Commentaria in III Regum
I say therefore: “Solomon awaking perceived that it was a dream,” namely not a natural one but supernatural and divine, that is a vision really and effectually together with the thing itself, namely with the wisdom sent by God and put into him. Whence the Hebrew, Septuagint and Chaldee have: And Solomon awaked, and behold a dream, namely it followed its effect, and appeared true; as if to say: Solomon, awaking, saw that he had really been made wise as he had dreamed, that is, as he had seen in sleep by divine vision. For he saw the images of all things thrusting themselves upon his mind and flitting about it, by which he clearly discerned whatever things he had not known before; he perceived therefore that this dream was real and true, as being supernatural, and sent by God together with the thing dreamed. Whence presently he settled the intricate dispute of the harlots most wisely, and administered all the rest most wisely, as is plain from what follows. So Suarez, Serarius, Pineda.
Similar dreams, not dreamed and false but real and true, are found in Holy Scripture, as when St. Peter, about to be freed from prison by the Angel, was told to dress and go out, “he thought he saw a vision,” and was dreaming, Acts chapter 12, verse 9, and yet he really dressed and went out. So the Hebrews delivered from Babylon and returning to Jerusalem say: “When the Lord brought back the captivity of Sion, we became like men comforted”; the Hebrew, like men dreaming; as if to say: So joyful, new, wonderful and unexpected was the return from exile to our country, that it seemed to be a dream, so that we thought we were not really returning but dreaming a return. So Solomon here awaking seemed to himself to have dreamed; but soon saw that the dream had been turned into a true thing. So St. Jerome, rebuked by God in a dream because he read Cicero before the Holy Scriptures, and hearing: “Thou art a Ciceronian, not a Christian,” was sharply beaten and scourged, not in a dream but in fact. Hear him, epistle 18 to Eustochium: “Nor was that sleep, or vain dreams, by which we are often deluded; the tribunal before which I lay is witness: witness the sad judgment which I feared. May it never happen to me to fall into such an inquiry. I confess that I had bruised shoulders, that I felt the blows after sleep, and thenceforth read the divine books with as great zeal as I had not before read the secular ones.”
And when he was COME (from Gabaon, where he had asked and obtained wisdom from God) to JERUSALEM, he stood BEFORE THE ARK OF THE COVENANT OF THE LORD, AND OFFERED holocausts—in thanksgiving for so great a gift of wisdom put into him by God. For the ark was in Sion, but the tabernacle and altar in Gabaon, as was said in verse 4.
16. THEN THERE CAME TWO WOMEN THAT WERE HARLOTS TO THE KING.—God so disposing, to make known to Israel the wisdom of Solomon given him by Himself a little before, through the skilful settling of the harlots’ dispute. For harlots the Hebrew has zonot, which the Chaldee translates tavern-keepers or hucksters: for zona, or harlot, is she who earns by prostituting either food, or services, or her body, such as the tavern-woman, the washerwoman, the seamstress, the weaver, the purple-dyer, who earns her living by her art and craft. And our Sanchez thinks these two were such, because harlots properly so called scarcely bear children, on account of vague intercourse and the mixing of seeds, for they prostitute themselves to anyone: it is otherwise with concubines, who cling to one lover only: for these conceive just as wives do.
But St. Gregory, Ambrose, Prosper, Pineda, Salianus and others commonly hold that these two were harlots properly so called, as the Septuagint and our version translate; and it is argued by the fact that no mention is made here of husbands, but they themselves contend in the dispute on their own account. For harlots, because they are avaricious, greedy, shameless and irascible, are likewise quarrelsome, nay the cause of many disputes, brawls, duels, slaughters and wars, as daily experience teaches.
19. FOR IN HER SLEEP SHE OVERLAID HIM,—namely, by turning over she lay upon the infant, and suffocated it with the weight of her body. Wherefore by Canon Law mothers are forbidden to sleep with infants, on account of the danger of their being overlaid, as is plain from part 2, question 5, canon Consuluit.
THEY CONTENDED BEFORE THE KING,—because witnesses and other proofs and indications were lacking, these poor women therefore, as is their way, strove with each other with contention of voice and clamor.
Allegorically, these two women represent the Synagogue of the Jews and the Church of the Christians, which contend with each other over the living and true child Jesus and Messias: but Solomon, that is Christ, settles the dispute saying in Matthew chapter 10: “I came not to send peace, but the sword.” For I came to divide the law and grace, Jews and Christians, believers and unbelievers, as St. Jerome beautifully teaches, epistle 131 to Rufinus, where he also adds that Solomon gave this judgment in the twelfth year of his age, for in this he began to reign; but above I showed that it was done in the twentieth year.
Again, they represent the Catholic Church, and the Arian, Nestorian and other heresies, which divide Christ into two, so that in him one is God, another man, and strive to claim for themselves the true faithful, who are the living sons of the Church, and to draw them to their heresy, and therefore to destroy and kill them. So St. Augustine, sermon 200 On the Seasons: “The impious and cruel heresy,” he says, “cries out that he be divided. What is ‘be divided’ unless that the Son be not equal to the Father? For while it takes away equality from the Son, it has also denied that the Father is good and omnipotent. For if God the Father could beget a Son like himself and would not, he is not good: if he would and could not, he is not omnipotent.” But the true mother, namely the Catholic Church, cries: “Give her the child, and do not divide him. He is my son, but better let him go born to her, let him go whole, yet let the maternal affection remain with me. Give her the child, let not the desires of his members be taken away, let his integrity not be divided, lest piety be taken from me. As she says: Give her the child and do not divide him, behold I also say it. Possess the whole, and do not divide God.” Angelomus, Eucherius or rather Bede, and St. Prosper, book On Predestination, transcribed this word for word from St. Augustine.
Tropologically St. Gregory, book 21 of the Morals, chapter 7, takes these two women for true and false teachers: for the true and good seek the salvation of their disciples, the false and bad their own glory and gain, with the perdition of their disciples. “Because,” says St. Gregory, “masters who are indeed vigilant in knowledge but asleep in life, kill their hearers, whom they nourish through the watches of preaching, by the sleep of torpor, while they neglect to do what they say, and by neglect overlay those whom they seemed to feed with the milk of words. Whence for the most part, while they themselves live reprehensibly and cannot have disciples of praiseworthy life, they try to draw to themselves the disciples of others: so that, while they show they have good followers, they may excuse in the judgment of men the evils they do, and as it were cover their negligence by the deadly life of those under them. Whence that woman sought the son of another, because she had put out her own: but yet Solomon’s sword found the true mother; because, namely, the wrath of the strict judge in the last examination shows whose fruit lives and whose perishes.” Then St. Gregory warns us to note carefully “that the living son is first commanded to be divided, that afterwards he may be given to the mother alone: because in this life the life of the disciple is, as it were, allowed to be shared, since from it at times one has merit with God, another is allowed to have praise from men. But the false mother is not afraid that the one she did not bear should be killed: because arrogant masters, ignorant of charity, if they cannot obtain the fullest name of praise from the disciples of others, cruelly pursue their life. For, inflamed by the torch of envy, they do not wish those to live whom they see they cannot possess.”
Angelomus and Eucherius transcribed the same from St. Gregory.
Symbolically St. Ambrose, book 3 On Virginity: “The two women,” he says, “are faith and temptation, which, after losing her own posterity by the vice of carnal conversation and the sleep of the mind, tries to take away the fruit of another’s posterity. And so while temptation disputes, faith wavers, until the sword of Christ distinguishes the hidden affections. What is this sword of Christ? That of which it is written: I came to send the sword upon the earth. It is the sword of which it is written: And thy own soul a sword shall pierce. And what this sword is, what this blade, learn: The word, he says, is living and effectual, and more piercing than any two-edged sword, and reaching unto the division of the soul and the spirit, of the joints also and the marrow.”