A blade is raised. A child wails. But the brow under the crown is untroubled. Solomon knows that the raising of the sword will reveal the true parent and the identity of the son. But how did he know this? Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac certainly bears some of the same themes of Solomon’s first test of wisdom. Except that Abraham proves himself the true father of the faith by his willingness to go through with the deed. The true mother of the child in 1 Kings 3 reveals herself through her unwillingness to let the child die.
While it is true that Solomon was granted divine wisdom from God earlier in chapter 3, we should not confuse the final cause with the efficient cause. The Lord granted that Solomon would become wise, but we should not imagine God waving a cosmic wand, muttering some Latin phrase, and transmuting Solomon’s neural pathways. The efficient cause of Solomon’s wisdom was, at least in part, the sum total of his life experience, rightly interpreted. Every person who has ever lived has been given the circumstantial experiences necessary to become wise. But not every person derives the right lessons from them. Proverbs 9:8-9 show that instruction is wasted on the fool, but makes the wise wiser still. As we will see, the educational value of one of the most distressing episodes of David’s life was lost on the father, but later turned to the profit of the son. Let us turn to 2 Samuel 15-19 to unearth the test that David failed.
DAVID FLEES BEFORE ABSALOM:
David’s son Absalom has decided that he’s not going to wait for his father to die to claim his inheritance and declares himself king at Hebron. David, who is worn down by the challenges of kingship and the consequences of his failure with Bathsheba, decides to flee the capital in order to avoid civil war in Israel. As David leaves Jerusalem, Ziba, the servant of Mephibosheth, comes riding after him with provisions and donkeys for his men. David is dismayed at Mephibosheth’s absence. Did he stay to throw in his lot with Absalom? Ziba confirms his fears, relaying Mephibosheth’s words: “Today the house of Israel will give me back the kingdom of my father” (2 Sam. 16:3).
If you remember, after David had solidified his throne, he asked if there was any descendent of Saul that he might show kindness to for Jonathan’s sake (2 Sam. 9). There was. Ziba, a servant from the house of Saul brings to him Mephibosheth, a crippled son of Jonathan who was dropped as a child by a scared nurse who feared he would be murdered in the aftermath of Saul and Jonathan’s deaths (2 Sam. 4:4). David decides that he is going to set aside the deep, abiding hatred that he bore in his soul for crippled people and lift the ban upon the lame and the blind entering his house (2 Sam. 5:8).(1) He welcomes Mephibosheth into his home, tells him he will always have a seat at the table, and appoints Ziba to tend to the entire inheritance of Saul and Jonathan on behalf of Mephibosheth. All of the land that belonged to the king and his son will now be tilled by Ziba and his sons for the benefit of Saul’s grandson (2 Sam. 9:10).
DAVID RETURNS TO JERUSALEM:
After Absalom’s death, David is disheartened and disconsolate. We are told that “all the people were arguing through all the tribes of Israel” (2 Sam. 19:9). The point at issue was who would be King. Should they reinstate David? David appears to be so deeply absorbed in his personal sorrow that he has little attention to give to the business of reinstating his Kingship. Likely his mind was consumed with counting all of the ways in which he brought this calamity upon his own head by his own sin and through his failures as a father. As he rode back into Jerusalem, there were surely throngs of people asking for appointments and favors in the wake of the aborted coup. Absalom very well may have made hasty reapportionments of property that David was now being hassled to correct as he rode back into the city; boos mixed with cheers.
It is in this state of mind that Mephibosheth hobbles out to David, his hair as long as eagles’ feathers, and his nails like birds’ claws. He explains that Ziba tricked him on the day that David fled before Absalom. Mephibosheth claims he was the one who had the idea to take the donkeys out to David, but Ziba left him behind and took the credit for himself. Knowing that his absence from David’s retinue in retreat would be seen as treason, Mephibosheth stopped tending his hair and nails as a sign of mourning. This act was a perilous measure to take. We know that Absalom was very particular about his own grooming (2 Sam. 14:26) and would have been too vain and prideful to allow one of his newfound subjects to remain in mourning for the departed King David. But Mephibosheth took the chance and survived until David’s return with a visible sign of his faithfulness to David’s claim to the throne.
Despite seeing Mephibosheth’s outward signs of mourning, David demands of him an answer for why he did not leave the city. Mephibosheth explains what really happened, proving that: “The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him” (Prov. 18:17). But David is unable to decide between the two stories and, cutting of Mephibosheth, “Why speak any more of your affairs? I have decided: you and Ziba shall divide the land” (2 Sam. 19:29). If David had only taken a moment to cross examine Ziba or think about the life-threatening risks Mephibosheth took to remain in mourning, he would certainly have seen that Jonathan’s son was in the right. If there was any question about the matter, Mephibosheth’s answer removes all doubt: “Oh let him take it all, since my lord the king has come safely home” (19:30).
LESSON LEARNED:
Hopefully at this point you will have seen the similarity between this interaction and Solomon’s inaugural demonstration of his wisdom in 1 Kings 3. In that passage, two prostitutes come before the king and play out the Proverbs 18:17 shuffle. Once they start going around in circles about the identity of the baby, Solomon asks for a sword and promises a half to each woman. At this point, the true mother cries out: “Oh, my lord, give her the living child, and by no means put him to death” (v.26). I can guarantee you that those words were shouted with as much force and conviction as her cries in the labor pains that brought the child into the world in the first place. The false mother was still formulating a calculated response when the shriek echoed through the courtroom. Mephibosheth’s response was equally involuntary and uncalculated. David raises the sword of his divine Kingship to split the inheritance in two and Mephibosheth shouts: “No! Let him take it!” Obviously, Mephibosheth is not fearing for the life of the inanimate inheritance, but his aim is the same as the true mother’s: the good of the beloved. Mephibosheth has already said that being reunited with the King is like seeing the “angel of God” (2 Sam. 19:27). This phrase recalls us to another reunion, that of Jacob and Esau in Genesis 33. Esau initially declines the generous gifts offered by Jacob, but Jacob insists that he take them declaring “No, please, if I have found favor in your sight, then accept my present from my hand. For I have seen your face, which is like seeing the face of God” (v. 10). Both Mephibosheth and Jacob do proper and fitting obeisance to man as the image of God. (2)
In each case, the two prostitutes before Solomon and Mephibosheth and Ziba before David, the opposing parties are not after the same thing. For Ziba, the disagreement is very much about getting the inheritance. For Mephibosheth, it is about being in right standing with the beloved, King David. In the case of the two mothers, the true mother is more concerned about protecting the life of her child than personally possessing it. This is the same maternal motivation that led Jochebed to send her beautiful baby Moses down the river. Likewise, Mephibosheth shows himself a true son of Jonathan in his selfless surrender of inheritance. Of the many brothers we find struggling for dominance over a birthright in the Old Testament, Jonathan stands out in glorious contrast for his willingness to give up his birthright to his adopted brother David. Jonathan risked his own life time and again for the man that he knew would take his crown one day. On top of Saul’s jealous anger at David, he is disgusted at what he perceives to be Jonathan’s limp-wristed response to the challneger: “You son of a perverse, rebellious woman! Do I not know that you have chosen the son of Jesse to your own shame, and to the shame of your mother’s nakedness? For as long as the son of Jesse lives on the earth, neither you nor your kingdom shall be established” (1 Sam. 20:30-31).
HOW SOLOMON LEARNED OF THESE THINGS:
A question that may have occurred to you in the course of this excursus is, “How did Solomon know about this?” The simple answer is the court reporter. We no longer have the “annals of King David” (1 Chron. 27:24) but we can be sure that there was some kind of courtly scribe who took down all of David’s decrees and preserved them for settling legal issues in the Kingdom. Furthermore, I believe that after Solomon was granted his request for wisdom from God, he didn’t wait around for the Spirit to “zap” wise thoughts into his head, but took it as a matter of faith that he would become wise, and set about to learn all of the lessons of his father. In this case, he would be learning a lesson that his father did NOT learn.
As Solomon read the court reporter’s account of his father’s reign, I’m sure that he was relieved to see Mephibosheth hobbling out to David’s returning retinue. “Ah! Now justice will be done.” After David makes the callous decision to divide the property in half and Mephibosheth spontaneously offers for the entirety of it to go to Ziba, Solomon must have shouted: “See, he is the innocent party! It’s so clear! He loved not his life more than his beloved king!” Interestingly, the account of David’s encounter with Ziba and Mephibosheth in 2 Samuel 19 does not tell us David’s final decision. For all we know, he may have shrugged his shoulders and responded to Mephibosheth’s surrender: “Okay, Mephibosheth doesn’t want the property, give it all to Ziba.” If he did, I am sure that Solomon cried out in frustration at his father’s short-sightedness, and likely hastened to make amends to Mephibosheth’s offspring himself. The tragic fact is that David was acting much more like Saul when he decided to go through with cutting the “baby” in two. He was more concerned with saving face and quickly moving this sticky case off his docket than getting to the bottom of the matter. “The purpose in a man’s heart is like deep water, but a man of understanding will draw it out” (Prov. 20:5). But that process takes patience and wisdom and would have required David to admit that his previous decision to strip Mephibosheth in favor of Ziba was a hasty one
The important lesson that Solomon took from reflection on his father’s failings is that in the very moment when an existential decision is suddenly and shockingly put before two people, the first-blush reaction that rises to the surface will reveal the hearts of the petitioners. What he learned was that even if you say you will cut the baby in two, you don’t really have to. The true heart will reveal itself in the nature of its response. This is summed up in the saying of our Savior: “Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks” (Luke 6:45). May our hearts be as true and may we have the wisdom of Solomon too.
Jonathan David White is a 2021-22 Theopolis Fellow. He lives in Annapolis, MD with his wife and two sons.
- I am not convinced that David really hated the blind and the lame, it seems plausible that he’s just returning schoolyard/battleground taunts with mortal enemies. Think Monty Python and the Holy Grail. However, the fact that this passage echoes Lev. 21:18 in its barring of entry for the blind and the lame to the temple is interesting. The Temple was not built yet, so it is possible that David instituted similar holiness rules for his house that he subsequently broke for love of Jonathan. In this sense, he is showing himself a better king than Saul, who would rather kill his son than break his word (1 Sam. 14:24-46). It is especially interesting that the “my soul hates” passage (2 Sam. 4:4) is immediately followed by the passage describing Mephibosheth’s crippling (2 Sam. 5:8)
- A detail that strengthens the tie between Mephibosheth and Jacob is that they are both made lame in the leg. This similarity is added to the already long list of correspondences: 1) Mephibosheth is David’s “brother” just like Jacob and Esau are brothers. Mephibosheth is representative of Jonathan’s line. Jonathan was David’s adopted brother. Thus Mephibosheth is best thought of as David’s brother in the same way that Abraham’s nephew, Lot, becomes a stand-in for his Abraham’s deceased brother, Haran 2) Mephibosheth goes out to meet his physically stronger brother with fear and trembling, fearing death at his hands. 3) The returning brother (David/Jacob) has been in self-imposed exile in order to avoid bloodshed among brothers and 4) The reunion takes place immediately after the fording of a river: Jabok– Gen. 32:22/ Jordan– 2 Sam. 19:15.