Or maybe Solomon just wasn't that wise...
In Joseph Heller’s “God Knows”, purporting to be the autobiography of King David (who comes through it like a classic wise-cracking Jewish comedian), he reckons that Solomon (or “Schlomo, that shmuck”) was actually a moron & when he proposed cutting the baby in half, it wasn’t a clever ploy to reveal the true mother, it was because he was too stupid to realise it would kill the baby.