Solomon's Table Was Never Empty and the Orchard He Sold for Nothing

People imagine Solomon's wealth as an abstraction -- vast treasure rooms, legendary mines, ships returning from Ophir laden with gold and peacocks and apes. The rabbis imagine it differently. They imagine his dinner table.

Rabbi Hama bar Hanina, teaching in the name of the earlier sages whose words were gathered in Kohelet Rabbah, a midrashic collection on Ecclesiastes assembled in the land of Israel around the 5th century CE, makes one precise, astonishing claim: Solomon's table never lacked a rose in summer or a cucumber in the rainy season. The same table, all year, held both. In the language of the ancient world, this is not luxury -- it is miracle. Summer crops and winter crops do not grow together. They belong to opposite ends of the calendar. For both to appear fresh on the same table at the same moment meant that either trade routes extended to every climate on earth, or that something stranger was happening in Solomon's kitchens.

Solomon's court kept herds and flocks beyond counting. His officials provided for the king without shortage -- a thousand men's provisions each day per quarter of the country, and yet they "lacked nothing" (1 Kings 5:7). What could that phrase mean? The rabbis say it means even the small things were attended to, even the garnish, even the seasonal flower on a winter afternoon.

There were the barburim -- fattened fowl grown in cages, a bird described as exceptional, outstanding, and foreign. Rabbi Berekhya, teaching in the name of Rabbi Yehuda, says this creature came each day from Barbary, a journey of weeks by any normal measure, appearing fresh on the king's table each morning. The midrash does not explain how. It simply notes the fact, the way one notes a miracle without stopping to argue about the mechanism.

This is Solomon's world: overflowing, impossible, calibrated. The Netinim and the children of Solomon's slaves numbered three hundred and ninety-two. His palace complex employed armies of servants organized by role. Every detail of the life around him expressed the same quality -- abundance so precise it bordered on the supernatural.

And yet Kohelet Rabbah, reading the verse "a time to seek and a time to lose" (Ecclesiastes 3:6), tells a story that uses Solomon himself to explain why wisdom and wealth are not the same thing as holding on.

A merchant and his son traveled by sea with two measures of dinars -- a compact, portable fortune. The captain gave them a dark corner of the ship. In the darkness, the merchant overheard the navigators speaking in low voices: when they reached open water, they would kill the passengers, throw them into the sea, and take the money. The merchant said nothing. He pretended to quarrel with his son. In the middle of a staged argument, he flung the dinars overboard.

When they arrived in port, the merchant went to the governor of Caesarea. He reported the conspiracy. The governor sent the conspirators to prison. Then came the question: on what basis do we convict men who ultimately did nothing? The dinars are at the bottom of the sea. No crime was completed. The governor answered: on the basis of Solomon, king of Israel, who wrote "a time to cast." There is a time when throwing away valuables is the correct and legally protected act. The man who cast his dinars away did so rationally, in self-defense. The navigators who forced that choice onto him owe him the equivalent.

Solomon, then, is not only the king whose table holds roses in winter. He is also the king whose wisdom legislates the morality of loss. His own story is the supreme example of something squandered that cannot be recovered -- not a pouch of dinars but a kingdom. His senior advisors told him, the day he released Israel from Egypt: Do you not know what you released? One strand of Israel would have been enough to justify war. But what you let go held a hundred maneh of olive trees, a hundred maneh of grapevines, a hundred maneh of pomegranates, variety upon variety, artisans and wealthy men and wise men and multitudes of women and children. "Your branches are an orchard of pomegranates" (Song of Songs 4:13). He had sold a garden and charged a maneh. Then he discovered what was in it.

The rabbinic tradition gathered in Midrash Rabbah, spanning centuries of commentary from roughly the 3rd through 7th centuries CE, holds both images of Solomon in tension without resolving them. He is the king whose table was never empty. He is also the merchant who did not know the value of what he sold. His wisdom understood the principle that there is a time to cast away. His life demonstrated that even he could fail to identify which thing was precious and which was the price.

The table with roses in winter. The orchard sold for nothing. Both belong to the same king. That is the point.