Solomon Sent Pharaoh's Dying Men Home With Shrouds

Pharaoh thought he was being clever.

King Solomon was building the Beit Hamikdash (בֵּית הַמִּקְדָּשׁ), the Temple in Jerusalem, and it required skilled artisans he did not have in sufficient number. He sent to Pharaoh of Egypt for craftsmen. This was a straightforward diplomatic request from one powerful king to another. The Temple was the architectural project of the age, and Solomon was pulling in labor from across the known world (1 Kings 5:13-18).

Pharaoh agreed to send workers. But before dispatching them, he called in his astrologers. He wanted to know, among the men available to send, which ones were fated to die within the year. The astrologers identified them. And those were the men Pharaoh sent to Solomon, workers who, by his calculations, would die in Jerusalem on Solomon's payroll rather than in Egypt on his own, sparing him the cost and inconvenience of their deaths, and perhaps embarrassing the great king of Israel with a construction site full of corpses.

It was audacious. It was also, as recorded in Ginzberg's retelling of this episode, profoundly miscalculated. Louis Ginzberg drew on rabbinic sources spanning centuries to compile his Legends of the Jews (published 1909-1938), and this story appears as a small gem embedded in the larger account of Solomon's reign, evidence of a mind that could read not just the present but the next move, and the move after that.

Solomon saw through the deception immediately. How, the legends do not specify. Perhaps he observed the men's condition, or consulted his own advisors. Perhaps, as the tradition elsewhere suggests, his gift for wisdom included reading what others tried to hide. At Gibeon, Solomon had asked God for an understanding heart (1 Kings 3:9), the capacity to discern between situations that looked the same but were not. Recognizing dying men sent as a diplomatic insult seems precisely the kind of discernment that gift was meant to enable.

What Solomon did next was extraordinary in its simplicity. He sent the men back to Egypt. But he sent them equipped with tachrichim (תַּכְרִיכִים), burial shrouds, the white linen garments in which Jewish tradition wraps the dead. And he sent along a message for Pharaoh: I suppose you had no shrouds for these people. I send them back to you, along with what they were in need of.

The message functioned on several levels simultaneously. On the surface it was polite, almost solicitous. Of course Solomon had noticed that these men were dying. How considerate of him to provide for their needs. But the subtext was a precise mirror held up to Pharaoh's own scheming: I know what you did, I know why you did it, and I am returning your trick to you gift-wrapped. The shrouds transformed Pharaoh's astrologers' secret knowledge into a public fact. Everyone receiving those men, seeing those shrouds, would understand what the king of Egypt had attempted. Pharaoh had tried to make Solomon look incompetent. Solomon had made Pharaoh look dishonest.

The Legends of the Jews place this episode in a pattern of encounters between Solomon and foreign rulers that consistently turn on the same dynamic. The foreign ruler underestimates Solomon. The foreign ruler uses deception or political maneuver. Solomon responds not with force but with a counter-move so elegant that it simultaneously neutralizes the threat and exposes the attempt. The Queen of Sheba arrived with riddles designed to stump him; she left, the tradition says, speechless at what she had encountered. Pharaoh sent dying men and received them back with burial clothes and a note. The pattern suggests a king whose wisdom was not merely philosophical but tactical, not just about understanding the nature of things but about understanding the nature of the people trying to manipulate him.

The Temple was completed (1 Kings 6:38). Solomon dedicated it with prayers of such scope that they asked God to hear not only Israelites but foreigners who came to pray toward it (1 Kings 8:41-43). The building Pharaoh had tried to sabotage became exactly what it was meant to be. The astrologers' calculations turned out to be correct about when those men would die; they were just wrong about where, and about what the dying would accomplish. The men sent to fail arrived back in Egypt wrapped in the evidence of what Solomon had known all along.