Solomon Wandered as a Beggar and Wrote It Down

He stood at the edge of a market in a city he did not know, holding out his hand. Solomon had been saying it for weeks. He was the king of Judah. He had built the Temple. He had spoken with demons and commanded the wind.

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The merchants looked past him. Children ran. A woman offered him bread from pity and moved quickly away.

He was not believed. That was the weather of those years. Banished from his house, stripped of his realm, sent among strangers without a coin or a companion, he told a story too large for a beggar's face. It was easier to call him mad than to hear him.

The Claim No Market Would Buy

He ate what strangers left. He slept in doorways. The man who had once opened his mouth and had every wise thing he needed pour out now opened his mouth and had nothing come out but a claim no one would accept.

In some cities he learned to stop saying it. In others he said it anyway, half out of pride, half because a wound keeps asserting itself. He wandered far-off lands. He begged his daily bread. People thought him a lunatic because he never tired of assuring them that he was Solomon, Judah's great and mighty king.

The throne at home was occupied. Ashmedai sat where Solomon had sat. The ring was gone from the finger that had ruled spirits. The beggar kept walking.

The Face That Went Pale

The lowest point was not the disbelief. The lowest point was the day someone recognized him.

He had almost grown used to the blank stares, the shrug, the small charity of people who gave him a crust so they could stop thinking about him. He was not prepared for the face that stopped. The face that looked at him fully. The face that went pale.

A person who had known him in his greatness, who could measure the distance between the king and the rags on the same body, standing in the same market, holding out the same hand.

There is a pain only recognition can cause. To be seen in full degradation by someone who knows what you were is not the same as being invisible. It is worse. A stranger's pity is abstract. This person's pity was specific, and Solomon had to stand inside it. Recollections stirred. The present misery became almost unendurable.

He did not die of it. He stored it. Later he would need a word for what a closed hand holds when the thing inside has already gone.

He Counted Seven Vanities

When the ring came back, and Ashmedai was driven out, and Solomon sat on the throne again, he did not suppress the memory. He made it scripture.

The book is Kohelet. The first verse announces the program: hevel havalim (הבל הבלים), vapor of vapors, all is vapor (Ecclesiastes 1:2). Breath. Something that dissipates the moment you close your hand around it. He used the word thirty-eight times. He had earned it.

He counted the vanities. Seven of them. He had lived across all of them: wisdom, pleasure, wealth, power, building, love, and the throne itself. He called each one vapor. Not because they were false. Because he had reached the end of each and found it give way to the next without resolving into anything solid. He had gone all the way through and come out with nothing in his hands (Ecclesiastes 2:11).

Seven is the shape of a complete circuit. He had not listed seven random disappointments. He had walked a structure. At the bottom of it he had stood in a market with his hand out, saying he was king, and the last vanity, kingship itself, had turned its judgments on him. A just man perished in his righteousness. Justice had stepped away, and the king was left without the side that had kept him standing.

Joab Stood and Spoke Before the Sword

The beggar who had not been believed now sat in judgment again. Joab was brought in for the murder of Abner. Solomon was already convinced of the guilt. He granted a defense anyway.

"Why didst thou kill Abner?"

Joab said he was the avenger of his brother Asahel, whom Abner had slain.

Solomon said Asahel had sought to kill Abner, and Abner had acted in self-defense.

Joab said Abner might have disabled Asahel without going to extremes. Then he pressed: Abner had aimed at the fifth rib. That is not a light wound.

Solomon heard him out. The man who had begged from strangers and been called mad still asked a guilty captain to speak before the sentence. Kingship, when it returned, did not come back as appetite. It came back as a hearing.

He Wrote Breath of Breaths

He wrote it all down. The markets. The pale face. The seven vanities. The days when a just man perishes in his own righteousness because the ground under kingship has shifted.

The book ends where it should end, not with a solution but with a position: fear God and keep the commandments, for this is the whole of humanity (Ecclesiastes 12:13). After the exile and the recognition and the rags and the hand held out in foreign markets, the conclusion is plain. Stand in the right relation to what is above you. That is all. That is enough.

A man who had gone to the bottom of each vanity and come back wrote that down, and it fits on one line.