King Solomon

Israelite king who built the First Temple in Jerusalem, whose wisdom became proverbial, who wrote (or was attributed with) Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Songs — whose reign represented the height of the united Israelite kingdom — and whose apostasy (foreign wives and foreign gods) is presented as the cause of the subsequent division.

Represents wisdom as the highest kingly virtue in the Israelite tradition — Solomon's judgment (splitting the baby), his commercial treaties, and his Temple-building create the archetype of the wise king — and the biblical warning that even the wisest man can be undone by sensual compromise provides the enduring moral.