Solomon lived on a different scale.The daily provisions necessary for his table were as follows:Thirty measures of flour,seventy measures of meal,ten fat oxen,twenty lean oxen and dozens of deer,roebucks,chickens and other game.
When Abraham moved into a new territory,he built himself a simple tent and slept on a few old rugs.
Solomon,on the other hand,spent twenty years building himself a new palace and ate from dishes made of solid gold.
It makes interesting reading,but it cost a terrible lot of money.Many hundred years afterwards when the Jews lived in exile in Babylon and wrote down the records of the past,they loved to dwell upon the glories of the reign of Solomon who according to them had been the undisputed master of all the land between the Euphrates and the Mediterranean Sea.
But the subjects of the mighty monarch who were obliged to do forced labour on all public works and who were forced to pay annual levies for the maintenance of the royal palace,the national temple,the terraced fortress of Millo,the walls of Jerusalem and the three new frontier cities which Solomon rebuilt and fortified,they were less enthusiastic and (truth to tell)they were for ever on the verge of rebellion.
Fortunately Solomon was a shrewd man and he kept the expenditures of his court within certain limits.
Like Joseph and several other great Jewish leaders,Solomon was very apt to have visions when he was asleep.Shortly after his accession to the throne,he dreamed that Jehovah asked him what gift he desired above all others.
Solomon answered that he chose wisdom.The word “wisdom”in the old Hebrew sense could be translated by either “wisdom”or “shrewdness.”
Solomon had his share of both.He was exceedingly bright but not rash.
As King of the Jews he also was the chief-justice of the nation.One of the first cases that were brought before him was a quarrel between two women who both claimed a small child as their own.Solomon ordered one of his life-guards to take the baby and hack it in two and give half of it to each of the women.What he had expected,actually happened.
The real mother begged the soldier to spare the child's life.
“For it is better,”so she argued,“that the wrong mother keep the child than it should suffer death in this terrible way.”
Such a quick and penetrating decision greatly pleased the multitude.It made Solomon popular.Not even the follies of his old age could quite deprive him of the affection of his subjects.
So he ruled for forty years,from 943B.C.to 903B.C.
And all that time,he spent money like water.
First of all he constructed the royal palace.It was an enormous building consisting of many halls and courtyards,all of them leading up to the Temple.Inside the high enclosure there was an armoury,a room where the King gave audiences and listened to cases of law.There were extensive living quarters for his Majesty and for all his attendants and there was a harem where the royal wives were kept far away from the gaze of the curious crowd.
Everything was built of stone and finished in cypress wood.It took twenty years to build.
Then came the temple.Of course,an ancient temple was something quite different from a modern church.It was a holy place where people came to make sacrifices to the gods,or in this case,to only one God,who was called Jehovah.No sermons were ever preached and the worshippers kept coming and going all the time.
It was not necessary that the building should be very large and Solomon's temple measured only ninety-five by thirty feet,which is the size of the average village church.
All the same,the edifice cost untold millions.The Jews were farmers and merchants and had little skill as artisans.The necessary stonecutters and wood-carvers and goldsmiths had to be imported from abroad.Most of them came from Phoenicia which was the greatest commercial centre of the world of three thousand years ago.
To-day,Tyre and Sidon are forlorn little fishing villages,but in the days of Solomon they were ports which impressed a visitor from the land-locked Jewish state as New York is apt to overawe a man who comes from a little city in the heart of the prairies.
David had already made a treaty with the ruler of Tyre.Solomon now concluded an alliance with the King of Sidon.
In return for an annual supply of grain,King Hiram placed a number of his ships at the disposal of the Jewish sovereign and promised to provide him with the necessary skilled labourers for his Temple.
The ships which Solomon chartered visited all the harbours of the Mediterranean as far as Tarshish (which the Romans called Tartessus)in Spain and they gathered gold and precious stones and costly woods for Solomon's holy shrine.
But the world of the Mediterranean was too small to supply all the needs of the great monarch.He decided to establish a trade-route into the Indies.He engaged Phoenician ship-builders to settle down on the shore of the Gulf of Akabah,an eastern branch of the Red Sea.There they built a ship-yard near the town of Ezion-geber (which the Jews had visited six centuries before when they were wanderers in the desert)and their vessels travelled as far as Ophir (which was either on the eastern coast of Africa or on the western coast of India)and then returned with sandalwood and with ivory and with incense,which caravans then carried to Jerusalem.
Compared to the pyramids (which were then almost three thousand years old)and to the temples in Thebes and in Memphis and in Nineveh and in Babylon,the temple of Solomon was not a very imposing building.
But it was the first time that one of the many small Semitic tribes of western Asia had ventured forth upon such an ambitious building plan.Even the rich Queen of Sheba,the famous gold land of Arabia,was driven by curiosity to visit the new capital of her northern neighbours and honoured Solomon with a visit,and expressed her admiration for what he had accomplished.
