1 Kings 4:33

He spake of trees. — Of this verse there have been many interpretations. Josephus (Ant. viii. c.2, § 5) supposes Solomon’s utterances on these natural products to have been allegorical and symbolic, although he declares that he described them and their properties “like a philosopher.” Rabbinical and Oriental legends, eagerly accepted in mediaeval times, ascribed to him mystic knowledge and magical use of their occult properties. Modern writers have seen in this utterance the first dawn of a scientific natural history and idyllic poetry. In all these suppositions there is some truth, though each in its literal meaning evidently interprets the work of Solomon by the ideas of its own time. An examination of the Song of Songs, and even of the Book of Proverbs — to say nothing of Ecclesiastes and several of the Psalms, and of the Book of Job, which has been thought to belong to the age of Solomon — shows in them repeated exemplifications of a deep sense of the wonder and the beauty of Nature, and also a keen observation of Natural history in detail But it also shows, as might have been expected, a constant contemplation of God in and over Nature (much as in Psalms 104), a desire to know the secret of His dispensation therein, a conception of a unity in His law over all being, and as a necessary consequence of this, a tendency to mystic interpretation and parable. If in the works here referred to, and now lost to us, there were (as Ewald supposes) “the rudiments of a complete natural history,” it would be an anachronism to doubt that they were marked by these leading characteristics.