TEXT [Commentary]

5. Solomon’s wealth and splendor (10:14-29)

14 Each year Solomon received about 25 tons[*] of gold. 15 This did not include the additional revenue he received from merchants and traders, all the kings of Arabia, and the governors of the land.

16 King Solomon made 200 large shields of hammered gold, each weighing more than fifteen pounds.[*] 17 He also made 300 smaller shields of hammered gold, each weighing nearly four pounds.[*] The king placed these shields in the Palace of the Forest of Lebanon.

18 Then the king made a huge throne, decorated with ivory and overlaid with fine gold. 19 The throne had six steps and a rounded back. There were armrests on both sides of the seat, and the figure of a lion stood on each side of the throne. 20 There were also twelve other lions, one standing on each end of the six steps. No other throne in all the world could be compared with it!

21 All of King Solomon’s drinking cups were solid gold, as were all the utensils in the Palace of the Forest of Lebanon. They were not made of silver, for silver was considered worthless in Solomon’s day!

22 The king had a fleet of trading ships of Tarshish that sailed with Hiram’s fleet. Once every three years the ships returned, loaded with gold, silver, ivory, apes, and peacocks.[*]

23 So King Solomon became richer and wiser than any other king on earth. 24 People from every nation came to consult him and to hear the wisdom God had given him. 25 Year after year everyone who visited brought him gifts of silver and gold, clothing, weapons, spices, horses, and mules.

26 Solomon built up a huge force of chariots and horses.[*] He had 1,400 chariots and 12,000 horses. He stationed some of them in the chariot cities and some near him in Jerusalem. 27 The king made silver as plentiful in Jerusalem as stone. And valuable cedar timber was as common as the sycamore-fig trees that grow in the foothills of Judah.[*] 28 Solomon’s horses were imported from Egypt[*] and from Cilicia[*]; the king’s traders acquired them from Cilicia at the standard price. 29 At that time chariots from Egypt could be purchased for 600 pieces of silver,[*] and horses for 150 pieces of silver.[*] They were then exported to the kings of the Hittites and the kings of Aram.

NOTES

10:14 25 tons of gold. Lit., 666 talents of gold. (There is no eschatological significance to be attached here to this otherwise infamous number!) Concerning the modern equivalent to the weight of the Hebrew talent, see the second note on 9:14. For a recent, positive defense of the plausibility of the huge quantities of gold listed in the Solomonic traditions, see Millard 1997:38-41.

10:16-17 200 large shields . . . 300 smaller shields. Both these categories are familiar ones from ancient Israelite warfare. The large shield (tsinnah [TH6793A, ZH7558]) is of body length; the smaller one (magen [TH4043, ZH4482], “buckler”) is small, round, and handheld (Cogan 2001:317-318; Sweeney 2007:151). The particular shields described here were for ceremonial use, thickly gilded with “hammered gold.” Sadly, they were captured by Pharaoh Shishak just a few years after Solomon’s death (see 14:26).

10:16 more than fifteen pounds. Lit., “600 (shekels),” with the term “shekels” not actually appearing in the text, as is commonly the case with amounts in the Bible. The second note on 9:14 gives the modern-day equivalences for the Hebrew shekel.

10:17 nearly four pounds. Lit., “three minas”; a “mina” is usually understood as the equivalent of 50 shekels (although Powell, in ABD 6.906, argues for the equivalence of 60 shekels to one mina).

Palace of the Forest of Lebanon. The official reception hall; cf. the note on 7:2.

10:18 a huge throne. The description of this throne is analogous to those from Egypt and Phoenicia (Sweeney 2007:151); cf. particularly the throne of the tenth-century King Ahiram of Byblos, as depicted on his sarcophagus (ANEP, pictures 456, 458).

10:19 a rounded back. Or, “rounded head” (ro’sh ‘agol [TH7218/5696, ZH8031/6318]); cf. the throne of Ahiram mentioned in the preceding note. Some prefer to emend the Hebrew to read “a calf’s head” (ro’sh ‘egel [TH7218/5695, ZH8031/6319]; cf. Seow 1999:87), following the LXX. But the MT should probably be retained (cf. Cogan 2001:318).

figure of a lion. A 12th-century Canaanite lion throne is depicted on an ivory panel from Megiddo (see Dever 2001:150-153).

10:21 silver was considered worthless. This is an amazing comment (cf. 10:27), and not without irony in the present editing of these texts (see the commentary for the Deuteronomic prohibition against an Israelite king multiplying gold and silver for himself).

10:22 fleet of trading ships of Tarshish. Tarshish is probably the name of a faraway seaport (in Spain? or in Sardinia? or in Anatolia?)—see Cogan 2001:319 for a strong argument for Tarsus in Anatolia. The gist of the present reference is that these ships are oceangoing; after all, they are presumably going to Africa, as the list of commodities seems to indicate.

peacocks. Heb., tukkiyyim [TH8500, ZH9415], a term used only here and in the Chronicles parallel (2 Chr 9:21). The Targum and Syriac support this translation (which Cogan [2001:320], following C. Rabin, understands as a loanword from Tamil, hence indicating trade with India). As the NLT mg indicates, a common alternative suggestion is “baboons” or the like, from the Egyptian ky with prefixed feminine t.

10:23 So King Solomon. Just before this verse, the LXX inserts a lengthy secondary passage that corresponds quite closely with much of the text of 9:15-22 MT (which, in turn, is entirely lacking in the LXX at that point). Probably, as Gooding (1965b:325-335) argues, this move was to help justify Solomon’s accumulation of so much wealth. For other examples of significant differences between the MT and the Old Greek in the ­Solomonic traditions, see the notes on 2:35 and 4:20.

10:26 horses. See the discussion of Solomon’s chariots and horses in the notes on 4:26.

chariot cities. A number of these were mentioned in passing in 9:15-19, with Hazor, Megiddo, and Gezer traditionally being the most prominent. Some years ago, archaeologists thought that they had uncovered clear Solomonic evidence for these “store cities” or “chariot cities,” with their distinctive gate-houses and “horse stables,” but more recent excavations have brought these discoveries into question. (This is also the case with the alleged Solomonic copper-smelting works at Tell el-Kheleifeh.) For a recent, brief overview on this topic, see Hamilton 2009:318-319; for more detail, see Davies 1986:85-94 and Knoppers 1997:19-44. For a recent, positive appraisal of the Solomonic provenance of the Gezer city gate, see Dever 2001:131-135.

10:28 Egypt . . . Cilicia. The MT vocalizes the Hebrew consonants m-ts-r-y-m as the common place-name mitsrayim [TH4714A, ZH5213] (Egypt), but a strong case could be made for reading the consonants as mutsri (“Musri”; cf. NLT mg, “Muzur”), a place near Que or Cilicia in Anatolia (hence the second NLT mg note). As Cogan (2001:321) has pointed out, both of these locations are well-known horse-rearing areas (unlike Egypt). Retaining “Egypt,” however, gives more force to the implied condemnation of Solomon’s multiplying horses, and going back to Egypt to obtain them.

10:29 pieces of silver. Presumably “shekels of silver”; the term “shekel” is omitted as is customary in Hebrew (cf. note on 10:16).

COMMENTARY [Text]

In this section we continue to encounter what appear to be randomly arranged notices focusing mostly on Solomon’s immense wealth. (See the preceding commentary section for Kitchen’s helpful organization of much of the present passage in light of the preceding queen of Sheba material.) Whether haphazard or not, the present editing of these brief Solomonic traditions is surely meant to dazzle the reader with Solomon’s greatness and, by implication, with the greatness of Solomon’s God.

One major feature of this section and the preceding one is the repeated reference to “gold,” indeed, to large amounts of gold. Modern readers might find this overwhelming after awhile, especially if they try to calculate the costs of these caches in modern currencies! And being “overwhelmed” is surely the point here—we are dealing with major monarchs and palace households, far and above any typical human experience. But such a basic observation as this can itself be misleading—if it is understood as being unique to Solomon—for it was rather typical of Middle Eastern monarchs to brag about their deposits of gold, and indeed about their lavish gifts in general. I was first alerted to this phenomenon during a lecture given by my esteemed Akkadian professor, the late William L. Moran of Harvard, and in particular by his repeated references to the 14th-­century-BC Amarna letters. Subsequently, Moran published what probably remains the definitive study of this corpus of over 380 tablets found in the el-Amarna plain in upper Egypt (see Moran 1992). A few examples from these cuneiform texts suffice to illustrate the point:

“Send the gold . . . Once I have finished the work what need will I have of gold? Then you could send me 3,000 talents of gold [here, a wildly extravagant amount], and I would not accept it” (el-Amarna 4).

“Send me much gold . . . Whatever you want from my country, write me so that it may be taken to you” (el-Amarna 9).

“Gold in your country [Egypt] is dirt; one simply gathers it up . . . Send me as much gold as is needed for [my new palace’s] adornment . . . When my ancestor wrote to Egypt, 20 talents of gold were sent to him [etc.]” (el-Amarna 16).

“May my brother [i.e., foreign diplomatic partner] send me in very great quantities gold that has not been worked, and may my brother send me much more gold than he did to my father” (el-Amarna 19).

“He showed much additional gold, which was beyond measure and which he was sending to me” (el-Amarna 27).

Sizable gifts of copper and silver are often mentioned as well, as well as lapis lazuli, chariots and horses, and their accoutrements. As Moran (1992:xxiv-xxv) concluded in his book: “Acknowledgement of gifts received, praise of the gifts or even a frank expression of disappointment, expression of the motivation behind the exchange of gifts, petition of countergifts to respond to the gifts now being dispatched—these and related topics dominate the international correspondence.” Previously in his Harvard lecture, Moran baldly asserted: “only the mighty can beg for gold”; there must have been a tremendous obligation for the recipient of the letter to return something grand to the royal petitioner.

The present Solomonic texts include no such actual begging for gold (but cf. the curious “Cabul” passage back in 9:10-14, and especially Hiram’s negative reaction to the “gift” in 9:13). Still, the international flavor of the “gold” texts both there and here, plus their striking intimacy, favor the comparison. Solomon may have been king par excellence, but he was not king sui generis (in a class of his own).

The curious conclusion of the present set of texts in chapter 10 is also to be noted. Why such comments on horses and their prices? Again, they indicate Solomon’s wealthy status both as a horse trader and a worthy king among his peers; but they also rest uneasily for the readers of the larger Deuteronomic texts (see the commentary on 4:20-34, especially concerning the “law of the king” in Deut 17:14-20). There are three things that the godly king is not to do: multiply horses (and especially go back to Egypt to get them), multiply wives, and amass large amounts of silver and gold! As Sweeney (2007:152) has recently pointed out, placement of the notice here about the horse trade with Egypt deliberately raises questions about the godliness of King Solomon, immediately prior to the infamous account of his love of many foreign women (11:1-13), and his support of their gods.