What is that building out yonder, glittering in the sunshine? Have you
not heard?
It is the House of the Forest of Lebanon. King Solomon has just taken
to it his bride, the princess of Egypt. You see the pillars of the
portico and a great tower, adorned with a thousand shields of gold, hung
on the outside of the tower. Five hundred of the shields of gold were
manufactured at Solomon’s order, and five hundred were captured by David,
his father, in battle. See how they blaze in the noonday sun!
Solomon goes up to the ivory stairs of his throne between twelve lions in
statuary, and sits down on the back of the golden bull, the head of the
bronze beast turned toward the people.
The family and attendants of the king are so many that the caterers of
the place have to provide every day one hundred sheep and thirteen oxen,
besides the birds and the venison. I hear the stamping and pawing of four
thousand horses in the royal stables.
They were important officials who had charge of the work of gathering the
straw and the barley for all these horses.
King Solomon was an early riser, tradition says, and used to take a ride
out at daybreak; and when in his white apparel, behind the swiftest
horses of all the kingdom and followed by mounted archers in purple, as
the cavalcade dashed through the streets of Jerusalem I suppose it was
something worth getting up at five o’clock in the morning to look at.
Solomon was not like some of the kings of the present day--crowned
imbecility. All the splendor of his palace and retinue was eclipsed by
his intellectual powers. Why, he seemed to know every thing. He was the
first great naturalist the world ever saw. Peacocks from India strutted
the basaltic walks, and apes chattered in the trees and deer stalked
the parks, and there were aquariums with foreign fish and aviaries with
foreign birds; and tradition says these birds were so well tamed that
Solomon might walk clear across the city under the shadow of their wings
as they hovered and flitted about him.
King Solomon had a great reputation for the conundrums and riddles that
he made and guessed. He and King Hiram, his neighbor, used to sit by the
hour and ask riddles, each one paying in money if he could not answer or
guess the riddle.
The Solomonic navy visited all the world, and the sailors, of course,
talked about the wealth of their king, and about the riddles and enigmas
that he made and solved.
Solomon had at his command gold to the value of £680,000,000, and he had
silver to the value of £1,029,000,377. The Queen of Sheba made him a nice
little present of £720,000, and King Hiram made him a present of the same
amount.
If Solomon had lost the value of a whole realm out of his pocket, it
would hardly have been worth his while to stoop down and pick it up.
He wrote one thousand and five songs. He wrote three thousand proverbs.
He wrote about almost every thing. The Bible says distinctly he wrote
about plants, from the cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop that grows out of
the wall, and about birds and beasts and fishes.
No doubt he put off his royal robes, and put on the hunter’s trappings,
and went out with his arrows to bring down the rarest specimens of birds;
and then with his fishing apparatus he went down to the streams to bring
up the denizens of the deep, and plunged into the forest and found the
rarest specimens of flowers. He then came back to his study and wrote
books about zoology, the science of animals; about ichthyology, the
science of fishes; about ornithology, the science of birds; about botany,
the science of plants.
Did any other city ever behold so wonderful a man?
His fame spread abroad, and Queen Balkis, away to the south, heard of
it. She sent messengers with a few riddles that she would like to have
Solomon solve and a few puzzles which she would like to have him find out.
She sent to King Solomon, among other things, a diamond with a hole so
small that a needle would not penetrate it, asking him to thread that
diamond. Solomon took a worm and put it at the opening in the diamond,
and the worm crawled through, leaving the thread in the diamond.
This queen also sent a goblet to Solomon, asking him to fill it with
water that did not pour from the sky, and that did not rush out from the
earth. Immediately the wise man put a slave on the back of a swift horse
and galloped him around and around the park until the horse was nigh
exhausted, and from the perspiration of the horse the goblet was filled.
She also sent King Solomon five hundred boys in girls’ dress and five
hundred girls in boys’ dress, wondering if he would be acute enough to
find out the deception. Immediately Solomon, when he saw them wash their
faces, knew from the way they applied the water it was all a cheat.
Queen Balkis was so pleased with the acuteness of Solomon that she said:
“I will just go and see him.”
Yonder it comes--the cavalcade--horses and dromedaries, chariots and
charioteers, jingling harness and clattering hoofs, and blazing shields,
and flying ensigns, and clapping cymbals.
The place is saturated with perfumes. She brings cinnamon, saffron,
calamus, frankincense and all manner of sweet spices. As the retinue
sweeps through the gate the armed guards inhale the aroma. “Halt!” cry
the charioteers, as the wheels grind the gravel in front of the pillared
portico of the king. Queen Balkis alights in an atmosphere bewitching
with perfume. As the dromedaries are driven up to the king’s storehouses
and the bundles of camphor are unloaded, and the cinnamon sacks and the
boxes of spices are opened, the purveyors of the palace discovered, so
the Bible relates: “Of spices, great abundance; neither was there any
such spices as the Queen of Sheba gave to King Solomon.”
Well, my friends, you know that all theologians agree in making Solomon
a type of Christ and making the Queen of Sheba a type of every truth
seeker, and I take the responsibility of saying that all the spikenard,
cassia and frankincense which the Queen of Sheba brought to King Solomon
are mightily suggestive of the sweet spice of our holy religion.