God asks Solomon what he wants and Solomon asks for wisdom. God is pleased with him for asking for something more selfless than long life or wealth or military conquest, so he gives him wisdom plus all those other things he didn’t ask for. Solomon quickly becomes famous for his wisdom all through Israel and beyond. People come from all over the world to hear him adjudicate disputes among his people. One such dispute is that famous story of Solomon threatening to cut a baby in half when he hears two women fighting over it. The baby’s true mother would rather see it given to the other woman than killed.
Solomon also gets the ball rolling on building a proper temple for God. He contracts with the king of Tyre because he says those people are the best at collecting lumber and he needs them to get this job done right. The king of Tyre blushes and gives Solomon a good deal on the labor, trading his men for Israelite grain and oil.
There’s a story of Benjamin Franklin turning a rival into a friend in the continental congress by borrowing a rare book from him. He said that if he had just acted friendly and said nice things to the man, it would have come off as insincere and they would have gotten along even worse. By getting the man to do him a favor though, it made the man basically justify to himself that Franklin must be someone worth doing a favor for, so he must be an okay guy. I think Solomon’s probably wise enough to run that game on the king of Tyre.
The workers from Israel and from Tyre collect lumber from the city of Byblos. The Middle East isn’t really known for its lush forests these days, but there used to be some good places for harvesting wood. Byblos was a big place for getting wood, so they had a lot of wood by-products around all the time like sawdust and stuff. Eventually someone decided to see what he could do with wood pulp and invented paper. There’s not a lot of paper left over from back then because it wasn’t nearly as tough as the flattened, woven reed mats called papyrus that the Egyptians used, so they didn’t hold up as well over the last couple thousand years. These sheets also didn’t travel very well. They would basically fall apart if you looked at them the wrong way. The only advantage they had over papyrus was that they were much thinner and could more easily be collected into sheaves. In Byblos, they started affixing these sheaves together and the resulting invention was named after the town. In Latin, they called it a biblius, which we translate into English as something like book or library. It is also where we get the word bible.
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