DIGGING UP SOLOMON’S GLORY

Manawatu Times, Volume LIV, Issue 6811, 15 January 1929, Page 10

DIGGING UP SOLOMON’S GLORY

Splendour of Monarch Recalled by Excavation Works at Megiddo

SAGE ROAD TO PHILOSOPHY. For the last three years archaeologists have been busy Jigging up the mound under ■which lie buried the remains of the age-old fishers of Megiddo. The searchers have now excavated the actual stables in which Solomon kept his horses. It is possible to see the very holes in the stone pillars to which, by their halters, these royal steeds were hitched. Standing within those stalls which have survived 2500 years, most of them years of oblivion, wc can recreate the magnifionee of a monarch whose prestige, at any rate in literature, far transcends the shadowy fame of Har-oun-al-Raschid in Bagdad or even of Akbar, the Mogul Emperor of India. A ruler in whom were united the wisdom of Solon, the wealth of Croesus and the indulgences of' an Abdul Hamid ceases to bo a myth and emerg cs a man. About the civilisation of Solomon, there lias ever been an element of thu credible. Palestine, as wc know it today, is no more than a mandated province with a severely limited revenue, a deficient rainfall and undeveloped resources—a region indeed romantic and beautiful but over certain areas, at any rate, deforested and desolate. Any idea of imposing on such a territory to-day the burdens of a sovereignty in Jerusalem so elaborate as Solomon’s with a vast multitude at once of favourites and priests, would be out of the question. Plates of Solid Gold. Yet, if wc are to believe the Scriptural narrative, which is at once specific and human, King Solomon did not merely maintain a temple and palaces; he built them and overlaid them with

plates of solid gold and adorned them with silken curtains of gorgeous embroidery. His throne of ivory, with its lions, Persian in their splendour, was the amazement of his generation, and the beams of his banqueting hall were of the cedar of Lebanon. Nor was this the extent of his achievement. While his capital was thus adorned, his frontiers were protected. Tadmor was but one of many outposts that he fortified. It was, indeed, in the pursuance of this policy that he selected Megiddo as one of his "cities of chariots." His reason was simple, and it is a reason that holds good even to our own day. For hundreds of years even before the days of Solomon, Megiddo had dominated the "passages of the hill country" of Palestine. It was by "the waters of Megiddo" that Deborah and Barak triumphed over Sisera. It was at. Megiddo that Pharaoh Ncelio and his Egyptians encountered the might of Assyria in the battlo where King Josiah, shot by archers, cried: "Have me away for I am sore wounded." It was through this valley that Holofcrncs, General of Nebuchadnezzar, approached Jerusalem and so lost his l.ead to the ingenious heroine, Judith. It was by way of Megiddo that, finally Lord Allcnby routed the Turks, afterward adding the name to his title. To Solomon, as to Allenbv, Megiddo was the inland Thermopylae of the Holy Land. Oriental Despot. How was it that Solomon achieved, if he did in truth achieve, all that is attributed to him? One answer is that lie was an Oriental despot, grinding the faces of the poor. Indeed, there was, at his death, a revolt of the ton northern tribes against the expenditure that ho had incurred. Nor can it be denied that following the custom which is not wholly discontinued even in the twentieth century, ho made use of forced labour. Ho had three levies, each of 10,000 men, who worked a month at a time on the slopes of Lebanon. In the quarries of the mountains he had 80,000 labourers, providing him with "great stones, costly stones and hewed stones." Ho had, moreover, 70,000 men that boro burdens.

Supreme Master of Literature. We arc told that Solomon "spake I’OOO proverbs," and that "his songs were a thousand and five." That

many of the "proverbs" attributed to him in the Bible arc his own is conceded even by critical scholarship; that no other man than he could claim the experience on which is based the Book of Ecclesiastes is also a strong probability; that the Wong of Songs is a lyric, romantic ami ritual, which expresses Solomon’s impulses, will not lie seriously denied,. It follows that Solomon, like his father, David, must be reckoned among the few supremo masters of the literature which never dies. Ho was not only King, he was poet. This man, the terrible refrain of whose voice, „s lrc dealt with traitors at his accession, was "fall upon him and bury him," could write, "many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it.” For in Solomon there couhl bo discerned a profound mysticism. There were times, sleeping and waking, in very truth he saw the unseen. Associated with the universal mind, it was universal equity that he was able to apply to local and temporary circumstances. Ho would base a verdict on the cry of a mother over her child. At the altar, surrounded by incense, ho would pour forth a prayer —exquisite in its pathos—for mercy on the mankind that is born to err. Corrupt Practices. The extent of his commercial operations and his political alliances transformed Jerusalem from a capital into a metropolis. In the temple there was a majestic assertion of one God, just, yet loving, before whom man had sinned and by whom man might be pardoned. Yet around Mount Zion, consecrated to a sublime ideal of deity, there were still tolerated tho abominable shrines, of faiths, already obsolescent, in which' worship was at best a pageant and at worst a hideous sacrifice of human infants. It was this idolatry that Soloman permitted and even practised.

But the vast establishment which, as years passed, Soloiuod gathered around him became a scandal even at a time when, in themselves, such establishments were not condemned. That such should have been the degeneracy of one.whose father started life as a shepherd lad was, indeed, an irony of ethics. The court became corrupt, and Solomon himself realised that it was a corruption of which the sequel would be disruption. He knew that he had

lost control over the northern provinces of his realm. That his intellect, once unsurpassed for its vigour, ceased to bo what once had aroused such admiration, is obvious. Here, with his own eyes, ho could soc that the magnificent fabric of friendships which he had woven together with such tact and skill was beginning to show signs of wear and tear. Moreover, his sou, Relioboam, inherited no trace of his father’s sagacious kiudness. Of Rehoboam Solomon says: "Yea, I hated all my labour which I had taken under the sun because I should leave it unto the man that should be after me. And who knoweth whether he shall be a wise man or a fool?” Greatest of all Eastern Kings. Yet even in his decay there was a sublimity about Solomon’s pessimism which arrests the sneer of the cynic himself. For it is to this disillusioned monarch—or, at any rate, to his personality—that we owe a poem on the mirage of life which is so incomparably great that no other poem of its kind—not'even the "Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam"—can be mentioned as in its class. "Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, all is vanity.” Pleasure and power, learning and luxury, duty and indulgence—all are brought under the sombre test of old age, the final word ringing out like the tolling of a bell: "Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep His commandments, for this is the whole duty of man."

Thus did the greatest of all Eastern kings pass from the stage of history into tho silence that is not broken. If ever a man did his best to right a world gone wrong, it was he. Blame him not because, living when and where and how he had to live, he failed of that deeper wisdom by which we consider the lilies of tho field, how they grow, knowing that Solomon in all his glory as not arrayed like one of these.