The Pharoah's Daughter

XXXI
The Pharoah's Daughter

ONE OF his great loves, besides Makeda, was Makshara, the daughter of Pharoah and she brought him into the house he'd built where there were figures of the sun, moon and stars in the roof causing the rooms to be lighted brightly day and night.
The mansion's beams were made of bras and its roof of silver and its panels of lead and its walls of stones, red with black, and brown with white and green and its floor was of blacks of sapphire stone and sardius.
Makshara possessed certain idols which her father had given her and Solomon saw her sacrificing to them. He didn't rebuke her about idol worship and sorcery because God was angry with him and caused him to forget his wisdom.
She even talked some of the Israelites into joining her in worshipping her idols.

Even Solomon became excited with Makshara's folly.
"It's good to worship the gods like my father and all the kings of Egypt, who were before my father," she told Solomon with a sweet smile.
"They call gods the things which have been made by the hands of the worker in metal , and the carpenter and the potter and the painter. They're not gods, but the work of the hand of man, but we worship none else than the Holy God of Israel and our Lady, the holy and heavenly Zion, the Tabernacle of the Law of God, whom He gave us to worship and our seed after us."
Makshara shook her head.
"Your son took the Ark, didn't he?"
Solomon remained silent.
"Your son, you had with an alien woman which God hadn't commanded you to marry, and what's more she's an Ethiopian, who isn't of your color, and isn't from your country and, moreover, she's black."
Solomon, inwardly, trembled at her words, but he refused to bow down to her idols.

A month later, Makshara turned against the king, treating him disdainfully and refusing his advances.
"What do you want me to do?" moaned Solomon. "You've turned against me and I don't know what's the matter. Tell me and I'll do anything you ask."
"Do you mean it, you'll do anything I ask?" she said, slowly.
"Yes," he whispered.
"Makshara then tied a scarlet thread on the middle of the door of the shrine she'd made to her gods and brought three locusts and put them in the shrine.
"Here's what you have to do, Solomon, kill those three locusts within breaking the scarlet thread." He did as he was told.
"I'll have sex with you now because you've sacrificed to my gods by entering into this shrineto kill the locusts."
Solomon returned to his own quarters, and remembering how he had enticed Makeda into his bed through deception so long ago and now he was the one who had been duped.
In the night, a shadow fell across him and a voice thundered, "Why, Solomon did you marry alien women and sacrifice to their gods?"
From being the wisest man in the world, he had become a fool.