The Two Meals Solomon Watched to Teach a Lesson About Kings

What Solomon's Table Actually Looked Like

The daily provisions of Solomon's household in the Book of Kings are staggering even read as inventory: thirty cors of fine flour, sixty of meal, ten fat oxen, twenty pasture-fed cattle, a hundred sheep, plus deer and gazelles and roebuck and fattened fowl. The rabbis noted that these provisions were merely the accessories. The real feast was something else, arriving from Barbary and from the far edges of the known world, exotic game appearing daily before the king's place. Each of his thousand wives prepared a separate banquet, hoping the king would dine with her. The scale meant that Solomon had eaten, in aggregate, more elaborate meals than anyone who had ever lived.

This is the man who said: better a dinner of herbs where love is than a fatted ox with hatred.

The proverb sounds like the observation of someone who has known hunger. It was not. It was the observation of someone who had watched closely what happened to people who ate at tables where the meat was plentiful and the atmosphere was wrong.

The First Meal Solomon Watched

The Midrash Hagadol preserves the account of Solomon conducting one of his famous investigations into the human condition. He disguised himself, as he did more than once in the tradition, and went out to watch people rather than to be watched. He found himself at a poor man's house where supper was being prepared. The meal was minimal: vegetables, perhaps a little bread, whatever the household could manage. But the family around the table was present with each other. There was talking. There was laughter. There was the particular quality of attention that people give each other when the meal is not the point of the gathering.

Solomon sat nearby and observed. He was the richest man in the world. He had eaten from tables that no one in that poor household could have imagined. And the meal he was watching had something his table did not have, something that the thirty cors of fine flour and the fattened fowl and the game from the farthest reaches of the world could not produce or purchase.

The Second Meal Solomon Watched

The second meal was at a wealthy man's house. The food was impressive. The preparations had been elaborate. Everything that could be served was being served. But there was something at the table that made eating impossible: the people around it were positioned against each other in some ongoing conflict that the food could not interrupt. The meal was technically excellent and humanly inedible. Solomon watched people eat in the presence of their own bitterness and understood that the food had become irrelevant. The fatted ox was on the table and hatred was in the room and the combination was exactly as poisonous as his proverb would later say.

He went back to the palace and wrote it down: better a dinner of herbs where love is than a fatted ox with hatred. The proverb in Proverbs 15:17 is usually read as a teaching about simplicity. What made a meal matter, he had seen, was not the quality of the food but the quality of the presence people brought to the table. Solomon had the most refined food in the world. He had also watched what happened when food without presence was consumed in quantity at a very expensive table, and the evidence had persuaded him that the poor man's vegetables were the better deal.

Why Solomon Trusted What He Had Seen

The tradition needed Solomon to have eaten everything before the proverb could carry weight. A man who had never tasted abundance saying that simplicity is better is making a philosophical argument. A man who had provisioned a thousand banquets and still arrived at the conclusion that the herbs-and-love dinner was richer had tested the hypothesis empirically. The rabbis treated the wisdom of Proverbs as data, not abstraction. Solomon had watched, compared, measured, and reported his findings. The findings happened to align with the instruction the Torah had given every Israelite about hospitality and the poor. But they came from evidence, not assumption.