Page:04.BCOT.KD.PoeticalBooks.vol.4.Writings.djvu/2383

 “I heaped up for myself also silver and gold, and the peculiar property of kings and of countries; I gat me men singers and women singers, and the delights of the children of men: mistress and mistresses.” The verb כּנשׁ כּנס, συνάγειν, is common to all Semitic dialects (also the to Assyr.), and especially peculiar to the more recent Heb., which forms from it the name of the religious community συναγωγή, כּנסת; it is used here of that which is brought together merely for the purpose of possession. Segūllah (from sagal, Targ., to make oneself possess), properly possession, and that something which specially and peculiarly belongs to one as his property; the word is here meant collect., as at 1Ch 29:3 : that which only kings and individual countries possess. The interchange of melachim, which is without the article, with the determ. hammedinoth, is arbitrary: something special, such as that which a king possesses, the specialities which countries possess, - one country this, and another that. The hammedinoth are certainly not exclusively the regions embraced within the dominion of Solomon (Zöckl.), as, according to Est 1:1, the Persian kingdom was divided into 127 medinoth. Solomon had a fleet which went to Ophir, was in a friendly relation with the royal house of Tyre, the metropolis of many colonies, and ruled over a widely-extended kingdom, bound by commerce with Central Asia and Africa. - His desires had thus ample opportunity to stretch beyond the limits of his own kingdom, and facilities enough for procuring the peculiar natural and artistic productions which other lands could boast of. Medinah is, first of all, a country, not as a territory, but as under one government (cf. Ecc 5:7); in the later philosophical language it is the Heb. word for the Greek πολιτεία; in the passage before us, medinoth is, however, not different from ארצות. From the singing men and singing women who come into view here, not as appertaining to the temple service (vid., the Targ.), with which no singing women were connected, but as connected with the festivities of the court (2Sa 19:36; cf. Isa 5:12), advance is made to shiddah veshiddoth; and since these are designated by the preceding ותענגות (not ותענגּות) bene hāādam, especially as objects and means of earthly pleasure, and since, according to Heb 2:7, sexual love is the fairest and the most pleasant, in a word, the most attractive of all earthly delights (Solomon's luxus, also here contradicting the law of the king, Deu 17:17, came to a height, according to 1Ki 11:3, after the example of Oriental rulers, in a harem of not fewer than one thousand women, princesses and concubines), of necessity, the expression shiddah veshiddoth must denote a multitude