Was King Suleiman (excuse my spelling) wise? If you know what being wise entails, you will know that it does not permit one to live with hundreds of wives. Such an arrangement is more suitable to a honeybee. So, to be wise, either Suleiman must neglect all his wives or fail in the pursuit and maintenance of wisdom. Yet people believe it’s possible to do both. Well, the Bible is not above testing our gullibility; indeed, the Bible may be the largest and most intricate of such tests.
Significantly, the Bible’s compilers did not include more stories about Suleiman’s wisdom, though more existed in Jewish folklore and mystical literature. For example, in extant literature Suleiman’s wisdom is tested by the Queen of Sheba in a test he passes by using his knowledge of the relationship between flowers and bees. It’s a charming story that testifies to the king’s knowledge of nature; consequently, it was excluded by the Bible’s compilers, for they took great pains to represent nature as a curse.
The Bible does include a story that has no precedent in Jewish folklore: the story of Suleiman mediating between the two women fighting for possession of a single child. Surely a man capable of “managing” 700 wives can keep two women happy? Consider his solution: he threatens to cut the child in two on the assumption that the true mother will be the first to cry out against this, as if a cunning thief would not guess his intent from the outset. Of course, according to the text, his test worked, the risk paid off, and few ask the overwhelming question.
Let us consider Suleiman’s solution and apply it to the situation in Palestine/Israel. Here we have two nations arguing for possession of the “Holy Land.” The two nations attend United Nations meetings and nothing is resolved and many, many people suffer. Well, perhaps it’s time we identified the land’s rightful owners by threatening to drop an atomic bomb on Palestine/Israel if the two nations don’t stop fighting.
The problem with this kind of “final solution” approach is that it doesn’t address the underlying problem that both land and children are seen as property, property that cannot be shared for mutual benefit because brotherhood is lacking and motherhood is still mired in animal instincts, where the family is determined by biological descent, and the spiritual notion of family is absent.
Ironically, the Bible sets a good spiritual example on this subject. It is not a pure book created by a single person and belongs to two peoples, Jews and Christians, and not only to them. In fact, the story of The True Mother was largely stolen, I mean borrowed, from a Tibetan folktale about a man who resolves a dispute over a child between two his two wives. The man gives each woman one of the child’s arms and asks them to pull, which they do even though it threatens to tear the child in two. Well, the child goes to the woman who lost courage first, and so she is assumed to be the true mother, as if it never happens that a biological mother can be cruel and abusive to her child. Thus goes the prejudice in all folklore, and the Bible, too. However, blood is no guarantee of love.
The land, or soil, is also a living thing, perhaps more like a mother than a child, and today the fight for her possession is between those who actually want to destroy her, who love her only as tourists and artists, and those who are ready to live and die with her.
