1 Kings 3:18

The two women indicate to us the church and the synagogue. The latter, after it tried to suppress the sacrament of human redemption and persecuted and killed the Redeemer through false accusations, claims, nevertheless, that its child should still be alive, that is, that the Jewish people should still be pleasing and acceptable to God and that he should give eternal life to the Mosaic law, which is dead. Since the [synagogue] is soaked in these errors, it perpetually quarrels with the church, which is represented by the other woman. However, the peaceful king settled the argument not by dividing but by gathering the children of both mothers, so that a single body might be created from the Jews and the Gentiles, whose head is Christ. And both mothers assert that they live under the same roof, because the church and the synagogue inhabit this world in dwellings, where they are mixed.

Is not that noble judgment of Solomon full of wisdom and justice? Let us see whether it is so. “Two women,” it says, “stood before King Solomon, and the one said to him, ‘Hear me, my lord, I and this woman dwell in one house, and before the third day we gave birth and bore a son apiece and were together; there was no witness in the house, nor any other woman with us, only we two alone. And her son died this night, because she laid on him, and she arose at midnight, and took my son from my breast and laid him in her bosom, and her dead child she laid at my breast. And I arose in the morning to nurse my child and found him dead. And I examined him at dawn, and behold, it was not my son.’ And the other woman said, ‘No, but the living is my son, and the dead is your son.’ ” This was their dispute, in which either tried to claim the living child for herself and denied that the dead one was hers. Then the king commanded a sword to be brought and the infant to be cut in half, and either piece to be given to one, one half to the one, and one half to the other. Then the woman whose the child really was, moved by her feelings, cried out, “Do not divide the child, my lord; rather, let it be given to her and live, and do not kill it.” But the other answered: “Let it be neither mine nor hers; divide it.” Then the king ordered that the infant should be given to the woman who had said “do not kill it,” for, as it says, “her compassion earned over her son.”It is not wrong to suppose that the mind of God was in him; for what is hidden from God? What can be more hidden than the witness that lies deep within; into which the mind of the wise king as though to judge a mother’s feelings and elicited as it were the voice of a mother’s heart? For a mother’s feelings were laid bare when she chose that her son should live with another, rather than that he should be killed in his mother’s sight. It was therefore a sign of wisdom to distinguish between secret heart thoughts, to draw the truth from hidden springs and to pierce as it were with the sword of the Spirit not only the inward parts of the body but even of the mind and soul. It was the part of justice also that she who had killed her own child should not take away another’s but that the real mother should have her own back again. Indeed the Scriptures have declared this. “All Israel,” it says, “heard of the judgment that the king had judged, and they feared the king, for they saw that the wisdom of God was present in judgment.” Solomon also himself had asked for wisdom, so that a prudent heart might be given him to hear and to judge with justice.

Such a Shechem is the church; for Solomon chose her whose hidden love he had discerned. Such a Shechem is Mary, whose soul God’s sword pierces and divides. Such a Shechem is a “coming up,” even as it appears in the meaning of the word. As to what the “coming up” is, hear Solomon speaking in reference to the church, “Who is she that comes up clothed in white, leaning on her brother?” She is radiant, a word expressed in Greek as aktinodes, because she is resplendent in faith and in works. To her children it is said, “Let your works shine before my Father, who is in heaven.”

The interpretation of Solomon's judgment on the quarrel of two harlot women (1 Kings 3) is clear as far as the simple history is concerned: that a boy of twelve years judged with an affection beyond his age for the depths of human nature. Hence, he was both admired and feared by all Israel, because he would not miss what was so skillfully concealed. But regarding typical understanding, as the Apostle says: All these things were written to happen to them by way of example, and they were written for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the ages have come. (1 Corinthians 10:11) Some Greeks hold that this should be understood in reference to the Synagogue and the Church, and that all things should be referred to that time when, after the crucifixion and resurrection, the true Solomon, that is, the peaceful one, began to reign both in Israel and among the Gentile people. But that adulteresses and prostitutes are called Synagogue and Church in the Scriptures, there is no doubt.

The first idea that occurs to me on consideration is that the two women are the synagogue and the church. For the synagogue is convicted of having killed Christ her son, born of the Jews according to the flesh, in her sleep; that is, by following the light of this present life and not perceiving the revelation of trust in the sayings of the Lord. That is why it is written, “Rise, sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will enlighten you.” That they were two and that they were alone, living in one house, may be taken to mean, without being far-fetched, that besides the circumcision and the uncircumcision there is no other kind of religion to be found in this world. So under the person of one woman you can include the race of circumcised men bound by the worship and the law of one God, while under the person of the other woman you can comprehend all the uncircumcised Gentiles given over to the worship of idols.But they were both harlots. Well, the apostles say that Jews and Greeks are all under sin. Every soul that forsakes eternal truth for base earthly pleasures is whoring away from the Lord. Now about the church that comes from the whoredom of the Gentiles, it is clear that it did not kill Christ.… Pay attention to the Gospel and listen to what the Lord says: “Whoever does the will of my Father, this is my mother and brother and sister.” So when did this one sleep, not indeed to smother her child in sleep but at least so that the dead one could be substituted and the living one taken away from her? Does it perhaps mean this, that the very sacrament of circumcision which had remained dead among the Jews because their view of it was wholly carnal and literal—that this lifeless sacrament of circumcision some Jews wished to foist like a lifeless body on the Gentiles who had believed in Christ, as it says in the Acts of the Apostles, telling them that they could not be saved unless they had themselves circumcised? They were foisting this on those ignorant of the law, as though they were substituting the dead child in the darkness of the night. But that argument would have no chance of success except where the sleep of folly had stolen over some part of the church of the Gentiles. From this sleep the apostle seems to be shaking her when he exclaims, “O foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you?” And a little later: “Are you such fools,” he says, “that after beginning with the spirit you now end with the flesh?” as though he were saying, “Are you such fools, that after first having a living spiritual work, you lose it and go on to accept someone else’s dead one?”
Indeed, the same apostle says elsewhere, “The spirit is life because of justice.” And in another place, “To be wise according to the flesh is death.” At these and similar words, then, that mother wakes up, and early morning dawns on her when the obscurity of the law is lit up by the word of God, that is, by Christ who was rising like the sun, that is, was speaking in Paul. He lit up this darkness when he said, “Tell me, you who wish to be under the law, have you not heard the law? For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by a slave woman and one by a free woman. But the one by the slave woman was born according to the flesh, the one by the free woman through a promise; which is all an allegory. For these are the two Testaments, one from Mount Sinai, bringing forth into slavery, which is Hagar (for Sinai is a mountain in Arabia), and she corresponds to the present Jerusalem, because she is in slavery with her children. But the Jerusalem above is free.” No wonder, then, if on account of dead works the dead child belongs to the Jerusalem below, while on account of spiritual ones the living child belongs to the Jerusalem above. After all, hell is sown below, where the dead belong; and heaven above, where the living belong. Enlightened in this way, as by the coming of daybreak, the church has an understanding of spiritual grace and thrusts away from it the carnal accomplishments of the law, like the other woman’s dead child. Instead [the church] claims for itself a living faith—since “the just person lives by faith”—which it has acquired in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit; that is why it recognizes with certainty the son as three days old and does not allow him to be snatched away.

Now let the other one claim that the gospel is hers, as being owed to her and produced through her. For that is what they were saying to the Gentiles in this dispute, those of the Jews who, while clinging to the letter of the law, dared to call themselves Christians. They were saying that the gospel had come as something owed to them for their justice. But it was not theirs, because they did not know how to grasp its spirit. So they even had the audacity to contend that they were to be called Christians, boasting in someone else’s name like that woman claiming a son she had not borne; and this though by excluding a spiritual understanding from the works of the law they had as it were drained the soul out of the body of their works, and while smothering the live spirit of prophecy had remained attached to their material keeping of the law, which lacked all life, that is to say, spiritual understanding. They wanted to foist all this on the Gentiles too, and take from them, like the living child, the name of Christian. In refuting them, the apostle went so far as to say that the more they claim Christian grace as their due and boast that it is theirs as though by right of the works of the law, the less it really belongs to them. “For to one who works,” he says, “his wages are not reckoned as a grace or favor but as his due. But to one who does not work but believes in him who justifies the wicked, it is faith that is reckoned as justice.” And therefore he does not count among their number those of the Jews who had believed rightly and were holding fast to a living spiritual grace. He says this remnant of the Jewish people were saved, when the majority of them had gone to perdition. “So therefore at the present time also,” he says, “a remnant has been saved, chosen by grace. But if it is by grace, it is no longer as a result of works; otherwise grace would no longer be grace.” So those are excluded from grace who claim the prize of the gospel is theirs by right, owed and given them for their works. This is like the synagogue claiming, “It is my son.” But [the synagogue] was lying. It too, you see, had received him, but by sleeping on him, that is, by being proud in its own conceits, it had killed him. But now this other mother was awake and understood that it was not through her own merits, since she is a harlot, but through God’s grace that she had been granted a son, namely, the work of evangelical faith, which she longed to nurse in the bosom of her heart. So that while one was using another person’s son to acquire human respectability, this one was preserving a true love for her own.

Again, I see these two women in one house as representing two kinds of people in one church: one of them dominated by insincerity, the other ruled by charity. So we may regard these two kinds of people simply like two women, called love and insincerity. Insincerity, of course, deceitfully imitates love. That is why the apostle warns us against her when he says, “Let love be without insincerity.” Although the two live in one house as long as that gospel net is in the sea, enclosing good and bad fish together until it is brought ashore, yet each is doing her own thing. They were both harlots, though, because everyone is converted to the grace of God from worldly desires, and nobody can properly boast about any prior justice and its merits. A harlot’s committing fornication is her own doing; her having a son is God’s. All human beings, after all, are fashioned by the one creator God. Nor it is surprising that God works well even in the sins of men and women. After all, even the crime of Judas the traitor was used by our Lord to achieve the salvation of the human race. But the difference is that when God brings something good out of anyone’s sin, it is not usually something that the sinner wants. It is not only that when he sins he does not sin with the same intention as God’s providence turning his sin to a just end—Judas, you see, did not betray Christ with the same intention as Christ had in allowing himself to be betrayed; it is also that when he realizes his sin has produced a better result that he never wanted to happen, it gives him more pain than pleasure. Suppose, for example, someone wants to give his enemy poison while he is sick, but he makes a mistake about the kind of medicine and gives him something beneficial instead, so that the sick person gets better through the kindness of God, who decided to turn his enemy’s villainy to his advantage. But when the wicked person realizes that his own hand has restored the other to health, he suffers torments and frustration. But if a harlot is willing to have the child she has conceived and is not driven by lust or avaricious concern for her shameful earnings to take an abortifacient and eliminate what she has conceived from her womb, in case her fertility should interfere with her sinning, then the appetite that had been dissipated among a great many is now concentrated on the one gift of God and will no longer be called greed, but love. So the harlot’s son is rightly understood as representing the sinner’s grace; the new creature born of the old shame is the forgiveness of sins.