King Solomon's Justice

But no other hypotheses such as those you pretend to advance and then discard are necessary. The test, which finds unconscious emotional truths under rational arguments, is "the meaning" of the story. Given which, it's surprising and (for me) telling that you hypothesize the behavior of the natural mother as strategic or rational, rather than being what the story presents and requires it to be, namely unconscious and emotional. As is the other confluence of emotions demonstrated by the second woman, who knows very well that she will not be considered the mother if she proposes to make the death of the child the price of winning her case, but who cannot dissemble her malice. The sage has brought out the unconscious condition of both women, not one.

For these among other reasons, I think this is not a story about justice. It's about wisdom. It is told about Solomon not because he is King, but because he is wise; this cliche story isn't biography: it is a conventional marker, a designator, for wisdom. The human being who does this is not a shaman, one who consults the spirits in the spirit world, as is typical of Eurasian prehistory. Nor is he a possessed, whom the god enters and through whom the god speaks, as in African tradition. Those are judges. He is a human who bridges the distance from the conscious to the unconscious and makes the truth visible. That's the context in which the closing reference to Buddhism makes sense.

It seems to me that the choice before you is whether to regard the metaphor or the message as the center of the next draft. The story of Solomon "splitting the baby" has become part of lawyers' language, and perhaps it is the story you should stick with, through its changes down the millennia. But maybe there was something being said about judging that was made more puzzling by its association with the wisdom-tale, and could be made more simple and straightforward by leaving the tale behind.