And all Israel heard of the judgment which the king had judged; and they feared the king: for they saw that the wisdom of God was in him, to do justice.
All Commentaries on 1 Kings 3:28 Go To 1 Kings 3
Augustine of Hippo
AD 430
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.
