Today, I want to begin with the words of Jesus which introduce Matthew 13, referring to the Queen of Sheba coming from the ends of the earth to see Solomon's wisdom: "behold, something better than Solomon is here" (12:42). To start with, here is a survey of Solomon's wisdom in 1 Kings 1-10.
Chapter 1. David is dying, and he's given a beautiful nurse named Abishag. Adonijah, sensing the transition, organizes his own ordination ceremony. Bathsheba, Solomon's mother, takes Nathan to ask David to keep his promise to Solomon and to her. Surely, she knows, if Adonijah is kinged, she and her son, by virtue of being political rivals, are enemies by default. It works. And Bathsheba is Lady Wisdom.
Solomon's advisors advise him to execute Adonijah for his plot. Solomon delays judgment, waiting--"If he is a worthy man..." (1:52)--and then only condemns him to house arrest--"Go to your house" (1:53).
Chapter 2. Adonijah throws away his pardon by asking for Abishag--an obvious political move, marrying the late king's concubine. Solomon, in his prudence, says No, and follows through on his promise to Adonijah, executing him. Joab makes a similarly bad choice and meets a similarly bad end. Because Solomon defers judgment until his enemies show their own bad character plainly, he is established not as a powerful victor but as a just judge. So the chapter ends, "Thus the kingdom was established in the hands of Solomon" (2:48).
Chapter 3. Here, Solomon asks Yahweh for wisdom. And then he judges rightly in the famous case between the two women, each of which had claimed maternity of a particular child. Solomon provokes their hearts to see which would produce maternal love: "Divide the living child in two" (3:25). It works.
Chapter 4. Here, the author begins to describe Solomon's wisdom and, this time, it's not about judging hearts:
Now, God gave Solomon wisdom... Solomon's wisdom surpassed the wisdom of all the sons of the east... He also spoke 3,000 proverbs, and his songs were 1,005. He spoke of trees, from the cedar that is in Lebanon even to the hyssop that grows on the wall; he spoke also of animals and birds and creeping things and fish. Men came from all peoples to hear the wisdom of Solomon, from all the kings of the earth who had heard of his wisdom. (vv. 29-34)
It has to be noted that Solomon knows the created order. "Animals" is behemah, which is elsewhere translated "livestock" and differs from "creeping things". Curiously, the text lists four of the five animal categories named in Genesis 1. Birds are sky-animals; fish are water-animals; and there are three kinds of land animals: livestock, wild animals, and creeping things. Solomon isn't described as speaking about the wild animals. (That's a puzzle for another day.)
Bathsheba must have taken Solomon to the zoo, or to nature preserves, as well as giving him music lessons. (Opinion time: I think the best of classical education these days gives kids a Solomonic education. I'm not a children's ministry expert, but this chapter gives biblical warrant for giving Sunday School lessons about frogs and flowers, and for singing songs.)
Chapter 5. The text calls Hiram, king of Tyre a "friend" of David (5:1). "Friend" is from ahev, which means "to love" and is cognate with the word for "heart". The word is used four times in early Solomon: Solomon loves Yahweh (3:3); David loved Hiram (5:1), Yahweh loved Israel (10:9), and Solomon loved many women (11:1). Ponder that. Ponder especially that the word is most commonly used to frame episodes. Hm. Identifying what one loves is often a good frame for explaining what happens next. But back to Solomon's wisdom.
Solomon wants to build a temple, now that he has established peace, and he wants Hiram's (Lebanese) cedar trees to do it. Because they're "the best". Wise Solomon can judge hearts, and he can also judge trees and architecture. They draw up a contract (wisdom), levy a workforce (wise), pays them well (wise), and establishes a covenant of peace between them. James says that doing wise stuff sows a harvest of peace (3:24). Here's an example.
Chapter 6-7. Solomon builds the temple. Well, the workers build it, of course, but Solomon had all of the ideas and made it happen, so he gets to be the subject of that sentence.
What's new in this chapter is that Hiram, whose dad is a bronze-worker, is described as being "filled with wisdom and understanding and skill for doing any work in bronze" (7:14). The rest of the chapter praises his work.
Chapter 8. This is, perhaps, the most important chapter: Solomon dedicates the temple to Yahweh and prays a lot.
Chapter 9. Hiram gets paid (wise).
Chapter 10. Building and dedicating the temple isn't the climax. The show-off is. The Queen of Sheba wants to see it. Why? She's a queen. She and Solomon have the same job. The text uses dramatic, romantic, big language: "She spoke with him about all that was in her heart... Solomon answered all her questions... Solomon gave to the queen of Sheba all her desire" (10:3, 13). In between, the Queen takes a look at some specific things:
The house that he had built
The food of his table
The seating of his servants
The attendance of his waiters and their attire
His cupbearers
His stairway by which he went up to the house of Yahweh
Her analysis:
Happy are your men
Happy are your servants
Blessed be Yahweh
(This is the chapter Evagrius Ponticus would use as a figure to describe his field research to the Egyptian monasteries in ~375 ad. Like the Queen, he reports on the house, the food, the clothing, the customs, and the happiness of what he saw.)
That's enough (for me) for now. How does that help us appreciate Matthew 13?
Jesus refers to himself as "better than Solomon", and commends the Queen of Sheba for coming to see his kingdom and hear his wisdom.
Like Solomon, Jesus starts by talking about trees (13:1-9, 18-23). He stays there, talking about wheat harvest (vv. 24-30, 36-43) and the mustard seed (vv. 31-32). Then bread (vv. 33-35), hidden treasure (v. 44), fine pearls (vv. 45-46) and a fish net (vv. 47-52).
They both speak in parables and proverbs. They both know the created world. Their wisdom relates to discerning matters of the heart, and identifies good men from bad ones.
In future posts, I may trace some relationships between the content of Jesus' parables and the content of Solomon's wisdom. But what screams out at the reader (at least this reader) about Jesus' self-comparison to Solomon and reference to the Queen of Sheba is his self-identification as a temple-building king.
Jesus builds a temple. He uses the best materials (living stones) and hires the best builders (the apostles). He only starts construction one he has established peace (by the blood of his cross). He shows off not only "the house" but also his food (the Eucharist, his broken body, food shared, charity, doing the works of the Father), the seating of his servants (who serve, who give honor, who bear their crosses with him), his attendants' attire ("put on Christ", and all of Col. 3), and the stairway (an exaltation only through humility).
He shows her the kingdom of heaven. Which he is proud of, and which she would do damn well to learn from and imitate as well as she can. He's proud of it because his people are happy (cf. Matt. 5:1-11, "Blessed are the..." x8).
The Queen asked Solomon everything that was in her heart, and we can do the same to Jesus. The only questions Jesus refuses to answer in the gospels are those which don't come from the heart.
Solomon gave the queen everything she requested, including wealth. What do we do with this? More later, but look at the figures that depict wealth in Matthew 13: harvests of a hundredfold, hidden treasure, a pearl of great price. Jesus has wealth to give. Let's look at that.
That's the enduring image for me: a happy, proud Jesus who loves to show off the institutions of his kingdom and the happiness of the people who live in it.
Perhaps the next post will begin to dig into Matthew 13 and explore the parables of Wise King Jesus, the Show-Off.