founded the liar and brought out the truth, and it must be presumed that he was a crossexaminer par excellence. "But this method would not have satisfied the exigencies of the legend. What would have delighted a lawyer would have tired a layman, and legends do not spring up among lawyers. The pop ular imagination does not follow the intrica cies of close reasoning, nor has it the patience to unravel painfully the thread of a fine-spun argument. It delights in swift and sudden changes of situation, and in a sensational cutting of the Gordian knot. In the popular mind the great judge is he whose methods are direct, swift and striking. It will furthermore occur to the lawyer that a medical examination of the women might perhaps have determined which of them was the mother of the older child; and indeed Josephus seems to have received a version of the legend in which this objection had been met, for he reports that the two women bore their children at the same hour of the same day. The king, having heard the statements of the women, fell a-thinking about the case and repeated their words, " This one says, my son is the living and thy son the dead, and that one says, thy son is the dead and mine the living." Some Bible commentators find the clue to the judgment in the manner in which the women made these statements. The false woman, whose object was to retain possession of the living child, shows- it in her eagerness to claim him, saying " mine is the living and thine the dead." It is the living child, the one she has in her possession, that she emphatically names first, whereas the true mother, who has had the dead child thrust upon her, says, " Nay, thine is the dead child and mine is the living." She desires to be rid of the dead child and regain possession of her own child. The value of this suggestion is left to psychologists; it could hardly have been the means of giving light in so difficult a case. But whether this was the clue or not, the king, after having
repeated these words of the women, suddenly cried out, " Fetch me a sword." His repe tition of the pleas before proceeding to judg ment is approved by the Talmudists, who made it a rule that the judge before render ing judgment, must state the case of both sides publicly, very much in the manner in which a judge sums up to the jury in our days. On the other hand, his abrupt call for a sword is severely condemned by some Talmudists as an act unworthy of a judge, who sought by illegal means to frighten the parties and who, had his sentence of judg ment been carried out, might have caused the death of an innocent child. It must be remembered that the Talmudists lived under a system of jurisprudence highly developed for many centuries, which compelled judges to follow an orderly and well regulated system of procedure. They could not countenance the capricious and lawless methods of an irresponsible judge, even though he were the king, by which justice was sought by rough and ready means. Hence Rabbi Judah, a great master of the law, a prince in Israel, and the compiler of the great Code known as the Mishnah, said, "If I had been present when he said ' Fetch me a sword,' I would have put a rope around his neck; for if God had not been merciful and prompted the mother to give up her child rather than see it die, it would surely have been killed by him. Of such a king it is said by Solomon himself, ' Woe unto thee, oh land, when thy king is a child.' (Eccles. ID : 16.)" Evidently the ancient methods of proced ure found little favor in the eyes of Rabbi Judah. In fact the Talmudists were rather impatient of the primitive methods of the Biblical law, even of the law of Moses, and they sought, under the influence of more re fined theories concerning human rights and methods of securing them, to modify the se verity of the ancient Mosaic law, even going so far as to abrogate it entirely when it was found to be out of harmony with the condi
