The Fate of Nations

We are all familiar with the phenomenon of powerful nations that appear invincible and eternally set in place suddenly—and at the moment inexplicably—vanishing, some from the power roster of major players and some from the forum of nations entirely. The Roman Empire, the British Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Soviet Union are all good examples. A mere century ago, the Brits ran more of the world than any nation ever had, holding sway over a full 23% of the world’s population and controlling an even more unbelievable 24% of the earth’s land mass. Today, they’re down to fourteen mostly-tiny colonies (now called overseas territories), three of which have no population at all. On the other hand, the Soviet Union—once one of the world’s two superpowers—didn’t so much shrink as simply stop existing, a turn of events that would have seemed impossible to imagine back when I was a child at P.S. 3 and we would practice hiding under our desks with our hands clasped reassuringly over our heads in case of a Soviet nuclear missile attack.

Yes, of course, there are also once-sovereign countries that stop existing as independent entities because they were absorbed into other countries like Wales, Sikkim, or Hawaii. And then there are nations that stop existing merely because they managed to morph into alternate versions of themselves, somewhat in the way Czechoslovakia turned into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1993. But the story I wish to write about this week is about a nation that broke apart neither as a self-defeating response to an all-powerful enemy gathering menacingly at the gate nor because the nation abandoned its own will to exist as an independent entity, but because it dissolved the glue that held its peoples together by abandoning its most foundational principles, thus losing its national will to self-define as a single country founded on an immutable set of shared ideals. You can trust that I speak here of what I know: I have spent my entire adult life studying this story and trying to internalize the lessons it has to offer those who take the time thoughtfully to contemplate its details.

When King David died, he left a fully unified kingdom to Solomon, his son and chosen successor. And Solomon starts off well, taking the reins of leadership, dealing firmly and well with those who opposed his ascension to the throne, becoming wise beyond the telling of it through his studies and his willingness to learn from the greatest sages of the day, and successfully constructing the great Temple in Jerusalem with which his name would forever be associated. And then things begin to go agley.

The Torah says explicitly that the king of Israel may not create a personal cavalry and specifically that he may not travel to Egypt to purchase the horses that such a fighting force would require. But that is exactly what Solomon did, putting together a personal militia consisting of 1400 chariots, 12,000 horsemen and horses—a force so astounding that the Bible even pauses to note what the price of a horse was in those days (150 shekels) so that readers can figure out the total for themselves and be suitably astounded.

The Torah, in my opinion more than wisely, says that the king must not amass a personal fortune in gold and silver. But that is precisely what Solomon did, and to such an extent that Scripture pauses to note that even the drinking vessels in the palace were made of pure gold and that the king’s throne itself, made of expensive and hard-to-procure ivory, was overlaid with pure gold.

The Torah makes a particular point that the king, although not restricted to a single wife, may not “multiply wives, lest his heart turn away from the worship of the one God.” The idea seems simple enough: if the king is left to marry as many different women as he wishes, he will inevitably marry foreign women devoted to the worship of their national deities who will seduce the king as well into their worship. But that is precisely what Solomon did, allowing his libido to override his allegiance to the Torah and eventually taking the astounding number of 700 wives. But those hundreds upon hundreds of women were not enough to satisfy the king’s apparently unquenchable desire for female company and so he took, in addition to his wives, another 300 women as concubines for a grand total of one thousand women. And the result was just as feared: Solomon, eager to please each wife by appearing to embrace her native culture was slowly seduced into the worship of foreign gods. (I know all this runs directly counter to the stories we tell children in Hebrew School about King Solomon, but I assure you I am not making any of this up. Feel free to read the tenth and eleventh chapters of the First Book of Kings to check my references.)

And so the picture slowly emerges of a nation becoming loosed from its moorings, one in which the mantle of leadership has passed to a well-meaning soul who lacks the inner fortitude and moral courage to resist being seduced by his own libidinous yearnings for wealth, power, and a never-ending supply of bedmates. It is not an appealing portrait, nor was it meant to be. Indeed, so intensely unpleasant is the story as told that it became commonplace later on to imagine that Kohelet, the Book of Ecclesiastes, was written by Solomon in his old age as a way of renouncing the follies of his own younger years. But the author or authors of books in the Bible that tell Solomon’s story in detail know nothing of Kohelet and simply draw the portrait with which they wish to present their readers as clearly and simply as possible.

And what happened next was the same thing that happens to any objects in the physical universe when the glue that has successfully been holding them together hardens and dries out, thus becoming unable to hold those objects together any longer: they fall apart and become related to each other solely in the context of shared history but not the context of daily reality.

Solomon was the last king of a unified Israelite nation, which had, in the end, only three monarchs on its throne: mad Saul, heroic David, and self-doomed Solomon. There was no next chapter: after Solomon died, the united kingdom dissolved and was replaced by two successor states, Judah in the south and Israel in the north. I suppose different people in ancient times interpreted this in different ways. But the great historian/s whose work became our Book of Kings had their own way of interpreting the events that led to the dissolution of the unified kingdom: “Therefore the Lord said to Solomon, Since you have not kept my covenant and my statutes, I shall tear the kingdom away from you and give it to one of your servants. For the sake of your father David’s memory, however, I will leave the kingdom intact for all of your days and tear it instead from the hand of your son.” And that is exactly what happened: Solomon’s son Rechavam (for some reason called Rehoboam in English Bibles) reigned over the kingdom of Judah in the south which was inhabited by members solely of the tribes of Judah and Benjamin, while Solomon’s servant Yeravam (called Jeroboam, equally weirdly, in English Bible) became king of the northern kingdom of Israel inhabited by the ten northern tribes.

What happened next I’ll write about in detail some other time, but the lesson of this part of the larger narrative is clear: nations survive neither when they create enormous armies or amass great wealth nor when their rulers live lives of excess and luxury beyond the imagination of most of the populace, but solely when they remain true to the ideas and principles upon which the nation was founded in the first place. The Israelite nation had several basic national principles in place by Solomon’s day, but monotheism—the belief in the one God—was the foundation stone upon which all the others rested. So it was inevitable that when Solomon succumbed to the worship of alien deities as a way of propitiating his many wives (and also, presumably, because his personal militia and his vast wealth made him feel invincible), he would soon become personally responsible for the dissolution of the union with his own dissolute ways. Countries, Scripture teaches us, live by their ideas, by the virtues they wish their nation to embody on the geopolitical level just as they personally embody them on the individual one. Nations, even enormously powerful ones, do not get to endure forever merely because they have a lot of money or guns: they survive because they remain true to themselves, because they don’t abandon their most basic principles, because their growth forward into the future is guided by the same principles that guided the nation when it was first founded.

As we make our way through these next weeks, it would behoove us all to devote some time to Solomon’s story. Yes, surely it is true that people suffer in our world because they personally lack the power and the wealth necessary to keep the forces of darkness at bay. But that is simply not how things work at the national level: nations, including immensely powerful ones, survive in this world based on the degree to which they keep faith with their finest national ideals and with the virtues their founders set in place as the principles intended to guide the nation forward into the future.