Anat

BTW, if we go back to Abraham, why would you expect a God that commands putting children to death for eating and drinking more than their parents would like them to to be concerned about a father sending a son to the desert in order to preserve marital harmony (and the inheritance of the preferred son) or killing a son as an act of faith?

The Evil One

Ah right, clearly your bald assertion counts for more than a heap of direct quotes from the text.

This is rich coming from you. You have decided that Solomon's acts in later life are all that counts. They are foolish, therefore Solomon is foolish, therefore "he wasn't wise". The section where he turns away from God wipes out all those earlier sections about how wise he was as far as you are concerned. and you have the gall to accuse me of reading half a text.

Whereas I don't have any trouble with the notion that a man might make mistakes in some particular respect - even be "led astray" if you want to put it that way - and yet still be considered a wise man overall. This is clearly the picture that I get of Solomon from the text as it stands.

By the way, you (again) didn't answer any of my substantive points on Abraham; you also failed to notice that I'd already addressed the point of Solomon's apostasy; "as Anat says, it is absolutely necessary to the narrative that Solomon should fail God in the end, because if he doesn't there is no explanation for the Davidic kingdom split, and, ultimately, how Judah came to be conquered". Furthermore I'm starting to notice a pattern in that you tend only to answer the last point I make in any given post. Are you actually reading what I write?


Erm, religious freedom anyone? Solomon was allowing his foreign wives to continue their own worship and not forcibly converting them to his. By modern standards this is both wise and eminently praiseworthy. Of course the standards of the authors were not modern standards and the usage of the term "detestable" leaves us in no doubt as to what their attitude was: same as yours.