מלכים ב, פרק ו׳, פסוק כ״ח

In the midst of a severe and extreme famine, a horrific legal dispute between two mothers unfolds before the king. Realizing that a woman's cry is not merely a general plea for help but a specific demand for legal intervention, the king asks her to clarify her exact request and claim [מצודת דוד, ביאור שטיינזלץ, מלבי״ם]. She directs her claim at the other mother, indicating that the accused woman is standing right beside her in the royal court, making no attempt to deny the shocking sequence of events.

The decision to bring this case to the king rather than a standard court is rooted in the nature of their contract. Under normal law, an agreement to kill a child holds no legal validity. Therefore, the plaintiff seeks the intervention of the king, who has the authority to issue rulings based on the extreme circumstances of the time and place. In her plea, she emphasizes that her companion was the one who initiated and provoked the terrible plan [מלבי״ם]. As the two women were starving to death, they had formed a desperate pact to cooperate and share the flesh of their children [ביאור שטיינזלץ].

The mother's focus on the act of eating, rather than the act of killing, suggests that her own son had already been slaughtered and cooked by the time the dispute arose [אברבנאל]. After the plaintiff fulfilled her part of the agreement and both women ate her son, the time came for the second woman to do the same. Instead, she hid her child. This betrayal may have stemmed from a sudden desire to save her son from death, thereby breaking their condition. Alternatively, it could have been driven by a selfish intention to keep the meat and eat it entirely by herself at a later time [אברבנאל].