The following is a guest post by OpenDiary blogger Atheist Under Ur Bed. This is part of an ongoing series that will be posted each Monday. You can read the introduction to this series by clicking here.

Welcome once again to Monday School – “The Rational Corrective To All That Nonsense They Tried To Teach You Yesterday!”

I’ve been reading the Bible again. The First Book of Kings – “Commonly called the Third Book of Kings,” according to the King James Version. Which is par for the course when it comes to the Bible, isn’t it?

In case you don’t recall, this is the book which opens with an aged King David cuddling with a highly-recommended young virgin in a desperate attempt to get warm.

I’ve done some research into this  (keeping up on the latest medical techniques is a hobby of mine, you see) and it turns out that what King David was actually engaging in here is technically known as – no, not that. It’s actually known as osphresiology – the practice of imparting new vigor to old people by rubbing them with young people. If respected folklorist Sir James K. Frazer can be believed, a form of it was practiced as late as 1779 when Philip Thicknesse wrote “I am myself, turned of sixty, and in general, though I have lived in various climates, and suffered severely both in body and mind, yet having always partaken of the breath of young women, wherever they lay in my way, I feel none of the infirmities which so often strike the eyes and ears in this great city of sickness [Bath] by men many years younger than myself.” Alas, it apparently worked better for Thicknesse than for King David, judging from the fact that David ends up dying in the very next chapter….

Which brings us to Solomon – David’s seventh son, heir to the throne, and allegedly one of the wisest men to ever live. How do we know Solomon was one of the wisest men who ever lived? The Bible tells us so. You can look it up (1 Kings 4:29-31) but you probably don’t need to. I think I heard about his great wisdom from kids in the street long before I ever read the Bible, and I’m betting you probably did, too.

It always comes as a great shock to actually read the Bible again and relearn that one of the first things Solomon does after he’s introduced to us is have people killed.

“As soon as he acceded to the throne, Solomon consolidated his position by liquidating his opponents ruthlessly, one by one,” is the way the Encyclopedia Britannica puts it.

Try as I might to remember this, Solomon’s pop culture image as a wise old king keeps blotting it out. Every time I go back to the Bible, I consequently arrive expecting to find some remarkable mixture of Lincoln, Einstein, and Gandhi. I’m always startled to find a cold-blooded Michael Corleone instead.

It almost comes as a relief when I race on and find this “wisest of men” happily sacrificing 22,000 oxen and 120,000 sheep after the construction of the Hebrew’s famous First Temple….

So, how is it that the label “wisest of men” managed to stick? Does the Bible provide us with a list of the many wise things that Solomon did the way anyone claiming that Edison was the greatest inventor in history can quickly list the light bulb, the phonograph, and motion pictures? No. All the Bible can do is tell us that when the Queen of Sheba came to see him and test his wisdom with hard questions, he was able to answer every one (1 Kings 10:1-3). This might be convincing if the Bible bothered to tell us what even one of those questions might have been, but it doesn’t give us so much as a hint. It doesn’t even tell us the full name of the Queen so we can track her down and double-check its claim that she visited Solomon at all.

Strange, isn’t it?

In fact, when you get right down to it, about the only thing the Bible tells us to support its claim that Solomon was wise is the story about the two harlots who both claimed the same baby. You know the tale, I’m sure: They come before Solomon, each claim the kid is her own, he says fine, I’ll cut the kid in half and you each can have an equal share. The fake mom happily agrees, saying in effect “What a swell idea!” while the real mom allegedly reveals herself by exclaiming, “No! Give the kid to the other woman – at least it’ll live!” Now, really – if this is such a spooky smart move on Solomon’s part, why haven’t more judges adopted his procedure in child custody cases since? How do we know he didn’t really think cutting the kid in half was a swell idea and that the real mom’s compassion didn’t save the situation by sheer accident? What if both women had been hard-hearted wretches and had eagerly agreed to slaughter the kid to spite the other the way some ex-lovers will slaughter the love of their life in the belief that “If I can’t have him, no one can!”? Would that outcome to the story have marked Solomon as a certified genius, too? Seems to me the story is less about him than about the loving mother – but then I’m not a paid chronicler of an ancient patriarchal religious dictatorship….

As for those actual chroniclers… they may well have taken the story from others and grafted it upon the legend of Solomon some 400 years after his death. It turns out that it’s a very common story in world folklore. The great German Bible scholar Hermann Gunkel suggests it actually originated in India (Myth, Legend, and Custom in the Old Testament, Theodor H. Gaster [Harper & Row, 1975], p. 494).

Does the Bible credit Solomon with anything else besides the wisdom to threaten to cut infants in half?

Well, The Song of Solomon, obviously. Alas, my Britannica says that “The Hebrew title of the book mentions Solomon as the author, but this seems improbable, primarily because of the late vocabulary of the work.” Kinda hard to attribute the Gettysburg Address to Lincoln if it contains words like “groovy,” “Yuppie,” and “Internet,” I guess….

The apocryphal book known as The Wisdom of Solomon was allegedly written by Solomon but is now believed to have been written by an unknown author in Alexandria in the first century BC – that is, some 800 years and 200 miles removed from Solomon. It ended up in the Catholic version of the Bible all the same.

The Book of Proverbs is often attributed to Solomon but is actually a collection of bits and pieces which wasn’t assembled until long after Solomon’s time. Parts may actually have been inspired by him, but other parts seem to have been a conscious rip-off of an Egyptian work known as “The Instruction of Amenemope.”

Among the sayings which might actually have come from Solomon is Proverbs 13:24: “He that spareth his rod hateth his son; but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes,” which is often rendered nowadays as “Spare the rod and spoil the child” – advice which modern child psychologists seem to universally condemn as most unwise.

Anything else?

Well, 1 Kings 11:3 tells us that Solomon had 700 wives and 300 concubines. If that was wise, it constitutes a kind of wisdom I missed learning about in health class.

1 Kings 11:4 goes on to tell us that these women actually convinced Solomon to worship other gods, presenting the Bible believer with something of a dilemma: Either Solomon really was wise here when he saw the Hebrew God to be an inferior sort of deity; or he made one of the worst sorts of mistakes an ancient Hebrew could make and the Bible is consequently wrong to call him one of the wisest men who ever lived.

The Britannica rather succinctly tips us off to its point of view when it says “Solomon is perhaps one of the most overrated figures in the Old Testament…. A son of the harem, Solomon had had little contact with the people of his realm, and he used many of them in [forced] labor battalions in his vast building programs to the economic disadvantage of Israel. By fostering social discontent in such ventures, Solomon prepared the way for the disintegration of the united kingdom…. Solomon’s oppressive taxation and commercial expansion brought about retaliation and rebellion.” It also says that although Solomon increased the wealth of Israel, it probably was not passed down to the people.

Upon his death, power passed to an unfit son and things rapidly deteriorated even further….

So: Wisest man who ever lived? Or just one more weird figure in the Bible who’s bizarrely considered something he wasn’t by a society that’s constantly being misinformed, deceived, and misled by its religious institutions?

You be the judge.

I’m sure you can’t do any worse than at least one guy I could mention….