Reflections on I Kings 3:5-12 “Nothing New About Spin”

Last updated on: July 21, 2017 at 5:25 pm by John C Holbert

Reflections on I Kings 3:5-12 “Nothing New About Spin” 2017-07-21T17:25:15-05:00 John C Holbert

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800px-Stefan_Heym_(1982) I want to commend to you a book that I have long known and loved. Warning: it is a darkly cynical use of the biblical tale of David and Solomon and will contain ideas you have perhaps never entertained in your religious life, but the ideas are surely worthy of some consideration, especially in the very divided world in which we live, characterized by “alternativefacts” and other like gibberish. The book is The King David Report, by Stefan Heym. Heym, a Jew, was born in 1913 in Chemnitz, Germany, fled Hitler in 1935, coming first to Chicago, but became disillusioned with America and returned to East Germany in 1952. He lived the rest of his life there, dying on a lecture tour to Israel in 2001.

Heym was a committed Marxist-Leninist (hence his detestation of the US and its capitalist ways), yet his return to Communist East Germany did little to satisfy him, because he hated with equal fervor the repressive police state East Germany became. His most famous novel was born as a satiric assault against that state. Interestingly, he chose the long and polit Remember_Belgium ically charged tales of David and Solomon, and the transfer of power from one to the other, as the mirror of the horrors that he found in East Germany.

Here is the story of the novel in brief: Etan, a scribe living in the time of the accession of Solomon to the throne of his father, is hired by the Solomonic regime to write a “King David Report,” the goal of which is to provide full legitimacy to the new ruler of Israel, and to quiet any rumors that may be abroad in the land that Solomon in effect stole the kingship from his eldest brother, Adonijah, as part of a plot hatched by Bathsheba, Solomon’s mother, and Nathan, David’s priest and prophet. In the course of interviewing the main characters of the story, Etan discovers, to his increasing shock and chagrin, that the transfer of power from David to Solomon has not been quite the divinely authorized one that Solomon and his minions want to claim that it was. In fact, Solomon has come to the throne only after a series of double-dealing power brokers have engineered what in effect was a coup. The more Etan probes the facts, the more he becomes a dangerous man, all too aware of what has happened to make Solomon king. “The King David Report” that Solomon had in mind is becoming in Etan’s reportorial hands a propagandist’s nightmare. So at the end of the novel we see Etan running for his life, pursued by Solomon’s henchmen who are attempting to quash the truth.

Well, that is only a novel, we may say, a work of fiction designed by a cynical critic of a repressive state to say fictionally what is quite dangerous to say publically. However, I do not think this novel may be dismissed so quickly as a creative bit of prose, far from the biblical story from which it sprang. A rereading of I Kings 3 convinces me that propaganda was hardly an invention of the 19th or 20th century. Reading this chapter leaves me queasy as I reflect on the early kingship of Solomon over Israel.

The text fairly oozes with saccharine piety. “Solomon loved YHWH, walking in the statutes of his father, David” (I Kings 3:3). Oh, he did, did he? And what exactly were “David’s statutes?” David, as his astonishing story makes plain, broke four of YHWH’s statutes (the famous Ten Words) in one chapter’s work! Here it is implied that David was a veritable paragon of religious truth, and he is matched in that by his beloved son. Well, he does sacrifice on the various high places in the land, but that is because the great Jerusalem Temple has not yet been built, but Solomon will get around to that project soon enough. During one of his regular sacrifices on the altar at Gibeon, YHWH appears to the pious Solomon in a dream. In the dream YHWH asks Solomon, “What should I give you” (I Kings 3:5)? In response, Solomon answers YHWH with what may only be termed fawning religious hooey. Allow me to summarize: O, YHWH, you made my father great, who was always faithful and righteous before you, and now you have made me king, too, even though I am only a little child, having no clue how to go out or come in. All I want from you, YHWH, is a discerning mind (literally, “a listening heart”) to govern your people, enabling me to discern good from bad. After all, who can finally and effectively govern your great people (I Kings 3:6-9)?

Workshop_Peter_Paul_Rubens_-Oordeel_van_Salamo-_vierschaar_Delft Good answer, Solomon, coos YHWH, and because you have only asked for that, for wisdom, and not for silver and gold and other earthly goodies, I will give you that discerning mind, and for good measure I will throw in the silver and gold, too, along with a long life of honor and fame (I Kings 3:10-14)! Ah, the humble Solomon gets rich and famous because of his unwillingness to pursue either. He becomes the most famous and wealthiest and most powerful king ever, and all because he never really wanted any of it. Now there is the “King David Report” that Solomon hoped for! YHWH chose him to be king after David precisely because he was the very best choice, excelling his deeply pious father with his own even deeper piety and humility. And this report has worked, because Solomon has long been known by Bible readers as the wisest of kings, as the builder of the richest of temples, as the writer of proverbs and songs beyond counting. In short, hardly anyone takes with any seriousness what the terrible tale of I Kings 1, 2 actually says!

Solomon became the king on a river of blood, eliminating his enemies one by one, after his kingship had been engineered by Bathsheba and Nathan who convinced a doddering David that he had promised his son Solomon the throne, though the text never tells us that he did. And as for the reputed wisdom of Solomon, when he dies in 922BCE and is succeeded by his rapacious son, Reheboam, a furious segment of the Israelite society, that had been taxed and worked overmuch by the huge demands of Solomon’s megalomaniacal building projects, rebel against the new king and rush north to form a new kingdom of Israel, leaving the rump state of Judah to survive as well as it can. So much for Solomon’s great wisdom! He may have been a fine writer of proverbs, as the tradition has long claimed, but as for running a country, he was a ham-handed despot.

So, I Kings 3 is propaganda, ancient spin, trying to convince us that Solomon was all that and even more. But underneath the spin lies something like the truth, and a more diligent Bible reader can catch a glimpse of it if she looks with care at what the whole text says. We modern Bible readers should not be fooled by ancient propaganda, no more than we should be taken in by its modern equivalent. Spinning appears to be an ancient art, but it is n US_PsyOps_leaflet o less a series of lies and half-truths now than it was in our sacred scripture.

(Images from Wikimedia Commons)

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