(…)
They tell us Solomon had a thousand women, and somewhere between the telling and the hearing, the number has labeled him guilty as charged. Seven hundred wives. Three hundred concubines. Before we have learned a single name, we have been instructed in what to think of them. These were the women who destroyed a wise man.
And I dare to ask… what destruction?
I dare to place my head as collateral against the certainty with which that sentence is repeated. What did these women destroy in Solomon the Great? We still approach his name looking for wisdom. Still furnish our imaginations with his wealth. Still enter his house through the stories, searching its rooms for something we believe he understood. Thousands of years later, we have yet to finish asking Him questions… but we are quite certain his wives were his undoing.
I disagree. Considerably so.
What has the number told you about the marriage? What have you learned of a woman by discovering that she was one among many? You have counted her company. You have yet to encounter her. Yet the counting is offered as though it has already disclosed what passed between her and her husband.
The bed is undefiled. I would ask that we consider what we are saying when we speak those words. What is holy between a man and his wife does not become comprehensible to the stranger merely because the stranger has counted the beds. Be it one bed or a thousand… from the doorway, you still do not know the marriage.
And perhaps that doorway is where so much of this judgment begins. A man looks into Solomon’s house, measures what he sees against what he believes himself capable of receiving, and calls the difference excess. But whose capacity has he measured? Whose bewilderment has he mistaken for the measure of a Sol•of•a•Man?
Consider that one woman may possess such depth that a lifetime beside her would continually introduce you to someone you had yet to know. Consider her intelligence, her abilities, the reach of her memory… the things she can bring into being. What appears to another man as a thousand women may be the fullness of the one woman standing before him. And to a man able to meet her there, she remains one. Whole. Her magnitude has cost her nothing.
Now consider Solomon’s thousand.
We will come to the seven hundred and the three hundred in their time. First, let us permit these women to exist beyond arithmetic. Beyond their fathers’ names. Beyond the kingdoms from which they came. Whatever place a woman occupied in her father’s house could never contain everything she was, everything Solomon might have recognized in her, or everything they might have become acquainted with in one another.
Pharaoh’s daughter, the old account tells us, arrived with a thousand instruments.
Be patient, yes? Let us stay here for a moment… at her arrival. Before the accusation has entered the room. Before someone has explained to you that what she carries will be his ruin. Imagine what she knew to bring. The instruments selected, prepared, carried across the distance. What had she understood of the man awaiting her that this was how she chose to enter his house?
We have heard of wisdom clothed in beauty before. Of precious stones, of brightness, of instruments prepared in the very making of a being. We have heard that light spoken of beneath another name… and we have heard what the telling eventually did to that name.
She recognized his light and furnished it.
A thousand instruments… and perhaps, to the two of them, the offering was as plain as being understood. Consider the intimacy of arriving with something another person has room within himself to receive. Consider being known well enough that someone brings the means for what is already within you to find expression.
And there were others. Women whose names have fallen from the telling while their alleged guilt remains perfectly preserved. How curious that we can be so certain of their influence when describing his destruction, then become so reluctant to consider their influence when admiring his greatness. We allow them enough power to ruin everything… and scarcely any part in making what we still praise.
Another king rises from the pages—Mansa Musa, with wealth, learning, and the building of a world around him—and I recognize the outline of that Solomonic character again. History seems to rebirth the figure through its telling. His supposed destruction has done little to prevent us from finding him elsewhere, dressed in another age.
But I return to the women. To the house. To what was carried through its doors and what was brought to life within its walls. I return to the wife who arrived with instruments, and to the ease with which we have called her offering a threat.
Before you tell me again that these women destroyed Solomon… let me hear what the house sounded like while they were there.
Leave a Reply