10
“If anyone speaks to you,” said the king, “bring him to me, and he will not trouble you again!”
11
“Please,” she replied, “may the king invoke the LORD your God to prevent the avenger of blood from increasing the devastation, so that my son may not be destroyed!” “As surely as the LORD lives,” he vowed, “not a hair of your son’s head will fall to the ground.”
12
Then the woman said, “Please, may your servant speak a word to my lord the king?” “Speak,” he replied.
13
The woman asked, “Why have you devised a thing like this against the people of God? When the king says this, does he not convict himself, since he has not brought back his own banished son?
14
For we will surely die and be like water poured out on the ground, which cannot be recovered. Yet God does not take away a life, but He devises ways that the banished one may not be cast out from Him.