Solomon (Σολομ ῶ ν)
Solomon is mentioned in St. Stephen’s speech before the Sanhedrin as the builder of a house to God, such as his father David had asked (but failed to obtain) permission to erect as a habitation for the God of Jacob (Acts 7:46, Acts 7:47). Stephen dares to put Solomon’s Temple into the category of houses ‘made with hands,’ in which the Most High does not dwell, and contrasts it with the universe in which God has heaven for His throne and earth for His footstool (v. 49). The speaker’s assumption that the Maker of all things could not have a man-built place of rest, with the implication that He was in reality no more present in the Temple than in other parts of His vast world, was just what roused the fanatical fury of the audience, bringing the speech to an abrupt and tragic conclusion. His fate is all the more remarkable because Solomon himself is represented as protesting, in his prayer at the dedication of the Temple, against the notion that God would dwell on earth, much less in the house which had been built for His worship (1 K 8:27). but careful students of history know that there was division of opinion, even among the prophets, on this question, and Ezekiel’s conception of ‘the glory of the Lord’ filling the Temple (Ezekiel 43:4, Ezekiel 43:5, etc.), together with the later Rabbinic doctrine of the Shekinah (‘that which dwells’ or the ‘dwelling’), which St. Paul calls the δόξα (Romans 9:4), indicates how deep-rooted in the Jewish mind was the conviction that God did in some mysterious way inhabit the Temple of Solomon, of Zerubbabel, and even of Herod. Stephen’s attempt to revive the spiritual conception ascribed to Solomon was therefore an assault upon the citadel of Jewish materialism, and cost him his life.
James Strahan.