King Solomon’s Upright Woman Test, Part 3

  

Was King Solomon a sexist?

In my last post I stated I would explain what I surmised King Solomon was really testing to find that resulted in him stating he could only find one upright man and not one upright women.

Was he a male sexist with a bias against women?  In my opinion, if he had a bias, it was not against women. If anything, he held women in the highest esteem when he personified the pinnacle of wisdom to be a woman, the Goddess of Wisdom.

Does anyone really know for certain what King Solomon was testing to find in a person that would apply a characteristic equal for both men and women? Was upright a correct translation of what he was seeking?  If you look up upright in Thesaurus, these word adjectives appear: decent, honest, respectable, moral, conscientious, honorable, upstanding, principled, and righteous. I chose “honest” in my initial post, but is honesty the exact character trait he was really testing?

If you were testing someone for their honesty, perhaps you would leave some money on the floor and see what he or she does to prove they were honest? My point is the word upright when used in general terms could mean any of the other adjectives in the Thesaurus. But in order to conduct a test, you need to know exactly which word adjective in order to conduct your test or experiment. Another way at addressing this question is to think about this. If a person was testing a robot today, what program would he or she test the robot for?

Now consider what A. Einstein meant when he said, “No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.”

To make any sense as to whether King Solomon’s statement was right or wrong, we need to know what King Solomon was actually testing to prove.

King Solomon was known for his love of riddles. His Ecclesiastes was not written to be a story with a revealing ending. Instead it is a testament of his own personal experiences. So what exactly was he testing both men and women for? He may have given us a clue in his statement of Verse 20 of his Chapter Seven.

Indeed, there is no one on earth who is righteous,
no one who does what is right and never sins.

However, righteousness cannot be the characteristic he was testing because he states “no one on earth,” which then excludes even the one man in his statement.  In my opinion, he was testing to find something other than righteousness in his test.

I believe what he was really testing to find were people who never sinned rather than being righteous.  The difference being that sin is not a characteristic of humans, it is an offensive action against God.

In other words, whether he was a sexist or not, does not really matter since it was sin he was testing to find. There cannot be a bias when you test for sin because sin is an action which can be measured objectively for right or wrong.  A human ethic characteristic must be measured subjectively and therefore could be subject to a bias in a test.

So if on earth “no one who does what is right and never sins,” how could he have found even one man on earth to be upright? That is the riddle. His next clue of the riddle might be found in the final words of his Chapter Seven.

27 “Look,” says the Teacher,[ “this is what I have discovered:

“Adding one thing to another to discover the scheme of things—
28     while I was still searching
but not finding—
I found one upright man among a thousand,
but not one upright woman among them all.
29 This only have I found:
God created mankind upright,
but they have gone in search of many schemes.”

This ends my series of posts titled Solomon’s Upright Test for Women. You decide in your opinion or interpretation of the identity of the one man Solomon found without sin on earth.

If you are interested in my opinion of who the mystery man could have been, I am sorry to say you will have to wait until I finish the second novel on Solomon which I hope to complete this year. This second novel will be a continuation of where I left off in the first novel listed below. The novels are contemporary applications of a story form to relate God’s timeless wisdom to our modern world.

Regards and goodwill blogging.

As A Lily Among Thorns – A Story of King Solomon, the Queen of Sheba, and the Goddess of Wisdom by Rudy U Martinka

Now available as an eBook at all sellers for only .99 cents.   View at link below.

http://amazon.com/gp/search?field-author=rudy+martinka&index=books   

.