Moses had warned the Israelite people of the many awful consequences of disobeying God, including the disaster of women eating their own children (Deut 28.57). More than 200 years after this event in 2 Kings, women again ate their own children during the siege of Jerusalem (Lam 4.10).

So: The common Hebrew conjunction here is rightly translated as a kind of logical connector. This woman accepted the idea of giving up her son in order that they might survive.

We boiled my son: It is not essential to describe how the child was prepared for eating. Several modern versions use a more general term, such as “cooked” (Good News Translation, New Jewish Publication Society’s Tanakh, Revised English Bible, New Jerusalem Bible). Some translators may need to know whether the child was killed before being prepared as food or cooked alive. While either possibility is gruesome to contemplate, if the choice must be made, it is probably more likely that the life of the child was taken before it was cooked.

Give your son, that we may eat him: Compare verse 28. This embedded quotation can be made into indirect discourse as follows: “The following day when I told her that it was time for us to eat her son, I learned that she had put him in a place where I could not find him!”

Quoted with permission from Omanson, Roger L. and Ellington, John E. A Handbook on 1-2 Kings, Volume 2. (UBS Helps for Translators). New York: UBS, 2008. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .