Solomon and the Wisdom Books

Solomon, David’s son, holds an ambiguous place in the Church’s veneration: he is commemorated among the Holy Forefathers as the wise king, yet the tradition remembers his fall into idolatry and reserves judgment on his end. This file treats that honest reserve, and the christological reading of the Wisdom books associated with his name — above all the Wisdom of Solomon’s portrait of the righteous sufferer.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Wise King and His Fall

Solomon, the son of David and Bathsheba, is the Old Testament’s figure of wisdom: at his accession he asked God not for riches or long life but for “an understanding heart to judge thy people,” and was given “a wise and an understanding heart” beyond all who came before or after (1 Kings 3:9–12). He built the temple in Jerusalem, uttered three thousand proverbs, and drew the Queen of Sheba and the wisdom of the nations to his court (1 Kings 3–10). To his name the tradition attaches the wisdom books — Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs, and (in the wider Old Testament received by the Church) the Wisdom of Solomon.

But the biblical narrative does not stop there. Solomon’s many foreign wives “turned away his heart after other gods,” so that “his heart was not perfect with the Lord his God, as was the heart of David his father,” and he built high places for idols; for this the Lord announced that the kingdom would be torn from his house (1 Kings 11:1–13). This fall is the reason for the Church’s reserve. Unlike his father David — whose repentance in Psalm 50 is celebrated and whose sainthood the Church proclaims without hesitation, with feasts on both sides of the Nativity — Solomon has no separate feast day of his own, and his final state has been a matter of genuine uncertainty in the tradition. Ben Sira’s review of the kings praises Solomon’s wisdom but laments his fall bitterly: “thou didst stain thy honour, and pollute thy seed” (Sirach 47:12–21). The Fathers and the tradition are divided on whether Solomon repented and was saved; the question is left open, and the Church does not resolve it (see the honest treatment in the sermons and commentaries on the Sunday of the Forefathers, e.g., Holy Cross Monastery, “A Sermon for the Sunday of the Holy Forefathers,” holycross.org).

Venerated, With Reserve

And yet Solomon is commemorated. On the Sunday of the Holy Forefathers and the Sunday before the Nativity, the Church numbers Solomon among the ancestors of Christ according to the flesh — he stands in the royal genealogy (Matthew 1:6–7) — and the synaxaria and hymnography name him among the righteous kings, sometimes with the title “Righteous Prophet and King” (Sunday of the Forefathers, OrthodoxWiki; the commemoration of the Old Testament kings among the Forefathers). This is a careful and instructive act of veneration. The Church honors Solomon as a forefather of Christ and as the wise king who built the temple and left the books of wisdom, without pronouncing on the outcome of a life that Scripture itself presents as tragically divided. Per METHODOLOGY §4.2, the tradition’s own reserve is reported, not overwritten: the Church’s commemoration of Solomon among the Forefathers is a real veneration, but it is hedged with the sobriety that his fall requires, and it carries none of the confident, feast-day glory the Church gives to David or to the prophets who did not so fall. Solomon is a case where the Church’s veneration and the honesty of Scripture are held together — a saint of the genealogy, honored for his wisdom and his place in the line of the Messiah, over whose end the tradition draws a reticent veil rather than a false certainty.

The Wisdom Books and the Righteous Sufferer

The deeper reason the Church treasures the Solomonic tradition is that the Wisdom literature, read christologically, yields one of the most striking prophecies of the Passion in the whole Old Testament. The Wisdom of Solomon — a book of the wider Old Testament (the anagignoskomena) received by the Church, though composed in Greek in Alexandria in the last centuries before Christ, not literally by Solomon (see The Wider Old Testament and the Anagignoskomena) — contains in its second chapter the plot of the ungodly against the righteous man: “Let us lie in wait for the righteous; because he is not for our turn… He professeth to have the knowledge of God: and he calleth himself the child of the Lord… He is grievous unto us even to behold: for his life is not like other men’s… Let us condemn him with a shameful death: for by his own saying he shall be respected [protected by God]. Let us examine him with despitefulness and torture, that we may know his meekness” (Wisdom 2:12–20). The Church reads this at once as a prophecy of Christ — the righteous One who called God His Father, whom the ungodly condemned to a shameful death, taunting Him on the Cross in almost the same words: “He trusted in God; let him deliver him now, if he will have him: for he said, I am the Son of God” (Matthew 27:43, echoing Wisdom 2:18). The correspondence is so close that Wisdom 2 stands beside Isaiah 53 and Psalm 21 among the clearest Old Testament portraits of the passion of the righteous Sufferer.

The following chapter’s assurance — “the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and there shall no torment touch them… their hope is full of immortality” (Wisdom 3:1–4) — is among the best-loved passages of the Church’s funeral and martyr commemorations, read as an Old Testament lesson (paremia) at Vespers and appointed for the feasts of the saints who suffered. Thus the Wisdom tradition associated with Solomon’s name, whatever the ambiguities of the king himself, becomes in the Church’s reading a well of prophecy: the righteous sufferer vindicated by God, the immortality of the just, the wisdom that “is the breath of the power of God” (Wisdom 7:25) — read by the Fathers of the pre-incarnate Wisdom of God, the Word (see Christ the Key to the Scriptures).

Wisdom and the Word

The Fathers made a further, deep connection: the personified Wisdom of the Solomonic books — “The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his way… when he prepared the heavens, I was there” (Proverbs 8:22–30) — was read christologically as a figure of the Son, the Wisdom of God (1 Corinthians 1:24), though the Proverbs 8 text (“the Lord created me”) also became a battleground in the Arian controversy, the Fathers taking care to read it of the Incarnation and not of any creaturehood of the eternal Word (the Arian misuse and the orthodox reading are treated in the christological and conciliar collections; see Christology; The Seven Ecumenical Councils). The great church of Constantinople, Hagia Sophia, “Holy Wisdom,” is dedicated to Christ under this name. So the Solomonic Wisdom books, gathered under the name of a king the Church venerates only with reserve, gave the tradition some of its richest language for the Word and the Passion — a further instance of the Spirit speaking through the Old Testament of the Christ to come.

References

The Holy Bible, KJV, with the wider Old Testament (1 Kings 3–11; Proverbs 8:22–30; Wisdom of Solomon 2:12–20; 3:1–4; 7:25; Sirach 47:12–21; Matthew 1:6–7; 27:43; 1 Corinthians 1:24).
“Sunday of the Forefathers,” OrthodoxWiki; and the sermons on the Sunday of the Holy Forefathers (e.g., Holy Cross Monastery, holycross.org) on the honest reserve regarding Solomon’s veneration and end.
Pentiuc, Eugen J. The Old Testament in Eastern Orthodox Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. (The Wisdom books; the anagignoskomena; the christological reading.)
The Wisdom of Solomon 2–3 as an Old Testament reading (paremia) at Vespers for the feasts of the saints (standard liturgical usage; The Menaion).