Really That Wise?

It is interesting to me how famous and well known and well loved Solomon was and is, but we have so very little of him in just I Kings. Regardless it is Solomon's so-called wisdom that I wish to discuss today. In I Kings Ch. 3 we have the infamous story of God telling Solomon that he can have anything that he asks for; anything! So Solomon asks for wisdom and God is pleased with this request and grants it. His wisdom encompasses "a mind to govern God's people" and "able to understand between good and evil". Okay that's all well and fine and then he even goes on to display this wisdom in the same chapter with an interesting story between two women and a baby. The text further says that people from all over the world came to hear his wise sayings. Alright, so apparently Solomon was a wise guy. Of course then we come to Ch. 11 of I Kings and we hit a big roadblock where it says he had 700 wives and 300 concubines, if you do your math correctly that is a 1000 women, which puts any polygamist to shame! A wise man knows one woman is enough to handle, this is not chauvinistic because the adverse is just as, if not more, true in saying a wise woman knows that one man is enough to handle. Solomon has a 1000! Okay okay I can get past this, I guess if he is so wise he can easily juggle all of them, but then we quickly find that many of them are foreign, oh whoops. Solomon did ask for discernment between good and evil, well crap hasn't God repeatedly said to the Hebrews not to marry foreign women (see Deut.), let alone a thousand of them! His heart turned from God to them and boom there went his wisdom right out the door. Any man will tell you that women have this power and not necessarily because they can but because we more often than not let them have it. The whole point of it is that if we are so wise then always keeping our hearts on God should be key at all times not matter what power the opposite sex may or may not have over us! So maybe Solomon was just wise selectively . . . .

Kalos Elpis

Kelly M. Doolittle