Solomon

• 1. Introduction

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  Solomon, also known by the name Jedidiah, was a king of ancient Israel whose reign is hypothesized to have stretched from roughly 970 to 931 BCE. In a single year, according to the Hebrew Bible, he collected tribute amounting to 666 talents of gold - that is about 18,125 kilograms of the metal. He ruled over a people who believed he could command demons, speak to animals, and receive wisdom directly from God in a dream. His throne was said to include moving mechanical parts, making it one of the earliest mechanical devices in recorded history. And yet archaeologists have never found the temple he supposedly built, nor the palace, nor the throne. What remains is a figure stretched between the historical and the legendary - revered in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, the Druze faith, and the Bahai Faith, invoked in Renaissance magic and West African folklore, and still debated by scholars who cannot agree on whether his famous empire ever existed at all. The questions the evidence raises are not easily dismissed. Who was Solomon, and how did a king whose historical footprint is so faint become one of the most referenced figures in the ancient and modern worlds?

• 2. The Heir and the Purge

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  Solomon was born in Jerusalem, the second-born child of David and his wife Bathsheba, who was the widow of Uriah the Hittite. His very existence was bound up in a story of sin and forgiveness. David had arranged for Uriah to be killed in battle by ordering his commanding officer Joab to withdraw support for Uriah on the front line, so that David could take Bathsheba as his wife. The first child born of that adulterous union died seven days after birth, which the Hebrew Bible presents as divine judgment. Solomon, born after David's forgiveness, was given a name meaning peace.

  When the elderly David could no longer stay warm, the court found a young woman named Abishag the Shunamite to attend to him. That vulnerability opened the door to political scheming. David's heir apparent, Adonijah, moved to declare himself king. He was outmaneuvered by Bathsheba and the prophet Nathan, who persuaded David to proclaim Solomon king instead, citing a promise David had made that is not recorded anywhere else in the biblical narrative. It is said Solomon ascended the throne at around fifteen years of age.

  His first acts were not gentle. Following David's instructions, Solomon conducted a purge that included his father's chief general, Joab. He then filled administrative, religious, civic, and military posts with allies. He expanded the cavalry and chariot arms, founded colonies that doubled as trading posts and military outposts, and enlarged the bureaucracy. The framework of a state was taking shape around a very young king.

• 3. Wisdom and Judgment

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  In 1 Kings, God appeared to Solomon in a dream and asked what he wanted. Solomon asked only for wisdom to guide his people. God, pleased that Solomon had not requested long life or the death of his enemies, granted the request and promised great wisdom as a reward.

  The most famous demonstration of that wisdom is known as the Judgement of Solomon. Two women each claimed to be the mother of the same infant. Solomon ordered the child cut in half and divided between them. One woman immediately renounced her claim, showing she would rather surrender the child than see it harmed. Solomon declared her the true mother. The story survived for three thousand years because the logic inside it is elegant: a mother's love is revealed by the willingness to give up the child rather than destroy it.

  Solomon has traditionally been regarded as the author of three biblical books: Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Songs. Rabbinical tradition also attributes to him the Book of Wisdom, which is recognized as part of the biblical canon by the Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church, Oriental Orthodox Churches, and the Church of the East, though Protestant traditions consider it apocryphal. Two hymns in the Psalms, numbers 72 and 127, bear a Hebrew title that can be translated either as "to Solomon" or "by Solomon". In that small ambiguity lies a whole scholarly dispute about authorship that remains unresolved.

• 4. Wealth, Wives, and Downfall

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  Trade relationships were central to Solomon's administration. He continued his father David's alliance with Hiram I, king of Tyre, and the two sent out joint expeditions to the lands of Tarshish and Ophir, importing gold, silver, sandalwood, pearls, ivory, apes, and peacocks. Israel under Solomon had extensive commercial traffic by land with Tyre, Egypt, and Arabia, and by sea with Tarshish, Ophir, and South India. Solomon is regarded as the wealthiest Israelite king named in the Bible.

  According to the biblical account, Solomon had 700 wives and 300 concubines. Most of the wives were described as foreign princesses - women of Moab, Ammon, Edom, Sidon, the Hittites, and a daughter of Pharaoh. The only wife mentioned by name is Naamah the Ammonite, mother of Solomon's successor Rehoboam. Solomon permitted his foreign wives to import their national deities, building temples to Ashtoreth and Milcom, acts the Hebrew Bible treats as the beginning of his downfall.

  The passage in 1 Kings describing Solomon's descent into idolatry identifies this as the reason God punished him. The king sinned in all three areas that Deuteronomy 17:16-17 forbids a king: he multiplied wives, he multiplied horses gathering chariots from as far as Egypt, and he accumulated vast quantities of gold. Jewish scribes say that his teacher Shimei ben Gera had kept him from marrying the daughter of Pharaoh while he lived, and that Solomon's execution of Shimei was his first descent into sin. Near the end of his life, Solomon faced enemies including Hadad of Edom, Rezon of Zobah, and his own official Jeroboam of the tribe of Ephraim. After a reign of forty years, he died of natural causes at around 55 years of age.

• 5. The Temple and What Archaeology Finds

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  For years before his death, David had been collecting materials for a temple in Jerusalem as a permanent home for Yahweh and the Ark of the Covenant. Solomon completed the structure with the help of an architect also named Hiram and materials sent from King Hiram of Tyre. The biblical narrative then describes Solomon spending thirteen years building a royal palace on Ophel, a hilly promontory in central Jerusalem. The palace complex included structures identified as the House of the Forest of Lebanon, the Hall of Pillars, and a Hall of Justice, alongside a residence for himself and one for Pharaoh's daughter.

  Excavations in Jerusalem have uncovered no monumental architecture from the relevant era, and no remains of the Temple or Solomon's palace have been found. Israel Finkelstein and Neil Silberman, in The Bible Unearthed, argue that at the time of David and Solomon, Jerusalem was populated by only a few hundred residents or fewer, which is insufficient for an empire stretching from the Euphrates to Eilath. They place the earliest independent reference to the Kingdom of Israel at around 890 BCE, and for Judah at around 750 BCE.

  Others disagree sharply. Kenneth Kitchen argues that Solomon ruled over a comparatively wealthy "mini-empire" and considers 666 gold talents a modest sum, calculating that over thirty years such a kingdom might accumulate up to 500 tons of gold. Yigael Yadin's excavations at Hazor, Megiddo, Beit Shean, and Gezer uncovered structures with impressive six-chambered gates and ashlar palaces, which he attributed to Solomon's reign. In 2013, silver hoards found in Phoenicia were linked to biblical passages describing Tarshish as a source of Solomon's wealth in metals, providing what scholars described as the first recognized material evidence agreeing with the ancient texts. And in 2014, professor of anthropology James W. Hardin and his team from the Cobb Institute of Archaeology at Mississippi State University discovered six official clay bullae seals at a site east of Gaza called Khirbet Summeily, dated to the tenth century BCE, which Hardin stated lend general support to the historical veracity of David and Solomon.

• 6. Across Religions and Legends

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  In Islam, Solomon is known as Sulaimaan ibn Daawuud, a prophet and messenger of God. The Quran attributes to him knowledge of the language of birds and supernatural abilities including controlling the wind, ruling over the jinn, and hearing the communication of ants. Unlike the biblical account, Muslim tradition holds that Solomon never participated in idolatry. During the Islamization of Iran, Solomon became merged with Jamshid, a great king from Persian mythology.

  In the Eastern Orthodox Church, Solomon is commemorated as a saint with the title Righteous Prophet and King, with a feast day celebrated on the Sunday of the Holy Forefathers. The staunchly Catholic King Philip II of Spain sought to model himself after Solomon. Statues of David and Solomon stand on either side of the entrance to the basilica of El Escorial, Philip's palace, and the structure of the Escorial itself was inspired by Solomon's Temple. In the Druze faith, when Solomon died, all the trees shed their leaves in mourning - all except the olive tree, which continued to bear fruit in his honor.

  During the Hellenistic period, Solomon came to be known as a magician and exorcist, with amulets and discovered seals invoking his name. The Testament of Solomon, an early pseudoepigraphical work from the 1st century CE, elaborates a detailed and grotesque demonology attributed to his powers. The Seal of Solomon, a legendary signet ring described as giving him command over the supernatural, appears in medieval Jewish mysticism, Islamic mysticism, and Western occultism and is the predecessor to the Star of David. A story from One Thousand and One Nights describes a genie punished by Solomon and locked in a bottle sealed with Solomon's seal, helpless until discovered by a fisherman centuries later. The Solomon Islands, a country and archipelago in Melanesia, were named for the king by the Spanish navigator Alvaro de Mendana, who became the first European to see the islands in 1568.

• 7. The Ethiopian Legacy

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  An Ethiopian account from the 14th century, the Kebra Nagast, maintains that the Queen of Sheba had sexual relations with King Solomon and gave birth beside the Mai Bella stream in the province of Hamasien, Eritrea. The child was a son who became Menelik I, King of Axum, and founded a dynasty that would reign as the Jewish, then Christian, Empire of Ethiopia. According to the tradition, that dynasty lasted 2,900 years until Haile Selassie was overthrown in 1974.

  Menelik was said to be a practicing Jew who was given a replica of the Ark of the Covenant by King Solomon. The tradition further holds that the original Ark was switched and traveled to Axum with Menelik and his mother, and is still there today, guarded by a single dedicated priest. The Ethiopian government and church deny all requests to view the alleged ark.

  The claim to Solomonic lineage was an important source of legitimacy and prestige for the Ethiopian monarchy across the centuries and had lasting effects on Ethiopian culture. Andre Lemaire, writing in Ancient Israel: From Abraham to the Roman Destruction of the Temple, states he could find no substantiating archaeological evidence for the Queen of Sheba's visit to Solomon, noting that the earliest records of trans-Arabian caravan voyages from Tayma and Sheba to the Middle Euphrates occurred in the mid-8th century BCE - some 250 years after the traditional timeframe of Solomon's reign. Yet seventeen years after that assessment, traces of cinnamon were found in Phoenician clay flasks from three small sites on the Israeli coastal plain dating to the 10th century BCE, suggesting trade routes with South Asia existed much earlier than previously thought.