It need hardly be added that the Solomonic regime was able to silence criticism. There are two ways to silence criticism. One is the way of heavy handed prohibition that is backed by forceful sanction. The treatment of Jereboam in 1 Kings 11:40 [Solomon sought therefore to kill Jeroboam; but Jeroboam arose, and fled into Egypt, unto Shishak king of Egypt, and was in Egypt until the death of Solomon.] suggests this way of handling criticism, which is consistent with the style of bloodbath with which the long reign began (1 Kings 2). It is curious that, given the extended criticism of Ahijah the prophet in 1 Kings 11, Solomon makes no response. Indeed the prophet is ignored. That is the second way of handling criticism; develop a natural immunity and remain totally impervious to criticism. The narrator seems to present that response of cold, resistant silence in deliberate irony. The same response is evident after the strong warning of 1 Kings 9:1-9. Immediately the narrative responds: "At the end of twenty years in which Solomon had built two houses . . . King Solomon gave to Hiram twenty cities in the land of Galilee." The royal consciousness was completely contained. Criticism had no viable alternative ground and did not need to be taken seriously. If Solomon had had television at his disposal he would have managed to buy the harshest critics and make them talk-show celebrities.
I'm going to pause here not only because it is deep with textual citations that I hope everyone is looking into. But also because Walter Brueggemann's translation of the "wisdom of Solomon" into the understandable language of our common as dirt experience with the method silencing them by killing them or threatening them as Trump and his supporters do, (as Putin or Duterte do with far more deadly results, or as the Kim regime in North Korea does to Stalinist levels of oppression, all making Trump envious) or doing it the modern "democratic" way of co-opting the opposition or, going with the television parallel, ignoring them into insignificance, which was a brilliant sharp and astute observation to have been made in the late 1970s. It is a practical example of how the deep study of scripture is anything but irrelevant, it gave him insight into things that the secular left still hasn't figured out in any effective way so as to counter the very same thing done by our imperial establishment. Indeed, the most prominent secular opposition media has enabled the imperial system in knee capping the only real political alternative to it.
The Democratic Party, after the Dixiecrat migration to the Republican Party in the 1960s, has, indeed been anything but perfect but it was in 1964 as it is today the only alternative to Republican-fascism. The fascism which Trump, Barr, McConnell and the fascists on the Supreme Court are doing their best to install is, in fact, the fascism of, by and for the wealthy which Nixon clearly hoped to deliver and which his own appointments to the Court aided and furthered, often with the "liberals" on the court going along so that they could fulfill the slogans of "civil liberties" as imagined by the ACLU and "liberal" law scholars. The "liberals" believing with the same late 18th century faith as the founders imposed some of the worst features in our Constitution that "nature" would sort it all out. As if "nature" has produced egalitarianism anywhere in any known species. That that regime of lies and envy and resentment and temptation and totally unrealistic dreams was made the equal of hard truth in the eyes of "justice" is certainly to blame for where we are now.
Even the line of disastrous rulings overturning the campaign finance reform that Democrats AND SOME REPUBLICANS! tried to correct the system with in the revelations of the crimes of Nixon, John Mitchell et al was accomplished by the Courts, proto-fascist as well as "liberal" equating money with speech and, in the fullness of that line of rulings, in such things as Citizens United, that corporations enjoyed the same rights as real human beings was, for all intents and purposes, supported by the "liberals" and, especially, the "leftists" sold with the words of the First Amendment so divorced from any reality and so any meaning. I suspect that the very people who brought Israel from the egalitarian commonwealth of Moses to the imperial inequality of Solomon used the most piously beloved and revered of phrases of The Law as support for what they were doing. It's one of the easiest ways to co-opt the opposition, to use the words they revere to peddle their complicity with the very thing they are supposed to oppose. You see it all the time with "liberals" and "leftists" in the media, you can read it in the lefty magazines, even as they ignore the lessons of their own RECENT experience, as in their enabling the installation of Trump by pushing the Greens or discouraging lefties from voting for Hillary Clinton. If I were within an arms length of someone who said, "You're not going to scare me for voting for the Dems with the Supreme Court," as I've heard play-lefties say for a quarter of a century, I can't guarantee you in 2020 that they wouldn't get a smack in the face.
There is no concrete evidence about the loss of energy in the regime. Indeed, the narrative suggests a remarkable level of energy toward all kinds of state developments, especially in economics and architecture. But one may at least wonder about the "happiness" of Solomon's community (1 Kings 4:20, 10:8), which reflects the happiness of satiation. It is at least thinkable that happiness characterized by satiation is not the same as the joy of freedom. It is evident that immunity to any transcendent voice and disregard of neighbor leads finally to the disappearance of passion. And where passion disappears there will not be any serious humanizing energy.
"It is evident that immunity to any transcendent voice and disregard of neighbor leads finally to the disappearance of passion. And where passion disappears there will not be any serious humanizing energy."
It is tempting to focus solely on the general apathy that characterizes the American public, 40% of which is clearly OK with any outrageous thing that Trump and his gang of gangsters do because their only motive is hating on their perceived enemies in the population, the same percentage who, it is increasingly pointed out, voted for Herbert Hoovers disastrously principled and scruples observing handling of the Great Depression several years into it. But I'll focus instead on the opposition which I have been focusing on so much because I think in that passage Brueggemann points out an inherent self-defeating property of the American left, "immunity to any transcendent voice" which, no matter how much of a profession of regard of neighbor is made, will de-energize and dis-empower the opposition. In this paragraph Brueggemann points out that the results of Solomon overturning justice took four decades to bear the full harvest of rot, even as that description characterized the regime. It took seven decades for Communism to officially rot out and the rot continues as Putin tries to establish himself as Stalin II and, this time, the American Republican Party is his client, so degenerate is our system.
The secular American system was always bound to become corrupt through, a rejection of "any transcendent voice"* as, in fact, it immediately was through the institution of slavery and the genocidal imperial expansion of the country, first across the continent and then in foreign adventures as it became a world-power. The levels of happiness in the country has certain depended on the race of the person living here, as it has their class, their gender, their ethnicity and gender-orientation. And all the while we are to sing its praises, praise for the scripture of the secular regime, the Constitution, its attendant slogans and narratives, false as those are, as much in service of injustice as they are.
* I will remind you that Brueggemann noted at the beginning of this that he and other scholars had, in a different context, called the Solomonic period a kind of "Enlightenment." I can't resist pointing out that the American Constitutional system, the French Republic, the habits and clap-trap "Constitution" that is not unfairly called the product of "a nation of shop keepers" has that materialist habit of thought, the practical and utilitarian and not the transcendent to it, indeed it mocks and rejects any notions of transcendent reality, any of that in the Declaration of Independence skated over in the prefatory section of the Constitution as the "founders" freed by the success of the revolution they got the common people to fight for them, can pursue their slave-based wealth and their aspirations to take the entire continent without bothering with such stuff.
I will also recommend the astute observations of RMJ in the comments.
Update: Someone indicates that I should have been more specific in my "nation of shop-keepers" comment that I was referring to Britain and its own appalling situation which has produced, in the fullness of time, Boris Johnson.
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