The Judgement of Solomon is a story from the Book of Kings in which Solomon ruled between two women who both claimed to be the mother of a child. Solomon ordered the baby be cut in half, with each woman to receive one half. The first woman accepted the compromise as fair, but the second begged Solomon to give the baby to her rival, preferring the baby to live, even without her. Solomon ordered the baby given to the second woman, as her love was selfless, as opposed to the first woman's selfish disregard for the baby's actual well-being. Some consider this approach to justice an archetypal example of an impartial judge displaying wisdom in making a ruling.
Biblical narrative
recounts that two mothers living in the same house, each the mother of an infant son, came to Solomon. One of the babies had been smothered, and each claimed the remaining boy as her own. Calling for a sword, Solomon declared his judgment: the baby would be cut in two, each woman to receive half. One mother did not contest the ruling, declaring that if she could not have the baby then neither of them could, but the other begged Solomon, "Give the baby to her, just don't kill him!"
The king declared the second woman the true mother, as a mother would even give up her baby if that was necessary to save its life, and awarded her custody. This judgment became known throughout all of Israel and was considered an example of profound wisdom.
Classification and parallels The story is commonly viewed in scholarship as an instance or a reworking of a folktale. Its folkloristic nature is apparent, among other things, in the dominance of direct speech which moves the plot on and contributes to the characterization.Mordechai Cogan, I Kings (Anchor Bible), New York: Doubleday, 2001, p. 196. The story is classified as Aarne-Thompson tale type 926, and many parallel stories have been found in world folklore. In Uther's edition of the Aarne-Thompson index,Hans-Jörg Uther, The Types of International Folktales: A Classification and Bibliography, Based on the System of Antii Aarne and Stith Thompson, I, Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 2004. this tale type is classified as a folk novella, and belongs to a subgroup designated "Clever Acts and Words". Eli Yassif defines the folk novella as "a realistic story whose time and place are determined ... The novella emphasizes such human traits as cleverness, eroticism, loyalty, and wiliness, that drive the plot forward more than any other element".Eli Yassif, The Hebrew Folktale: History, Genre, Meaning (Folklore Studies in Translation), Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999, p. 27
Hugo Gressmann has found several similar stories in world folklore and literature, especially in India and the far east.See Hugo Gressmann, "Das salomonische Urteil", Deutsche Rundschau 130 (1907), pp. 212–28 One Indian version is a Jataka story dealing with Buddha in one of his previous incarnations as the sage Mahosadha, who arbitrates between a mother and a Yakshini who is in the shape of a woman, who kidnapped the mother's baby and claimed he was hers. The sage announced a tug of war, drawing a line on the ground and asking the two to stand on opposite sides of it, one holding the baby's feet, the other his hands – the one who pulled the baby's whole body beyond the line would get to keep him. The mother, seeing how the baby suffered, released him and, weeping, let the Yakshini take him. When the sage saw that, he returned the baby to the hands of the true mother, exposed the identity of the Yakshini and expelled her.See E. B. Cowell (ed.), The Jātaka, or Stories of the Buddha's Former Births, VI, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1907, p. 163. In other Indian versions, the two women are widows of one husband.See for example G. R. Subramiah Pantulu, Indian Antiquary 26 (1897), p. 111 Another version appears in Li Qianfu's Chinese drama The Chalk Circle (in which the judge draws a circle on the ground),Theodor Herzl Gaster, Myth, Legend, and Custom in the Old Testament: A Comparative Study with Chapters from Sir James G. Frazer's Folklore in the Old Testament, II, New York: Harper & Row, 1969, p. 493. which has spread worldwide, many versions and reworkings being made, such as Bertolt Brecht's 1940s play The Caucasian Chalk Circle.
The common motif in those parallel versions is that the wise judge announces an absurd procedure, which is reasonable in some perverse way: splitting the baby, according to the principle of compromise; or a tug of war, in which one can possibly presume that the true mother will be motivated to pull harder. But the procedure is actually a concealed emotional test, designed to force each woman to decide between her compassion for the baby and her will to win.William Hansen, Ariadne's Thread: A Guide to International Tales Found in Classical Literature, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002, p. 228.
There is indirect evidence that the story was also widespread in ancient times in the western world. A Greek papyrus fragment,P. Oxy. XLI 2944 dating from the beginning of the second century AD, includes a fragmented reference to an ancient legal case which is similar to the judgment of Solomon. The writer ascribes the story to Phliliskos of Miletos, living in the fourth century BC.William Hansen, Ariadne's Thread: A Guide to International Tales Found in Classical Literature, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002, pp. 229–30.Eric G. Turner, The Papyrologist at work (Greek, Roman and Byzantine Monographs 6), Durham, NC: Duke University, 1973, pp. 7-14 A fresco found in the "House of the Physician" in Pompeii depicts pygmies introducing a scene similar to the biblical story.William Hansen, Ariadne's Thread: A Guide to International Tales Found in Classical Literature, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002, pp. 231–32. A picture of the fresco. Some think that the fresco relates directly to the biblical story,Frederick E. Brenk, "Greek, Greeks; C. Religion", Encyclopedia of the Bible and its Reception, v. 10, 2015, p. 889. while according to others it represents a parallel tradition.
Several suggestions for the genre of the biblical story have been raised beyond its characterization as a folktale of a known type. Edward Lipinski suggests that the story is an example of "king's bench tales", a subgenre of the wisdom literature to which he finds parallels in Sumerian literature.Edward Lipinski, "Ancient Types of Wisdom Literature in Biblical Narrative", in Alexander Rofé and Yair Zakovitch (eds.), Isac Leo Seeligmann Volume, Jerusalem: E. Rubenstein, 1983, pp. 51–55
Scholars have pointed out that the story resembles the modern detective story genre. Both king Solomon and the reader are confronted with some kind of a juridical-detective riddle. Meir Sternberg notes that two genres merge in the story: A riddle and a test; the juridical dilemma, which is the riddle, also constitutes a test for the young king: if he can solve it, he will be acknowledged as possessing divine wisdom.Meir Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading (Indiana Studies in Biblical Literature), Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985, p. 167. Stuart Lasine classifies the story as a law-court riddle.Stuart Lasine, "The Riddle of Solomon’s Judgment and the Riddle of Human Nature in the Hebrew Bible", Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 45 (1989), p. 61
According to Raymond Westbrook, the story is essentially a hypothetical problem, introduced to the recipient as a pure intellectual challenge and not as a concrete juridical case. In such problems, any unnecessary detail is usually omitted and this is why the characters in the story have no distinctive characteristics. The description of the case eliminates the possibility of obtaining circumstantial evidence, thereby forcing the recipient to confront the dilemma directly and not seek indirect ways to solve it.Raymond Westbrook, "Law in Kings", in André Lemaire, Baruch Halpern, and Matthew J. Adams (eds.), The Book of Kings: Sources, Composition, Historiography and Reception (Supplements to Vetus Testamentum 129), Leiden: Brill, 2010, pp. 446–47.
Some scholars think that the original folk story underwent significant literary reworking so that in its biblical crystallization it can no longer be defined as a folktale. Jacob Liver notes the absence of any "local coloring" in the story, and concludes that the story is "not an actual folk tale but a scholarly reworking of a folk tale (apparently from a non-Israelite source) which in some way reached the court circles of Jerusalem in the times of Solomon".Jacob Liver, "The Book of the Acts of Solomon", Biblica 48 (1967), p. 82 Similarly, Ze'ev Weisman notes that the story seems "more of a paradigmatic anecdote created in the milieu of courtly wisdom than a folktale".Ze'ev Weisman, Political Satire in the Bible (SBL Semeia Studies 32), Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1998, p. 107. George W. Coats also characterizes the story as an anecdote ("Parable, Fable, and Anecdote: Storytelling in the Succession Narrative", Interpretation 35 , p. 379)
Origin The story has a number of parallels in folktales from various cultures. All of the known parallels, among them several from India, have been recorded in later periods than the biblical story; nevertheless, it is unclear whether they reflect earlier or later traditions. Hermann Gunkel rules out the possibility that such a sophisticated motif had developed independently in different places.Hermann Gunkel, The Folktale in the Old Testament (Historic Texts and Interpreters in Biblical Scholarship), translated by Michael D. Rutter, Sheffield, UK: Almond, 1987, p. 156. Some scholars are of the opinion that the source of the story is untraceable.James A. Montgomery and Henry Snyder Gehman, Kings (International Critical Commentary), Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1951, p. 109.Gwilym H. Jones, 1 and 2 Kings (New Century Bible), I, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1984, p. 131.
In the biblical version, the two women are identified as prostitutes, but in some Indian versions they are widows of one husband. Some scholars have inferred the origin of the story from this difference. Following Gressmann,Hugo Gressmann, "Das salomonische Urteil", Deutsche Rundschau 130 (1907), pp. 218 Gunkel speculates a possible Indian origin, on the basis that "[s]uch stories of wise judgments are the real life stuff of the Indian people", and that, in his view, "a prostitute has no reason to value a child which was not born to her"; he acknowledges, however, that the Indian versions "belong to a later period". On the other hand, Lasine opines that the Hebrew story is better motivated than the Indian one, for it alone attributes the motivation for the behavior of both women to typical motherly feelings: compassion for the true mother and jealousy for the impostor.Stuart Lasine, "The Riddle of Solomon’s Judgment and the Riddle of Human Nature in the Hebrew Bible", Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 45 (1989), p. 70. Other scholars point out that such a travelling folktale might become, in its various forms, more or less coherent. The assertion that one version is more coherent than the other does not compel the conclusion that the first is more original, making the argument about which version's women had more compelling reasons to fight over the child irrelevant.
Composition and editorial framing