A rich man once sent his only son abroad to trade in distant markets. During the son's long absence the old father died, and he had left his will in the safekeeping of a trusted slave.
When the son came home, he found the slave living in his father's house, wearing his father's robes, giving orders to the servants. The slave refused to step aside. "I am the son," he announced. "This is my inheritance."
The case was brought before the judge. The judge, reading the will's wording closely, ruled that the old man had written a single ambiguous sentence: The plaintiff is a slave to the son, and therefore all the property goes to the son. The judge concluded that the father had anticipated exactly this dispute and had cleverly given the property to the son — while entrusting it through the slave's hands to protect it from plunder during the son's absence.
But the slave kept arguing, bringing witnesses who supported his false claim. The case was appealed to King David.
David, seeing the slave's witnesses so confident and the son so emotional and unsettled, dismissed the son and ruled for the slave. The real son wept.
Then the young prince Solomon, still a boy, asked to decide the case. David, curious, allowed it.
Solomon called for a bone from the dead father's body — perhaps a finger bone, small and white. He called for two basins. "Each of you," he said to the claimants, "will let a drop of blood into a basin. We will dip the father's bone in your blood. Whoever's blood the bone drinks — that is the true son."
The slave drew blood and let it fall into his basin; the son drew blood and let it fall into his. The bone was dipped into the slave's blood. The blood stayed on the bone's surface. It was dipped into the son's. The bone absorbed the blood — drank it in — and turned red to its core. The same substance recognizing itself.
The whole assembly saw it. The slave was ordered to surrender everything to the son.
Solomon's test, the Exempla preserves, would become a legend about his wisdom — the ability to cut through a dispute with a sign nature itself had to agree with. Even the bones of the father could be called as witness.
(From The Exempla of the Rabbis, Moses Gaster, 1924, no. 391, from the Ben Attar collection.)