Someone once asked King Solomon about a famously bitter line he had written in Ecclesiastes 7:28 — "One man among a thousand have I found; but a woman among all those have I not found." Why, they wanted to know, had the wisest man in the world written something so sweeping about women?
Solomon did not defend the line. He said, "I will show you."
The Two Tests
He summoned one of his servants — a man who loved his wife deeply — and gave him a charge. "Kill your wife tonight, and I will give you one of my daughters in marriage."
The man took a sword and went home. He stood over his sleeping wife. He raised the sword. And he could not bring it down. He returned to Solomon and confessed: "I cannot do it. I love her."
Then Solomon called the wife in. He said to her, "Your husband is unworthy of you. Kill him tonight, and I will marry you myself." He handed her a sword.
What she did not know was that the sword had been forged of lead — shaped to look like steel, but too soft to cut a throat.
The Edge That Did Not Hold
That night she stood over her sleeping husband. She brought the sword down — again, and again, and again. The soft lead bent and crumpled. She could not kill him. She kept trying until dawn.
In the morning, Solomon revealed the test. The sword was made of lead. She had not been defeated by love, like the husband. She had been defeated only by the softness of the metal.
This exempla, preserved in Codex Gaster 185 and drawing on medieval Solomon-legends, is offered in the rabbinic tradition as Solomon's own demonstration of the verse. The reading is uncomfortable and the Sages themselves debated it; rabbinic literature also preserves counter-stories of women of extraordinary faithfulness. But the exempla's point is narrower than a universal claim. It is about the danger of judging a heart by an untested night — and about a king who, to prove his bitter line, used a sword that could not cut at all.