The Wisdom and Cynicism of Solomon (#14 in a series)

 Most people have heard of King Solomon, even if they don't know much about the Bible. He was famous for two things, (a) his wisdom, and (b) his financial wealth.  To a lesser degree, he was also known for his harem; more on that later.  Solomon was also the 17th of 19 sons of King David, not exactly a power position in line for succession to the throne, but he had a bit of help from his mom, and after having his brother Adonijah executed on a pretext, the rest, as they say, was history.


Most people are also familiar with some form of a Wishing Fable too: a genie in a bottle, a sprite at the bottom of a well, or perhaps a dryad in an oak tree, a golden lamp housing a djinn, Ryūjin the sea-dragon, fairy godmothers, or a leprechaun—if you can catch him.   While as children we fantasized about what wish we might make, only one man in the Bible ever had God pop the question.

In 1 Kings 3:5 we read:   The LORD appeared to Solomon one night in a dream and told him, "Ask me for whatever you want and I'll give it to you."

You can read the entire story in chapter 3, but a condensed version of his answer was:

    O LORD my God, You have made Your servant king in place of my father David, yet I am but a little child; So give Your servant an understanding heart to judge Your people to discern between good and evil. For who is able to judge this great people of Yours?"
I should point out that he wasn't a "little child" in the natural.  He was old enough to have made an alliance with Pharaoh king of Egypt and married his daughter. In that culture, referring to himself as a little child before the Lord was a sign of his humility and his respect for God. It is also worth noting that he called the Israelites "God's people," not "my subjects."  So he not only gave a good answer, but he answered with a good heart and a good attitude.

I will put God's reply from verses 11-14, in the footnotes below,¹ but God was quite pleased with that response!

So, how did Solomon know what to ask for in the first place? Simple. His father, King David, had taught him. We learn that in Proverbs 4:3-9.

    When I was a son to my father, Tender and the only son in the sight of my mother,
    Then he taught me and said to me, "Let your heart hold fast my words; Keep my commandments and live;
    Acquire wisdom! Acquire understanding! Do not forget nor turn away from the words of my mouth.
    "Do not forsake her, and she will guard you; Love her, and she will watch over you.
    "The beginning of wisdom is: Acquire wisdom; And with all your acquiring, get understanding.
    "Prize her, and she will exalt you; She will honor you if you embrace her.
    "She will place on your head a garland of grace; She will present you with a crown of beauty."

His Dad had taught him the right answer!

Solomon eventually wrote portions of the Book of Proverbs, the Song of Solomon, and Ecclesiastes.  The reason that we are spending so much time looking at Solomon's life story is so that when he writes about animals and the meaning of life, we will have a frame of reference for putting it in context.  This is needed because the end of his life was not like the beginning—

Deuteronomy 17:16, 17 outlines three things a king must not do:

The king, moreover, must not (1) acquire great numbers of horses for himself or make the people return to Egypt to get more of them, for the LORD has told you, "You are not to go back that way again."  He must not (2) take many wives, or his heart will be led astray.  He must not (3) accumulate large amounts of silver and gold for himself, the key being "for himself."

1.  To be clear, these horses mentioned in Deuteronomy are not pets. This verse is talking about a military buildup that exceeds the peacetime needs for readiness, and about returning to old paradigms for planning when no one is actually threatening to do you in.  Solomon amassed an army of 12,000 horsemen and 1,400 charioteers, far more that policing the borders would have required. And it wasn't an all-volunteer army either!  Solomon was drafting young men who did not want to be there and ruining their lives for no real purpose other than his own pride.

2.  Solomon had 700 wives and 300 concubines, so just as he had needlessly meddled in the lives of young men through conscription, he had also made nearly a thousand women little more than well-kept inmates. It is hard to imagine that he kept all their names and stories straight. Moreover, his wives included Hittites, Moabites, Edomites, Sidonians, and Ammorites. These were nations with which the Lord had forbidden intermarriage because it would introduce foreign gods that got their power from the demonic realm.

3.  God did not have a problem with Israel being a rich nation. God Himself had blessed Israel with precious metals. The problem here is that Solomon saw fit to bless himself. The King James phrases it this way in Deuteronomy 17:17, "neither shall he greatly multiply to himself silver and gold." But Solomon had centralized the national government, taking power away from and taxing the original tribal system that God had ordained.

God spared Solomon the full brunt of judgment for the sake of his father, David, but when Solomon died, the kingdom was shattered in two. So with this background in mind, let's look at some of the things Solomon had to say² about animals and the afterlife—

 16Furthermore, I have seen under the sun that in the place of justice there is wickedness and in the place of righteousness there is wickedness. 17I said to myself, "God will judge both the righteous man and the wicked man," for a time for every matter and for every deed is there. 18I said to myself concerning the sons of men, "God has surely tested them in order for them to see that they are but beasts." 19For the fate of the sons of men and the fate of beasts is the same. As one dies so dies the other; indeed, they all have the same breath and there is no advantage for man over beast, for all is vanity. 20All go to the same place. All came from the dust and all return to the dust. 21Who knows that the breath of man ascends upward and the breath of the beast descends downward to the earth?
— from Chapter 3 

Having said earlier in the chapter that there is a time and season for everything, Solomon begins to expand on the place of final Justice. As wise as Solomon may have been, Ecclesiastes does not contain the fullness of the Gospel. It offers no fully formed concept of resurrection. In fact, the phrase "under the sun" identifies a strictly physical Earth, and as such, it would be wrong to overly spiritualize this passage. If you look long enough, you will find some commentator who will make these verses fit just about any doctrine you wish! But here is my take on it:

18 - God tests men so that they are aware of their own mortality. Our earth-body is not significantly different than an animal's.
19 - Physical bodies on this current Earth are subject to death.
20 - Decomposition is a fact.
21 - Scientific observation of our physical world alone cannot answer where the spirit goes.

The distinction is made between the incorporeal breath and the corporeal flesh. The good news is that ruach, the Hebrew for breath, is used for both men and beasts, so even though the question is posed with one ascending and one descending, it is the same word—he is not calling the soul of man an apple and the souls of beasts oranges. This is a passage about mortality; it is not about immortality.

As a broader comparison, we can show that even within the set of mankind alone, there can be both upward and downward; compare with Proverbs 15:24: The path of life leads upward for the prudent, that he may turn away from Sheol beneath. This both foreshadows the choice of eternal life offered in the Gospel and reflects the law's option of Deuteronomy 30:19, to choose life. 

Even though mankind's mortality was emphasized in verses 16-20, Solomon had referenced eternity earlier in Chapter 3.
3:11 - He (God) has also set eternity in their (men's) heart...
3:14 - I know that everything God does will remain forever;
Our present life on Earth should be viewed as a segment of something much bigger. To focus only on this present life is Pursuit of the Wind, cf Ecclesiastes 1:17.

By contrast, Solomon drops this doozie in 9:5, "the living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing, and they have no more reward, for the memory of them is forgotten." This actually contradicts other verses in Ecclesiastes unless you realize that Solomon is sticking with a strict Earth-perspective here.  And most of this book does conform to that perspective as we are constantly reminded by phrasing such as "under the sun" and "vanity, all vanity." Instead of reading verse 5 as one sentence, it should probably be read as four lines of poetry because it is illustrating the vanity of earth-based perspective, not stating a literal fact. 

In chapter 12, the author goes all poetic with imagery³ of aging and death. Verse 7 offers this intriguing insight:  then the dust will return to the earth as it was, and the spirit will return to God who gave it.  The conventional interpretation of that verse holds that the body decays back into elemental form and the spirit goes to God for judgment.  But the use of the word "return" opens a possibility that the spirit retreats back to a place of premortal existence or that we are fetched home again.

That concept contradicts what I was taught as a child: that all that we are began at conception and any preexistence is limited to God's thoughts and plans.  Yet, the more that I look into that mystery, the harder it has become to accept the dogmatic tenet that our inter-dimensional spirit has to play by the physicality rules of Earth.  Wouldn't the "in God's image" part of us exist in God?

Read carefully; don't add more to what I am saying.  Each unique human soul begins at conception because we must begin on Earth to be fully human. If it could occur some other way, then Jesus would not have had to have been born of Mary.⁴ But I have not found anything in scripture that would negate the "raw material" for our spirit from having existence in the spirit realm prior to joining up with our body at conception.  If you think you can find something, please put it in the notes below. 

This requires making a distinction between the spirit and soul, but Hebrews 4:12 does that—the Word of God pierces to the division of soul and spirit.  Man became a living soul when God breathed a spiritual element into the dust of earth elements.


Well, we are not going to solve that on-going mystery in this blog, but there are at least two parts of the issue that have a bearing on our pets-in-heaven question:
1.  Are we spirit that became a human soul at conception? Or are we a soul, originating at conception, who possesses a spirit that allows communication with God?
2.  Does God exist outside of time, or does time exist inside God?


In Summary...
  Solomon's cynicism that nearly swamps the reader of Ecclesiastes has to be held in context.  When the words seem hopeless and nihilistic, that is because he was writing poetry from a humanistic point of view; it is not about God's thoughts across eternity except in a few points of contrast.
   One of the major themes of Ecclesiastes is that man ought to be recognizing that God is far bigger and greater than our temporary existence. The book is not about heaven, but about earth's limitations.

Although we don't learn a lot here about pets going to heaven, we have discovered why two of the counter-arguments that pets do not go to heaven are invalid. (1) We learned that Solomon's statement about the fate of humans being like that of the animals was limited to the physical bodies made from the dust of the earth and that we should not try to extrapolate some spiritual-dimension meaning from his description of the physical dimension.  (2)  We learned that despite Solomon's reverse-psychology approach of calling life "vanity" and "meaningless," the theme of his poetry is advocating our pursuit of the Eternal God.

He ends on this note:
The conclusion, when all has been heard, is: fear God and keep His commandments, because this applies to every person. For God will bring every act to judgment, everything which is hidden, whether it is good or evil. Ecclesiastes 12:13, 14 

We can be confident that in the end, God will "do the right thing" when it comes to pets in heaven. In the meantime, out-of-context verses in Ecclesiastes should not be used for "proof" that animals could not go to heaven. 


Footnotes

¹ 1 Kings 3:11-14   God said to him, “Because you have asked this thing and have not asked for yourself long life, nor have asked riches for yourself, nor have you asked for the life of your enemies, but have asked for yourself discernment to understand justice, behold, I have done according to your words. Behold, I have given you a wise and discerning heart, so that there has been no one like you before you, nor shall one like you arise after you. “I have also given you what you have not asked, both riches and honor, so that there will not be any among the kings like you all your days. “If you walk in My ways, keeping My statutes and commandments, as your father David walked, then I will prolong your days.”

² Traditionally, Solomon is accepted as the author of Ecclesiastes.  This is based on the author identifying himself in 1:1 as the son of David, king in Jerusalem, and verse 1:12 where he says that he was king over Israel in Jerusalem. This title, "King over Israel in Jerusalem," is unique to this verse of scripture and Solomon is the only person it fits completely. His father ruled from Hebron at first, and the northern tribes of Israel broke away from Jerusalem after Solomon's death. 
   The author also calls himself the Koheleth (qoheleth), which can also mean a collector, but is often translated as 'preacher' in English Bibles. Several commentaries that I checked are not satisfied with that translation, and the one that I thought made the best argument suggested using "lecturer" as a better fit.  In today's Western culture which is so far removed from Solomon's Temple in both time and space, the word "preacher" can evoke the showmanship of a televangelist, whereas "lecturer" stays closer to the message. 

³ The Adam Clarke Commentary has a detailed interpretation of the imagery. He posits that almond blossoms in verse 5 are old men with white hair, and the silver cord in verse 6 is the medulla oblongata.  Here is a link for more.

⁴ This is, at least in one regard, an example of how to solve the logic problem of God making a rock so big that He could not lift it. Here was an area of authority that God had restricted Himself from occupying because He has given it exclusively to man. So God became man.