Why is it called the "Song of Solomon"?
What the apocryphal attribution of the Canticles can teach us about its hidden meanings
Consider the above image, a detail of King Solomon by his namesake, the painter Simeon Solomon (image from Wikipedia). Do you see the hidden symbolism?
If you don’t see it now, don’t worry. I promise that it will be quite obvious by the time you finish reading this.
Who Was Solomon?
The Hebrew Bible spills considerable volumes of ink concerning the old king, typically using terms so superlative that the figure presented in the ancient texts, though it might indeed be based on an actual historical person, must surely itself be apocrypha.
Solomon, so it is said, was the wisest of all the Hebrew kings, wiser even than the wise men of the East (ie, Persia) and of Egypt. That’s pretty dang wise. In this regard, as well as homophonically, he bears a striking resemblance to the apocryphal Greek tyrant Solon, whose association with the qualities of regal sagacity have proven so durable that even now, 2,500 years later, politicians are still described (usually ironically) as solons.
His reign, so the ancient texts claim, was incomparable. While they remember his father David as the righteous warrior king who established the Yahwist regime in Jerusalem, they record the forty-year rule of Solomon as the peak of peace and prosperity for the unified kingdom of Israel and Judah. Indeed, the name ‘Solomon’ is etymologically related to the salem part of ‘Jerusalem’ — the same word which survives in modern Arabic as salaam — “peace”. Because of the martial successes of his father, there were no more urgent wars to fight — and thus Solomon could focus on strengthening the kingdom’s economy and directing the resultant wealth (1 Kings 10:23 claims, consistent with the theme, that Solomon was “greater in riches and wisdom than all the other kings of the earth”) to public works, of which the most famous by far was the seminal First Temple which he raised on the peak of Mount Zion.
Yet the aspect of this man’s life which is most superlative is also often overlooked: King Solomon was apparently the most sexually active king in the history of the Holy Land — and not by just a little bit. The book of 1 Kings informs us that he married 700 wives of noble birth and kept 300 concubines. The Song of Songs keeps a much more modest count, claiming “sixty queens” and “eighty concubines” (Songs 6:8). Whatever the true count may have been, multiple sources agree: Solomon was a rock star-level stud who loved to get his freak on.
Take another gander at the image above. Now do you see it?
Solomon’s Wisdom
1 Kings 3 records how, at the beginning of his reign, Solomon made a fateful decision. After sacrificing to Yahweh at Gibeon, the young king found that he had garnered the Lord’s favor, and could ask for anything he wished. What should he choose? Long life? Riches? Glory? An inexhaustible supply of women willing to do his sexual bidding?
Solomon asked for none of these things, and he ended up getting all of them. What he requested instead, as you might have already guessed, was that the Lord bless him with the gift of Wisdom. The Lord was right pleased with this request, and gladly granted it; then, as the remainder of the story lays out in glorious detail, Solomon’s divinely granted gift of Wisdom led to him receiving every other wealth, power and pleasure that the young king could have dreamed of.
The 8th chapter of Proverbs — another biblical book apocryphally attributed to Solomon — epitomizes the king’s Wisdom by allowing Her to speak in Her own voice. Over 33 majestic verses, She describes the story of all creation from Her feminine perspective, proudly proclaiming Herself as the wife and companion of the Lord Yahweh. She was the first of his creations — an interesting literary parallel with the creation of Eve, the first companion to be born of Adam — and then She creatively collaborated with him in crafting the heavens, the earth, and everything within them. (Yes, you read that right: these biblical verses explicitly state that God and Goddess created the cosmos together.)
And, as Wisdom cries out from the hills, She’s looking for lovers. Consider verse 17:
I love those who love me, and those who seek me find me.
The secret sauce of Solomon’s famed wisdom lay in its erotic integration of masculine intellect with feminine intuition. 1 Kings tells us that the wise king combined a cunning intellect with a deep insight — literally, “a huge heart.” This marriage of logic and intuition is allegorically represented in the most famous anecdote of Solomon’s wisdom, the case of the two prostitutes who each claimed to be the mother of the same infant.
1 Kings 3 lays out the basic facts of the case. The two women, both new mothers, both lived in the same house; and because of high infant mortality rates in the ancient world, one of the two babies died in the middle of the night. At that point — so alleges the plaintiff — the mother of the dead infant switched out the two babies in the night, while she, the mother of the living infant, slept unawares. The defendant disputed the allegation, and countered that the plaintiff was lying to the king to try to take her baby.
What to do? The wise king immediately seized upon an ingenious solution. He called for his royal sword and proclaimed that he would sunder the child in half, giving one piece to each of them.
Immediately, one of the two women cried out in terror and pleaded with the king: “Please, my lord, give her the living baby! Don’t kill him!” Recognizing the speaker to be the child’s true mother, Solomon then returned the baby to her, unhurt.
What do we learn from this anecdote about the king’s wisdom? Besides a recognition of the general brutality of justice systems in the ancient world, it would behoove us to also get a sense of the case’s allegorical meaning: the marriage of intellect and intuition as represented by the symbols of hair-splitting distinction and holistic grokking. The intellect is here represented by the sword — the power to intellectually discriminate, to draw distinctions. The root word of both separation and preparation is Latin pares, known most commonly today through the common kitchen utensil of the paring knife. It is the blade which divides in half, which cuts one thing or idea off and away from others.
This tale demonstrates Solomon’s ability to integrate such cutting intellect with holistic thinking, represented by the precious life of the child. There are some things, Solomon knew, that can only be destroyed by the logic of separation; by combining this feminine insight with masculine intellect, he quickly arrived at the emotional truth of the matter.
Solomon’s Wealth
Under Solomon’s reign, so we’re told, “the people of Judah and Israel were as numerous as the sand on the seashore; they ate, they drank and they were happy” (1 Kings 4:20). Through “the king’s table” (a somewhat poetic reference to the kind of patronage distribution systems which were typical of the palace economies of the period), Solomon distributed roughly 5 tons of “the finest flour,” 10 tons of meal, 30 head of cattle, 100 sheep and goats, and an unspecified number of deer, gazelles, roebucks and “choice fowl” — every day. Were we to read this reference literally, we would be forced to conclude that “the king’s table” would need to be the size of an Olympic swimming pool — at least!
As if that weren’t enough, the Bible goes on to tell us that the old king also kept 16,000 horses and that he had enough gold to put it on basically everything. 1 Kings 10:21 bluntly states that “All King Solomon’s goblets were gold, and all the household articles in the Palace of the Forest of Lebanon were pure gold. Nothing was made of silver, because silver was considered of little value in Solomon’s days.”
Good golly. Where did all this wealth come from?
1 Kings explicitly states that it came from foreign trade. Although the 666 talents (roughly 25 tons) of gold imported into the unified kingdom annually is usually framed as “tribute,” elsewhere the author of Kings clarifies that these deals were very much quid pro quo. Chapter 5 lays out the terms of Solomon’s trade treaty with Hiram, king of Phoenician Tyre, in an admirable level of detail for an ancient text: in exchange for logs of cedar and juniper, delivered by raft to Solomon’s Mediterranean ports, the king provided yearly supply of grain and olive oil. Elsewhere, Kings discusses the details of another deal between the two allies, in which Solomon essentially sold twenty Galilean towns to Hiram for 120 talents of gold.
Solomon apparently did another deal with the famous queen of Sheba, who came to his court bearing “120 talents of gold, large quantities of spices, and precious stones” (1 Kings 10:10). Here the text becomes tantalizingly suggestive, noting only that in return, “King Solomon gave the queen of Sheba all she desired and asked for, besides what he had given her out of his royal bounty” (verse 13). One wonders what, exactly, the queen had “desired and asked for.”
The text mentions various other trade deals, not only with Egypt but even “the whole world” (10:24), proving that economic globalization is nothing new under the sun. In short, Solomon’s wealth found its origin in imports and exports, the benefits of international trade. This makes even more sense when considered in the context of the ancient “Silk Road” which, despite the singularity of its name, actually refers to numerous interconnected trade routes which moved goods and wealth between West and East over thousands of years. Like so many rivers, these routes ebbed and flowed over time, and occasionally even changed their courses; the “golden age” of Solomon probably refers to a historical period when the unified kingdom of Israel and Judah happened to sit at a major nexus of some of the most popular Silk Road routes. This would readily explain the references to “spices” and other exotic goods which generated so much wealth for the Hebrews during this long economic boom.
Solomon’s Sexuality
The wise king, we are told multiple times, married the prize plum of the ancient world: the daughter of the pharaoh. Personally, I would be quite content to marry only one Egyptian princess, though of course Solomon didn’t stop there. We’re told that he “loved many foreign women besides Pharaoh’s daughter — Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Sidonians and Hittites” (1 Kings 11:1).
Of this, the author of Kings does not approve.
Is this because of a prudish sex negativity in general? Heavens, no. Kings takes it as a given that keeping a vast harem is part of the royal prerogative — nothing to see here. Rather, the author takes umbrage at Solomon’s decision to marry so many foreign women:
They were from nations about which the Lord had told the Israelites, “You must not intermarry with them, because they will surely turn your hearts after their gods.” Nevertheless, Solomon held fast to them in love. He had seven hundred wives of royal birth and three hundred concubines, and his wives led him astray. As Solomon grew old, his wives turned his heart after other gods, and his heart was not fully devoted to the Lord his God, as the heart of David his father had been. He followed Ashtoreth the goddess of the Sidonians, and Molek the detestable god of the Ammonites. So Solomon did evil in the eyes of the Lord; he did not follow the Lord completely, as David his father had done. (1 Kings 11:2-6)
Later, we will see how this condemnation of foreign intermarriage will come into thematic conflict with the main point of the Song of Songs, which paints a very different picture of the same subject. But at this point, this post has grown rather long and I need to wrap it up.
Why is it the Song “of Solomon”?
The first verse of the Song proudly proclaims its origin: “The Sublime Song of Solomon.” Thus, in many ways, the Song gives us the key we need to unlock its hidden meanings, right from the get-go.
Each of these examined qualities of Solomon — his wisdom, his wealth and his sexuality — are described in the ancient texts in essentially erotic terms. In previous posts, I have already shown how Eros refers not only to sexuality but also other, more esoteric, forms of intercourse. In the figure of Solomon, we find three unique erotic expressions:
His wisdom stems from the erotic integration of his masculine intellect with feminine insight, epitomized by the story of his judgment with the two sex workers;
His wealth was generated by the erotic intercourse of foreign trade, epitomized by the anecdote of the queen of Sheba;
And, of course, his superlative sexuality conforms to the most vernacular understanding of Eros current today.
In all of these instances, he, the young and virile king, is placed in juxtaposition with female characters: the two sex workers, the queen of Sheba, his vast harem. When his masculine virility unites with these feminine principles, the effect is, for lack of a better term, sex magic — spells potent enough to manifest Israel’s golden age.
In other words, when the Canticles — an erotic poem which describes the sexual longing and eventual consummation of bride and groom — tell us that their song is “of Solomon,” it’s important for us to remember the original cultural context in which that reference was made. To the ancient Hebrews, ground under the heels of a litany of cruel empires, the “Song of Solomon” spoke longingly of something more than a merely human wedding. It’s a hieros gamos, a sacred marriage — not only of God and Goddess but also of Israel and Judah, of the end of exploitation and the return of peace and prosperity. To them, the attribution “of Solomon” therefore meant much more than just a reference to an old, dead king.
Indeed, it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to call it — Messiah.