This haftarah opens immediately after Solomon's dream at Gibeon, in which God offers him whatever he wishes for and Solomon asks instead for an understanding heart to govern the people wisely, a request God grants along with riches and honor he did not ask for, and Solomon wakes to realize it had been a dream, then offers sacrifices and holds a feast for his officials in response.
The haftarah then narrates the case that demonstrates this granted wisdom in practice: two women living together, each having recently given birth, come before Solomon disputing whose child survived the night and whose had died, each claiming the living infant as her own with no witnesses to settle the matter directly.
Solomon orders that the living child be cut in two with a sword and divided equally between the two women, a command that immediately reveals the truth: the real mother begs him to give the child to the other woman rather than see it killed, while the false claimant is willing to accept the division, and Solomon awards the child to the woman whose compassion exposed her as its true mother, a judgment that becomes known throughout Israel as proof of the wisdom God had given him.
Both accounts also share a lesser noted detail worth pairing: neither Joseph nor Solomon is tested on abstract knowledge alone, but on a concrete, high stakes human situation, a nation's coming famine in one case, a disputed child's life in the other, where getting the answer wrong would have cost real people dearly.