In the time of King David (who reigned c. 1010 to 970 BCE) there were three years of famine across the land of Israel. A poor man with nine sons and daughters went without food for several days. His neighbor took pity on the household and brought them nine boiled eggs, one for each child, and the children ate them.
Twenty years passed. The same neighbor, now older and harder-hearted, came to the poor man and demanded payment, not just for the nine eggs but for the thousands of chickens those eggs would have hatched into, had they not been boiled and eaten. Generations of chickens. Eggs upon eggs, compounded. The claim was monstrous in its greed but clever in its form.
The case went before King David. He listened and, reasoning on the narrow logic of ordinary property law, condemned the poor man to pay three hundred gold dinarim. The poor man had no such sum. He offered his sons and daughters as slaves for two hundred dinarim, and his house for ten. Ninety remained owing. The creditor's collectors began to beat him for the balance.
His son Solomon, then still a young prince, heard of the verdict. Moved by rachamim, compassion, he came to his father the king with a suggestion, and the court gathered to hear it. Solomon said to the creditor, Sow your field this year with boiled beans. I will show you a fair field and a fair harvest. The creditor laughed. How can boiled beans grow? Everyone knows a boiled bean will not sprout. Solomon answered, And how can boiled eggs hatch chickens? The entire case collapsed on that sentence. King David, hearing his son's argument, overturned his own verdict. The poor man and his family were restored, the house was returned, and the children came home.
This exemplum, preserved as number 342 in Moses Gaster's 1924 Exempla of the Rabbis and drawn from Codex Gaster 66, shows why the tradition remembered Solomon as the wisest of all kings, 1 Kings 3:12, even while his father still wore the crown. Sometimes a child's question is the only way to rescue a father from his own ruling.