Solomon's Fame: the Queen of Sheba and Three Books—Proverbs, Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes
The kingdom at its height: peace from Tiphsah to Gaza, everyone under his own vine. The Queen of Sheba arrives to test the rumours with riddles, and Solomon leaves three books that entered the Bible.
These were the years later remembered as the model: "Judah and Israel dwelt in safety, every man under his vine and under his fig tree, from Dan to Beersheba, all the days of Solomon." No wars, no rivals; trading fleets, cavalry, tribute from neighbouring kings, a palace that took thirteen years to build.
Word reached the Queen of Sheba, and she came "to test him with riddles," with a great caravan of camels, spices, gold and precious stones. She spoke with him about everything on her mind, and there was nothing he could not explain. Seeing his house, his table, his servants and his ascent to the Temple, she said plainly: I did not believe until I came and saw—and not half was told me.
What survives from those years is not only palaces. Three books of the Bible bear Solomon's name: Proverbs, which begins with the fear of Heaven and ends with the hymn to the woman of valour; the Song of Songs, a love poem tradition reads as the dialogue between God and Israel; and Ecclesiastes, the bleakest book in the Bible, the verdict of a man who had everything.
The midrash arranges them by age: the Song of Songs in his youth, Proverbs in his maturity, Ecclesiastes in his old age.
How we know
On the chronology
Academic history dates this event differently. In the age of the kings the divergence is not the one familiar from the Persian period, where Seder Olam runs about a hundred and sixty-five years short. Here academic chronology reckons some reigns as overlapping — father and son on the throne together — so its span from the division of the kingdom to the destruction of the Temple comes out nearly three decades shorter. The gap therefore grows: a hundred and thirty-five years at the division, a hundred and fifty-four at Sennacherib, a hundred and sixty-four at the destruction. The anchors of the academic count are external documents: the battle of Qarqar (853), Jehu's tribute on the Black Obelisk (841), the fall of Samaria (722), Sennacherib's campaign (701), Megiddo and Nebuchadnezzar's campaigns in the Babylonian Chronicles (609, 605, 597). Both dates appear on the timeline when the divergence layer is on.
Sources
Tanakh
- Melachim I 5:1–14 — “each man under his own vine” — the peace and the borders of the kingdom
- Melachim I 10 — the visit of the Queen of Sheba: her riddles and “not half was told me”
- Divrei HaYamim II 9 — the parallel account of the Queen of Sheba
Chazal: Mishnah, Talmud, midrash, Zohar
- Shir HaShirim Rabbah 1:10 — the midrash on Shlomo’s wisdom and his books (the paragraph to be checked)
- Shabbat 30b — they wished to hide away Kohelet, but it opens and closes with words of Torah
- Bava Batra 15a — Shlomo’s books were written down by “Chizkiyahu and his company”
- Yadayim 3:5 — Rabbi Akiva: “all the Writings are holy, but the Song of Songs is the holy of holies”
Basis: stated in the Tanakh.