THE glory of Solomon vanished like an unsubstantial pageant, and left nothing behind it but a vague memory. The true golden age of the Jewish past was far more the age of their David, with its outburst of song and golden deeds, than the Byzantine gorgeousness of Solomon, which the sequel proved to be splendid with the colourings of decay. The Book of Kings, with a play upon his name, which if intentional has a certain grimness of its own, says that when he was old—though he could not have been more than 139 140 SOLOMON. wives turned away his heart," and his heart was not perfect shalêm) with Jehovah."1 The Book of Chronicles, after dwelling on the ideal of his glory, his building of the Temple, his prayers, and his commerce, refers to the prophets who had acted as his historiographers, and adds only that he slept with his fathers. Two deadly evils lurked behind the superficial brilliancy, and wrought incredible harm to king and people—the curse of poly- gamy and the curse of despotism. The primitive simplicity of the monarchy was nobler, though less showy, than this irides- cence of moral stagnancy and luxurious decline. There must have been many who watched with unfavourable eyes the displacement of national simplicity by alien magnifi- cence. Strange and apparently universal as was the desuetude into which the provisions of the Mosaic law had fallen, and little as Solomon seems to have been conscious of the obliteration of Mosaic conceptions which was manifest in his proceedings,
THE glory of Solomon vanished like an unsubstantial pageant, and left nothing behind it but a vague memory. The true golden age of the Jewish past was far more the age of their David, with its outburst of song and golden deeds, than the Byzantine gorgeousness of Solomon, which the sequel proved to be splendid with the colourings of decay. The Book of Kings, with a play upon his name, which if intentional has a certain grimness of its own, says that when he was old—though he could not have been more than 139 140 SOLOMON. wives turned away his heart," and his heart was not perfect shalêm) with Jehovah."1 The Book of Chronicles, after dwelling on the ideal of his glory, his building of the Temple, his prayers, and his commerce, refers to the prophets who had acted as his historiographers, and adds only that he slept with his fathers. Two deadly evils lurked behind the superficial brilliancy, and wrought incredible harm to king and people—the curse of poly- gamy and the curse of despotism. The primitive simplicity of the monarchy was nobler, though less showy, than this irides- cence of moral stagnancy and luxurious decline. There must have been many who watched with unfavourable eyes the displacement of national simplicity by alien magnifi- cence. Strange and apparently universal as was the desuetude into which the provisions of the Mosaic law had fallen, and little as Solomon seems to have been conscious of the obliteration of Mosaic conceptions which was manifest in his proceedings,
Farrar_Solomon.docx