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The World's First Competitive Business Model (Hint: it was Divine)

Mordechai Ben-Menachem

Lemma: The wealth of King Solomon is well documented and testified in many documents-not ‘just’ Hebrew documents, but also those of other nations. From where did this exemplary wealth derive? The land of Israel is not extraordinarily fertile, nor large, nor blessed with any ‘outstanding’, resource. Solomon did not have obvious mining operations (despite Rider Haggard’s “King Solomon’s Mines” and other such fictional works). All nations at that time were agricultural. If Israel was ‘simply’ an agricultural economy, like all others, particularly with the limited rainfall common to the land then there could not be wealth accrual. Israel is dependent upon local rains and does not have extensive water sources flowing in, such as the Nile Valley or Mesopotamia. In a bad rain-year, there would be hunger, not wealth! Farms were like everyone and everywhere. The source of wealth is not obvious; nor can accrual be accounted for in any usual manner. This question is the basis for this article.

The answer was in a unique national business model and implementation mechanism: the Levites were central to it all. It should be stated that this article is a “shortened” form of a much longer piece, discussing the tribe of Levi in general, currently in process of being published as a book.