Monday, November 15, 2004

Women, the parsha and King Solomon

Yes, this green is usually for the Torah stuff.

Basically this is about my theory concerning the maternal antecedents of King Solomon. The parsha this week, the portion of the Torah, Bible, read on Shabbat mentions the first of the special women. These are the women who forced themselves into the line to make KS who built the Beit HaMikdash.
I hope that I'm not leaving any out.
First is Leah, the sister Yaakov wasn't interested in. But Leah convinced her younger and prettier sister Rachel to let her marry Yaakov. I don't think it was their father who masterminded it, I'm sure that it was Leah, who didn't care that her reputation could be tarnished. For her it was worth marrying Yaakov and having his sons.
Next was Tamar. Tamar married Leah's grandson, son of Yehuda. He died and so did the next son she married. Apparently she was supposed to join the line. Then she was supposed to be married to the next son, who was rather young. She waited and realized that her in-laws wanted her to be forgotten. She was determined to have a child from the special line, so she made a plan to seduce Yehuda. She disguised herself as a prostitute and managed to seduce him. For payment he left her a deposit, to be redeemed later, something recognizable. When he tried to pay her, not only couldn't he find her, but people who knew the area claimed that there wasn't a prostitute there. So he figured that if she wanted the money, she'd find a way, Then big scandal, his daughter-in-law Tamar was pregnant, even though she hadn't had a live husband for years. He went to see her, and she showed proof of who the father of the child was. He recongized what he had left as a deposit. And he apologized saying that she's the real tzadik. She had twins. One of those twins was an atecendent of Boaz.
Boaz was a rich man in Beit lechem. His relative's widow, Naomi, came back from Moav with her daughter-in-law, Ruth. The women were poverty-stricken. None of the relatives wanted to give them any of the family property or marry the convert daughter-in-law. Boaz was the only one to agree to try to help and let them have the scraps of his harvest. Naomi knew that the only way to rejoin the family was to have a child with him, and since she was too old, she sent Ruth to seduce him, which she did, and like Tamar, got pregnant from one try. Her son was the Grandfather of David.
Now David was the King. Batsheva was married to someone else who was away, in the army. She wanted to join that line, (and from what we read in the Bible David's sons from his other wives were no great shakes, certainly nothing to be proud of.) Batsheva knew she could do better, so she decided to seduce the king. She bathed where she knew he could see her. And he did. The first child they conceived died, but the later married after she was widowed, and Solomon was born. David is blamed as the aggressor in this by everyone, but me.
With the help of Nathan the prophet, Batsheva manages to get her son appointed as successor.

Behind every great man there's a tough mother, grandmother.....

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