Solomon
c. 990–c. 931 BCE · Ancient Israel
“To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:”
The lineage through Solomon
Inspired(7)
who Solomon shaped
- Melville called it "the truest of all books" — and meant it as the spine of Moby-Dick
- In the Try-Works chapter, Ishmael names Ecclesiastes "the fine hammered steel of woe," the standard against which all other grief is measured
- The vanity, the wind-chasing, the wisdom-that-is-sorrow of Solomon becomes the whole metaphysical weather of the whaling voyage
- Tolstoy turned this book's verdict into a deathbed
- He quoted Solomon's vanity of vanities at the heart of his own spiritual crisis in A Confession — and even faulted the English rendering, the mark of a man reading it closely
- The Death of Ivan Ilych is that quarrel made into a story: a man who lived for the world's approvals discovering, too late, that all of it was vapor
via Praise of Folly
- Erasmus made Ecclesiastes his chief witness — the one book of Scripture Folly can call to the stand
- Folly opens her case for universal foolishness by quoting Solomon directly, including the Vulgate tag "stultorum infinitus est numerus" — "the number of fools is infinite"
- The audacity is the point: she turns the Bible's own wisdom literature into testimony that folly rules the world, and that even King Solomon was a fool
- Bunyan lifted his most famous episode straight from here — The Pilgrim's Progress's Vanity Fair is named for Ecclesiastes' "vanity of vanities, all is vanity"
- The Preacher's verdict on the emptiness of worldly things becomes a town the pilgrims have to pass through and resist
- One verse, set as an epigraph in Bunyan's text, generated a whole allegorical set-piece
via Confessions
- A line from the Wisdom of Solomon runs straight into Augustine's most personal book
- Augustine quotes its insight that wisdom is God's to give — not something a man seizes by his own effort — and folds it into the Confessions (10.29) as the hinge of his own surrender
- Its formula for a measured, numbered, weighted creation surfaces again in his accounts of the ordered world
- One verse out of Proverbs became the engine of an American life
- Franklin's father drilled Solomon's line into him — "Seest thou a man diligent in his calling, he shall stand before kings" (22:29) — and Franklin made it his work-ethic creed
- He quotes it by name in the Autobiography, then notes he has since stood before five
- One line surfaces in Thoreau's woods — Ecclesiastes 9:4, "a living dog is better than a dead lion," pressed into service to argue the living present beats a revered, dead past
- A "time to reap, a time to sow" echo turns up too, though Thoreau favored Hindu and Persian scripture — the engagement is glancing, not structural
Famous Quotes
“Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.”
“Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.”
“Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.”
“Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave: the coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehement flame.”
About Solomon
David's son and Israel's wisest king, builder of the First Temple in Jerusalem. Traditionally credited with Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, and the apocryphal Wisdom of Solomon, he became the archetype of wisdom in the Western tradition.
Solomon, Ranked
According to 
- Proverbs~450 BCSolomonEasy·Short·60 pagesInfluence—Popularity—BibleWisdomHebrew
- Song of Solomon~300 BCSolomonModerate·Quick·11 pagesInfluence—Popularity—BibleLyricHebrew
- Ecclesiastes~250 BCSolomonModerate·Quick·22 pagesInfluence—Popularity—BibleWisdomHebrew
- Wisdom of Solomon~50 BCSolomonModerate·Quick·42 pagesInfluence—Popularity—BibleWisdomAncient Greek