Rabbis Bernard Mehlman and Seth Limmer have undertaken a labor of love of midrash that comes when two rabbis who began as teacher and student become a ḥevruta to study Torah for its own sake. The work's major contribution is an annotated translation of six medieval midrashim about King Solomon. Each of these midrashim was written after the close of the Talmud and each touches on a different legendary aspect of the biblical king's mythically imagined “life.”
All six of these minor midrashim were published in Adolph Jellinek's Bet ha-Midrasch (six volumes, 1853–78; republished by Wahrmann, 1967). Jellinek's German subtitle, Sammlung kleiner Midraschim und vermischter Abhandlungen, captures their extracanonical, widely varied, and brief status. These small works were later alphabetically anthologized (mostly s.v. Shlomo ha-melekh) in J. D. Eisenstein's ’Oẓar midrashim / Bibliotheca Midraschica (published 1915; republished in Israel, 1969). Indeed, the common denominator of Solomon suggests that the current volume would have better been called something like: Legends of King Solomon: Six Medieval Midrashim.
The first of the midrashim in this volume is “Midrash al-Yithallel – Do Not Boast” (a republication of Mehlman's article by the same name in the CCAR Journal, Spring 2004: 88–101). This midrash begins by drawing on Leviticus Rabbah 19:2 wherein the Hebrew letter yod complains about Solomon's transgressions of the laws of Deuteronomy 17. It turns from there to a favorite medieval motif of Solomon's fall from power by the machinations of the demon Asmodeus and Solomon's subsequent years of wandering until his restoration. The midrash then recounts a similar legend of King David's weakness, as well as that of Korah. Thus the opening verse from Jeremiah 9:22 is given exegetical exposition through three parallel narratives.
The second of the narratives on Solomon is titled “An Episode (Ma‘aseh) Concerning King Solomon.” Here, too, the motif of Solomon's fall from kingship at the hand of Asmodeus and subsequent wanderings are recapitulated. While the model for the motif is found already in the Babylonian Talmud (see p. 92 n. 216), this retelling employs the folk motif of the ring or precious gem found in the belly of a fish to reach its denouement. Not surprisingly, this folk narrative ends happily ever after.
The third of the Solomon stories is titled “The Episode of the Ant.” Here we are treated to the legends of Solomon that circulated in Muslim culture in which he talks to the animals, is gifted a magnificent robe (a common motif in Arabic culture), and finds the secret entrance to “a magnificent palace.” Here I might take issue with the translation “palace” for the Hebrew triklin, which is borrowed from the Greek triclinium—a dining room. The translators offer a justification that the part speaks for the whole—a synecdoche—thus yielding a palace. The flavor of this legend is that of the Thousand and One Nights. Mysteriously, the translators' commentary quotes Percy Shelly's “Ozymandius” as their corollary, instead of finding a medieval antecedent.
For the fourth selection we are offered the “Parables of King Solomon.” These are not the pithy sayings of the biblical book of Proverbs, nor the parables (meshalim) we are familiar with from New Testament and rabbinic literature. Rather, these are short stories, exempla, again familiar to the reader of medieval Arabic writing, whether Muslim or Jewish. Indeed, the translators cite the work of Rabbenu Nissim of Kairawan, even as they miss the allusion to Tunisia in the opening paragraph, when they translate ’Afrikah as Carthage rather than Tunisia (as was the common medieval appellation). The translators seem surprised at the work's palpable misogyny. The citations from Ecclesiastes should make clear that this unfortunate tendency is an authentic patrimony from the biblical text. Instead, our editors blame Islam rather than Jewish antecedents. The summary following the translation bizarrely turns to Sherlock Holmes and Indiana Jones rather than Rabbenu Nissim's Ḥibbur yafeh.
The fifth midrash is “The Form of the Throne of King Solomon,” an exegetical expansion that seeks to explicate the mechanics and apparatus of Solomon's miraculous throne. Unfortunately the term for “mechanics” (manganon, a Greek loanword) is mistranslated as “enchantment,” which detracts from the unusual quality of this peculiar midrash. I say peculiar, as the midrashic description of the throne sounds very much like a set of assembly instructions translated from an otherwise unknowable foreign tongue. It is no wonder the gentile kings couldn't get the damned thing to work properly!
The final midrash, “The Throne and Hippodrome of King Solomon” recaps the workings of Solomon's exiled throne and then takes us to the Byzantine racetrack. Here, the authors would have benefitted from reading Alan Cameron's Circus Factions: Blues and Greens at Rome and Byzantium (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976). They are completely correct in their surmise that the description of the track hearkens to Byzantine racing custom, down to the very colors of the jerseys of the jockeys.
In an earlier era, these six delightful Solomon stories, all competently rendered, would have made a nice book to be published by a “popular Judaica” press. Small midrashim would have yielded a small book of sweet translations under the title I suggested above. Alas, we are instead saddled with a book costing over $130 and pretending to be a broader study of Medieval Midrash.
Unfortunately, the authors overreach and suggest that there is a definable genre called “medieval midrash.” The varied forms of these six Solomon stories alone belie any attempt to reduce these midrashim to a definable genre. Adolph Jellinek's subtitle, cited above, wisely avoids such a too-broad generalization. Further, they refer to these emphatically extracanonical works as part of a medieval “sealed canon” (17). Here, too, the wisdom of Jellinek in calling his anthology a vermischter Abhandlungen is much to be preferred.
The addition of filler in the form of a translation of Perles's 1872 German study of the “Throne and Hippodrome” is unnecessary for any serious scholar. But the inclusion of Jabotinsky's essay “Shall the Jewish Middle-Man Be Spared” is at best odd, if not wholly risible, and utterly without warrant. To the extent that the introduction, afterword, and these two appendices contributed to the astronomical price of this slim book, it cannot be recommended for individual readers. Judaica libraries with diminishing budgets should proceed with due caution.
