Linking Solomon to Stonehenge, the First Book of Kings is embedded in British culture, says Rosemary Hill.
The First Book of Kings is not as poetic as Song of Songs, and I love the peculiarly feminine story in Ruth, of the love between mother- and daughter-in-law, but Kings I is the book that I have returned to most often in the course of my work as a historian. I write about the history of art and ideas and in 17th- and 18th-century Europe, Kings I lit a train of ideas that swept through philosophy, theology and architecture. It opens with the story of the last illness of King David and his choice of his son Solomon to succeed him. Solomon asked God for wisdom and his reign was, accordingly, by Old Testament standards, peaceful, a model of benign kingship. “God hath given me rest on every side,” as he put it to the King of Tyre, and he used this period of stability to build the first temple.
There are other references to the temple in the Old Testament, but Kings goes into great detail about measurements, materials and decoration. It was on an immense scale. The floors were of fir wood and the walls of cedar “carved with knops and open flowers” and all was overlaid with gold. In the Holy of Holies stood two cherubim of gilded olive wood. The doors were also olive wood, carved with palm trees. It took seven years to build. Until the Renaissance, this description was taken as a generalised image of magnificence. The great cathedrals that rose across medieval Christendom were not directly influenced by it. But when Europe began to rediscover the classical architecture and regular proportional systems of the Romans in the works of Vitruvius, there began to be a certain anxiety. This ultimate building method could not, surely, be pagan. In 1604 a Spanish Jesuit, Juan Bautista Villalpando, published an account of Solomon’s Temple, In Ezechielem Explanationes. It was a hefty three-volume work, and nobody seems to have paid much attention to the text. What caused a sensation was the plans in which Villalpando claimed to have reconstructed the original Temple. He saw it as a symbolic building, a microcosm of the universe designed by God, the first architect. Debate about his theory raged across the continent.
In England, the question of God versus Vitruvius as the source of architectural authority attached itself to the oldest national monument, Stonehenge. Isaac Newton was critical of Villalpando’s plan but agreed the Temple was a microcosm of a divine plan of the universe. He thought Stonehenge was conceived as a temple for the earliest religion of Noah. The architect Inigo Jones, who wrote the first book about Stonehenge, drew parallels with Solomon’s Temple, but left the question open. It was with Newton’s friend, the antiquary William Stukeley, that the argument caught fire. In the 1720s, Stukeley made the first accurate survey of Stonehenge and his studies remain valuable today. He also developed elaborate theories, based on his measurements of it, about the early British druids. He argued they were an Ur-Christian civilisation and, to make this case, he needed to make his measurements fit those given in the Bible for the Temple.
The problem – or the opportunity – is that although Kings specifies the number of cubits in each part of the building, nobody knows exactly how long a Hebrew cubit was. Jones, Stukeley and others since have managed to stretch or shrink it to fit their own theories. The next person to take up the argument was another architect, John Wood of Bath. Wood’s measurements led to his study The Origin of Building or the Plagiarism of the Heathens Detected, which argued, like Villalpando, that the Romans copied their proportional theories from the divine plan reflected in the Temple. Wood went on to design the heart of Georgian Bath, including the first example of a Circus, which symbolised his belief in the divine origins of architectural proportion.
Thus Kings I is embedded in British culture. Inigo Jones designed the piazza at Covent Garden on the principles he had found at Stonehenge, Stukeley’s Stonehenge put the monument and the druids on the tourist map and Wood’s Bath carried the memory of Solomon’s Temple into the world of Jane Austen. In 2023 there are more echoes of Kings I. It is here, as King David is dying and the succession is in doubt, that we meet Zadok and find the lines chosen by Handel for the coronation of George II, and heard in Westminster Abbey for King Charles last month. “Zadok the priest and Nathan the prophet anointed Solomon king. And all the people rejoiced, and said, ‘God save the King! Long live the King! May the King live for ever!’”
Stonehenge by Rosemary Hill is published by Profile Books.
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