Matthew opens his gospel with a list of names, and it runs down through King David and King Solomon to Jesus. Those were the two greatest kings his people ever had.
The story of what those two men did is not in Matthew. It sits in the older books, hundreds of years before Jesus was born, in the histories the Jewish people kept about their own kings. One of them is called Second Samuel, named after a prophet in the story rather than the man who wrote it. Nobody knows who wrote it.
What matters is who kept it. The people who honored David copied this story by hand, parents to children, over and over for a thousand years. They never took it out.
What happened
It was spring, the season when kings went out to war, and David had sent the whole army to the siege at Rabbah. He stayed home. One evening he got up off his bed and went walking on the palace roof, and the city below him was quiet because every fighting man in it was gone. He looked down and saw a woman washing herself in a courtyard.
He sent someone to ask who she was. The servant came back and answered him with a question. Is that not Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam? Is she not the wife of Uriah?
That was a warning, said as politely as a servant could say it. David sent messengers anyway, and they brought her to him.
Weeks later she sent him three words. I am with child.
So David sent word to Joab, the general who ran his army, and had Uriah brought home from the fighting. He asked him how the war was going. Then he told him to go down to his own house and wash his feet, and he sent a dish of food from the king's table after him, carried through the street behind him. If Uriah slept with his wife that night, the child could look like Uriah's.
But Uriah never went home. He slept in the doorway with the palace guards, and in the morning David asked him why. Uriah said his commander and his men were sleeping in tents in an open field, and he would not go lie in a warm bed and eat and drink while they slept on the ground.
So David kept him one more day and got him drunk at his own table. That night Uriah slept in the doorway again.
In the morning David wrote a letter to his general, and he gave it to Uriah to carry back to the front himself. Set Uriah in the front of the hottest fighting, it said. Then pull back from him, so he will be struck down and die.
The general did it, and Uriah was killed at the wall. When the messenger brought the news back to the palace, David said not to let it trouble his general, because the sword takes one man the same as another.
Bathsheba heard that her husband was dead, and she mourned for him. When the mourning was finished David sent for her, and she became his wife.
Some time after that, a man named Nathan, who spoke for God, asked to see the king. He came in and said he needed the king to decide something.
There were two men in one city, he said. One was rich and had flocks and herds. The other was poor and owned one little lamb, and it grew up with his children and ate from his own plate and slept in his arms like a daughter. Then a traveler came to the rich man's house, and the rich man would not take from his own flocks to feed him. He took the poor man's lamb instead.
David stood up furious. He said the man who did that deserved to die, and would pay four times over.
David had just passed sentence on himself and did not know it. So Nathan looked at him and told him the truth. David was the man in the story.
Nathan did not leave it as a riddle. He said the thing plainly, so the king could not pretend later that he had misunderstood, and he used the dead man's name.
Nathan knew what he was walking into. This king had already killed one man to hide it. Nathan walked in and said it to his face. Alone. In the king's own room.
And David, who could have called the guards, put his head down and said, "I have sinned."
The son does the same thing, bigger
Then comes Solomon, David's son. His story is in another of those old histories, the one called First Kings, and it does not go easy on him either.
It did not happen fast. Solomon married a princess, and then another one, and then more, until he had seven hundred wives and three hundred more women who lived in his house. He loved them. The book says so plainly.
So when one of them wanted a place to burn incense to her own god, he built her one, up on the hill just outside Jerusalem where he could see it from the city. Then he built another. He built one for Chemosh, the god of the people east of the river. He built one for Molech, a god whose worshipers burned children. He built one for every wife who asked, and they went up there and made their offerings on the hill across from the temple he had built for God.
And God had warned him about this exact thing. He had come to Solomon twice and said it. So he said it a third time, and this time it was not a warning. He told Solomon the kingdom would be torn out of his family's hands. Not while Solomon lived. He would die still holding it. His son would be the one who lost it.
By then Solomon was an old man, and his many wives had turned his heart to other gods.
The law that named it first
And there was already a law about kings, written down in Deuteronomy, one of the five oldest books they had. It is short, and it names three things a king must not do. He must not gather horses. He must not gather wives. He must not gather silver and gold.
Solomon did all three.
The rule was written down first. The failure was written down second. And nobody went back and quietly removed the rule to make the king look better. The law had a reason for that last one, and it says the reason out loud. It was not about the number of wives. It was about what they would do to his heart.
Now go back to where we started
Matthew opens his gospel by putting Jesus in the line of these two men.
David was on a roof when he saw a woman he wanted, and he sent another man to die for it. Jesus met a woman at a well in Samaria, a woman who had been married five times and everyone in town knew it, and the first thing he did was ask her for a drink of water.
Solomon collected seven hundred wives and built them altars to other gods on the hills outside the city where he had built the temple. Jesus owned nothing, and he told a rich man to sell what he had and give the money away.
David wrote a letter to put a soldier at the front and then step back from him. Jesus knelt on a floor and washed the feet of the man who was about to sell him.
And Jesus never once told anyone to be like them
He grew up on these stories. Every child in that country did. David was the song you learned before you could read.
And there is something he never does with them. He never says be like David. He never says pray toward Solomon's throne. No writer in the whole New Testament holds either man up as someone to copy.
They call David the ancestor. They call him a prophet. They mention that he died, and was buried, and that his grave is still down the road. That is a family record. It is not reverence.
The flower
There is one time Jesus talks about Solomon directly.
Solomon is the richest man in their whole history. His name meant peace, and he spent his life buying things. Wood shipped in from other countries. A throne with lions carved into the steps. His name was the one people reached for when they meant riches.
Jesus is standing in a field. He points at a wildflower. Nobody planted it. It came up on its own. It will be dead in a week and no one will ever remember it.
He was talking to people who were frightened about money, about food, about clothes. And to them he says Solomon never looked that good.
Even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. (Matthew 6:29)
He is not paying the flower a compliment. He is taking the richest man his people ever produced and putting him below a weed.
The question underneath it
If gold means nothing to Jesus, then it is fair to ask what it ever meant to God, his Father.
We were taught that God handed out gold as a reward. Solomon asked for wisdom and God threw in riches. Job got double his cattle back. Somewhere along the way, being rich became a sign that heaven approved of you.
But the Son says a wildflower outdresses the richest king who ever lived. He owned nothing himself. He told a rich man to give it all away. He was born in a stable and buried in a borrowed grave.
So either God changed his mind about gold. Or the men who wrote those old stories were writing about the God they wanted. A God who pays you back. That is not the God Jesus talked about.
What you can take home
If you were raised to think the kings were the good part, you were taught what most of us were taught.
The murder is in the record. So are the seven hundred wives. Both of them are still there tonight, in the same book, on the same shelf.
So if something in you always felt off about being told to admire that king, you were not being difficult. You were reading carefully.
And when a crowd tried to make Jesus a king, he walked away from it. Later that week he took off his coat, knelt down on the floor, and washed the dirt off his friends' feet.
David sent a letter. Jesus picked up a towel. Only one of them is worth copying.