The purpose of this essay is to resolve a contradiction between the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament. The conflict is about the function and identity of G-D’s alleged son, as depicted in both sources. This essay is divided into two parts, the first is comprised stories from the life of king Solomon, the second part is comprised of stories from the life of Jesus of Nazareth.
Part 1
A little more than 3000 years ago in a land far, far away; there lived an old king, worn down by war and family disputes. After many years of hardship the king was approached by a prophet who came to make a covenant with him on behalf of the G-D of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The prophet said, “And it shall come to pass, when your days be expired that you must go to be with your fathers, that I will raise up your seed after you, which shall be of your sons; and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build me a house, and I will establish his throne for ever. I will be his father, and he shall be my son: and I will not take my mercy away from him, as I took it from him that was before you: But I will settle him in my house and in my kingdom forever: and his throne shall be established forevermore.”—1 Chronicles 17:11
A short while passed and the king bore a son by a woman named Bathsheba. Again the prophet came to the king and delivered him a message from the Most High, “Then David consoled his wife Bathsheba, and went to her and lay with her and she bore a son, and he named him Solomon (Peaceful). The Lord loved him, and sent a message by the prophet Nathan, and named him ‘Beloved of the Lord’ (Yedidiah). Because of the Lord.”—2 Samuel 12:24-25
Karen Armstrong, British author and commentator on comparative religion, correctly identified this moment the event that branded Solomon as king David’s heir and G-D’s choice. Armstrong concludes that the name Yedidiah, “Beloved of Yahweh” is the indicator that Solomon is to succeed King David. What Armstrong doesn’t mention is that this is also the moment that confirms Solomon as the seed of David who was prophesied to build G-D’s House and become G-D’s only begotten son. What comes next are series of confirmations of G-D’s covenant with David, through Solomon.
Twelve years passed after G-D made a covenant with king David. Solomon was young and inexperienced, but David had become old and sick. After a failed coupe by David’s other son, Adonijah, king David formally appointed Solomon as his replacement; and had Solomon ride out on the king’s personal mule to be crowned. Solomon rode back into Jerusalem on this mule with crowds of Jews cheering. When he arrived back at the royal palace David said to Solomon, “My son, I had planned to build a house to the name of the Lord my G-D. But the word of the Lord came to me, saying, ‘You have shed much blood and have waged great wars; you shall not build a house to my name, because you have shed so much blood in my sight on the earth. See, a son shall be born to you; he shall be a man of peace. I will give him peace from all his enemies on every side; for his name shall be Solomon, and I will give peace and quiet to Israel in his days. He shall build a house for my name. He shall be a son to me, and I will be a father to him, and will establish his royal throne in Israel forever.’”—1 Chronicles 22:7-10
King David’s declaration to his son was followed by an identical statement to all the people and Sanhedrin of Israel. So what does this statement tell us? It tells us that king Solomon is the person mentioned by G-D in His covenant with David (2 Samuel 7:14 & 1 Chronicles 17:11); that G-D was the one who named Solomon before his birth; that G-D begot or chose Solomon as His son; and finally that Solomon’s kingdom was meant to last forever. Furthermore this information is important in understanding Talmudic debates among chief rabbi’s on this topic and second Temple rabbinic mentality. King David capped this speech to Israel with this verse, “King David said to the whole assembly, “My son Solomon, whom alone, G-D has chosen, is young and inexperienced, and the work is great; for the Temple will not be for mortals but for the Lord G-D.”—1 Chronicles 29:1
King David Dies shortly after having his son crowned as monarch over Israel and Judah, but not before making preparations for the construction of the Temple of G-D on Mount Moriah. Solomon heeds his father’s wishes and hastily begins building the House of G-D. Solomon confirmed this when he said, “‘So I (Solomon) intend to build a house for the name of the Lord my G-D, as the Lord said to my father David, ‘Your son, whom I will set on your throne in your place, shall build the house for my name.’”—1 Kings 5:5. This verse too confirms Solomon’s role in G-D’s covenant with David, with Solomon testifying to it personally.
The most pivotal moment in Solomon’s life came when he turned 13 years of age; fatherless, overwhelmed, young and confused, the boy journeyed to the top of Mount Gibeon, a short trip from Jerusalem, to offer sacrifice to his G-D. Solomon hoped to receive guidance and G-D’s favour. After an entire day of making many sacrifices Solomon fell asleep on the Mount, “At Gibeon the Lord appeared to Solomon in a dream by night; and G-D said ‘Ask what I should give you.’”—1 Kings 3:5
G-D so loved king Solomon that he offered him anything he wished, without limitations. What was a 13 year old boy to ask for? Humbly, Solomon asked for his only desire—wisdom and the ability to judge between good and evil for his people’s sake. And G-D rewarded his humble intentions, “I now do according to your word. Indeed I give you a wise and discerning mind; no one like you has been before you and no one like you shall arise after you. I give you what you have not asked both riches and honour all your life; no other king will compare with you.”—1 Kings 3:12
What lessons can be gleaned from this event? Solomon’s age, at the time of the dream, is interesting because it’s the traditional age when Jewish boys become men; the Bar Mitzvah. What does Bar Mitzvah mean? It translates as Son of the Commandments. This in itself is interesting because the word for son—Bar—isn’t Hebrew, it’s Aramaic. And the ceremony symbolizes the transition of religious responsibility from the child’s father to the child. Additionally, this event directly connects with a story written in the T’nach’s Tehillim (the Bible’s Psalms).
The book of Psalms is usually credited entirely to king David, although, there is proof that king Solomon wrote at least one psalm—Psalm 72. If Solomon wrote one psalm, then two are plausible also. Psalm 2 reads, “I will tell of the decree of the Lord: He said to me, “You are my son, today I have begotten you. Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage and the ends of the earth your possession. You shall break them with a rod of iron, and dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.” Now therefore, O kings, be wise; be warned, o rulers of the earth. Serve the Lord with fear, and rejoice with trembling. Kiss the son, lest He be angry, and you perish in the way; for his wrath is quickly kindled. Blessed are all who take refuge in him.”—Psalm 2:7-11. Roddy L. Braun’s peer journal, Solomonic Apologetic in Chronicles, confirms the position that Solomon was the only person referred to in the Davidic covenant. The journal was written in 1973 in a time when new Biblical interpretations were frowned upon. Roddy uses Psalm 2 to verify this position.
Psalm 2 closely resembles the event on Mount Gibeon (1 Kings 3:5-12). The resemblance doesn’t end where G-D says, “ask of me, and I will make…,” giving Solomon an open invitation to ask for his heart’s desire (1 Kings 3:5); no, the comparison gets deeper when we look at the original Hebrew text. In Psalm 2:12 the author uses the Aramaic word Bar, instead of the Hebrew Ben for son; but why? Because by the author’s use of Bar instead of Ben the reader is able to efficiently identify the “son”— for King Solomon was at the age of Bar Mitzvah when he received the dream from G-D. Solomon himself said that night, “And now o Lord my God, you have made your servant King in the place of my father David, although I am only a little child; I do not know how to go out or come in.”—1 Kings 3:7 (Translation of Psalm 2:7 provided by Zev Porat of Tel Aviv, Israel)
Years go by and Solomon prospers through his wisdom. He acquires much wealth, many horses, 700 wives and 300 concubines from the surrounding nations. Late in his life he wrote the book of Kohelet (Ecclesiates), a book ridden with symbolism and grief. In it he wrote, “Better a poor but wise youth than an old but foolish king who no longer has the sense to heed warnings. For the former can emerge from a dungeon to become king; while the latter, even if born to kingship, can become a pauper.[However] I reflected about all the living who walk under the sun with that youthful successor who steps into his place. Unnumbered are the multitudes of all those who preceded them; and later generations will not acclaim him either. For that too is futile and pursuit of wind.”—Ecclesiates 4:13-16 JPS translation
While it’s uncertain who the poor, but wise youth who will step into Solomon’s place is at this point, what is most interesting about this passage is that king Solomon in his old age fell from grace because he did not heed the Deuteronomy warnings that pertained to Hebrew royalty. Jewish and Islamic legends state that after allowing one of his wives to build an idol that represented the girl’s deceased father, God punished Solomon by allowing the demon Sakhr (Asmodeus) to steal his magic ring and take his place on the throne. Solomon became ‘a poor wanderer, whose royal identity no one credited’; this legend is closely connected to the king born into kingship that becomes a pauper in Ecclesiastes 4:15.
At the end of part one of this report we’ve concluded that king Solomon was the only person referred to in G-D’s covenant with king David (2 Samuel 7:14). King Solomon was seen as the son of G-D, the builder of the Temple, and heir of an eternal kingdom, as told by king David and Solomon. We’ve discovered that king solomon also wrote Psalm 2 to tell the story of the event on Mount Gibeon, where Solomon gained his wisdom and had his Bar Mitzvah. We distinguished that king Solomon was thirteen years old when he ascended Mount Gibeon. We found an Aramaic word strategically put among a predominantly Hebrew Bible. Lastly we’ve discovered that Solomon left us with a prophecy of someone in the future who would stand in his place.
Part 2
One thousand years separated the first Temple Solomon built from the rebuilding of the second Temple under Roman occupation. It was during this stressful time in Israel that Jesus was born. Years later he and his disciples used the Hebrew Bible to identify prophecies that pointed to events in his life, in order to spread his message of the coming of the Kingdom of G-D. Using this method he became greatly influential in Israel. What separated Jesus from other messianic candidates of the time can be summed up in two verses from the Christian New Testament:
G-D so loved the world that he sent His only begotten son, that whoever believes in him may not perish but have eternal life.—John 3:16
The Queen of the South shall rise in judgement with this generation, and shall condemn it: for she came from the uttermost parts of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon; and, behold, a greater than Solomon is here.—Matthew 12:42
Jesus believed he was the only begotten son of G-D, greater than Jonah, king Solomon and the Temple; but for the purpose of this essay we will only look at what Jesus said about Solomon. Verse #1 is one of a series of verses in the New Testament where Jesus is either referred to or refers to himself as the son of G-D. The contradiction here is that king Solomon was begotten by G-D a thousand years earlier and David, Solomon, the Prophet Nathan and all of Israel were witnesses; as related in part 1 of this essay. Another of these verses appears after the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist in the Jordan river, where G-D is said to have called out from heaven saying, “This is my beloved son, with whom I am well pleased.”—Matthew 3:17. But there are a few scriptural problems and or contradictions with this verse as well. Like in the previous verse, Solomon was also formally named by G-D as Yedidiah (Beloved of G-D), which seems to connect all these verses to king Solomon in one way or another.
On the same topic, Saul, the Jewish Pharisee and convert to the Messiahship of Jesus, wrote the book of Hebrews—a letter sent to Jewish believers in Jesus as the Messiah. In this letter he wrote the following, “Long ago G-D spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he also created the worlds. He is the reflection of G-D’s glory and the exact imprint of G-D’s very being, and he sustains all things by his powerful word. When he had made purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, having become as much superior to angels as the name he has inherited is more excellent than theirs. For to which of the angels did G-D ever say, “You are my Son, today I have begotten you”? Or again, “I will be to him a father, and he shall be to me a son”?”—Hebrews 1:1-5. Part 1 of this essay clarified that these specific verses that Saul used to solidify the faith of Jewish believers in Jesus (2 Samuel 7:14 and 2 Psalm 2:7) spoke only about king Solomon; therefore the question must be asked: who does Saul think Jesus is?
The verse where Jesus calls himself, “a greater than Solomon,” is problematic also. On Mount Gibeon, after Solomon told G-D what he desired, G-D said, “no one like you has been before you and no one like you shall arise after you. I give you what you have not asked both riches and honour all your life; no other king will compare with you.”—1 Kings 3:12. Therefore Jesus’ statement seems to cause a paradox: If G-D said that no other king will compare with Solomon, and Jesus is prophesied to return in bodily form to reign as king in a 1000 year Messianic kingdom, then how can he be greater than Solomon according to 1 Kings 3:12?
There are two possible resolutions to these contradictions: the first is that Jesus didn’t realize that Solomon had been begotten by G-D and what he and his disciples believed was false. The second is that Jesus and his disciples knew that Solomon was begotten by G-D and named Beloved of the Lord; which means that they also believed that Jesus was a reincarnation of king Solomon.
Reincarnation is a concept that originated five thousand years ago in India. The earliest religion to believe in the transmigration of the soul is Hinduism. King Cyrus the Great in the sixth century BCE named the inhabitants of northern India Hindus after the Indus River and may have had some influence on this religion. The Hindu religion defines reincarnation as: the perfecting of the soul through numerous rebirths, at the moment of perfection the soul reunites with its Source. Although it is the Hindu religion that first describes this term, many sects within other religions also have this idea in their theologies, including Kabbalah and Chassidis within Judaism, who would say gilgul has been in Judaism from the very beginning.
According to Jewish Halakic Midrash rules of Biblical interpretation, there is a concept called Davar ha-lamed me-inyano. In this interpretive concept, if there are two contradictory passages, where the contradiction is either overt or hidden. It is then necessary to seek a third passage to explain both in a way that each is taken to refer to a different subject, thus avoiding contradiction. In this case Ecclesiastes 4:13-16 seems like a possible solution. Jesus’ life seems to fit into the criteria in these verses of the ‘poor, but wise youth.’ Jesus did go to prison and as written by Saul in Hebrews, “When he had made purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high,” which alludes to Jesus becoming a sort of king in heaven after coming out of prison. Presently there are over 2.2 billion people who call themselves follower of Jesus and he was denied by later generations of his own people.
There is strong evidence that many of Jesus’ teachings came directly from Solomonic sources in the Bible. For example, Christianity’s most famous teaching, love your enemies, actually originates in proverbs 25:21, called the proverbs of king Solomon. And other beatitudes also came from this same source. The apostle John’s gospel points to Solomon in numerous places as well, but none more important than what he says at the beginning, where John describes Jesus as the Word of G-D, in the beginning with Him. This material comes from Proverbs 8, where Solomon writes “I wisdom was in the beginning with G-D…”
In Hebrew and Islamic legends of King Solomon he is referred to as a bridge between all three monotheistic religions (Sarit Shalev- Eyni, Solomon, his Demons and Jongleurs: the Meeting of Islamic, Judaic and Christian Culture). Islam, Christianity and Judaism identify Solomon as king over the lower realm the earth, demons, the birds of the air and the beasts of the fields as well as the upper dominions of the angels. He used his power over demons to employ them in the construction of God’s Temple in Jerusalem. Solomon was considered the original exorcist, this may be the reason that Jesus asked the religious authorities, ‘And if I drive out demons by Beelzebub, by whom do your people drive them out?’”
The only remaining question is whether Jesus is the reincarnation of king Solomon, who returned to fulfill the prophecy he placed in his writings, or the world is still waiting for the arrival of another messianic figure with identical qualities?
Bibliography
Armstrong, Karen. Jerusalem One City Three Faiths. New York:Ballantine Books, 2005.
American Bible Society. Holy Bible with the Apocryphal/ Deutercanonical Books. New York: American Bible Society, 1989.
Ego, Beate. All Kingdoms and Kings Trembled Before Him: The Image of King Solomon in Targum Sheni on Megillat Esther. Ego, Beate.Source: Journal for the Aramaic Bible; Dec2001, Vol. 3 Issue 1/2, p57, 17p.
Shalev-Eyni, Sarit. Solomon, His Demons and Jongleurs: the Meeting of Islamic, Judaic and Christian Culture.1 saritse@h2.hum.huji.ac.il.Source:Al-Masaq: Islam & the Medieval Mediterranean; Sep2006, Vol. 18 Issue 2, p145-160, 16p, 1 Black and White Photograph, 3 Illustrations
Braun, Roddy L. Solomonic Apologetic in Chronicles. Source: Journal of Biblical Literature; Dec73, Vol. 92 Issue 4, p503, 14p
Thomas L. Thompson. The Messiah Epithet in the Hebrew Bible.
Michael V. Fox PhD. The JPS Bible Commentary Ecclesiastes. Philidelphia: Jewish Publication Society 2004
A Reincarnated King 