“Speak to the two women thus: ‘As we do not know to which of you two the boy belongs, let her who is the strongest take the boy.’ When each of them has taken hold of one of the boy’s hands, and he begins to cry out on account of the pain, the real mother will let go, being full of compassion for him, and knowing that if her child remains alive she will be able to see it again; but the other, who has no compassion for him, will not let go. Then beat her with a switch, and she will thereupon confess the truth of the whole matter.”
In comparing this with the famous judgment of Solomon there appear some reasons for believing the Oriental tale to be the earlier. In the Biblical tale there is evidently a missing link. Why should the false mother, who had so desired the child, consent to have it cut in two? What motive could she have? But in the Tibetan tale one of the women is the wife, the other the concubine, of a householder. The wife bore him no child, and was jealous of the concubine on account of her babe. The concubine, feeling certain that the wife would kill the child, gave it to her, with her lord’s approval; but after his death possession of the house had to follow motherhood of the child. If, however, the child were dead, the false claimant would be mistress of the house. Here, then, is a motive wanting in the story of Solomon, and suggesting that the latter is not the original.
In the ancient “Mahosadha Jataka” the false claimant proves to be a Yakshini (a sort of siren and vampire) who wishes to eat the child. To Buddha himself is here ascribed the judgment, which is much the same as that of the “wise Champa maiden,” Viśākhā. Here, also, is a motive for assenting to the child’s death or injury which is lacking in the Biblical story.
Here, then, we find in ancient Indian literature a tale which may be fairly regarded as the origin of the “Judgment of Solomon.” And it belongs to a large number of Oriental tales in which the situations and accents of the Biblical narratives concerning David and Solomon often occur. There is a cave-born youth, Aśuga, son of a Brahman and a bird-fairy, with a magic lute which accompanies his verses, and who dallies with Brahmadetta’s wife. A king, enamored of a beautiful foreign woman beneath him in rank, obtains her by a promise that her son, if one is born, shall succeed him on the throne, to the exclusion of his existing heir by his wife of equal birth; but he permits arrangements for his elder son’s succession to go on until induced by a threat of war from the new wife’s father and country to fulfil his promise. A prime minister, Mahaushadha, travels, in disguise of a Brahman, in order to find a true wife; he meets with a witty maiden (Viśākhā), who directs him to her village by a road where he will see her naked at a bathing tank, though she had taken another road. This minister was, like David, lowly born; a “deity” revealed him to the king, as Jahveh revealed David to Samuel; he was a seventh minister, as David was a seventh son, and Solomon also.
Although the number seven was sacred among the ancient Hebrews, it does not appear to have been connected by them with exceptional wisdom or occult powers in man or woman. The ideas in which such legends as “The Seven Wise Masters,” “The Seven Sages,” and the superstition about a seventh son’s second-sight, originate, are traceable to ancient Indo-Iranian theosophy. It may be useful here to read the subjoined extract from Darmesteter’s introduction to the “Vendîdâd.” Having explained that the religion of the Persian Magi is derived from the same source as that of the Indian Rishis, that is, from the common forefathers of both Iranian and Indian, he says:
“The Indo-Iranian Asura (the supreme but not the only god) was often conceived as sevenfold: by the play of certain mythical formulæ and the strength of certain mythical numbers, the ancestors of the Indo-Iranians had been led to speak of seven worlds, and the supreme god was often made sevenfold, as well as the worlds over which he ruled. The names and the attributes of the seven gods had not been as yet defined, nor could they be then; after the separation of the two religions, these gods, named Aditya, ‘the infinite ones,’ in India, were by and by identified there with the sun, and their number was afterward raised to twelve, to correspond to the twelve aspects of the sun. In Persia, the seven gods are known as Amesha Spentas, ‘the undying and well-doing one’; they by and by, according to the new spirit that breathed in the religion, received the names of the deified abstractions, Vohu-manô (good thought), Asha Vahista (excellent holiness), Khshathra Vairya (perfect sovereignty), Spenta Armaîti (divine piety), Haurvatât and Ameretâot (health and immortality). The first of them all was and remained Ahura Mazda; but whereas formerly he had been only the first of them, he was now their father. ‘I invoke the glory of the Amesha Spentas, who all seven have one and the same thinking, one and the same speaking, one and the same father and lord, Ahura Mazda,’” (Yast xix. 16.)[1]
In Persian religion the Seven are always wise and beneficent. The vast folklore derived from this Parsî religion included the Babylonian belief in seven powerful spirits, associated with the Pleiades, beneficent at certain seasons, but normally malevolent: they all move together, taking possession of human beings, as in the case of the seven demons cast out of Mary Magdalene. In Egypt the seven are always evil. But neither of these sevens are especially clever. In Buddhist legends they are not so carefully classified, the seventh son or daughter manifesting exceptional powers, sometimes of good, sometimes of evil, but they are usually referred to for this wit or wisdom. In the Davidian and Solomonic legends these notions are found as if merely adhering to some importation, and without any perception of the significance of the number seven. David is an eighth son in 1 Sam. xvi. 10–13, but a seventh son in 1 Chron. ii. 16. Solomon is a tenth son in 1 Chron. iii. 1–6, but the seventh legitimate son in 2 Sam. xii. 24–25. The word Sheba means “the seven,” but the early scribes appear to have understood it as shaba, “he swears,” as in Gen. xxi. 30–31, where after the seven ewe lambs have given the well its name, Beersheba, it is ascribed the significance of an oath. Bathsheba is commonly translated “Daughter of the Oath,” but there can be little doubt that the name means “Daughter of the Seven,” and that it originated in the astute tricks by which that fair foreigner made herself queen-mother and her son king, above the lawful heir, whom she was instrumental (perhaps purposely) in getting out of the way by furthering his wishes.
Moral obliquities are little considered in these fair favorites of translunary powers. Viśākhā, in one Buddhist tale, gets herself chosen by the Brahman as bride of a great man by her care to veil her charms at the bath; in another tale she attracts a prime minister in disguise, and becomes his wife, partly by laying aside all of her clothing at a bathing tank where she knows he will see her. Bathsheba’s fame is similarly various. Her nudity and ready adultery with the king did not prevent her from passing into Talmudic tradition as “blessed among women,” and to her was even ascribed the beautiful chapter of Proverbs (xxxi.) in praise of the virtuous wife! In the “Wisdom of Solomon” she is described as the “handmaiden” of the Lord in anticipation of the Christian ideal of immaculate womanhood.
A similar development might no doubt be traced in the beautiful story of Vi[’]s[=]akh[=]a of Shravasti, the most famous of the female lay-disciples of Buddha. The queries put to her by Buddha and her explanations of her petitions, which had appeared enigmatic, are related in Carus’s Gospel of Buddha, and in form correspond with the very different questions and solutions that passed between the Brahman and the Tibetan Viśākhā, already mentioned. The name Viśākhā, from a Sanskrit root, meaning to divide, came to mean selection and intelligence, of all kinds, but in the matron of Shravastî wit becomes the genius of charity, and cleverness expands to enlightenment.
The Queen of Sheba,—“Queen of the Seven,”—is a sister spirit of this lay-disciple. Whatever truth may underlie the legends of this lady, there is little doubt of her legendary relation to the Wise Women of Buddhist parables,—to Viśākhā of the sevenfold wisdom; and of her who decided between the rival claimants to the same child; to Ambapāli, the courtesan, who journeyed to hear Buddha’s wisdom and presented to him and his disciples her park and mansion; and to the Queen of Glory, whose story belongs “to a very early period in the history of Buddhism.” Such is the opinion of Mr. Rhys Davids, whose translation of the Mahásudassana-Sutta, containing an account of the queen’s visit to the King of Glory, in his Palace of Justice, attended by her fourfold army, may be read in Vol. XI., p. 276, of Sacred Books of the East.