in its plain bourgeois simplicity any more suitable to the name they bear than the religious. Unless Solomon was like Haroun al-Rashid, and made himself privately acquainted with the ways and thoughts of the citizens, it is difficult to see how he can have written so completely as one of them would have done.
The truth is that both David and Solomon were idealised by later generations. The heroes of a grander if not better age, they towered far above the petty figures of their successors. Favoured by the contemporary depression of Egypt and Assyria, they had been enabled to rear and to retain a powerful empire, comparable to those which afflicted and oppressed the divided people of the later Israelites. Solomon in particular is represented in tradition as not only the most fortunate but the wisest of kings, not in the sense in which it is said that religion is the best part of wisdom (Prov. i. 7), but in that in which the 'children of the east' were accustomed to use the word. This is clear from the language of the Hebrew narrator:—
'And God gave Solomon wisdom and understanding exceeding
much, and largeness of heart even as the sand on the sea-shore. And
Solomon's wisdom excelled the wisdom of all the children of the
east country, and all the wisdom of Egypt. For he was wiser than
all men; than Ethan the Ezrahite [read, perhaps, 'the native,' i.e.
the Israelite], and Heman, and Calcol, and Darda, the sons of
Mahol [probably a foreigner]: and his fame was in all the nations
round about. And he spoke three thousand proverbs [or, similitudes],
and his songs were a thousand and five. And he spoke of trees, from
the cedar in Lebanon unto the hyssop that springeth out of the wall:
he spoke also of beasts, and of birds, and of creeping things, and of
fishes. And there came of all peoples to hear the wisdom of Solomon,
from all kings of the earth, who had heard of his wisdom.' (1 Kings
iv. 29-34.)
I see no reason for not accepting the substance of this
tradition. The principal point in it is the ascription to
Solomon of a power of apophthegmatic composition which
the author, as a devout theist, could not but trace to a divine
gift, just as the author of Ex. xxxvi. ascribes the skill of the
artisans of the tabernacle to the direct operation of Jehovah.
