Where do kings get their wisdom? A council? Advisers? Their wives? If he’s a king with any wisdom to start with, he’ll get it from whoever is wise, no matter their status. Like a shepherd boy.
In one story this week, The Shepherd Boy, the king finds out about a shepherd boy who was famous for giving wise answers whenever someone asked a question.
The king needed to “see it to believe it,” so he invited the boy to the palace to test him. He asked three questions and the boy answered wisely each time.
The questions:
- How many drops of water are in the ocean?
- How many stars are in the sky?
- How many seconds does eternity have?
Even though the questions were asking “how many” and asked an impossible task, the boy did not answer with a number. He had much more clever answers, such as the answer to how many seconds eternity has:
In Lower Pomerania is the Diamond Mountain, which is two miles and a half high, two miles and a half wide, and two miles and a half in depth; every hundred years a little bird comes and sharpens its beak on it, and when the whole mountain is worn away by this, then the first second of eternity will be over.”
The king was impressed, and invited the boy to move to the palace and be as his own son.
