Job 29:16

⁷The righteous care about justice for the poor. The wicked aren’t concerned about knowledge.

⁵A father of the fatherless, and a defender of the widows, is God in his holy habitation.

⁷He brought up Hadassah, that is, Esther, his uncle’s daughter; for she had neither father nor mother. The maiden was fair and beautiful; and when her father and mother were dead, Mordecai took her for his own daughter.

²It is the glory of God to conceal a thing, but the glory of kings is to search out a matter.

⁴They turn the needy out of the way. The poor of the earth all hide themselves.

¹⁸(no, from my youth he grew up with me as with a father, I have guided her from my mother’s womb);

²⁶They judged the people at all times. They brought the hard cases to Moses, but every small matter they judged themselves.

⁸If there arises a matter too hard for you in judgment, between blood and blood, between plea and plea, and between stroke and stroke, being matters of controversy within your gates, then you shall arise, and go up to the place which the LORD your God chooses. ⁹You shall come to the priests who are Levites and to the judge who shall be in those days. You shall inquire, and they shall give you the verdict. ¹⁰You shall do according to the decisions of the verdict which they shall give you from that place which the LORD chooses. You shall observe to do according to all that they shall teach you.

¹⁴then you shall inquire, investigate, and ask diligently. Behold, if it is true, and the thing certain, that such abomination was done among you,

¹⁶Then two women who were prostitutes came to the king, and stood before him. ¹⁷The one woman said, “Oh, my lord, I and this woman dwell in one house. I delivered a child with her in the house. ¹⁸The third day after I delivered, this woman delivered also. We were together. There was no stranger with us in the house, just us two in the house. ¹⁹This woman’s child died in the night, because she lay on it. ²⁰She arose at midnight, and took my son from beside me while your servant slept, and laid it in her bosom, and laid her dead child in my bosom. ²¹When I rose in the morning to nurse my child, behold, he was dead; but when I had looked at him in the morning, behold, it was not my son whom I bore.”

²²The other woman said, “No! But the living one is my son, and the dead one is your son.” The first one said, “No! But the dead one is your son, and the living one is my son.” They argued like this before the king.

²³Then the king said, “One says, ‘This is my son who lives, and your son is the dead one;’ and the other says, ‘No! But your son is the dead one, and my son is the living one.’”

²⁴The king said, “Get me a sword.” So they brought a sword before the king.

²⁵The king said, “Divide the living child in two, and give half to the one, and half to the other.”

²⁶Then the woman whose the living child was spoke to the king, for her heart yearned over her son, and she said, “Oh, my lord, give her the living child, and in no way kill him!” But the other said, “He shall be neither mine nor yours. Divide him.”

²⁷Then the king answered, “Give the first woman the living child, and definitely do not kill him. She is his mother.”

²⁸All Israel heard of the judgment which the king had judged; and they feared the king, for they saw that the wisdom of God was in him to do justice.