Brueggemann Walter – Solomon - Israel’s Icon of Human Achievement

Walter Brueggemann – Solomon - Israel’s Icon of Human Achievement

A study of King Solomon as portrayed in Israel’s tradition and memory opens up an investigation of immense complexity. It invites entry into some of the most demanding questions of Old Testament faith. By way of entry into those complexities and questions, I begin this study by noting the playful openness of the subtitle of the book.

There is no doubt that King Solomon is presented in memory and tradition in ancient Israel in relationship to royal power, that is, in relationship to the concentration of social, political, and economic leverage as it was established in David’s Jerusalem. There is no doubt, moreover, that royal power was a dramatic novum in ancient Israel that entailed a deep break from older tribal patterns of social organization. The new power arrangements of the royal dynasty in ancient Jerusalem bespoke quite new patterns of social relationships that included social stratiﬁcation, differentiation of social roles, and the accumulation of surplus value, all conditions earlier unknown in Israel.1 Because these patterns of power represent something of a discontinuity with older patterns, it is not surprising that new emergent forms of social power were highly contested in ancient Israel. Some viewed the rise of monarchy under David and Solomon as a social emergent willed by YHWH, the God of Israel; others, in equally strong advocacy, viewed the monarchy as a betrayal of the older covenantal traditions of Israel. Consequently, great interpretive energy was utilized in the formation of the tradition in order to ﬁnd an adequate accommodation between remembered tradition and newer social emergence. It is reasonable to say that “remembered Solomon” embodied all of the issues that swirled in ancient Israel around the reality of royal power. That reality is constituted by a concentration of socioeconomic political energy coupled together in intriguing ways with equally forceful theological-ideological interpretation. The interface of realpolitik and hermeneutical energy assured that royal power in ancient Israel remained under endless contestation. The ﬁgure of Solomon is inescapably a cipher for that endless contestation.

In what follows I will refer to Solomon as a model of royal power. The term “model” suggests that Solomon is, in the Old Testament, the paradigmatic presentation of royal power with all of the assets and liabilities that inevitably come with the newer emergent social relationships. The term “model,” however, also deliberately begs important questions. In what follows it will be clear that the historicity of Solomon as reported in the Old Testament is, in the present mood of scholarship, at best complex and laden with problems. Thus “model” allows for the possibility that the Solomon given us in the Old Testament text is a constructive paradigm that emerges out of Israel’s longtime contested interpretive process, a contested paradigm that may or may not stand close to what “happened” in Israel’s history. There is no doubt that the central presentation of Solomon in 1 Kings 3–11—and no less so the several derivative presentations considered in what follows—is an outcome of a complicated editorial and traditioning process laden with thick ideological trafﬁc, even though that ideology carried by the text is itself not all of one piece.