It was called the House of David because David sired the entire royal line; no one speaks (or spoke) of the House of Saul dying on Mt. Gilboa because of Sauls great piety and nobility, y'know. Solomons fondness for women is certainly referenced repeatedly in the bible, but also the one large flaw in an otherwise flawless, exemplary, record. If that disqualifies him from paragon status it disqualifies his father as well, or Solomon would never have been born; he may have liked women, but I've never heard of him having someone killed to get one. According to the biblical text, his wisdom was a divine gift--and accompanied by wealth and power because he asked for wisdom instead of those things. He built the Temple because God forbade David to do so due to the blood on his hands, but the same text that makes that claim also claims that the Temple was built under Solomon and consecrated with the Presence of God upon its completion. That's not to say Josiah wasn't a paragon in his own right, especially among Rehoboams successors (though Hezekiah seems as worthy of respect) but construction of the Temple seems seems not a cause of the towering position Solomon yet retains in all Abrahamic religions, but a symptom of the overall piety responsible for both the Temple and Solomons stature.

Right; it's just adultery for a married man to have sex with anyone but his wife (though if I understood what you said below you're saying it's ALL adultery, because the concept of "fornication" is a later development), unmarried women are stoned or burned alive if discovered not to be virgins when wed (for "playing the harlot in her fathers house", as I believe it's translated in English) and unmarried men who have sex with unmarried women must pay the bride price to the father AND marry them, irrevocably. Prostitution isn't forbidden as such, but it's hard to find a way to engage in prostitution that isn't forbidden; it's not as if incidents like what happened with Tamar (which is mentioned before the written law was supposed to have been recorded anyway) condone prostitution. When did you become such a biblical literalist and, perhaps more importantly, how does that square with your apparent attitude toward fundamentalists? There's ample evidence on how the written law handled the issue: The written law itself, which may not attack prostitution directly, but has it bracketed with fire pretty well.

Suddenly the text as written that was so important to recall in the last paragraph is "the silly habit that uneducated evangelicals are partial to"? Careful now; changing horses in midstream like that is a good way to drown. You know the ancient drill: Kill all "men" (any boy old enough to carry a spear), impregnate all the women, carry the able bodies off as slaves and salt the earth so anyone who manages to survive has no way to grow food. Are you saying that's all just falsified intimidation combined with embellishments centuries later? Sprang forth fully formed like some R rated Athena? Assyria doesn't seem to have engaged in that much, but genocide via relocation and assimiliation rather than mass slaughter and enslavement was one of the biggest Assyrian contributions to ancient culture. The way I recall the biblical text we're selectively treating as an authority that's how Israel ENDED, not how it began, and the land hungry Israelites didn't have many places to send conquered people at the birth of their nation regardless.

It leads to "fallen women", babies christened with their fathers surnames and fathers until recently able to deny undeniable parternity (and the consequent obligations). When most property is owned by men who can never be nearly as certain of their childrens paternity as the mother, society will inevitably develop customs and laws to help compensate for those facts. That tendency is even stronger when the society in question is a relatively small one and thus deeply concerned with preserving its unique cultural identity while surrounded by very different and far more numerous neighbors. That doesn't mean it will make child bearing the sole acceptable purpose of sex, and I agree that the bible very clearly does nothing of the sort, but it does tend to make reproductive potential a requirement. Stable families are also required or at least encouraged, of course, or we'd probably have a Torah that says something more like "have sex with as many women as possible as often as possible but make sure they're all Jews". Ritual purity, incidentally, strikes me as more of a sanitary than a reproductive issue; the priests didn't want blood from anything but the sacrifices in the Temple, and Israel on the march didn't want it all over the camp attracting every scavenger and predator for miles.

We've had this discussion; I used the broader term because of the context and examples drawn from parts of the bible other than the Torah proper (which doesn't mention David or Solomon once). The Prophets referenced, reinforced and relied on the Torah throughout their writings, and even speaking of "the Law and the Prophets" doesn't really cover the whole of the OT. Since we've been discussing more than the Torah itself it didn't seem proper to refer by name to it alone.

Even slaves as laborers were, at least on paper, more than mere property but, yes, the concept of concubines is well established in the bible and elsewhere, and adding a female member to ones household as far less than a wife doesn't represent adultery (if we're accepting that "fornication" didn't exist as a concept, presumably there's no reason to address that). An unmarried woman was assumed to be a virgin until proven otherwise, and killed if found to BE otherwise, which should make the general attitude on extra-marital (including pre-marital) sex clear. That's about more than property rights; no sane person deals with damaged property by destroying it. Both divorced women and widows were previously married, and sex with their husbands wasn't adultery, but I missed the part in Ruth where she's held up as a virtuous woman providing for her family through noble prostitution (but only with unmarried men, of course). If memory serves, that book ends with a marriage.

We both know you can't create a legal system that specifically and explicitly addresses every contingency, and simply saying, "x is illegal" isn't enough because of the need to define what does and does not constitue x. Consequently and unsurprisingly the Torah seems better understood as a general overview of the law with many particular examples to illustrate the spirit; were it a simple checklist of what accused criminals either did or did not do Israel wouldn't have needed Judges. Thus prostitution isn't explicitly forbidden, but most of the ways it can occur are at some point in the text. The omission of any reference to female homosexuality (which, after all, is how this discussion began) is still a glaring oversight; the closest the ????????? ,??????? OR ?????????? come to anything like that is discussion of MALE homosexuality, and women are not men (a fact of which the Torah seems QUITE aware).

For the record, I do consider myself an "evangelical" Christian because of this thing called "the Great Commission". I prefer the term "fundamentalist" for the kind of Christians you have in mind, both because it's more informative and because I resent and refuse to accept their implication that they're the only "real" Christians. Also for the record, calling people "stupid" twice in the same sentence is a good example of what I (and not only I) mean when we suggest it's not in RAFOs best interest to come off like an insular clannish antisocial "community" that looks at everyone but its first order of humans like, well, like fundies look at other Christians as well as non-Christians.