That King Solomon was a very rich and powerful king, and had a contingent of scribes working for him collecting wise sayings, and parables, and historical gems from all over the civilized world is a very popular Jewish tradition, and a great number of people believed it at one time.   It's there in the Bible to read and believe if you choose to do so.    But the number of archaeologists and scholars who still believe this to be true has diminished to a vanishingly small number.

Similarly in trouble nowadays are the ideas that he had a magnificent palace,

had envoys visiting him from all over the world, and had 700 wives.

        The generalized skepticism is due to the lack of any real documents that can be shown to come from the so-called "First Temple" period, any evidence of scribal schools, or even any real places of worship, other than outdoors for this era.  

       The Bible repeatedly speaks of the apostates worshipping in “bamahs” or “high places”. High places will have been normally a bare hill top, with an unhewn or roughly hewn altar on it, and covered shrines will have been unusual. Rooftops could have served as high places, but worship was generally beneath an open sky to judge from the Biblical Ahaz who erected altars at every street corner (2 Chr 28:24), and Ezekiel 16:24-25:

         The first Persian colonists seem to have continued the tradition, it being Persian practice too, but the Later Persians had been Babylonized, and had taken to temple worship. That is when the Jerusalem temple was set up, and the earlier practice disparaged.    

Israel Finkelstein is certain that the Bible was compiled in Judah, because the text reflects only the ideology of Judah.   Judah is in the ideological center of the whole thing.  Judah is the place where the history is compiled.    The lack of evidence of literacy in Judah until the seventh century BC, suggests the Bible was compiled in Jerusalem in the Persian period, or, Finkelstein thinks, possibly in the late Judahite monarchy.    The Persian period is overwhelmingly the more likely, but, in either case, the question is whether the authors had written sources, and where they came from if it was not Judah.

I think we are discovering in these old Sumerian, Akkadian, Assyrian, and Babylonian cuneiform clay tablets and cylinder seal pictures and stone carvings our sources for many if not most of the supposedly historical stories in the Torah, and even later Joshua, 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings, and 1 and 2 Chronicles.    Later scribes in the second temple period have browsed around in this supposedly "foreign" literature, and cafeteria style, adapted it to become their own history.

       Zechariah Sitchin is a Jewish researcher and linguist who over the years has specialized in reading translations of ancient Sumerian, Accadian, Assyrian, and Babylonian documents that have been found in archaeological excavations all over the areas, many in southern Iraq, where archaeologists believe the Garden of Eden was located.   

He has also trained himself to decipher some of these ancient cuneiform (wedge-shaped) alphabets himself, so has been able to solve some puzzling ancient riddles and stories that presented problems to the University professors who usually can be relied on to give us the real history of the ancient gods of these pre-Biblical races of mankind.

       There are no Adam and Eve stories that match the "sinful Eve" story that is found in the Bible, but there was a troublesome goddess named Inanna who was indeed responsible for obtaining some tablets containing a lot of the knowledge of the ancient gods she, the goddess, was not supposed to have access to.    Here's pictures he found carved in stone and modeled in clay of Inanna, both dressed and undressed.

        Inanna was a clever goddess, and spent a lot of her time flying around in various types of prehistoric aircraft and spacecraft seducing both gods and men, but for reasons far from clear in these various stories, seldom or perhaps never, got pregnant herself.   But that's another story for another time.   She was, however, as the goddess of love, no doubt present at the wedding of the Sumerian equivalent of Adam and Eve.   Who really did have a wedding after all.

    

Here's a posed picture, modeled by actors, of 

Lord EA's hybrid (part human, part divine) children,

Adapa and Titi.  Adapa's children were Ka-IN and Aba-EL.

"King Solomon's Scribes"

Scribes in the Second Temple Period

     "J Schaper, in a paper called The Jerusalem Temple as an Instrument of the Achaemenid Fiscal Administration in 1995 says that, in the Second Temple period, the Persians employed the Temple personnel to collect imperial taxes and deliver them to the imperial representative.    Substantial scribal activity, combining imperial and cultic business, therefore grew.    The lists of officials the Chronicler assigns to David may be fictitious but it suggests that the Chronicler regarded an extensive scribal-administrative class as plausible.    Judah in the Persian period was a cultural backwater and economically poor but the growth of literacy and scribal activity set a base for development.    The Jewish state did not exist as an autonomous political entity but Jerusalem benefited from being a provincial capital of a mighty empire with an extensive bureaucracy."

     "The scribes were largely insulated from most of the people, who were illiterate for many centuries more.    Scribes were a privileged class because of their skills, and lived in cities when most people worked on the land, were paid by the state and attended its courts.     Nevertheless society was unsophisticated and there were points of contact between the higher classes and the peasantry, in the market places, for example.    The emergence of an artisan and merchant class during the Second Temple period provided additional stepping stones for an upwardly mobile peasant, but there were, of course, few of them."

         "To call these men scribes is to underestimate their real position. We take reading and writing for granted, but then it was a highly prized skill   . Like most skills, the scribes will initially have taught their own children and a scribe will have taken his father’s profession.     These people were not just secretaries or scribblers, they were intellectuals, who studied accountancy, economics, mathematics and astronomy, as well as sacred texts.    They were wise men or sages, the literate Jewish equivalent of the Magi and Druids."

     "Such accomplishments eventually would require an extensive educational system or scribal schools in which not just the writing of Hebrew, but the reading of other languages, mastery of diplomatic forms, principles of archiving and so on would be passed on.    Undoubtedly there were scribal schools later, in the Hellenistic age."

    "In the Ptolemaic and Seleucid periods Judah’s wealth increased considerably, and the later we move in date the easier it is to conclude that the temple could sustain a number of scribal schools with a vigorous literary activity.   The later in time, the better evidence we have for scribal activity.     Even if holy scribbling began before the Second Temple period, it continued and increased during this period.     Since scribblers were rare before then, but common afterwards, what is the objection to postulating that the scriptures were actually written when scribbling was popular? The onus of proof of the antiquity of the scriptures lies on those who want to argue that they were written earlier.   If less likely, it remains possible, but must be shown, not assumed."

   "The education of the scribe broadened in the Hellenistic period, and they spread their values to non-scribes. Education in classical Greece was to produce warrior citizens versed in gymnastics, music, and grammar.   Later the Sophists added politics, dialectics, and rhetoric.   In the Hellenistic period, children in general were taught arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy.    In the second century BC literacy had become more widespread in Judah because of Greek influence, the growth of international trade under Persia, the emergence of a middle class of merchants and artisans, and the growth of the administrative class, especially under the Ptolemies.   Ben Sira invites his readers to attend his school, possibly even without payment, but the range of topics in his book shows he is not training scribes, but offering an education to anyone who wanted to study."

When Dumuzi returned to Earth, however, Ningishzidda’s elder brother, Marduk, Enki's eldest son, took charge of Abael and the animal husbandry project.   Whether Dumuzi or Marduk supervised Abael, the Enki lineage ran livestock for Mission Earth.