In the Bible, Solomon is the classic example of the wise monarch. King Solomon embodies wisdom but when we try to find what his wisdom consisted in we may be left feeling none the wiser. The only detailed illustration of Solomon’s being wise is this rather bizarre story of the two women and the baby. Otherwise we are given only summaries of the wise things that caused people like the Queen of Sheba to come from far and wide to hear him. He uttered proverbs – three thousand of them. He wrote one thousand and five songs. He knew about all kinds of trees from the greatest to the smallest and he knew about birds, beasts, reptiles and fish (from which came the idea that he could understand their language). And finally he was good at guessing the answers to riddles. Clearly Solomon had a kind of wisdom, which wasn’t quite what we think of as wisdom. He was it seems clever with words and good at nature sciences.
But then of course there is the matter of Solomon’s dream at Gibeon. God tells him to ask what he wants and instead of asking for long life, riches or dead enemies, Solomon asks for that which will enable him to be a good ruler. More specifically he asks for ‘a hearing mind’ which will enable him to judge the people and discern between good and evil. God is pleased and grants him the discernment to hear justice with a wise and discerning mind. By hearing justice is meant the ability to adjudicate between conflicting claims such as we hear in the sad story of the two women and the two babies.
So we might look more closely at this story to see what the workings of wisdom look like. On the surface the story has a Baldrick like quality about it, (that is if you were a devotee of the Blackadder stories). Solomon comes up with the cunning plan to cut the baby in half – the true mother wants to save the child’s life even if it means giving him up, the false mother accepts because even if it means she can’t have the child, her rival wont either. But is that what wise discernment consists – the formation of cunning plans? If we look more closely at the story we might discern for ourselves something of the workings of Solomon’s mind. The story starts with a prolonged account of what has happened given by one of two prostitutes sharing a house. They had both given birth but the second women is supposed to have smothered her child by lying on him. She then gets up and steals the other child while its mother is asleep. Perhaps Solomon may have wondered how this woman was able to give such a detailed account of what had gone on while she was asleep. The second woman speaks much more briefly, ‘My child is alive, it is yours who is dead.’ Solomon seems to detect a distinct pattern in their speeches. The more loquacious woman mentions the dead child first, the other mentions the live one first. Does Solomon intuit that the woman who has brought the case is not being truthful – the woman who woke up with a dead child which she herself may have lain on – who is perhaps out of guilt desperate not to believe that her child is dead and so has concocted the whole story of the theft of a child. And does Solomon intuit that the woman who says simply, ‘The live one is mine, the dead one is yours,’ is in fact in the right. He cannot prove it so he improvises a grisly confrontation in which the woman he believes to be in the wrong demonstrates her true colours. ‘Cut it in two.’ Solomon’s judicial wisdom lies not then primarily in the cunning plan but in his prior insight into the true character of these two women.
And so we begin to see perhaps that the source of Solomon’s wisdom is in the gift of attentiveness, of a hearing mind which can not only read the fine details of nature, or the intricacies of language, but also the true character of the human being in front of him. What Solomon displays in his just dealings is the justice of God. So by implication it is his attentiveness to the justice of God which enables him to be just.
Solomon is not, however, the only wise character in the Old Testament. One of the most repeated phrases in the Old Testament is the saying, ‘The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.’ And one of the great God-fearers in Scripture is Job, and one of the great Biblical poems about wisdom is found in chapter 28 of Job, which asks where wisdom is to be found? And the answer is that man does not know the way to it and that it is hidden from all things living. Only God knows its place. And that is why fear of God and turning away from evil is the only way to become wise. Only when we are responsive to God and hold ourselves accountable before God can we begin to learn wisdom. And that Job does throughout his life even in the midst of tragic suffering.
There is much more that could be said about Job but the reason for mentioning him is to provide a more balanced picture of wisdom. Solomon’s wisdom lies in his dealing with other people, in the exercise of his judicial responsibilities. He can read other people’s character. Job’s wisdom relates mainly to himself in the way he reacts to disaster. Solomon’s is a wisdom of power, Job’s is a wisdom of powerlessness.
And when we look more closely at what happens to both of them we see that Solomon’s wisdom does not prevent him from behaving foolishly. The expansion of trade and wealth and royal alliances confirmed through marriage to rather a lot of wives leads Solomon into apostasy – his loyalty to God is compromised. His wisdom does not give him a kind of mandarin superiority. There are no guarantees that his wisdom will not prevent him from behaving foolishly in his own life however good he is with others. Job on the other hand discovers a kind of serenity in accepting that he cannot always be wise, he cannot understand the ways of God, he cannot see into transcendence – he is human, but he is only human. And that too is great wisdom.