We’ve talked a bit about the “Power of Women” motif popular in Renaissance-era European art before. It was a glorious time for art, when every neoclassicist Lowlander worth his salt painted women riding classical scholars like ponies and legendary heroes forced to wear beautiful pink dresses. And one of the more popular scenarios under the “Power of Women” umbrella was that of King Solomon being led into idolatry by his wives.
You are, I assume, roughly familiar with the story of Solomon, son of David, third king of Israel, noted for his wisdom and friendly reception to the Queen of Sheba. Something that’s less frequently mentioned about him is that, towards the end of his life, he sort of ditched the contemplation to marry every woman who walked into the room:
Now king Solomon loved many foreign women, besides the daughter of Pharaoh, women of the Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Zidonians, and Hittites; of the nations concerning which The Lord said unto the children of Israel: ‘Ye shall not go among them, neither shall they come among you; for surely they will turn away your heart after their gods’; Solomon did cleave unto these in love. And he had seven hundred wives, princesses, and three hundred concubines; and his wives turned away his heart. For it came to pass, when Solomon was old, that his wives turned away his heart after other gods; and his heart was not whole with the Lord his God, as was the heart of David his father. [1 Kings 11:1-5]
So, right-ho, bit of a sad picture there at the end, the wisest king in history abandoning his own religion to please a vast assortment of wives (“But I love them!”). Luckily for us, it’s also very funny, because every time someone painted the scene of Solomon’s wives leading him into idolatry, it looks exactly like every anti-drug D.A.R.E. commercial you’ve ever seen. There’s the old, doddering king, buffeted about by his shapely, long-legged wives in the direction of a smirking statue, and the look on his face is always “I don’t know, my mom said…” and the look on their faces is always “You always do everything your mom tells you to do, Solomon, also called Jedidiah, son of David and flower of the Tree of Jesse, ruler over all twelve tribes of Israel?”
Like, buddy! You are the leader of the Northern and Southern kingdoms, you can do whatever you want, you don’t have to let your wives boss you around just because it’s 1000 to one!
“All the other nations are doing it.”
“I don’t know. It feels weird.”
[stage-whispered from behind] “I told you he wasn’t going to worship her.”
“Oh, my God, I know.”
“Just one oblation. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to oblate again.”
“Well…”
“Do it. Acknowledge Astarte.”
“Yeah, do it.”
“Everyone cool is doing it.”
“Do it to be cool.”
“Don’t you wanna be cool?”
“Worshiping one god isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? Worshiping a million gods.”
“I’m not really sure about this.”
“What’s to be sure about? God, it’s like prostrating oneself with a baby. If Naamah the Ammonite can do it, surely the king can give it a try.”
“Maybe I’ll just venerate him later.”
“It’s just one little god, Solomon. How much can it hurt?”
“I just don’t feel comfortable.”
“Oh my GOD, it’s not like we’re asking you to venerate DAGON here. Calm down.”
“I…maybe this once.”
“Great. Hold it in your lungs for a minute before you let it out, then pass it.”
“Solomon…”
“Hey, Solomon…”
“Solomon babe, how come we don’t have an Asherah pole?”
“Yeah, why can’t we have an Asherah pole?”
“All the OTHER Canaanite nations have an Asherah pole, and we don’t even have ONE.”
“Pleeeeease can we have an Asherah pole? We can keep it in my room, you won’t even have to see it.”
“It is SO PATHETIC that we only have one god when everybody else has so many. People laugh at us, you know. They call you One-God Solomon, and it’s the worst. I’m embarrassed to mention that I’m one of your seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines at parties.”
“You might as well just buy us one because otherwise we’re all going to ask you about it when it’s our turn to have sex with you.”
“HEY FUCKO, WORSHIP THIS OR I’LL PINCH YOU IN THE FUCKING DICK”
“Okay, you baby. You don’t even have to do anything. We’ll procure the snow-white horse, slay the unblemished lamb, catch the blood in a silver dish, pour it onto a smoking incense, and drape the Goddess’ likeness with flowers and glorious raiment. All you have to do is incline your head respectfully. God. Worship much? [whispered, aside] I told you we should have married Tiglath-Pileser II of Assyria.”
Tags: artwork, king solomon, power of women, western art history
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DARE was really effective for me, actually, though… Remember the “broken record” technique? “No. No, guys. No, I dont want to. NO GUYS SERIOUSLY I CARE ABOUT MY FUTURE.”
Relevant:
That statue in the second-from-the-last picture? 10/10 would worship.
I thought that was another wife (just… a very pale one) and briefly wondered if they were worshiping the giant amphora.
Solomon probably would try to marry a statue by that point.
After the first 600, who has time to stop and check if a new wife is made of stone or not?
It looks like the Champions League trophy, so…maybe?
Just venerate the golden idol a little bit, for me, just to say you TRIED it.
So David’s heart may have been whole with the Lord his God, but I don’t remember stories about Solomon murdering one of his generals so he could get away with raping the man’s wife. I’m just saying.
*Cher Horowitz voice* She was taking a bath, man. That’s an unequivocal sex invite!
I sometimes like to sub in the Veggie Tales version where it’s about Jr. Asparagus or whoever lusting over a special rubber ducky, and the war is all pies. Especially because this story was always drummed into me about being the FIRST PARABLE (Children in Worship curriculum v. big on parables) where anything can totally be another thing.
“anything can totally be another thing”
To be honest, as a third-generation atheist, I was brought up to believe this was religion in a nutshell…
Except it’s very COMPLICATED. Like, some things are actually other things, and “it’s, like, metaphor, man, and it you don’t get it you’re a dumb,” and then other things are actually themselves and it’s like, “no, this part is super literal and if you don’t get it, you’re not listening to God,” or whatever. It got very confusing for me. I grew up in a church where most things (but not all the things) were taken as metaphors, and then I got super fundamentalist and joined one where it most things (but not all the things) were take ultra-literally, and it was always important to know which was which, and I never really did figure it out.
Did your Sunday school really try to excuse the David & Bathsheba business as a parable? That’s a novel contortion. Useful if you want to maintain inerrancy while ignoring the inconvenient parts though!
Man. I got KICKED OUT of Sunday school for prevaricating when the nun asked me if I thought Jesus REALLY ACTUALLY FOR REAL walked on the water and I said something like ‘it doesn’t matter whether it really happened or not, what matters is what the story tells us about Jesus’.
That was the same year as it really sunk in that, as a person of the lady persuasion, I wasn’t going to be allowed to be a priest. I still maintain it would have been a good career fit for me, despite my current lack of faith.
Fun fact! My 6th-grade Sunday school teacher did, in fact, tell us (in a hushed aside) that Bathsheba shouldn’t have been outside bathing on her roof, where people could see her. No mention was made of the relative heights of the standard house and the fucking palace of the king.
I’m sure with 700 wives and 300 concubines there was a fair bit of rape going on.
we are rapidly moving away from “funny jokes about art”
I mean you could say this post was asking for it.
I doubt it, considering his age and the sheer number of women. Probably there was a lot of, let’s call it mutual consolation, among the ladies who didn’t get much attention.
I much prefer this speculation.
HEADCANON ACCEPTED.
Honestly, being the neglected wife or concubine of a fantastically wealthy elderly king would probably be a pretty sweet deal.
I vaguely remember reading somewhere that eunuchs could also help the hetero-oriented wives get laid in this type of situation.
i’m now imagining a connected program where nervy former idolaters speak at school assemblies – “I was riding the bull, man. Worshiping Ba’al six, maybe seven times a day.”
I was worshipping Asherah and I, like, got too into the whole wine and raisin cakes thing man.
I see a tree now and I *have* to have a glass of wine.
It’s made my life so hard, you can’t imagine.
actually though, in a rural agrarian society, wouldn’t that be pretty life hindering?
see a tree
take a shot
see another tree
take another shot
rinse
repeat
My liver hurts just thinking about it.
In #7, what’s with the two-fingered man skulking around a pole? Can we hand the microphone to him, please?
nbd, just dying at the perfection of the “Tiglath-Pileser II” reference.
Tiglath-Pileser would’ve been so much less of a buzzkill.
It’s a long story, but my husband refers to me as Tiglath-Pileser. Yes, darling, I am an Iron Age king of Assyria and don’t you fucking forget it.
And because of this idolatry, the kingdom was split after Solomon’s reign, 10/12 tribes were sacked by the Assyrians and ended up lost, idolatry permeated the kingdom of Judea, the Temple was eventually destroyed, and Jewish history has been mostly a long string of bummers ever since.
Idolatrous babes: Not even once.
….let alone 1000. I mean come on Solomon where did you even find the time?
The 300 concubines were for sex. The 700 wives were for his emotional work. It’s really HARD being king of Judea, you need lots of people to sympathize with you and laugh at your jokes and really, if you saw the solutions he had for legal disputes early in his reign, no wonder he needed 700 women around to come up with better solutions.
“We could cut the baby in half!”
“No, honey, babies aren’t as good when you cut them in half. They’re better whole.”
“We could find an extra baby? Seems like the tents are full of babies right now.”
“Those are your children, Sweetie, your wives and concubines will destroy you if you give away their children.”
Must have been boring af. No wonder they got way into idolatry.
I used to have a book of humorous poems based on Bible stories, and the one about Solomon and his wives was all about how he must have gotten chapped lips and really exhausted trying to kiss them all goodnight. In fact, he probably never got any sleep, because by the time he got them all kissed, it was the next night and he had to start over.
Oh my God, that’s the most hilarious and innocent interpretation of how 1000 wives/concubines will physically exhaust you.
I remember that!
‘Chapped lips’
was that a mehrunes dagon reference??
Mehrunes Dagon and Mallory are both referencing the Mesopotamian Dagon (in MD’s case, probably by way of medieval demonology).
But who Could resist the idolatrous cult that is handing out that awesome circus-peanut hat in #4? (I would be idolating so fast…)
Last week some teenagers were fundraising for D.A.R.E. outside BART and I politely declined once, yet still she pursued me, and yea, I ended up yelling at a 16-year-old about the manifest failings of my D.A.R.E. program until the spouse got off of his train and gently pulled me away.
It is NOT HER FAULT, probably, that teaching D.A.R.E. at our school was a form of punishment for the officers. (One dude had to do it because he failed his drug test!) It is not her fault that those officers encouraged children to turn in their parents for smoking weed like some sort of decadent western Young Pioneers. It is not her fault that the people they picked for the anti-bullying aspects of D.A.R.E. were my bullies, and also very smart people who used their new power as a way to continue bullying.
“Officer, if you don’t stop doing drugs, we’ll make you tell TEENAGERS to not do drugs!”. Fucking brilliant. That sounds like a terrible program.
DARE still exists? I thought I remembered a news item years ago about how they were admitting their program didn’t work and packing it in.
…ok, looks like what actually happened was a study came out in 2010 saying “DARE is bs” whereupon they lost a bunch of funding and came out with a new curriculum. The new curriculum is called “keepin’ it REAL” and is meticulously capitalized as such on Wikipedia.
SO I have been hearing about people who are into “Thoth-Amon” parenting? And it seems to be just these really involved parents, people who take attachment parenting up to 11, people who presumably are into appropriating a little bit of ancient Egyptian culture, but fine. That’s fine.
And mostly it’s people saying “We’re still breastfeeding our one-year-old but we’re not like super Thoth-Amon or anything.” which is also fine. You take the parenting stuff that works for you from each approach.
So yes, Thoth-Amon is the leader of a snake cult in Conan the Barbarian. It is also the replacement for “helicopter parent” in the millenials to snake people plugin. I… have not realized this for months. I asked some of my friends if they were doing Thoth-Amon parenting.
On the plus side, you got to believe in a better and more magical world for us all.
Would you just maybe think about writing a Sunday school curriculum
I mean, that’s what volunteering to teach Sunday School is all about, isn’t it?
Is that Pan on a hippity hop?
“Pan on a hippity-hop” is my new go-to curse word.
Help I can’t stop laughing about this.
I can report that it’s a full day later and I’m still laughing about this.
Nymph 1: *whispers* Hurry up!
Nymph 2: Oh please, he’ll never catch us. Dionysus already liquored him up–he’s going to bounce right into a tree any minute now.
“I mean, if you don’t want to, that’s fine, I just thought we were a FAMILY…”
If the future in which the Duggars breed enough to take over the United States ever comes to pass, I bet this is how the whole Josh-Duggar-Ashley-Madison shitshow will be depicted.
I hope they had a version of the spectacular D.A.R.E. them song, which still is ear wormable to me and still brings with me massive secondhand embarrassment.
Also, I refused to do my 8th grade D.A.R.E. ‘graduation, which involved giving a speech ON CAMERA to the class and then WATCHING IT BACK (shudder) because “if you can’t pledge to all your friends to stay drug free, you aren’t really committed! Everyone else is doing it!”
Oh man. That graduation ceremony sounds atrocious. I won my D.A.R.E. competition when I was in 5th or 6th grade, and I had to stand up and give a speech about how important it was to me that I would never do drugs or alcohol.
All I have to say to 12-year-old me now is a very Channing Tatum-esque “Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha…………….”
OH MY GOD I’D FINALLY MANAGED TO FORGET THE SONG NOOOOOOOOOOO
Genuinely hoping “PINCH YOU IN THE FUCKING DICK” isn’t a typo, because that’s way funnier for some reason.
seriously, the best way to end the comment thread right now.
Our Lady of Ortberg does not make typos.
Except it's very COMPLICATED. Like, some things are actually other things, and "it's, like, metaphor, man, and it you don't get it you're a dumb," and then other things are actually themselves and it's like, "no, this part is super literal and if you don't get it, you're not listening to God," or whatever. It got very confusing for me. I grew up in a church where most things (but not all the things) were taken as metaphors, and then I got super fundamentalist and joined one where it most things (but not all the things) were take ultra-literally, and it was always important to know which was which, and I never really did figure it out.