Solomon Read an Inscription on a Dead King's Throat and Understood

The wisest king in Israel's history spent part of his life wandering as a beggar, which is the kind of fact the tradition returns to whenever someone misunderstands what wisdom is. Solomon had violated three commandments the Torah assigns specifically to kings: do not multiply wives, do not multiply horses, do not accumulate excessive gold. He had multiplied all three and told himself, privately, that he could do so without sinning. The Midrash on Ecclesiastes in the Midrash Rabbah collection describes the heavenly accounting: the attribute of divine justice presented these three violations, and God's response was crisp. What is this crown doing in your hands? Descend from my throne.

An angel descended wearing Solomon's face. The real Solomon was left in the streets, holding a staff, stopping strangers to tell them he was Kohelet, that he had once been king over Israel in Jerusalem. They struck him with reeds. They put bowls of grits in front of him. The Sanhedrin eventually noticed something was wrong with the figure on the throne, for he never allowed his feet to be seen, and Bathsheba and Solomon's wives confirmed that his behavior had changed entirely. But the investigation took time. Solomon wandered for a long season before the truth was restored.

It was during these years of wandering, or perhaps in some earlier descent through the chambers of the earth, that Solomon came to a palace that stood at the edge of existence. Several of the Ginzberg legends describe Solomon exploring strange regions that ordinary kings cannot reach. In one such chamber, Solomon found a hall of statues. They looked carved and still, except for one that looked alive. When Solomon approached it, the statue called out in a voice meant to summon help: here is Solomon, it announced to the other statues, Solomon has come to undo you. At the sound, great noise arose among all the figures. Solomon pronounced the divine Name. Silence returned. The statues fell. Their progeny, those demonic beings connected to the carved forms, ran into the sea and drowned.

From the throat of the lifelike statue, Solomon drew out a silver plate. On it were written characters he could not read. He brought it to a youth from the desert, who told him the language was Greek. The words on the plate read: I am Shadad son of Ad, who ruled over a thousand thousand provinces, rode upon a thousand thousand horses, had a thousand thousand kings as my vassals, and slew a thousand thousand heroes. When the Angel of Death finally approached me, I was powerless.

The plate had been there before Solomon's wandering, but he was prepared to read it only after. A man who had not been struck with reeds in his own city, who had not eaten grits from a bowl handed to him in contempt, would still have found the inscription interesting. It takes something more to find it true.

Shadad son of Ad had arranged his wealth in the one pattern that always fails: more of everything, scaled up until the numbers stop meaning anything. A thousand thousand of anything is a way of saying I did not think I would ever have to stop. But the inscription found in Solomon's wandering records what happened when the arrangement met the one thing that does not negotiate: the approach of the Angel of Death. No province interceded. No horse outran it. No vassal king volunteered to go in his place. Shadad had accumulated every form of power except the one that mattered, and he had not even known there was one that mattered until the Angel appeared.

Solomon wrote it down in Ecclesiastes, the book of someone who had held everything and found it weightless. He wrote: of laughter, I said it was confounded. The rabbis expanded this: how confounding is laughter, how confounding is the life built on the assumption that more wisdom, more wives, more gold, more horses, represents progress toward something durable. Solomon had laughed at the man in his court who ordered shoes to last seven years, knowing the man would be dead in seven days. He had wept at a wedding, knowing the groom's fate. He had read the futures of everyone around him. He had not read his own.

The tradition that assembled around Solomon in the centuries after his reign understood Ecclesiastes as the book he wrote from the far side of humiliation. Not from the throne, but from the road. Not from the place of wisdom already secured, but from the place where wisdom had to be recovered after being lost. Midrash Rabbah on Ecclesiastes, compiled in the fifth century CE from Talmudic sources reaching back to the second century, reads the opening words differently than a casual reader might. When Solomon writes that he was king over Israel in Jerusalem, the rabbis note the past tense as evidence. He was king. He wrote this from a place where kingship was something that had happened to him, not something he currently possessed. The book begins in retrospect because it could only have been written there.

The silver plate in the dead king's throat was more direct than any prophecy. It did not predict. It testified. I ruled. I slew. I rode. I was powerless. The grammar of the past tense is the whole lesson: the thousand thousands were real, and then they were exactly as significant as a vapor. Solomon put the plate away and carried what was written on it for the rest of his life, and that carrying is what the Book of Ecclesiastes actually is.