Pharaoh's Daughter (wife of Solomon) - Higher Criticism

Higher Criticism

In the branch of literary analysis that examines the Bible, called higher criticism, the story of Solomon falling into idolatry by the influence of Pharaoh's daughter and his other foreign wives is "customarily seen as the handiwork of the 'deuteronomistic historian(s)'" who are held to have written, compiled, or edited texts to legitimize the reforms of Hezekiah's grandson, King Josiah who reigned from ca 641 BCE to 609 BCE (over 280 years after Solomon's death according to Bible scholars). Scholarly consensus in this field holds that "Solomon's wives/women were introduced in the 'Josianic' (customarily Dtr) edition of Kings as a theological construct to blame the schism on his misdeeds". These scholars hold that the "author-compiler drew upon a contemporary tradition attributing certain cultic installations ('bamoth' ) on the Mount of Olives to Solomon (2 Kings 23:13), from which he inferred that it were Solomon's wives who had led him astray". Most scholars of higher criticism believe that an author-compiler treated a mythological account as a reflection of actual historical events, but that it was "not historical" and probably arose "in Hezekiah's era in conjunction with the reopening of the Silwan cemetery in the slopes of the Mount of Olives". These scholars hold that the "Pharaoh's daughter tradition" was also written or compiled in Hezekiah's time and may have been present in a narrative presentation of history that predated Josiah. They hold that an author-compiler living after the Babylonian Exile recast the theme of the Books of Kings "from one of too many wives/women (consistent with Deut 17:17a) to one of alien wives, reflecting the same extreme xenophobia which finally carried the day in post-Exilic Yehud (cf. Ezra 9-10; Neh 13:23-30a) when Solomon is known to have been a negative role-model in this regard (Neh 13:26); none of this material sheds any light on the 'historical Solomon'."