Solomon

• son of King David and Bathsheba; continued father’s tyranny and taxation; built temple, navy; harem numbered 1000

97:9.15David’s cor­rupt po­lit­i­cal ma­chine be­gan to get per­sonal pos­ses­sion of land in the north in vi­o­la­tion of the He­brew mores and pres­ently gained con­trol of the car­a­van tar­iffs for­merly col­lected by the Phil­is­tines. And then came a se­ries of atroc­i­ties cli­maxed by the mur­der of Uriah. All ju­di­cial ap­peals were ad­ju­di­cated at Je­ru­sa­lem; no longer could “the el­ders” mete out jus­tice. No won­der re­bel­lion broke out. To­day, Ab­sa­lom might be called a dem­a­gogue; his mother was a Ca­naan­ite. There were a half dozen con­tenders for the throne be­sides the son of Bathsheba—Sol­o­mon.

97:9.16Af­ter David’s death Sol­o­mon purged the po­lit­i­cal ma­chine of all north­ern in­flu­ences but con­tin­ued all of the tyranny and tax­a­tion of his fa­ther’s regime. Sol­o­mon bankrupted the na­tion by his lav­ish court and by his elab­o­rate build­ing pro­gram: There was the house of Lebanon, the palace of Pharaoh’s daugh­ter, the tem­ple of Yah­weh, the king’s palace, and the restora­tion of the walls of many cities. Sol­o­mon cre­ated a vast He­brew navy, op­er­ated by Syr­ian sailors and trad­ing with all the world. His harem num­bered al­most one thou­sand.

• not in Joseph father of Jesus’ ancestry

122:1.1Joseph, the hu­man fa­ther of Je­sus (Joshua ben Joseph), was a He­brew of the He­brews, al­beit he car­ried many non-Jew­ish racial strains which had been added to his an­ces­tral tree from time to time by the fe­male lines of his pro­gen­i­tors. The an­ces­try of the fa­ther of Je­sus went back to the days of Abra­ham and through this ven­er­a­ble pa­tri­arch to the ear­lier lines of in­her­i­tance lead­ing to the Sume­ri­ans and Nod­ites and, through the south­ern tribes of the an­cient blue man, to An­don and Fonta. David and Sol­o­mon were not in the di­rect line of Joseph’s an­ces­try, nei­ther did Joseph’s lin­eage go di­rectly back to Adam. Joseph’s im­me­di­ate an­ces­tors were me­chan­ics—builders, car­pen­ters, ma­sons, and smiths. Joseph him­self was a car­pen­ter and later a con­trac­tor. His fam­ily be­longed to a long and il­lus­tri­ous line of the no­bil­ity of the com­mon peo­ple, ac­cen­tu­ated ever and anon by the ap­pear­ance of un­usual in­di­vid­u­als who had dis­tin­guished them­selves in con­nec­tion with the evo­lu­tion of re­li­gion on Uran­tia.