Solomon’s way

The prayer of Solomon from 1 Kings 3:

Your servant is here among the people you have chosen, a great people, too numerous to count or number. So give your servant a discerning heart to govern your people and to distinguish between right and wrong.

Solomon is an interesting figure. As someone who admires Walter Brueggemann, I find reading 1 Kings a curious experience. Brueggemann casts Solomon as the start of what went wrong with Israel. The forced labor, the temple itself, and the glorification of the monarchy all for Brueggemann point to toward the conditions that give rise to prophetic condemnation. With more than an incidental nod to the United States, he sees imperial power itself s the root cause of Israel’s apostasy. The mingling of God’s people and national power are even more offensive than marriage with Moabite women.

And yet, I struggle to find any signs of that when I read 1 Kings. Solomon is the height of Israel. He completes the work David could not accomplish. His initial act as monarch – after wiping out all of David’s enemies and settling all of David’s unsettled scores – is to forge an alliance with Pharaoh by marrying an Egyptian princess. The flight from Egypt begun when Moses rejected his status as a son of Pharaoh comes full circle.

This is all interesting to me because American Christians seem particularly conflicted over the relationship between the people of faith and the machinery of state power. We find Romans 13 hard to read. And we often find Amos and Hosea more to our taste than Solomon’s days of glory. When Solomon gets his come uppance, Bruggemann ties it back to the glory of national power and aggrandizement.

But the Bible does not appear to be nearly as suspicious of power as we are. It rather appears to condemn power detached from obedience to God’s purposes. Is our contemporary blanket distaste for state power a reflection of the Bible or something else?

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