During his reign, Solomon violates Deuteronomy’s law of the king (17:16–17): he acquires wealth, horses, and wives, and God declares that his kingdom will be torn away from his heirs. Yet unlike David, Solomon does not repent. Reading Ecclesiastes as written by Solomon, Rashi portrays the king as losing everything, including his kingdom, during his own lifetime, and not only repenting but also instituting protective measures for the Torah.
Paul’s (ca. 5-67 C.E.) portrayal of Jesus as an exalted ruler may seem to challenge Jewish monotheism. Yet the idea of a human king ruling on God’s behalf is already found in the Bible. Reading Paul alongside Jewish traditions of divine kingship shows how his claims about Jesus remain consistent with exclusive allegiance to one God.
Among Solomon’s many foreign wives, only Pharaoh’s daughter receives individualized attention—but why does her story center on Solomon’s building projects?
In the Bible, the Queen of Sheba is an unnamed foreign visitor to Solomon’s court. How did she later become a paradigmatic religious convert, Solomon’s wife, and the mother of Nebuchadnezzar and Menelik I, the founding figure of the Ethiopian royal court? The answer begins in the Qur’an.
Noah, Melchizedek, Abraham’s servant, Laban, and Jethro all bless YHWH, but, as Rabbi Pappias notes in the Mekhilta, the Israelites don’t. Only later in the Bible do we find David and Solomon blessing YHWH, but so do Hiram King of Tyre and the Queen of Sheba.
So why aren’t we told which mother actually stole the baby?
Royal lovers, a female goatherd and male shepherd, King Solomon and his bride, an urban relationship that ends violently, and a sister and her protective brothers. Is it possible to read these episodes as a single love story?
In a joint venture, the Phoenician King Hiram and King Solomon go to Tarshish to bring back silver—the Levant has no silver deposits of its own. Where is Tarshish? Archaeological science, specifically, the ability to trace the chemical fingerprint of silver, and Phoenician inscriptions such as the Nora Stone, point us to the answer(s).
God grants the young Solomon divine wisdom in a dream at Gibeon. This account, which reads like an ancient Near Eastern royal novella, was an apologia for Solomon’s accession and his style of kingship.
Bathsheba first appears as the object of David’s lust, then as the mother of Solomon, who pleads with the king to make her son his heir. And yet, a close look at her actions shows her to be someone with agency, able to manipulate her husband and even her son to ensure Solomon’s safety and rule.
Deuteronomy does not have the festival of Shemini Atzeret (“the eighth day of assembly”), while Leviticus and Numbers do. This difference helps explain why the festival is absent in the story of Solomon’s dedication of the Temple in Kings but appears in the version of this same story in Chronicles.
A small shrine model, found in an archaeological excavation of the 10th century B.C.E. city at Khirbet Qeiyafa, together with a 9th century B.C.E. Temple excavated at Motza, help us better understand the Temple of Solomon, known only from the biblical text.
Upon purifying the Temple in his first year as king, Hezekiah delays the celebration of Passover until the 14th of Iyar, the date of the Torah’s Pesach Sheni, “Second Passover.” A close examination of the story (2 Chr 29–30) demonstrates that this wasn’t a simple application of the Pesach Sheni law, but that Hezekiah was innovating in order to create unity between the northern Israelites and southern Judahites.
Set against the Pharaonic Solomon, Jeroboam frees Israel from servitude and founds the Northern Kingdom. Hadad plays a similar role on behalf of the Edomites. Why are these two “rebels” depicted as heroes?
Copper has been mined in the Timna Valley since the 5th millennium B.C.E. Recent excavations reveal that activity in the region peaked in the 10th century B.C.E., during the kingdom of Edom. But did the Edomites control this lucrative copper industry, or was it dominated by the Israelite kingdom of David and Solomon?
The Song of Songs is a collection of love poetry. The Rabbis read it as an allegory of the relationship between God and the Jewish people. Only in the Middle Ages, in Spain and Northern France, did scholars begin to pay attention to the plain (Peshat) meaning of the text. Some went as far as dropping the allegory altogether and treating it as love poetry, as it was originally intended.
Deuteronomy envisions a king constantly reading torah and limiting his wealth and resources. Is this how kings are described in the rest of the Bible? What was kingship like in the ancient Near East?
Finding gender equality in the Song of Songs without compromising God and meaning.
The book of Ruth tells the story of David’s great grandmother Ruth, a Moabite woman who attaches herself to a Judahite family. Could this have been designed as a positive spin for a persistent, problematic tradition about David’s foreignness—a tradition so controversial that it was excised from the rest of the Bible?
