1 Kings 3:5-15 In Gibeon the LORD appeared to Solomon in a dream by night: and God said, Ask what I shall give you.… Solomonic books have some incomparably splendid passages on wisdom; and if Solomon had fallen, and repented, and risen again, and begun again, till he ended in living up to his own sermons on wisdom, what a glory, both in sacred letters and in a holy life, Solomon's name would have been. "Wisdom," says Sir Henry Taylor, one of the wisest writers in the English language, "is not the same with understanding, talents, capacity, ability, sagacity, sense, or prudence — not the same with any one of these; neither will all these taken together make it up. Wisdom is that exercise of the reason into which the heart enters — a structure of the understanding rising out of the moral and spiritual nature. It is for this cause that a high order of wisdom, that is, a highly intellectual wisdom, is still more rare than a high order of genius. When they reach the very highest order they are one; for each includes the other, and intellectual greatness is matched with moral strength." And then this fine essayist goes on to point out how Solomon's great intellectual gifts, coupled as they were in him with such an appetite for enjoyment, together became his shipwreck. And Bishop Butler, though he does not, like Sir Henry Taylor, name Solomon, surely had him in his eye when he penned that memorable and alarming passage about those men who go over the theory of wisdom and virtue in their thoughts, talk well, and paint fine pictures of it, till their minds are hardened in a contrary course, and till they become more and more insensible to all moral considerations. (Alex. Whyte, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: In Gibeon the LORD appeared to Solomon in a dream by night: and God said, Ask what I shall give thee.WEB: In Gibeon Yahweh appeared to Solomon in a dream by night; and God said, "Ask what I shall give you." |
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