Breasts and Cisterns

          Drink water from your own cistern, running water from your own well. Should your springs overflow in the streets, your streams of water in the public squares? Let them be yours alone, never to be shared with strangers. May your fountain be blessed, and may you rejoice in the wife of your youth. A loving doe, a graceful deer—may her breasts satisfy you always, may you ever be captivated by her love. Why be captivated, my son, by an adulteress? Why embrace the bosom of another man’s wife? (Proverbs 5:15-20)

 

          Didn’t I say that Solomon didn’t have a problem with sexuality? I find myself wondering when he wrote or said this. Was it after the foreign wives that the Law forbade him to have got him involved with the worship of their gods? Was he recognizing that error in his own judgment? I don’t know. Once again, however, I think the lesson needs to extend beyond sexuality. 
         It seems as if we are always looking around, assuming that everyone else has it better. Not only do we, as individuals, try to keep up with the Joneses, but as communities and even as a nation, we look around. We’re technically and legally married to the form of government that our Constitution (the marriage license between the people and the government) dictates, but have you seen the neighbor to the north? Or the ones who live across the pond. Talk about breasts – especially those ones along the north road. 
         Of course, this is precisely what the Jews did. They looked around at all the other nations and made up their mind that the thing keeping them from happiness was their lack of a human king. They complained and got Saul. Big mistake. God removed him from power and gave the kingdom to David. David, the adulterer. David, the liar. David, the murderer. David, the disobedient. After David came Solomon, who had many wives that led him into the worship of other gods. After that, it gets worse more often than it gets better, until God said “You want to be like the other nations? Here, be part of this nation.”
         Another idea that comes to mind is Potemkin villages. A long time ago, the Soviet Union invited American journalists to visit. The journalists returned to America singing the praises of the Soviet way of life. “You should see their towns!” What they didn’t realize until some time later is that those towns were all fake. They were set up to show the success of Communism. The unreported reality included millions being killed and imprisoned. 
         My feeling on the issue is this – if you want to abandon your relationship with God or with the Constitution, or with whatever, that’s your right. Your right, however, ends at the tip of your nose. You don’t have the right to insist that I commit adultery against God, against my family, or against my nation. I’ll drink water from my own cistern, thank you very much.