“The king said, ‘Cut the living child in two; give half to the one and half to the other.’”-1 Kings 3:25
The two prostitutes begin shouting at each other, each claiming the living child is her own.
The absence of witnesses further compounds the difficulty.
So what to do?
Solomon has no choice but to do something so off-the-cuff and dramatic that it would force the truth to come out in one way or another.
He orders the baby and a sword to be brought to him.
Solomon flat-out tells the two women that since he can’t decide either way who is telling the truth, he has no choice but to divide the baby with the sword and give each woman half of the infant’s body.
Obviously, if that happens, the two women will end up with two dead children instead of one living one.
Solomon raises the sword, ready to cut the baby in half.
One woman, in her evil bitterness, tells Solomon to get on with it.
Why?
Because she feels it would be better if both women lost the child to death.
The other woman begs Solomon not to strike the child and tells Solomon she will give up her claim to the baby as long as the child can live.
Solomon puts his sword down and says…
“Give the living child to the first woman,
don’t kill it, because she is its mother.”
Solomon correctly understood that the real mother would not want to see her own child killed just so that both sides would lose.
The story then concludes by telling us…
“All Israel heard of the decision the king had made and held the king in awe, for they saw that God’s wisdom was in him, enabling him to render justice properly.”-1 Kings 3:28
Alrighty, let’s switch over to the takeaway.
There’s an uncomfortable but important truth buried inside this story.
The false mother was willing to see the child die as long as the other woman suffered too.
That attitude revealed she didn’t truly love the child.
The real mother, on the other hand, was willing to surrender her own rights, her own claim, and even endure heartbreak if it meant the child could live.
Life mattered more to her than pride, revenge, or victory.
And honestly, when you look at the modern Middle East conflict, you can see a chilling parallel in the attitudes of Hamas and Israel.
Hamas openly glorifies death and martyrdom.
They have sent young men and even children into suicide missions.
They build military infrastructure around civilians and are willing to sacrifice their own people for ideological victory and propaganda.
That mindset resembles the false mother in Solomon’s story.
“If I can’t win completely, then let both sides suffer.”
Israel, despite all its flaws, generally operates from the opposite instinct.
Its society is built around preserving life.
In fact, Israel has repeatedly been willing to divide land, negotiate territory, make concessions, and accept risky compromises in the hope of preserving peace and preventing more bloodshed.
Ironically, some of those concessions have even gone against what God originally commanded concerning the land.
But the motivation behind those actions has often been the desire to preserve human life over endless war.
And that’s the deeper principle Solomon understood:
A person’s attitude toward innocent life exposes what is truly in their heart.
The woman who truly loved the child wanted life preserved at all costs.
The woman consumed by bitterness was willing to destroy life just to avoid losing.
Leave a Reply