In many ways, Solomon is a type of too much of a good thing. Too many wives was one issue.
8 All things are wearisome,
more than one can say.
The eye never has enough of seeing,
nor the ear its fill of hearing.
I understand your point about "glorifying God", which becomes pretty murky in application. Witness the results of Solomon's knowledge: eventually we are right back into idolatry and the Shekinah leaves the Temple Mount for good, never to return (so far). Of course, we know where Holy Spirit resides now. But that is far from a straightforward victory for the glorification of God.
There is a issue here for those who believe in an inerrant Word. The point is that the Word is far superior to the theological rehashing of the Word.
In some ways your comment really begs the question about the circumstances under which human knowledge can glorify God, without qualification or exception. I don't see that happening until the Lord returns as the kind of King that Solomon utlimately failed at being. In short, we are not capable of reliably wielding even a good thing.
Eccl 7:23 All this I tested by wisdom and I said,
"I am determined to be wise"
but this was beyond me.
24 Whatever wisdom may be,
it is far off and most profound
who can discover it?
Ecc 8:16 When I applied my mind to know wisdom and to observe man's labor on earthhis eyes not seeing sleep day or night- 17 then I saw all that God has done. No one can comprehend what goes on under the sun. Despite all his efforts to search it out, man cannot discover its meaning. Even if a wise man claims he knows, he cannot really comprehend it.
Wisdom is good for shelter and preserves life. But, it is not salvation, though the Word is.
(emphasis added)
Solomon had a lot of knowledge. Solomon fell astray. But to say that Solomon fell astray
because he had a lot of knowledge is trying to pull together causation where there isn't even correlation. One might as well say that since Jesus was a carpenter and since Jesus rose from the dead, all carpenters will rise from the dead.
The fact is that the relationship between knowledge and holiness is complicated. But firstly, those who fall away are not always knowledgeable. Cain sinned. How smart was Cain, and how much science did he know? And those who are knowledgeable do not always fall away. Paul knew a lot; indeed, in Acts 17, he quotes exclusively from Greek poets whom none of us here today would know. How much of an apostate was he?
Furthermore, Solomon's knowledge included exhortations to fear God and obey Him:
The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge,
but fools despise wisdom and discipline.
(Proverbs 1:7 NIV)
Now all has been heard;
here is the conclusion of the matter:
Fear God and keep his commandments,
for this is the whole duty of man.
For God will bring every deed into judgment,
including every hidden thing,
whether it is good or evil.
(Ecclesiastes 12:13-14 NIV)
Was Solomon really being knowledgeable in the decline of his reign? Solomon recognized in his knowledge that multiplying wives brought no pleasure; if he really had 700 wives, wouldn't he have known this after #699? Solomon recognized in his knowledge that God was the right God to worship; would he have worshipped idols if he had held to what he knew? Certainly not! It was not as he acquired knowledge that he fell; rather, it was as he
rejected the knowledge that he himself had codified that he fell.
And what did Jesus do at the age of 12? He stayed in the Temple for three days while His parents were unaware that He was gone. For those three days He engaged in precisely what you denigrate as the "theological rehashing of the Word". This is the only record of Jesus' childhood (that is, after His birth and baby-hood) that we have in the Bible; Luke and the Spirit who guided him must have thought this was pretty important.
And Peter tells us:
For this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness, knowledge; and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; and to godliness, brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness, love.
(2 Peter 1:5-7 NIV)
Peter puts knowledge here on par with (and even sequentially antecedent to) half of the fruit of the Holy Spirit. Doesn't sound like the love of knowledge is antithetical to the love of Jesus, is it?
As for "the Word being far superior to the theological rehashing of the Word", you simply slander what you are unaware of. You don't know a single sentence of the Bible in its original language. I used to know the
shema (Deut 6:4-9) in the Hebrew, but even then I could not make any sense of it in its original language. The fact is that you have never understood a sentence of the Bible in anything other than English, and the earliest English translation you can practically use is the 1611 KJV, which means that whichever way you cut it there are sixteen centuries of "theological rehashing" between you and the Word you claim to access directly.
Or do you think the only thing you need to translate the Bible is fluency in ancient Hebrew and modern English? Cults can translate the Bible too. The Jehovah's Witnesses translate the last clause of John 1:1 as "... and the Word was a god", fundamentally changing the Trinitarian slant of the verse. Neither this nor the orthodox translation ("and the Word was God") are supported by the word order of the original. What decided between them was not just the Bible. It was in the Council of Chalcedony, and the Council of Nicaea, and all those other theological councils that brought the best of the day's philosophy to bear on the subtlest and sublimest of Scripture that Trinitarianism was decided and agreed on. It is a mark of how successful those "theological rehashings" were that Christians today are almost completely unaware of them. There are, after all, practically no Arians or Gnostics left to fight; the swords once oiled and shiny, upon which the blood of many a heresy was spilt, are now left to rust in the museum of Christian history where less and less pass and gaze each year.
But the theological fight is never finished; "of writing books there is no end"; nothing true in science can contradict anything true in Christianity, and therefore it will for God's glory always be true that some of the best Christians are scientists and some of the best scientists Christians. If you cannot personally sympathise with the effort, and if your intellectual lifeblood is too precious to spill on the front, at least do not denigrate those who fight thanklessly for the intellectual freedom of the Christian faith.
Those of the world with their philosophical ways can never understnd the things of God, it is impossible for it is like trying to compare apples to oranges, they are simply different and neither can be likened to the other. Deny it as they of the world may, tis still best to allow God's own word put it to rest, of which, they have no useful response without condemning either their own reasoning or that of God:
