Then came King Solomon.
My brother is so beautiful, he breaks my heart.
He walked behind all. He walked past me without glancing to the left or the right. His eye is brown, the color of the fawn’s eye, with a perfect radiance of black lash. These are like darts. They wound.
While the priests who bore the Ark stood high on the temple porch, and while others began to slaughter animals under the morning sunlight, King Solomon himself mounted the platform of the high altar and presided over the sacrifices. Still the aweful hush of the peoples continued, and I could hear the crackling and the hissing of sacrificial meats. I could smell the strong delicious odors. There was a tumult of emotions in my breast. Oxen and sheep went up to God. Solomon stood in the midst of it all, not a big man, neither tall nor muscled, but of unutterable authority and royal calm, presiding.
All at once he turned to the temple and sang in a level chant:
The Lord has set his sun in the heavens,
but said he would dwell in the thick of the darkness!
Then the king faced us and called to all the people: “Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel, who has fulfilled what he promised to David. For I have risen in my father’s place and sit on the throne of Israel, and I have built this house for the name of the Lord God of Israel, and there have I provided a place for the Ark of the Covenant, which the Lord made with Israel when he brought our parents out of Egypt.
“There is a room in the temple, dark with a thick and holy darkness, the Debir: there shall the priests set down the Ark, beneath the outstretched wings of two cherubim.”
I think I did not breathe all the while that Solomon spoke his blessing.
Then he raised his arms to heaven. His voice soared. He prayed, “O Lord, God of Israel, there is no God like thee in heaven above or on earth beneath, keeping covenant with thy servants!”
I said, Yes.
“Lord, confirm the word spoken to David my father, that there would never fail a son of his on the throne in Israel, so long as they kept thy commandments—”
I thought of my brother, of him who prayed the prayer, and in my heart I said, Yes.
“But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold,” Solomon cried, “heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain thee! How much less this house which I have built. Yet have regard for the prayer of thy servant, O Lord my God, that thine eyes may be open night and day toward this house. Hearken to the supplications of thy people when they pray toward this place. Hear in heaven, thy dwelling place, and when thou hearest, forgive. For thou didst separate them from among all the peoples of the earth and made them thy heritage, O Lord, O Lord God!”
My brother then nodded toward the priests who bore the Ark of the Covenant, and slowly, with dreadful solemnity, they entered the temple. There was a space of time in which no sound was made nor any motion. A great weight lay upon us all. The king stood in a rigid attitude, watching. From his vantage he could see inside. We could not. I watched him. He wore a slim circle of gold around his locks. His cheeks had a sunken quality. His jaw flexed slightly, as if chewing. Then he squinted his dark eyes. Then a light smile touched his lips. A door shut within the temple, reverberating. Suddenly my brother stepped backward, averting his face. I looked and saw the priests running out the temple door, over the porch and down the steps. Behind them a black smoke was rolling. Cloud filled the house of the Lord, so that no priest could stand near it. I looked and saw that my brother was laughing. It was a soundless laughter, altogether contained. His lean body bent, his mouth remained closed and his eye open—but there was within him such a hilarity that, though no one else seemed to see it, I, too, began to laugh. But I laughed aloud, an embarrassing cackle.
I went down to my knees, laughing. The people beside me drew back. I knelt in a small circle of sunlight, frightening my neighbors, but I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t stop. I covered my face with my two hands and squealed and shook like a madwoman.
I said, It’s Solomon’s laughter! I’m laughing for King Solomon!
Several people tried to grab me. No matter, I kept laughing. I said: Because of my brother, the glory of the Lord has entered his temple like smoke! I was trying to explain my ecstasy.
But then that ox Benaiah came and picked me up and started to carry me away from the temple. I cried, Solomon! Solomon! I twisted around and saw the king on the high altar. He wasn’t paying any attention to me.
Then I wondered whether Solomon himself hadn’t signaled his commander to bear me away. So laughter vanished, and joy went out of the thing. I recall that I began to kick Benaiah. I bit him. But without conviction, really. What else should I expect after all these years? This old warrior doesn’t hate me. He wasn’t going to hurt me. Still, I bit his forearm and said, “Are you going to kill me, too, the way you killed Joab?”
Benaiah the son of Jehoiada, commander of all my brother’s armies—he is an ox, mute and mountainous. Joab was clinging to the altar of the Lord, begging refuge; but because King Solomon had ordered it, Benaiah ignored the altar and murdered the man. He’s loyal. He is not unkind. He won’t hurt me. But I don’t like him.
I don’t think there is anyone in Jerusalem whom I like anymore.
I don’t even like Solomon. He knows nothing of my long sorrow. Widowhood doesn’t touch him. Poverty, the scorn of all Jerusalem, the stink of other men’s sinning—what does the king know of these things? Did my father David ever tell his son Solomon that I was raped by my brother, David’s first son, Amnon? Surely my father whispered the sins of Joab into Solomon’s ear, or else Joab would not have been murdered. Did he whisper, too, that Tamar was raped? Did he care that Tamar was raped? Did he tell Solomon that the only person who befriended Tamar was himself murdered? That Absalom was murdered, leaving Tamar widowed and friendless—a madwoman?
I don’t like Solomon.
I do not honor his wealth or his power.
But I love him. I love him. God help me, I can’t stand the torture it causes me, but neither can I control it: I dream about my brother. I pant to see him passing in the city. I burn in the flesh of my face. I have fallen in love with Solomon.
II
IT TOOK SEVEN YEARS to build the temple of the Lord. After that it took another thirteen years for the king to build the houses and halls of his own royal compound.
Through twenty years the queen mother watched the glorious constructions of her son in silent satisfaction. Not only did he create habitations of splendor for the Lord and the Lord’s anointed, he also surrounded Jerusalem with a new wall, expanding both the city and its population.
Farther abroad, he fortified cities crucial to the defense of the kingdom. He built great stables of stone for the horses of his cavalry and of his charioteers. He built naval yards in order to control trade both by land and by sea, and from those yards he launched a fleet of new ships—also his own construction.
And in the midst of these national labors the king did not forget his mother. He designed apartments for Bathsheba in his personal palace. And she sat nearest him for any public feast. When the king went forth to welcome foreign dignitaries, it was his mother who walked beside him. There was no queen in Israel equal to Bathsheba.
This is not to say that there were no other queens in Israel. Solomon married often. Bathsheba could not choose wives for her royal son. But she made it a practice to attend every wedding, and then to indicate her supremacy by leading the new wife to rooms in the house where all the king’s wives dwelt. This was a building huger than the temple, rich by reason of its many cedar pillars and called, therefore, the House of the Forest of Lebanon. It had forty-five rooms in the upper story alone and was connected to Solomon’s palace by several public rooms, the waiting hall and the throne hall.
But on any given evening, Bathsheba herself did not have to pass through public places in order to see her son. She walked on floors of cypress down a hall whose walls were cedar, polished, inlaid with gold and ivory. She had but to whisper h
is name, and he was present to her, available and alert.
She loved her son. She was proud of his power and accomplishments, though she was not surprised by them—hadn’t she groomed him for this glory? In everything Bathsheba praised Solomon.
But she also knew the mind of the man.
All the world was aware of his wisdom. People stood in awe of the king because his judgments were wise and just. He moved among the nations in a manner most sovereign and tranquil—but the mother knew the mind of her son. Therefore, she kept as close an association with him as love and motherhood allowed. It was not prestige that caused her to walk at his elbow. It was caution. Bathsheba in her sixtieth year was a realist. She knew there was in this splendid king a flaw that could cost him the kingdom.
IN THE TWENTIETH YEAR of his reign, as he approached the fortieth year of his life, King Solomon sealed a covenant with Pharaoh Shishak, king of Egypt, by taking his daughter in marriage.
Through his highest ambassadors, Egypt said to Israel: “You are now my son-in-law.”
And Israel replied: “Peace shall be our gateways and trading shall be the talk between us.”
Perhaps to make a dramatic gesture of the opening of doorways—and, at the same time, to display the sort of power that now was allying itself with Israel—Pharaoh Shishak attacked a city that sat on the Egyptian highway north and south along the Great Sea: Gezer, due west of Jerusalem, but still controlled by Canaanites. He defeated it, burned the place to the ground, then gave it as a dowry to Solomon.
Clearly, this marriage was made for its political benefits.
What a great blasting of horns, therefore, accompanied the king’s appearing in the portal of his palace! What a shiver of timbrels and bleating of flutes as he descended the stone roadway to the city gates where he would meet King Shishak’s daughter. Solomon was sunlight in white linen. There went through the crowds that lined the road a trembling, as horseflesh trembles, a physical reaction of awe.
The king went bareheaded. Behind him walked the queen mother with two crowns. And behind her the daughters of Jerusalem prepared to dance the king and his bride back up to his palace again.
But if the king caused shivers in the multitude, the bride caused explosions of delight and applause.
She came through the gates in a palanquin borne upon the shoulders of eight men. Its wide canopy covered her in shade, covered the child whose complexion was like milk, whose cheek was breakable alabaster, whose lip was a scarlet thread. The people thundered approval. She was all the art and the sweetness of Egypt, condensed into a single, perfect face.
The palanquin was a gift of Solomon to his bride. He had made its pillars of silver, its chair of gold, the seat deep, soft, and purple, its whole interior fitted with leather. But even so rich a sedan looked brutish next to its passenger. The palanquin was set down before the king. Then Shishak’s daughter smiled and arose and stepped out on a foot as translucent as seashell.
From the moment Egypt put forth her fingers and touched his hand, the king of Israel ceased breathing.
And his mother noticed the difference.
Egypt had fixed an enormous gaze directly upon Solomon’s dark eyes. It was a brazen act, really. She did not so much as blink. Even when the queen mother stepped directly in front of her to place the wedding crown upon the bride, Egypt peered through her as though she were air. And Solomon answered stare for stare. Neither did he acknowledge his mother’s formal word when she spoke to him, or her kiss, or her placing of the wedding crown upon his head. He gaped like a shepherd.
Then Egyptian beauty and Israelite splendor turned and walked together toward the palace—and now the dancers followed with ceremonial whirling and laughter, and Jerusalem joined the procession. But Bathsheba had stepped away from the festivities. She stood to the side, watching her son ascend the streets with this new woman. As light as frost, she was. As dainty and thin and white. And, perhaps as cold.
Already the city had thrown itself into revelry, celebrating the mighty union made. But the queen mother was not hungry. She was alarmed.
III
HERE IS THE sort of story that the citizens of Judah and of Israel told regarding the wisdom of their king:
Two harlots came to wise King Solomon.
They had a dispute which no one could resolve.
One woman said, “My lord, this woman and I share one house and two rooms. In the same week we both gave birth to children. But then this woman’s baby died in the night because she lay on it. At midnight she arose and while I slept she took my son and laid in my bosom her own dead son. When I woke in the morning to nurse my child, behold, he was dead. But I looked closely and saw that it wasn’t mine at all. It was hers.”
The other woman cried, “No! The living child is mine! The dead one is yours.”
The first woman said, “No, the dead child is yours!”
Then the king said, “Since you cannot agree I will divide the matter evenly between you. Give me the baby.”
They placed the living infant in his lap.
The king said, “Bring me a sword!”
So a sword was brought to the king.
And the king said, “Cut the living child in two equal halves. Then give half to the one woman and half to the other.”
Immediately the first woman wailed, “Oh, my lord, don’t kill the baby! Give him to her!”
But the other woman said, “Let it be neither mine nor yours. Divide it.”
The king said, “Give the living child to the first woman, and do not slay it. She is his mother.”
Tales like this were told far beyond the borders of Israel. The fame of wise King Solomon spread west through Egypt into Africa, and as far east as the Indus River. People declared that the largeness of his mind was like the sand on the seashore.
Likewise, the grandeur of his personal household was rumored as far south as Sheba in Arabia. It was reported to the queen of Sheba that Solomon—whose kingdom controlled the trade routes which her caravans traveled—kept forty thousand horses and twelve thousand riders. She heard that for one day alone his private provisions consisted of thirty measures of fine flour and sixty measures of meal, ten fat oxen, twenty pasture-fed cattle, and a hundred sheep, besides harts, gazelles, roebucks, and fatted fowl. That much food was required to feed the king’s officers and counselors, his many wives and servants, his multitudinous family.
And his guests.
The queen of Sheba determined to be one of the guests of this resplendent king, to prove the tales concerning him and to test his wisdom with hard questions.
There was no secret to her going. The journey was a long time in the planning and then again as long in execution. News flew through the deserts of Arabia and the high plateaus of Africa. Ships on the Red Sea learned of it. Nomads knew. They moved toward the high roads in order to watch passage of the caravans of Sheba. It was a very great retinue with camels bearing spices and gold and precious stones. It stretched as far as the eye could see both north and south along the trade route. And in the center of it all, in her own golden carriage, came Queen Bilkis as if she were a burning onyx for brilliance.
Jerusalem was ready. Jerusalem had also heard the news.
South of the city the caravans of Sheba were met by the chariots of Israel, in the foremost of which stood three persons: a driver; a woman handsome, erect, and formidable; and a man of dark, remarkable beauty. This man wore a thin circle of gold around his hair. This was Solomon himself, who led Queen Bilkis into Jerusalem with fanfare and elegance.
The king of Israel had built a pavilion in the greater court of the temple of his God, where he and Sheba could sit as luminaries above the public. He had stretched purple canopies over the platform. And when the day came for them to take their places there, servants appeared on every side, waving fans of an Egyptian design.
Four figures met and sat on the high pavilion: Queen Bilkis of Sheba and her vizier, King Solomon of Israel and that woman of magnificent silence, t
he queen mother. She had been a wife of David. Solomon introduced her as Bathsheba.
Bilkis opened her formal inquisition. “Solomon, master builder, I put you a question,” she said. “You have scattered fifty new forts across the Negev south of your kingdom. I saw them as I journeyed here. All around this city you have built a new wall. I admired it when I arrived. You have chariots and armies and shields and spears, vast protections against your enemies. But here am I within the forts, inside the wall, on the soft side of your every soldier. What if I, behind my smile, were that enemy? What good then, O King? What value are all the stones and metals you can measure?”
Solomon nodded. His black hair tumbled to his shoulders. His brown eyes were like an oiled wood, untroubled though filled with thinking. Queen Bilkis found that his looks alone consumed her attention and gave him an intellectual advantage.
“Queen, you are right.” He gave her a radiant smile and said, “In themselves my walls and all my munitions are useless. But their strength is in a weak thing, and their power is in that which powerful men despise.”
The queen of Sheba said, “What weak thing can save a nation?”
King Solomon answered: “There was a little city with few men to guard it. A great king came and besieged it. But there was found in it a poor wise man, and he by his wisdom delivered the city. The queen of Sheba has not yet passed the last defense of Israel. It sits beside her on this platform.”
“You must mean yourself,” said the queen. “And you suggest that you are a poor man. But the house behind us and the one in front of us belie you, Solomon. How can you call such a life poor?”
“But this is what wealth has revealed to me,” said Solomon: “the poverty of all life.” He raised his voice so that everyone gathered might hear him. “I’ve made a test of pleasure and found that it was vanity. Yes, I have accomplished many great works: I’ve built houses and planted vineyards and made gardens and dug pools from which to water a forest of growing trees. I own herds and flocks greater than any before me in Jerusalem. I have been entertained by the most excellent singers, both men and women. But when I considered what my hands had done and the toil I had spent in doing it, I saw that all was vanity. It was all a striving after wind, and nothing was gained under the sun. I tell you, there is no difference between the rich and the poor, except that one may deceive himself with dreaming and another may not. Wisdom is in this, to know that one is poor.”
The Book of God: The Bible as a Novel Page 34