Scripture Study

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I’ve recently become one of the Gospel Doctrine teachers in my ward, and we’ve been making our way slowly through the Hebrew Bible. Coming to the text again after many years of neglect, I’m finding the Bible a much livelier read for me this time around. It’s still a strange book, but it’s also packed full of soulful stories that sometimes crackle with the divine presence. Recently, we stumbled into the seemingly endless annals of the kings of Israel and Judah.

In our attempt to make some sense of the first few chapters of 1 Kings, we focused on the famous story (3:16-28) about Solomon’s ability to see to the heart of the matter in a dispute between two women over their infant sons, one dead and the other alive. Solomon’s famous proposal to cut the live boy into two pieces immediately identified the true mother. I’ve always loved the story as what seemed like an elegant judicial tactic that shone a light on the dark corners of human nature. For me the focus of the story was on Solomon and his solution. It was a compelling account of wise jurisprudence in ancient Israel.

In retrospect, I had no idea what was going on. Not really. It wasn’t until I returned to that makeshift courtroom as an adult, preparing a Gospel Doctrine lesson that I began to see this encounter in a new and holy light.

Some basic study of the text and its probable history is enough to orient ourselves to the biblical situation. Solomon was not the one of David’s sons that was expected to succeed him. Adonijah had claimed that honor. Instead, the prophet Nathan and Solomon’s mother, probably Bathsheba, preyed on the failing wits of the second king of united Israel, her addled (and curiously cold-intolerant, we discover in one of the stranger twists of Bible history) but still powerful husband, David. After the queen’s shenanigans and backed by the prophet, Solomon’s chances looked pretty good.

In the event, Solomon rose to the throne, but his success was to be short-lived unless he consolidated power, rapidly. He did so by systematically executing anyone who might make a claim to his throne or be a key supporter of someone who would. It’s a brutal story, not for the faint of heart. These are old stories about vulnerable rulers and their fractious successors.

This was ancient Israel, though, not a movie. It wasn’t enough to be powerful and to kill off your enemies. A king also had to be wise. Ideally, a king would wield the wisdom of God we know as Jehovah. Solomon had consolidated his power, but he had yet to demonstrate that God had endowed him with true wisdom.

Into this fraught moment in the reign of Israel’s third king walk two angry, fearful, grief-struck prostitutes. Roommates, they lived on the vulnerable margins of society. Both had infant sons. Both had awakened that morning to discover their boy was dead (the first one to awaken swapped her dead baby for the other’s live one before the second awoke to the sight of that same dead baby beneath her breast). But one of the two young boys had in fact survived.

His fate was the judicial problem to test the new king—which woman could rightfully claim the boy? Given the lack of men to resolve the issues themselves or provide reliable testimony (their world was not ours, and it placed women in much worse positions than we would now tolerate), the decision of the woman to whom the baby would belong depended on the intervention of a wise judge. If God in fact favored him, the new king was such a man. Now was the moment to understand whether God really had blessed Solomon with wisdom.

The testimony begins with a woman declaring that the other woman had stolen her live son while she slept. She goes on at length, indicating that her son was older by three days and confirming that there was no man in the house who might adjudicate the legal question at hand.

Many scholars think that Solomon quickly figured out that the woman who spoke first about death (e.g., her baby died, mine survived) was the one whose baby had actually died. The one who began her declarations about life (e.g., my baby lives, her baby died) was the one whose baby was still alive. They’re probably right: ancient Hebrew readers and writers often saw the order of words and clauses as pregnant with meaning in a way that escapes our American English attention. So, after noticing that distinction in speech patterns between the two women, Solomon apparently knows the answer to the puzzle.

But in the absence of reliable testimony, a test is necessary to prove the point to the court and the nation. Solomon knows the truth, but he has to prove it. So, he proposes to treat the baby as a piece of inanimate property that could easily be split to apportion it between the two women, like a contested bushel of barley or a pail of sheep milk. The frightened mother of the live boy exclaims that she would rather see her son raised by her roommate than see him dead. The bereaved mother of the dead boy falls into Solomon’s trap and asks for her half of the boy.

What possible sense could this dilemma make? Better my child be dead than taken from me? I don’t know any parents who believe that, unless they have actually lost their mind. Maybe what Solomon has done here is allowed us a sideways glance into the minds and motivations of these two women. One is bereaved to the point of insanity. The other is irritated and worried but rests comfortable in the knowledge that her son is alive. In other words, what if this test is intended to determine which of the women is truly broken by grief?

While, due to some anxiety I’ve suffered over the years, I’ve lived through the loss of my children in morbid, panicked daydreams, my children have only ever suffered one actual medical problem, which responded well to treatment, however terrifying the process was. I know and love, however, a handful of people who have suffered precisely that bereavement of all terrible bereavements. That grief breaks the soul; it tears words from throats and ransacks minds. There is perhaps no grief greater than that of a parent whose child has died.

But now I find myself struck with godly sorrow. What I thought was a story about a wise man exposing a criminal is actually a story about a desolate mother whose grief has carried her beyond sanity. I’ve had to confess that in the past I judged the bereaved mother as a jealous woman who hated her roommate and wanted to steal her baby in order to hide her sin of accidental infanticide. I was dead wrong.

Instead, now I see the primal, annihilating scream of a woman all alone, mentally broken by the realization that she accidentally smothered her child. I guess it’s useful to understand the way that Solomon got to the nature of that soul-breaking grief in his famous thought experiment. I suppose it’s helpful to know that this feat (and presumably others like it) clinched Solomon’s authority as the king chosen by God for Israel. But those political facts pale in comparison with my encounter with the enormous, feral anguish of a mother who blames herself for her infant’s death. That seems to me to be the stunning display, the outpouring of insight, from this passage in 1 Kings 3.

We have seen into the heart of this young mother, brutally alone in her grief. But what do we do next? Do we, as my young self did, think, “Great work, Detective Solomon: you solved the case”? Or do we ask, “O God, how can we be vessels in healing the heart of this grief-ruptured woman?” Such a stark view into the heart of another person is a call to obligation. It’s a covenant, not a titillation. Solomon’s court is no reality TV show, voyeurs basking in the misery of hapless defendants. It is a Christian call to love, prayer, and action. It is a revelation to us. So here I stand, heartbroken and renewed not so much by the wisdom of Solomon but by the covenantal obligation that another’s grief imposes on me, their companion in the walk of faith. The tears of the grief-mad woman flow from the waters in which I was baptized (Mosiah 18:8-9). They call to my soul.