The Night Solomon Married Into Rome by Accident

The day Solomon finished building the Temple was the day he nearly destroyed everything he had built. The rabbis of the Talmudic period, working from Proverbs 31 and from what they knew of Kings, assembled a portrait of that night that is both intimate and catastrophic. It begins with a marriage and ends with an angel planting a reed in the floor of the sea.

Solomon had, until that moment, shown restraint in one significant area. Shimei ben Gera, the man who had cursed his father David during Absalom's rebellion, was still alive and serving as Solomon's teacher. As long as Shimei lived, Solomon did not take Pharaoh's daughter to wife. The text in the Ginzberg collection is precise about this sequence: the teacher's presence was a restraint. When Solomon finally executed Shimei for violating the terms of his house arrest, removing the last figure who had stood between Solomon and his worst impulses, the king immediately arranged the marriage he had been delaying.

The evening of the Temple's dedication should have been the holiest night in Israel's history. The Talmudic midrash on Proverbs describes what actually happened: Solomon held two celebrations simultaneously, one for the completion of the Temple and one for his wedding to Pharaoh's daughter. The two parties merged. The rejoicing over Pharaoh's daughter, the text says plainly, overshadowed the rejoicing over the Temple. The daily offering the next morning was not brought until the fourth hour, because Solomon slept late, because Pharaoh's daughter had spread a canopy over him hung with gems that shone like stars, and every time he stirred toward waking, the artificial constellations above him lulled him back to sleep.

The priests and the people stood outside the Temple waiting. They needed the king to authorize the morning service. They were afraid to wake him. Finally, they went to Bathsheba, Solomon's mother, who was not afraid of anything. She went in, bent him over a bedpost, and rebuked him as only a mother can. The Book of Proverbs, the rabbis read, records the very words she used: what are you doing, son of my womb, son of my vows, do not give your strength to women, do not let your ways destroy kings. Bathsheba had prayed during her pregnancy not for a son who would be wealthy or powerful, but for a son who would be quick in Torah and worthy of prophecy. She reminded him of this now, standing over a bed scattered with the jewelry of an Egyptian princess.

Why is Solomon called Lemuel in Proverbs? The midrash explains: because he whispered to God, as if conspiring, that he could take many wives and not sin. Lama lo El, why does he need God. The name Lemuel is built from those words. At that moment, the text says, the Holy One considered destroying Jerusalem. The city that had taken seven years to build, the Temple that had been planned since David's time, the project that had consumed the greatest organizational achievement in Israel's history, all of it placed in jeopardy on a single night because a king wanted to be comfortable.

Meanwhile, in heaven, the archangel Gabriel received a different assignment. He descended to the sea and drove a reed into the ocean floor. The reed did not seem like much. But earth and sediment began collecting around it, slowly, the way great things always begin. On the day Jeroboam erected the golden calves in the northern kingdom, generations later, a small hut was built on the island that had formed around Gabriel's reed. That hut, the Ginzberg text notes without further elaboration, was the first dwelling-place of Rome.

The chain of causation runs like this: Solomon kills his teacher and marries unwisely, which signals a loosening of his commitment to Torah. The loosening is visible to heaven. Gabriel acts. The action is so small, a single reed in the ocean, that it is invisible to anyone watching. But the island forms, and the hut goes up, and centuries later an empire grows from that hut, and that empire will one day destroy the very Temple Solomon built on the night he neglected to wake up in time for morning prayers.

The Legends of the Jews, compiled by Louis Ginzberg from Talmudic and midrashic sources spanning the first through fifth centuries CE, understood this as a lesson not about Rome but about consequences. Rome is not the point. The point is the reed. The point is that Gabriel does not wait for decisions to become obvious disasters. He plants the seed of consequence before Solomon has even finished sleeping. The universe responds to what we choose before the choice has had time to show its effects on earth.

Bathsheba's rebuke eventually reached Solomon. He wrote Proverbs 30 as a kind of admission: I am a greater fool than Noah, who was cursed through wine and still did not teach me caution. I did not learn from Adam, whose eating cost the world everything. The rabbis read these verses as Solomon's public confession, the wisest man alive acknowledging that the categories of wisdom and foolishness do not protect a person who will not use them.