SOLOMON
137
SOLOMON
that he was led by his wives and connubines to worship
strange gods.
The fact that Solomon's reign was passed in tran- quillity, except for the attempts of Edom and Damas- cus to regain their independence, testifies to the care he displayed for the defence of the realm. That he showed no ambition to undertake foreign conquests redounds to his credit; after the exhausting w;irs of David the nation needed repose. And if he spent his people's wealth la\'ishly, his commercial policy may have helped to produce that wealth, and perhaps even given to the Jewish people tliat impulse towards trade which has been for centuries so marked a trait in their character. Nor can the indirect effects of the commerce he fostered be overlooked, inasmuch as it brought the people into closer contact with the out- side world and so enlarged their intellectual horizon. And in two other respects he profoundly influenced his nation's after-history, and therebj- mankind in general. In the first place, whatever the burdens which the construction of the temple entailed upon the generation that saw it erected, it eventually became the chief glory of the Jewish race. To it, its ritual, and its associations, was largely due the stronger hold which, after the disruption, the religion of Jehovah had upon Judah as contrasted with North- ern Israel; and when Judah ceased to be a nation, the reconstructed temple became in a still higher degree the guardian of the Hebrew faith and hope. And secondly, the Book of Proverbs, though parts are ex- pressly ascribed to other authors tlian Solomon, and even those sections which are attributed to liim may be complex of origin, is nevertheless the product of Solomon's spirit and example, and much that it con- tains may actually ha^■e proceed' d from him. And as Proverbs served as a model for many works of a similar cliaracter in later times, some of which, as has been said, were popularly ascribed to him (Ecclesiastes, Wi.sdom), the debt which the world of literature indi- rectly owes to the Hebrew king is considerable. The works named do not exhaust the list of productions with which Solomon's name is connected. The Song of Songs is attributed to him; two of the Canonical psalms are entitled his; and a book of Psalms of quite late date also goes by his name.
Besides the Histories of the Hebrews and of the Old Testament hy MiLMAN (1866); Stanley (1868); Ewald (1869); Stadk (1884): KoHLER (1884): Klostermann (1896); Wellhatjsen (1897): KiTTEL (1895); Renan (1892): Wade (1910); etc., see: MacCcrdy. Hi.'itorti. Prophecy and the Monuments (3 vols., New York. 1894-1901), §§-05 sqq. : Bacon, Solomon in tradition and in fact in New World. June. 1S9S; Weil, The Bible, the Koran, and the Talmud (London. 1S46). 200-lS; Conway. Solomon and Solo- monic Literatifre (Chicago, 1S99) ; Cardinal SIeignan, Solomon, son rigne. ses icrits (Pari.s. 1S90): VloouRorx. Iai Bible el tes de- couvertes modernes. Ill (Paris. 1896), 25.3-105: Kent, Student's Old Testament, V 'New York, 1905), 14-16, 16.'>-199: Beer, Said, Darid, Solomon (TUbingen. 1906). See also the articles on .Solo- mon in KiTTo's, Smith's. Hastingb*8, Cheyne's, and Vigour- ocx'a dictionaries of the Bible.
Gabriel Oussani.
Solomon, Psalms of, eighteen apocryphal psalms, extant in Greek, probably translated from a Hebrew, or an Aramaic original, commonly assigned to the first century B. c. They contain little of originality and are, for the most part, no more than centns drawn from the Psalms of I);ivid. In them Messianic hope is not bright; a gloom enshrouds that hope — the gloom caused by Pompey's siege of Jerusalem [see Apocrypha, I, (3)].
Solomon, Odes of, forty-two lyric poems, an apocrj-phal work, recently discovered ancf published (1900) by J. Rendol Harris. History. — The existence of these apocryph:il odes was known by various references. The pseudo-Athanasian Sj-nopsis Sancta; Scriptura; (sixth centun,) lists the " Antilegomena"
and ad<ls <^v ^Kdvois 5^ Kai raf'Ta ripi^Tjin-aL
^a\^l Kai (^iSri SoXo^iujiTO!. The ".Stichometry " of Nicephorus, Patriarch of Constantinople (beginning of ninth century), in like manner includes among the
"Antilegomena", "the Psalms and Odes of Solomon
containing 2100 ffrixoi.". It may be that these odes
are the new psalm-book written for Marcion and ex-
cluded from the Muratorian Canon (end of second
century). The ^aX/wJ iSiuiriKol, prohibited as non-
canonical by the Council of Laodicea (c. A. D. 360),
if taken as "psalms of personal experience", might
readily be the "Odes of Solomon". Lactantius
(Div. instit., IV, xii) writes: "Solomon ita dicit:
Infii'matus est uterus Virginis et accepit foetum et
gravata est, et facta est in multa miserationc mater
virgo ". In the MSS. of Lactantius the gloss is added
in Ode undetngesimo, or in Psalmo undevigesimo. Ode
XIX, verse 6, of the SjTiac translation (discovered by
Harris) reads: " (The Spirit) opened the womb of the
Virgin, and she conceived and brought forth, and the
Virgin became a Mother with many mercies". Lac-
tantius is clearly citing a Latin translation of the
Odes of Solomon, done by the beginning of the fourth
century a. d. The Sahidic "Pistis Sophia", a
Gnostic work of the Copts of the latter part of the
third century, uses the "Odes of Solomon ' as canon-
ical Scripture. Harris (p. 81) thinks he h;is found
traces of the Odes in Saints Irenseus and Clement of
Alexandria. These important apocryphal writings
had been lost for centuries till they were discovered
and published (1909) by J. Rcndel Harris, after they
had lain on his shelves two years in a heap of SjTiac
MSS. brought from the neighbourhood of the Tigris.
The S>Tiac MS. of the odes is of paper probably three
or four hundred years old, contains the "Psalms of
Solomon", the odes (incomplete in the beginning and
the end), coarsely written, pointed here and there in
the Nestorian manner, and at times w'ith the Jacobite
vowels.
Original Text. — (a) The language of the odes may have been Hebrew or Aramaic. Our S3Tiac version is probably from a Greek text, which in turn was a translation of an original Hebrew or .Aramaic text. This opinion is warranted by the continual grouping of the odes with the "P.salms of Solomon", the con- stant reference of them to Solomon as author, and the Semitic spirit which equallj' permeates both sets of IjTics. (b) The time of composition would seem to have been not later than the middle of the second century, nor earlier than the beginning thereof. The terminus ad quern is set by the fact that there is some doubt as to the canonicity of the odes. Such doubt is scarcely intelligible, especially in the third- century author of "Pistis Sophia", unless the odes were composed before the middle of the second cen- tury. The terminus a quo is set by the content of Ode XIX. The painlessness of the Virgin birth (verse 7), though a logical corollary to the dogma of the supernatural character of the Divine bii'th of Jesus, is an idea which we find no trace of even so late iis the Johannine writings. Where;is the absence of a mid- wife from the Virgin birth (verse 8) is a detail which clearly parallels these odes with the apocryphal Gos)iels of the Infancy and prohibits us from assign- ing Ode XIX to a period earlier than the beginning of the second century, (c) The author is considered by Harris and Hausleiter (Theol. Litbl., XXXI, no. 12) to have been a gentile in a Palestine Judeo-Christian community. Harnack thinks that the Grundschrift is Jewish and all Christian sentiments are the super- added work of a Christian interpolator. Cheyne (Hibbert Journal, Oct., 1910) agrees with Harnack.
Imjmrlnnce. — This latest find of Mr. Harris is one of the most important contributions ever made to extant apocryphal Biblical literature. The impor- tance has been greatly exaggerated by Harnack. With his usual keen sense of sources, the Berlin pro- fessor scents here a unique source of the Johannine tradition; in the "Odes of Solomon", he tells us, we have the very "quarry wherefrom the Johannine blocks have been hewn" (p. 111). We have already
