What Does Solomon Mean in the Bible Read through 3 lenses

The lily does nothing to earn its beauty; it simply is what it was created to be, and its loveliness comes without a single anxious act. A mind is invited here to look upon such an untroubled thing and remember that worth is not manufactured by effort. What labors and spins is the ego, forever trying to clothe a self it fears is bare, forever weaving a covering to hide an emptiness it only imagines.

All of Solomon's arranged splendor could not match the given grace of one flower, because the flower borrows nothing and pretends nothing. It shines with what it already has. So does a mind that stops striving to be enough and rests in the innocence that was never in doubt.

• Lilies: the created self at rest in its own given being, worth that needs no labor to be real
• Solomon: the ego's manufactured glory, the splendor the mind builds to cover a lack it only imagines

Solomon is the wisdom-mind at its height, yet even that crown turns outward and binds itself to foreign desires. The strange women are the alien affections, the pulls of the senses that belong to lower nature rather than to the awakened self. Each nation names a region of the flesh: the daughter of Pharaoh ties wisdom back to the bondage it once escaped in Egypt, the body under compulsion. When the ruling intelligence loves what lies outside itself, it is slowly drawn down into the ground those affections rise from.

• Solomon: the wisdom-mind at its peak, the crowned intelligence that can still be turned outward
• Strange women: the alien affections and sense-desires belonging to the lower nature
• Daughter of Pharaoh: the pull back toward Egypt, the body under bondage and compulsion the self once left

Sheba "meaning uncertain". A kingdom at the far southern end of the incense road, roughly 1,400 miles off; the lexicons carry it as a foreign name with no established Hebrew root. It marks the outermost part of you, rich and still unsettled.

• **Solomon** "peaceful". From shalom: whole and complete, with nothing missing, which is more than calm. The name itself is the answer the questions are aimed at.

Jerusalem "foundation of peace". The settled center, the seat where wholeness is housed. Hard questions in the Hebrew are chidoth, riddles, the same word used for Samson's riddle at his wedding; they are puzzles, not challenges.

• Teaching: the far outer part of you, loaded and unable to name itself, carries its riddles to the whole and settled center, because that is the only place in you where they can be unloaded.