re more familiar with from historical and archaeological records.
——♦——
‘The Lord turned not from the fierceness of his great wrath.’
2 KINGS 23, 26.
Merneptah reigned over Egypt from 1213 to 1203 BCE, the fourth Pharaoh of the Nineteenth Dynasty. The pyramids were already ancient by this time. Merneptah’s name meant ‘Beloved of Ptah’ (Ptah was the creator-god), and it was in 1896 that the distinguished Egyptologist Flinders Petrie found a stele – an inscribed stone monument – to his memory at Thebes. The inscription focuses on Merneptah’s defeat of the Libyans. ‘A prodigious deed has been done for Egypt,’ it concludes. A mighty general, Merneptah:
gave courage to his armies in their hundreds of thousands, restored the breath to those who panted in their fear … he vanquished the Libyans and sent them packing from Egyptian soil: now the fear of Egypt is deep within their hearts. Their vanguard was routed; their legs would serve them only for flight; their bowmen threw down their weapons in fear; running for their lives, their morale failed them and they discarded their water-skins and kitbags to speed their flight. The Libyan leader, basest of men, ran for his life through the darkness of the night, without his regal headdress – or even the sandals from his feet. Without food or water he fled, fearful of the anger of his own family and of his generals, now turning on one another, their tents reduced to ashes, their supplies seized by our men. No hero’s welcome awaited him at home but fear and loathing for a leader marked out as unlucky, damned to defeat by the power of Egypt’s Pharaoh…
On the so-called ‘Israel Stele’ (c. 1208 BCE), Israel is actually little more than an afterthought: a peripheral concern for the Pharaoh Merneptah; one of the small-fry nations of the ancient world.
After this signal triumph, the stele sums up other aspects of Merneptah’s legacy:
Canaan weeps in her captivity; Ashkelon has been taken and Gezer seized. Yanoam no longer endures; Israel lies devastated, bereft of its seed.
And there we have it – last on a list of the secondary achievements of a now-not-very-famous Pharaoh: the first known mention of Israel in any non-scriptural history.
Chronicled Collisions
Most modern scholars – even believers – would agree that those who think of the Old Testament as literally ‘true’ are mistaking its original purpose. But so too are those who have it down as a work of fiction – as even the most sceptical researchers would accept. Regardless of religious truth, whether we see the Bible as divine ‘revelation’ or merely ‘myth’, there’s a historical strand in the scripture that simply cannot be dismissed. In this great drama of the Jews and their destiny, Israel, its tribes, its kings and prophets may have centre-stage, but there are also walk-on parts for some of the most illustrious civilizations of the ancient world. Or march-in parts, perhaps – for these great empires generally arrived as invaders, irrupting their way into Jewish history by force of arms.
Prisoners are kept hard at work at a time when Assyria’s kings were masters of the ancient world. Enslaved enemies of this kind very likely built the wall in Sennacherib’s Palace in Nineveh, on which this relief (c. 700 BCE) appears.
The Assyrians whose forces were laid low by the Angel of Death in 2 Kings 19, 35 were just one example: their King Sennacherib is as well known to ancient historians and archaeologists as he is to biblical scholars. So too, however, were the Hittites, Achaemenid Persia and the Babylonians: all had their different dealings with the Jews, all recorded (from an Israelite perspective) in the Bible.
A Chaotic Chronology
It’s ironic that, just as history makes its first appearance in the Bible narrative, that narrative should go into just about complete chronological meltdown. In the first five books, the so-called ‘Pentateuch’ (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy), the stories may be extravagant and the lifespans (such as Methuselah’s 969 years) even more so – but the basic timeline of the action is quite clear.
Though written by Samaritans, this seventeenth-century scroll of the Pentateuch (the Bible’s first five books) is believed to represent a link in an unbroken chain of scriptural succession dating all the way back to Old Testament times.
As the Old Testament goes on, however, we find a clearer sense of narrative unclarity emerging: a realization that we’re reading a collection of separate – and sometimes wildly varying – sources. If these were brought together by ancient scholars, it was for the broader themes and preoccupations they shared – not because they can be seen as constituting the consecutive ‘chapters’ of a single, straightforward narrative. (Just to add to the confusion, the King James Bible differs in its ordering from the traditional Hebrew version – while the Catholic book parts company again.)
‘200,150 people of high and low estate, both men and women were taken captive’.
2 KINGS 19
Hence, in the King James Bible, we find the Book of Esther – set in the years of Persian power – coming well before the Book of Daniel, which deals with the Babylonian Captivity. An inversion, then, of the historical chronology. The Captivity is a complication in itself, since so many different Prophets wanted to have their say about its significance. The Books of Jeremiah, Hosea, Isaiah and others all address the destruction of Jerusalem and the carrying of Israel into exile, but their placing in the Bible may seem to imply a narrative progression that isn’t there. And then there’s the Song of Solomon, whose very name suggests a much earlier origin than its final placing in the scriptural sequence seems to imply.
Modern scholars have done their best, but these aren’t difficulties that can easily be overcome. This book just tries to find the clearest way it can through a very tangled story.
Incidental Israel
As far as the chronicles of conventional history are concerned, it is Israel that is the occasional interloper, the passing mention – barely registered in other, much grander narratives. In so far as it does occur, the differences of perspective are so striking that we do well to
recognize the biblical account at all. Which narration is nearest to the historical truth is impossible to verify: how are we to judge between Jewish ancestral myth and, say, Assyrian propaganda? Take the invasion of Sennacherib – or, as his own chroniclers called him:
Sennacherib the great, the magnificent world-ruler, King of Assyria and of the four quarters of the world. Wise shepherd to his people; beloved of the gods; protector of right, overseer of justice; friend of the poor; pious in his offices; great hero, strong warrior, foremost among princes. He whose rage destroys the rebellious, whose thunderbolt fells the wicked …
We saw his invasion being summarily dispatched by God’s angel in 2 Kings 19. But his own inscriptions recall it rather differently:
Hezekiah of Judah would not bow down to me. Forty-six of his strongholds – all walled cities – as well as innumerable smaller towns in his territory were taken. My men brought up siege-engines, razed them to the ground with battering-rams, attacked and took them by storm, stole in through breaches made in the surrounding walls or undermined their fortifications with mines and tunnels. One way or another, I laid siege to them and took them. 200,150 people of high and low estate, both men and women were taken captive. I carried off as booty countless horses, mules, asses, camels, cattle and sheep. The King himself was holed up in his royal city, caught like a bird in a cage. I built ramps and fortifications to prevent people from leaving the city, imprisoning them in their wretchedness. Having sacked his [other] cities, I cut them off from their hinterlands … The glory of my greatness overwhelmed Hezekiah in his terror: the Arabs and other mercenaries who had come to serve him deserted him. In the end he had to submit to my yoke and to pay me tribute: 30 talents of gold; 800 talents of silver; gems; antimony; jewels; carnelian; couches and chairs inlaid with ivory; elephant hides and tusks; ebony, boxwood and other rich treasures, along with his daughters, his wives, his musicians – men and women … All these things I had brought to me in Nineveh.
Dark History of the Bible Page 12
