Abstract - King Solomon –What kind of a father was he?
King Solomon is one of the most well known personalities in the Holy Bible. He is especially known as “being the wisest man who ever lived” according to the Bible. Many religious people today look to the words of King Solomon and see in them God’s divine wisdom which is timeless and universally applicable. His teachings negate and veto any others in the mind of many religious people today.
His supposed teachings especially regarding child rearing are considered irrefutable, unambiguous and coming from a divine origin. This is especially the case when we consider the issue of the corporal punishment[1] of children, which King Solomon is purported to have been a staunch advocate of.[2]
However, how much do we really know about King Solomon the person? More importantly, what do we know about specifically King Solomon, the father? This is a reasonable question because King Solomon’s teachings singularly continue to dramatically impact certain segments of the Judeo-Christian world especially when it concerns the issue of corporal punishment of children.
King Solomon –What kind of a father was he?
General Introduction to the personality of King Solomon
King Solomon (Hebrew [Shelomoh] - שלמה – peaceful) is one of the most celebrated personalities in ancient history. He is well known for his wealth, wisdom and his almost mythical associations with a myriad of wives and other women. According to the Bible, Solomon was a king, poet, a lover, a supremely wise judge, singer, scholar, scientist, astronomer, cosmologist, botanist, zoologist, meteorologist, geographer, trader, economist, inventor, a controller of the wealth of the world and a prodigious writer.
We only know all of this (generally speaking) because of what we find in the pages of the Holy Scriptures. In fact, it has been universally recognized by Bible scholars that in fact there is a paucity of information about King Solomon, not only within the Biblical record, but also outside of the Sacred Volume. “The comparative scantiness of historical data for a life of Solomon is itself significant. While that of David (his father) [David also is mentioned more times by name than any other person in the Bible] occupies I Samuel 16 – 31; II Samuel 1-24, I Kings 1 & 2, I Chronicles 10 – 29, that of Solomon fills only the eleven chapters I Kings 1- 11 and the nine [chapters] II Chronicles 1 – 9.”[3] We can also point to the books of Proverbs (certain parts only, not all), Ecclesiastes, the 72nd Psalm and the Songs of Songs as traditionally having either been written by or (concerning Psalm 72) for Solomon.
Outside the Bible, in the writings of ancient historians, Solomon is barely acknowledged. Josephus the Hebrew historian mentions that Solomon is referenced by two classical Greek historians: Menander and Dios. They only mentioned that Solomon and Hiram, the King of Tyre, shared riddles with each other, but that Hiram was able to best Solomon.[4] Other materials are very scanty. Additional mentions concerning Solomon and his life are found in the writings in the early historians Eupolemus and Alexander Polyhistor.[5] In this discussion, however, we will focus on the material found in the Sacred Volume as our primary source for the information presented in this paper.
King Solomon: What kind of a father was he?
At first, we are presented with some pretty difficult realities about trying to learn much of anything in a concrete way about King Solomon. Very little information about him is presented to us in Scripture. Of course, the best would be some type of a biography of his life so we could really know him and such books were written about King Solomon. Note the following text which shows this:
“And the rest of the acts of Solomon, and all that he did, and his wisdom, are they not written in the book of the words of Solomon?”[6]
It would be really great if we simply had access to this biography of Solomon’s life and probably therein many of our questions about him would be answered, but sadly this ancient resource has been lost. All we have to go forward in this quest is what we find basically in the Bible itself. As we have here shown, the information about Solomon is sparse, terse and limited. If we are going to really extract from the Bible information about Solomon, we are going to have to really be willing to look very closely at the little information we do have and try to extract from it data to help us paint the correct picture of King Solomon, the father.
The writings of King Solomon
According to the Bible, Solomon wrote 3,000 proverbs (note that the whole section of Proverbs 1:7 to 9:18 can be considered a single proverb!) and 1,005 songs (the Song of Songs is considered only one song – more like a dramatic opera), but in fact, almost all of what Solomon produced is no longer with us. Many books must have been written by Solomon as he attests in Ecclesiastes 12:12 (and by other writers as well) to help explain what was happening in his time as well as in the previous period before Solomon lived. All of this at the present time is lost to us.
What were the tools that King Solomon had available to learn?
King Solomon had available many historical and religious works to refer to. The Bible shows that Solomon “sought out and set in order many proverbs, … The Preacher sought to find out acceptable words.”[7] Of course, he had the Law of Moses (found in the first five books of the Bible) available which we even find his father David urging him to follow the teachings of.[8] This book would have been required reading by Solomon on an annual basis according to Rabbinical understandings of Deuteronomy 31:10-13.
Other books were also available to Solomon, which no doubt discussed many different issues. We can summarize several of these mentioned in Scripture – some of which are even written by individuals who lived contemporaneously with Solomon (like Nathan the prophet).
"The Book of the Wars of the Lord" (Numbers 21:14)
“The Book of Jasher" (Joshua 10:13; II Samuel 1:18)
"The Book of the Acts of Solomon" (I Kings 11:14)
"The Book of Nathan the Prophet" (I Chronicles 29:29)
"The Book of Gad the Seer" (I Chronicles 29:29)
"The Prophecy of Ahijah the Shiloite" (II Chronicles 9:29)
"The Visions of Iddo the Seer" (II Chronicles 9:29)
"The Book of Shemiah the Prophet" (II Chronicles 12:15)
"The Book of Jehu the Son of Hanani" (II Chronicles 20:34)
"The Sayings of Hosai" (II Chronicles 33:19)
Definitely, Solomon would have had access to these and other written records for his reference and learning and they no doubt helped shape him into the person he became because he was certainly a scholar and very well read. However, to understand what type of a father Solomon was, we need also to look at the relationship he had with three main people in his life. These people are: (1) his own father, King David; (2) his mother, Queen Bathsheba; (3) his private tutor, the prophet Nathan.[9] Finally, to help us better understand Solomon the father, we need to look at some of the information we have about Solomon the person. Certainly, we can learn things about the general lifestyle, personal orientation, habits, character traits and the like from anecdotal stories about Solomon. This approach will be the basis for our investigation. (END OF PART ONE)
[1] When we use the term “corporal punishment” throughout this paper, we are referring to the practice commonly referred to as “spanking” or in British parlance “smacking.”
[2] Refer to the author’s website for information on his book on this subject – www.biblechild.com
[3] McClintock and Strong, Cyclopedia of Biblical, Theological and Ecclesiastical Literature (CBTEL), vol. IX, pgs. 861-862.
[4] (Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 8:55–62, 143–149).
[5] Eusebius, Preparatio Evangelica: 9:30); Clement of Alex.: i.21 – quoted in CBTEL – ibid. note 3.
[9] CBTEL, Vol. IX, pg. 862.
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