1.38 Solomon's Magnificence

History in the Bible

Garry Stevens

History, Christianity, Judaism, Bible, Religion & Spirituality

4.6 • 693 Ratings

🗓️ 28 August 2016

⏱️ 25 minutes

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Summary

David's son Solomon is the first Hebrew king we can assign reliable dates to. Or maybe not. Solomon is a dazzling glitter-ball on the international stage; the richest, wisest, and most awesome king in the entire Middle East. He marries an Egyptian princess. I go through the legends of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, and investigate the role of Solomon's benefactor, King Hiram of the Phoenician city of Tyre.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Gary Stevens, and welcome to the History in the Bible podcast.
0:24.8	All the history, in all the books, in all the Bibles.
0:27.9	The Bible's. Episode 1.38, Solomon's Magnificance.
0:46.5	In the last episode of the history in the Bible, we finished the story of King David.
0:51.8	Now we can continue with Solomon, last seen disposing of his father's
0:56.5	old guard. Solomon is the very first person in the Bible that scholars can assign a reasonable
1:04.0	date to, or maybe not. Let's just follow the scholarly consensus for the next few episodes.
1:11.3	After I finish with Solomon, I'll spend an episode or two on what modern scholars make of the whole period of the United Kingdom.
1:19.8	We owe Solomon's dates to the pioneering work of the American scholar Edwin Teal, the father of biblical chronology.
1:30.5	Teal was a missionary, an archaeologist,
1:37.4	and an academic. He devoted much of his long life to a scientific study of the reigns of the Hebrew kings down to the exile. He published and refined his studies in three separate
1:43.7	editions of his book, The Mysterious Numbers of the Hebrew Kings, from 1951 to 1983.
1:52.0	Despite its title, the work is sober and scholarly. Subsequent researchers have challenged the niceties of his dates, but even so, their own ideas generally only differ by a few years.
2:07.2	Only in a few cases do scholars have major quarrels about regnal dates.
2:12.7	In this podcast, I will use the slightly modified chronology of J. Maxwell Miller and John Hayes, published in
2:20.5	2007. I have a bibliography and a table of the Hebrew kings on my site, www.com. I'll get into more
2:32.2	details about dating the kings of Judah and Israel in later episodes.
2:37.0	The consensus is that Solomon died somewhere between 931 and 927 BC.
2:45.0	The slight uncertainty arises from disagreements about how the Hebrews reckoned the beginning of their year.
2:52.9	A second date that most scholars think is more or less reliable is the start of the
2:58.5	construction of Solomon's Temple. Some fancy detective work by historians uses the efforts
3:05.2	of the Greek historian Menander, who wrote in the late Hellenistic period.
	...

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