The Jesse Tree ~ December 13: Solomon

Symbol: scales of justice

1 Kings 3:5-14, 16-28
⁵ At Gibeon Yahweh appeared to Solomon in a dream during the night. God said, ‘Ask what you would like me to give you.’ ⁶Solomon replied, ‘You showed most faithful love to your servant David, my father, when he lived his life before you in faithfulness and uprightness and integrity of heart; you have continued this most faithful love to him by allowing a son of his to sit on his throne today. ⁷Now, Yahweh my God, you have made your servant king in succession to David my father. But I am a very young man, unskilled in leadership. ⁸And here is your servant, surrounded with your people whom you have chosen, a people so numerous that its number cannot be counted or reckoned.

⁹So give your servant a heart to understand how to govern your people, how to discern between good and evil, for how could one otherwise govern such a great people as yours?’ ¹⁰It pleased Yahweh that Solomon should have asked for this. ¹¹‘Since you have asked for this,’ God said, ‘and not asked for long life for yourself or riches or the lives of your enemies but have asked for a discerning judgement for yourself, ¹²here and now I do what you ask. I give you a heart wise and shrewd as no one has had before and no one will have after you. ¹³What you have not asked I shall give you too: such riches and glory as no other king can match. ¹⁴And I shall give you a long life, if you follow my ways, keeping my laws and commandments, as your father David followed them.’..

¹⁶Later two prostitutes came to the king and stood before him. ¹⁷‘If it please you, my lord,’ one of the women said, ‘this woman and I live in the same house, and while she was in the house I gave birth to a child. ¹⁸Now it happened on the third day after my delivery that this woman also gave birth to a child. We were alone together; there was no one else in the house with us; just the two of us in the house. ¹⁹Now one night this woman’s son died; she overlaid him. ²⁰And in the middle of the night she got up and took my son from beside me while your servant was asleep; she took him in her arms and put her own dead son in mine. ²¹When I got up to suckle my child, there he was, dead. But in the morning I looked at him carefully, and he was not the child I had borne at all.’ ²²Then the other woman spoke. ‘That is not true! My son is the live one, yours is the dead one’; and the first retorted, ‘That is not true! Your son is the dead one, mine is the live one.’ And so they wrangled before the king.

²³‘This one says,’ the king observed, ‘ “My son is the one who is alive; your son is dead,” while the other says, “That is not true! Your son is the dead one, mine is the live one.” ²⁴Bring me a sword,’ said the king; and a sword was brought into the king’s presence. ²⁵‘Cut the living child in two,’ the king said, ‘and give half to one, half to the other.’ ²⁶At this the woman who was the mother of the living child addressed the king, for she felt acutely for her son. ‘I beg you, my lord,’ she said, ‘let them give her the live child; on no account let them kill him!’ But the other said, ‘He shall belong to neither of us. Cut him in half!’ ²⁷Then the king gave his decision. ‘Give the live child to the first woman,’ he said, ‘and do not kill him. She is his mother.’ ²⁸All Israel came to hear of the judgement which the king had pronounced and held the king in awe, recognising that he possessed divine wisdom for dispensing justice.

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