1And it happened after the death of Saul, when David had returned from striking down Amalek, that David stayed in Ziklag two days. 2And it happened on the third day that, look, a man was coming from the camp, from Saul, his garments torn and earth on his head. And it happened when he came to David, that he fell to the ground and did obeisance. 3And David said to him, “From where do you come?” And he said, “From the camp of Israel I have gotten away.” 4And David said to him “What has happened? Pray, tell me.” And he said, “The troops fled from the battle, and also many of the troops have fallen and died, and also Saul and Jonathan his son died.” 5And David said to the lad who was telling him, “How do you know that Saul died, and Jonathan his son?” 6And the lad who was telling him said, “I just chanced to be on Mount Gilboa, and, look, Saul was leaning on his spear, and, look, chariots and horsemen had overtaken him. 7And he turned round behind him and saw me and called to me, and I said, ‘Here I am.’ 8And he said to me, ‘Who are you?’ And I said to him, ‘I am an Amalekite.’ 9And he said to me, ‘Pray, stand over me and finish me off, for the fainting spell has seized me, for while life is still within me… .’ 10And I stood over him and finished him off, for I knew that he could not live after having fallen. And I took the diadem that was on his head and the band that was on his arm, and I have brought them here to my lord.” 11And David took hold of his garments and tore them, and all the men who were with him did so, too. 12And they keened and they wept and they fasted till evening for Saul and for Jonathan his son and for the LORD’S people and for the house of Israel because they had fallen by the sword. 13And David said to the lad who had told him, “From where are you?” And he said, “The son of an Amalekite sojourner am I.” 14And David said to him, “How were you not afraid to reach out your hand to do violence to the LORD’s anointed?” 15And David called to one of the lads and said, “Come forward, stab him.” And he struck him down, and he died. 16And David said to him, “Your blood is on your own head, for your mouth bore witness against you, saying, ‘I was the one who finished off the LORD’s anointed.’” 17And David sang this lament for Saul and for Jonathan, 18and he said to teach hard things to the sons of Judah—look, it is written down in the Book of Jashar:
19“The splendor, O Israel, on your heights lies slain,
how have the warriors fallen!
20Tell it not in Gath,
proclaim not in Ashkelon’s streets.
Lest the Philistine daughters rejoice,
lest the daughters of the uncircumcised gloat.
21O hills of Gilboa—no dew!
and no rain upon you, O lofty fields.
For there the warriors’ shield was besmirched,
the shield of Saul unburnished with oil.
22From the blood of the slain,
from the warriors’ fat—
Jonathan’s bow did not retreat,
and the sword of Saul never turned away empty.
23Saul and Jonathan, beloved and dear,
in their life and their death they were not parted.
They were swifter than eagles,
and stronger than lions.
24O daughters of Israel, weep over Saul,
who clothed you in scarlet and bangles,
who studded your garments with jewelry of gold.
25How have the warriors fallen
in the midst of the battle.
Jonathan, upon your heights slain!
26I grieve for you, my brother, Jonathan.
Very dear you were to me.
than the love of women.
27How have the warriors fallen,
and the gear of battle is lost.”
CHAPTER 1 NOTES
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1. after the death of Saul … David had returned from striking down Amalek. As the story unfolds, an odd symmetry emerges: David has just struck down Amalek; an Amalekite says he has struck down Saul; David has this Amalekite put to death.
2. look, a man was coming … his garments torn and earth on his head. The “look” signals the visual perspective of David and his entourage: what they see is a man who has adopted the most visible signs of conventional mourning. The Amalekite wants to make it clear that he regards Saul’s death, and the defeat, as a catastrophe, though, as we shall see, he really has another purpose in mind.
4. What has happened? The words he uses, meh hayah hadavar, are identical with those spoken to the messenger who brings the news of the disastrous defeat to Eli in 1 Samuel 4:16. There are several other echoes here of that earlier scene.
5. the lad who was telling him. The repetition of this phrase (see next verse), as J. P. Fokkelman has noted, calls attention to the act of telling and by underlining that act may make us wonder whether this is an authentic report or a fabrication.
6. I just chanced to be on Mount Gilboa. Does one accidentally stumble onto a battlefield while the killing is still going on? A more likely scenario is that the Amalekite came onto the battlefield immediately after the fighting as a scavenger, found Saul’s corpse before the Philistines did, and removed the regalia.
Saul was leaning on his spear. From Saul’s words in verse 9, what this means is not that he was resting but that he was entirely spent, barely able to stand.
8. I am an Amalekite. Only now, in the middle of the story, is the national identity of the messenger revealed. The fact that he was an Amalekite means he would have felt no recoil of taboo about doing violence to the king of Israel—something Saul appears to grasp at once. (Compare Doeg the Edomite’s slaughter of the priests of Nob in 1 Samuel 22.) But there is also dramatic irony here: Saul lost his hold on the kingship when he failed to kill the Amalekite king; now he begs an Amalekite to kill him, the king of Israel.
9. Pray, stand over me and finish me off. “Stand over” suggests that Saul himself is barely standing, that he is collapsed against the support of his spear—the very spear that has been associated with his kingship and with his outbursts of rage. “Finish me off” is somewhat inelegant as English diction, but the nuance of the Hebrew (the polel conjugation of the verbal stem that means “to die”) is essential to the story: Saul feels he is dying, and he asks the Amalekite lad not to kill him but to finish him off before the Philistines can get to him. The Amalekite and David concur in this indication of what the Amalekite does to Saul.
the fainting spell. The Hebrew noun appears only here. It may be related to a root that suggests “confusion,” or, alternately, “weakness.”
for while life is still within me. This clause, which has vexed some critics and has led to emendations, is most simply construed as a broken-off sentence that the failing Saul does not have the strength to complete.
10. I stood over him and finished him off. This whole story obviously contradicts the account of Saul’s death by his own hand in 1 Samuel 31. Predictably, this has led many critics to imagine two conflicting “sources.” It is reassuring that more recent scholarly consensus has come to the sensible conclusion that the Amalekite lad is lying. Having come upon Saul’s body, he sees a great opportunity for himself: he will bring Saul’s regalia to David, claim personally to have finished off the man known to be David’s archenemy and rival, and thereby overcome his marginality as resident alien (“sojourner,” ger) by receiving a benefaction from the new king—perhaps a portion of land at David’s disposal. Fokkelman shrewdly notes that the Amalekite, instead of removing the diadem and armband from Saul’s body, might better have buried the body or dragged it off and so saved it from desecration by the Philistines.
for I knew that he could not live after having fallen. The Amalekite sees Saul’s condition “leaning” on his spear to be equivalent to having fallen (“for the fainting spell has seized me”) and assumes, as does Saul himself in this account, that in any case the king will not survive.
14. How were you not afraid … to do violence to the LORD’S anointed? Although the Israelite piety of David’s statement is noteworthy, his words, as in the previous episodes in which he warned against harming Saul, are also politically self-interested because he, too, is the LORD’S anointed. In fact, now with Saul’s death, he alone is the LORD’s anointed.
16. your mouth bore witness against you. There is no way of knowing whether David actually believes the Amalekite’s story, but it is certainly convenient for him to be able to point an accusing finger at someone with whom he has had nothing to do as the person responsible for Saul’s death, and then to order immediate punishment.
the LORD’S anointed. At the end of the episode, David makes a point of using the epithet of divinely grounded royal status instead of simply calling his predecessor “Saul,” as the Amalekite (who never even refers to him as “king”) had done.
17. And David sang this lament. We have been aware since 1 Samuel 16 of David’s gift as a lyre player and (presumably) as a singer. Only now do we hear him in action as a singer-poet. This grandly resonant lament, cast in archaic epic diction, marks a great moment of transition in the larger narrative, as the David–Saul story becomes the David story. It is also another public utterance of David’s that beautifully serves his political purposes, celebrating his dead rival as it mourns his loss and thus testifying that David could never have desired Saul’s death.
18. to teach hard things. The Masoretic Text has “to teach the bow”—a problematic reading because the lament scarcely provides instruction in the arts of war. Some critics delete “bow” (qeshet), following the Septuagint. The present translation revocalizes qeshet as qashot, with Fokkelman.
look, it is written down in the Book of Jashar. This lost work, mentioned elsewhere in the Bible, was obviously familiar to the ancient audience. The title probably means “Book of the Upright,” though another reading of yashar, as a verb rather than as a noun, yields “Book of Songs.” (This, however, requires revocalizing the word.) It might have been an anthology of archaic Hebrew poems.
20. Tell it not in Gath. There is an ironic echo here of the account of David’s activities as vassal to the king of Gath, activities that he did not want told in Gath (see 1 Samuel 27:11).
Lest the Philistine daughters rejoice. In this martial culture, the young women had the role of celebrating the victors (“Saul has struck down his thousands… .”), gloating over the defeated enemy, and enjoying the spoils the men brought back from their conquest (compare verse 24).
21. O hills of Gilboa. As Shimon Bar-Efrat has observed, apostrophe is the dominant form of address throughout the elegy. David first turns, in a plural verb, to Israel at large (“Tell it not in Gath”), then to the hills of Gilboa, then to Saul and Jonathan, then to the daughters of Israel, then to Jonathan alone. The apostrophe is a form of address that underscores the actual absence of the person or object addressed and so is especially apt for an elegy.
lofty fields. The Hebrew usedeh terumot is a little obscure. The simplest solution is to treat the initial particle u as an excrescence and to read the phrase as a poetic inversion of the similar meromey sadeh in Judges 5:18. In the parallelism here, “lofty fields” would be an epithet for “hills of Gilboa.”
unburnished with oil. The shields were made of leather, often studded with metal plates. Rubbing them with oil before battle would have made their outer surface slippery and thus would have enhanced their effectiveness in deflecting weapons. But the Hebrew for “unburnished,” beli mashiaḥ, is a pun—it means “unanointed” or “messiah-less,” a haunting intimation that the LORD’S anointed is no more. Clearly, the image of the royal shield lying befouled in the dust is a powerful metonymy for Saul himself.
22. Jonathan’s bow … the sword of Saul. After the image of the implement of defense, the shield, lying cast aside, we get a retrospective picture of these two offensive weapons destroying the enemy. The idea of the sword or the bow consuming flesh and blood is conventional in ancient Near Eastern martial poetry.
23. in their life and their death they were not parted. This is, of course, an extravagant idealization on the part of the elegist since father and son were almost estranged and twice Saul was on the point of killing Jonathan.
24. O daughters of Israel, weep. The invocation of the daughters of Israel to weep over the king who brought them precious booty is a symmetrical antithesis to the initial warning to keep the news away from the daughters of the Philistines, who would rejoice.
26. I grieve for you, my brother, Jonathan. Jonathan several times proclaimed his love for David. It is only in Jonathan’s death, and at the distance of apostrophe, that David calls him “my brother” and says that Jonathan was dear to him.
More wondrous … than the love of women. Repeated, unconvincing attempts have been made to read a homoerotic implication into these words. The reported details of the David story suggest that his various attachments to women are motivated by pragmatic rather than emotional concerns—and in one instance, by lust. This disposition, however, tells us little about David’s sexual orientation. The bond between men in this warrior culture could easily be stronger than the bond between men and women.
27. How have the warriors fallen, / and the gear of battle is lost. The first clause here echoes the second verset of the opening line of the poem and so closes the elegy in a ringing envelope structure. The second clause beautifully picks up the image of the cast-off shield lying in the dust, and of the relentless bow and sword that will never more be borne into battle. It is misguided to render the verb at the end as “perished” (King James Version, New Jewish Publication Society) because that presupposes that “gear of battle” is actually an epithet for Saul and Jonathan. Far more effectively, the lament concludes with a concrete image of shield and sword and bow abandoned, and by a simple process of metonymy we vividly understand the fate of the two men who once wielded them.
1And it happened afterward that David inquired of the LORD, saying, “Shall I go up into one of the towns of Judah?” And the LORD said to him, “Go up.” And David said, “Where shall I go up?” And He said, “To Hebron.” 2And David went up there, and his two wives as well, Ahinoam the Jezreelite and Abigail wife of Nabal the Carmelite. 3And his men who were with him David brought up, each man and his household, and they settled in Hebron. 4aAnd the men of Judah came and anointed David there as king over the house of Judah.
4bAnd they told David, saying, “It was the men of Jabesh-Gilead who buried Saul.” 5And David sent messengers to the men of Jabesh-Gilead and said to them, “Blessed are you to the LORD, that you have done this kindness with your lord, with Saul, and have buried him. 6And now, may the LORD show faithful kindness to you, and I on my part as well shall do this bounty for you because you have done this thing. 7And now, may your hands be strengthened and be you men of valor, for your lord Saul is dead, and it is I whom the house of Judah has anointed as king over them.”
8And Abner son of Ner commander of Saul’s army had taken Ish-Bosheth son of Saul and brought him over to Mahanaim 9and made him king over Gilead and over the Asherite and over Jezreel and over Ephraim and over Benjamin and over Israel altogether. 10Forty years old was Ish-Bosheth when he became king over Israel, and two years did he reign. But the house of Judah followed David. 11And the span of time that David was king in Hebron over the house of Judah was seven years and six months.
12And Abner son of Ner with the servants of Ish-Bosheth sallied forth from Mahanaim to Gibeon. 13And Joab son of Zeruiah and the servants of David had sallied forth, and they met each other by the pool of Gibeon, and they took up their positions on either side of the pool. 14And Abner said to Joab, “Pray, let the lads arise and play before us.” And Joab said, “Let them arise.” 15And they arose and crossed over—twelve in number for Benjamin and for Ish-Bosheth son of Saul and twelve from the servants of David. 16And each man grasped the head of the other with his sword at the side of the other, and they fell together. And they called that place the Field of Flints, which is in Gibeon. 17And the fighting was very fierce on that day, and Abner with the men of Israel were routed by the servants of David. 18And the three sons of Zeruiah were there, Joab and Abishai and Asahel. And Asahel was as swift-footed as one of the gazelles of the open field. 19And Asahel chased after Abner, and he swerved not to the right or left in going after Abner. 20And Abner turned round and said, “Are you Asahel?” And he said, “I am.” 21And Abner said to him, “Swerve you to your right or your left and seize for yourself one of the lads, and take you his armor.” But Asahel did not want to turn away from him. 22And Abner once more said to Asahel, “Turn you away from me. Why should I strike you to the ground, and how would I show my face to Joab your brother?” 23And he refused to turn aside, and Abner struck him in the belly with the butt of the spear and the spear came out behind him, and he fell there and died on the spot. And it happened that whoever came to the place where Asahel fell and died, stood still. 24And Joab and Abishai chased after Abner, and as the sun was setting, they had come to the hill of Ammah, which faces Giah on the way to the wilderness of Gibeon. 25And the Benjaminites gathered behind Abner and formed a single band, and they took a stance on the top of a certain hill. 26And Abner called out to Joab and said, “Must the sword devour forever? You surely know that it will be bitterness in the end. And how long will you not say to the troops to turn back from their brothers?” 27And Joab said, “As God lives, had you but spoken, from this morning the troops would have given up pursuit of their brothers.” 28And Joab sounded the ram’s horn, and all the troops halted, and they no longer chased after Israel, and they fought no more. 29And Abner and his men went all that night through the Arabah, and they crossed the Jordan and went all the way through the ravine and came to Mahanaim. 30And Joab had turned back from pursuing Abner, and he gathered together all the troops, and nineteen of David’s servants were missing, and Asahel. 31And David’s servants had struck down from Benjamin and from Abner’s men three hundred and sixty men. 32And they bore off Asahel and buried him in his father’s grave, which is in Bethlehem, and Joab and his men went all night long, and day brightened for them in Hebron.
CHAPTER 2 NOTES
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1. David inquired of the LORD. In keeping with the repeated emphasis of the preceding narrative, David, at each crucial juncture, solicits guidance from God’s oracle before he makes his move.
go up into one of the towns of Judah. The preposition is used with precision: David does not want to “go up to one of the towns” but “into one of the towns”—that is, to set up headquarters in the town, leaving Ziklag at the edge of Philistine territory.
Where shall I go up? Given the binary character of the oracle’s response, the actual form of the question would have been “Shall I go up to Hebron?” But the question is recast in its present form to emphasize that God has picked out Hebron from all the towns of Judah.
4a. king over the house of Judah. It is a little odd for a single tribe to have a “king,” but the act is deliberately presumptive on David’s part—first the king of Judah, eventually of all the tribes. Saul’s son Ish-Bosheth, by contrast, becomes king of an alliance of northern tribes. The text is silent on the Philistines’ view of David’s move to kingship in Hebron, but one can assume they countenanced it as a reasonable act on the part of their vassal opposing the house of Saul.
5. David sent messengers to the men of Jabesh-Gilead. This is another shrewd political maneuver. The men of Jabesh-Gilead had been closely allied with Saul. David, seizing the occasion of their act of bravery, summons them, praises their burying of Saul, and offers them an unspecified “bounty” (or “benefice”—literally, “good thing”).
7. for your lord Saul is dead, and it is I whom the house of Judah has anointed as king over them. David finesses Saul’s hostility toward him and presents himself as the legitimate successor: just as the men of Jabesh-Gilead have been valorous in burying Saul, they should now show valor in following the newly anointed David.
8. Abner … had taken Ish-Bosheth. Abner the commander in chief is clearly the real power here, and this surviving son of Saul is little more than a puppet king. The original name (reflected in Chronicles) was Ish-Baal, with the “baal” component being a general epithet for God (or god), not necessarily referring to the Canaanite deity. But because of its pagan associations, the sternly monotheistic later editors systematically substituted boshet for baʿal, boshet meaning “shame.”
Mahanaim. The location is to the east of the Jordan and hence outside the new area of Philistine conquest.
9. Asherite. The Masoretic Text reads “Ashurite,” which would be, implausibly, a non-Israelite people. Some critics emend to “Geshurite,” but that is a Canaanite group, and so the emendation perpetuates the problem. It is simplest to read this word as a reference to the northern tribe of Asher.
and over Israel altogether. Shimon Bar-Efrat has made the plausible proposal that this final phrase is not a summary of the preceding list but the last stage in a chronological process: Ish-Bosheth extended his rule gradually, beginning with Gilead in trans-Jordan and moving westward into the territory the Philistines had conquered. It was only after a time that he actually ruled “over Israel altogether.”
10. two years did he reign. At first thought, his reign should have been nearly as long as David’s seven and a half years in Hebron. But if it took him five years to consolidate his control over the northern tribes, the reign of two years would make perfect sense.
12. Abner … sallied forth from Mahanaim to Gibeon. The reason for this expedition may have been David’s attaching the men of Jabesh-Gilead, who had clearly been in Saul’s camp, to himself. Gibeon is in the territory of Benjamin, just a few miles northwest of Jerusalem.
14. let the lads arise and play before us. The “lads” (neʿarim) are elite warriors. The verb “play” clearly indicates gladiatorial, or representative, combat. (Goliath calling for an Israelite champion to fight him is another instance of combat through designated representative.) It is, however, deadly combat and not just a form of jousting, as the details of the fighting make clear.
15. twelve in number. Throughout this strange episode, as Robert Polzin has aptly observed, there is an “extended ritualization of action as it is described through extensive stylization of language.” The ritual combat is virtually an allegory of the civil war that it inaugurates. (Polzin reads it as an allegory of Israelite monarchy.) The twelve champions on each side recall the twelve tribes of Israel—an image of a nation destructively divided against itself. (The number of fallen soldiers on Abner’s side will be 360—30 times 12—and on Joab’s side 20, an eighteenth part of the other side’s casualties.) The implausibility of the account of combat, then, would have been overridden for the writer by the neatness of its symbolic function.
16. each man grasped the head of the other with his sword at the side of the other. The evidence of artifacts from the ancient world suggests that precisely this mode of ritualized combat was quite widespread. A bas-relief found in Syria, roughly contemporaneous with our story, an Egyptian carving, archaic Greek vase paintings, and a Roman sculpture all show warriors in precisely this posture.
they fell together. All twenty-four warriors were killed—hardly a surprising outcome if each man was free to wield a sword against his adversary’s side. Because there can be no decisive outcome in this encompassing mutual slaughter, general fighting then breaks out.
the Field of Flints. It is not clear whether they were fighting with flint weapons (perhaps because these were archaic and part of the ritualized combat), or whether the old term had become a general designation for knives or swords.
17. Abner with the men of Israel were routed. Given the relatively low number of casualties, it seems likely that fewer than a thousand on each side were engaged. In such limited combat, the veterans of David’s battle-hardened guerilla band of six hundred might have had a distinct advantage.
20. Are you Asahel? Abner, who surely would not have had any compunction about killing some other Judahite, realizes, quite accurately, that it will mean trouble for him to kill one of the sons of Zeruiah. Asahel, the ace sprinter, sounds very much like the youngest of the three, although we are not told specifically about the order of their birth.
21. his armor. This noun, ḥalitsah, appears only here and in the Samson story. It is rendered in modern translations, erroneously, as “tunic,” “garment,” or even “belt,” but as we know from the Iliad, it is rather armor that a warrior takes from a slain foe on the battlefield. (The King James Version actually gets it right here but not in the Samson story.) The word is related to ḥaluts, “vanguard,” and the vanguard fighters would surely have worn armor.
22. Why should I strike you to the ground. Abner, the seasoned warrior, is coolly confident that if necessary he has the skill and the combat experience to kill this impetuous young man.
how would I show my face to Joab your brother? The literal wording of the Hebrew is “lift up my face.” What is at stake here is not merely a question of diplomatic relations with the opposing commander but vendetta justice (Hebrew, geʾulat hadam, “redemption of the blood”): if Abner sheds the blood of Joab’s brother, Joab will feel honor-bound to shed the blood of the killer in return.
23. struck him in the belly with the butt of the spear. Asahel is pursuing Abner at top speed. Abner, to save his own life, uses an old soldier’s trick: he suddenly stops short and thrusts his spear backward, under his pursuer’s shield (if Asahel is carrying one) and into the soft belly. The momentum of Asahel’s rapid running would have contributed to the penetrating force of the spear’s butt.
24. Ammah … Giah. The first name means “conduit,” the second “gushing,” and so both may be related to an aqueduct system linked to the pool at Gibeon.
26. You surely know that it will be bitterness in the end. This grim prognostication hovers over not only the continuing civil war but the entire David story. In the previous verse, Abner’s forces were reported regrouping and taking up a defensive position on the hilltop, so they are now, after the rout, in a state to inflict serious casualties on their adversaries if Joab persists. Therefore he agrees to the truce, though he surely has vendetta on his mind.
27. had you but spoken. The Masoretic Text has “had you not spoken.” This has led some interpreters to construe “morning” as “tomorrow morning” (that is, the troops would have gone on pursuing you all night long had you not spoken up now). But this is strained because the Hebrew ʾaz mehaboker (literally, “then from the morning”) idiomatically refers to the morning of the day on which one is speaking. One should either emend “had not” (luleiʾ) to “had” (lu) or, as Rashi proposed long ago, construe the former in the sense of the latter.
29. the Arabah. This is a north-south depression running from the Sea of Galilee all the way to the Gulf of Aqabah.
the ravine. The Hebrew term bitron might conceivably be a place-name. The root means to cleave or split and occurs in the Song of Songs collocated with “mountains,” yielding something like “mountains of the divide.” The scholarly proposal that this word means “middle of the morning” has no warrant in ancient Hebrew usage.
32. all night long. Perhaps the reason for this forced march through the night is that Joab’s troops want to get safely out of Benjaminite territory, not entirely trusting the truce.
1And the fighting between the house of Saul and the house of David went on a long time, and David grew stronger and the house of Saul weaker and weaker.
2And sons were born to David in Hebron. And his firstborn was Amnon, by Ahinoam the Jezreelite. 3And the second was Chileab, by Abigail wife of Nabal the Carmelite. And the third was Absalom son of Maachah daughter of Talmai king of Geshur. 4And the fourth was Adonijah son of Haggith. And the fifth was Shephatiah son of Abital. 5And the sixth was Ithream, by Eglah wife of David. These were born to David in Hebron.
6And it happened during the fighting between the house of Saul and the house of David that Abner kept growing in strength in the house of Saul. And Saul had a concubine named Rizpah daughter of Aiah. 7And Ish-Bosheth said to Abner, “Why did you come to bed with my father’s concubine?” 8And Abner was very incensed over the words of Ish-Bosheth, and he said, “Am I a dog’s head attached to Judah? Today I have kept faith with the house of Saul your father, with his kinsmen and his companions, in not handing you over to David, and you dare reproach me with guilt over the woman today? 9Thus may God do to Abner, and even more, for as the LORD has sworn to David, just so will I do for him—10to transfer the kingship from the house of Saul and to set up the throne of David over Israel and over Judah from Dan to Beersheba!” 11And he could say back not a word more to Abner in his fear of him.
12And Abner sent messengers to David in his stead, saying, “To whom should the land belong? Make a pact with me and, look, my hand will be with you to bring round to you all Israel.” 13And he said, “Good. I shall make a pact with you. But one thing do I ask of you, namely, you shall not see my face until you bring Michal daughter of Saul when you come to see my face.” 14And David sent messengers to Ish-Bosheth son of Saul, saying, “Give back my wife Michal, whom I betrothed with a hundred Philistine foreskins.” 15And Ish-Bosheth sent and took her from her husband, from Paltiel son of Laish. 16And her husband went with her, weeping as he went after her, as far as Bahurim. And Abner said to him, “Go back!” And he went back.
17And Abner parlayed with the elders of Israel, saying, “Time and again in the past you sought to have David become king over you. 18And now, act, for the LORD has said, ‘By the hand of David My servant will I rescue My people Israel from the hand of the Philistines and from the hand of all their enemies.’” 19And Abner spoke as well in the hearing of Benjamin, and Abner went as well to speak in David’s hearing in Hebron all that was good in the eyes of Israel and in the eyes of Benjamin. 20And Abner came to David in Hebron, and with him were twenty men. And David made a feast for Abner and for the men who were with him. 21And Abner said to David, “Let me rise and go and gather to my lord the king all Israel, that they may make a pact with you, and you shall reign over all your heart desires.” And David sent Abner off, and he went in peace. 22And look, David’s servants and Joab had come from a raid, and abundant booty they brought with them, and Abner was not with David in Hebron, for he had sent him off, and he went in peace. 23And Joab and all the force that was with him had come, and they told Joab, saying, “Abner son of Ner has come to the king, and he sent him off, and he went in peace.” 24And Joab came to the king and said, “What have you done? Look, Abner has come to you! Why did you send him off, and he went, going off? 25You know that Abner son of Ner to dupe you has come and to learn your comings and goings and to learn all that you do.” 26And Joab went out from David’s presence and sent messengers after Abner, and they brought him back from the cistern of Sirah, and David did not know. 27And Abner came back to Hebron, and Joab drew him aside into the gate to speak with him deceptively, and he struck him there in the belly, and he died for the blood of Asahel, Joab’s brother. 28And David heard afterward and said, “Innocent am I, and my kingship, before the LORD for all time of the blood of Abner son of Ner! 29May the bloodguilt come down on the head of Joab and all his father’s house, and may there never lack in the house of Joab a sufferer of discharge from his member and running sores on his skin and a man clutching the woman’s spindle, and one falling by the sword and one wanting for bread!” 30And Joab and Abishai his brother had lain in wait for Abner because he put to death Asahel their brother in Gibeon in the fighting. 31And David said to Joab and to all the troops who were with him, “Tear your garments and gird on sackcloth and keen for Abner.” And King David was walking behind the bier. 32And they buried Abner in Hebron. And the king raised his voice and wept over the grave of Abner, and all the people wept. 33And the king lamented over Abner and said,
should Abner have died?
34Your hands—never bound,
your feet never placed in fetters!
As one falls before scoundrels you fell.”
35And all the people continued to weep over him. And all the people came to give David bread to eat while it was still day, and David swore, saying, “Thus and more may God do to me, if before the sun sets I taste bread or anything at all.” 36And all the people took note and it was good in their eyes, all that the king had done was good in the eyes of the people. 37And all the people and all Israel knew on that day that it had not been from the king to put to death Abner son of Ner. 38And the king said to his servants, “You must know that a commander and a great man has fallen this day in Israel. 39And I am gentle, and just anointed king, and these sons of Zeruiah are too hard for me. May the LORD pay back the evildoer according to his evil!”
CHAPTER 3 NOTES
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1. And the fighting. This summary notice at the head of the chapter follows directly from the story of the battle at Gibeon that precedes it: the truce on that day is only temporary, and a drawn-out civil war ensues.
2. And sons were born to David. The insertion of this genealogical list here may be motivated by the fact that the northern tribes, brought round by Abner, are about to cast their lot with David, making him monarch of the entire nation and thus a properly dynastic king. But succession to the throne is not simple, and the list bristles with future disasters: Amnon, who will rape his half sister and will be murdered by her brother; Absalom, who will usurp the throne; Adonijah, who will proclaim himself king while the infirm, aged David lies in bed unawares.
3. Chileab. The Septuagint and the Qumran Samuel fragment have a different name, Daluiah. In any case, this son plays no role in the ensuing narrative, nor do Shephatiah and Ithream.
Maachah daughter of Talmai king of Geshur. Geshur is a small trans-Jordanian kingdom at the foot of the Golan. The marriage is clearly a political act through which David establishes an alliance in the north, outflanking the house of Saul. It is conceivable that Absalom’s later aspiration to the throne may be influenced by his awareness that, alone of David’s sons, he is grandson of a king. After the killing of Amnon, he will take refuge in Geshur.
5. Eglah wife of David. It is a little odd that only she is so designated. This might be because she stands at the end of the list, or because there was knowledge of another Eglah who was not David’s wife. In all this, one notes that David the guerilla leader with his two wives has now become David the king with a whole royal harem.
6. Abner kept growing in strength. This is the same verb, in a different conjugation, as in the opening verse of the chapter, which reported David’s growing strength and the weakening of the house of Saul. As the Saulide forces are progressively harder pressed in the continuing war, the nominal king becomes more and more dependent on his military commander; and Abner, while not actually pretending to the throne, arrogates more and more power to himself.
7. Why did you come to bed with my father’s concubine? This crucial act is elided in the narrative report and revealed only in Ish-Bosheth’s indignant question. To take sexual possession of a king’s consort was to make an implicit claim to the power he exercised, as we shall see again when Absalom publicly cohabits with David’s concubines. “To come to bed with”—literally, “to come into”—is an idiom for sexual intercourse that generally indicates sexual possession of a woman with whom a man has not been previously intimate. (I explain the semantic logic of the idiom in the second comment on Genesis 6:14.)
8. Am I a dog’s head attached to Judah? The dog in biblical idiom regularly figures as a contemptible beast—the antonym of the fierce and regal lion. The phrase “attached to Judah” is lacking in the Septuagint, and some critics have inferred that it is a scribal interpolation. It might make sense, however, as a compounding of the insult because Judah is the despised enemy of Benjamin, the tribe of Saul.
you dare reproach me with guilt over the woman. Abner’s angry protest has a nice double edge. You are entirely dependent on my loyal support, he tells Ish-Bosheth, so how could you dare object to so trivial a thing as my taking a particular woman as sexual partner? Alternately, the implication could be: you are entirely dependent on me, so how could you object to my taking possession of this sexual symbol of political power? You should have been content that I left you nominally on the throne.
9. for as the LORD has sworn to David. Ish-Bosheth’s protest about Rizpah drives Abner, David’s military adversary, to embrace the notion that God has promised the throne to David. Rather than continue to serve a carping, pusillanimous man like Ish-Bosheth, who neither fully accepts Abner’s power nor knows how to exercise power on his own, Abner now is ready to throw his weight with a truly kingly leader and to help him become king over all the nation’s tribes (verse 10).
11. he could say back not a word. The contrast between the angry Abner and the quaking Ish-Bosheth is all the stronger because the puppet king’s fearful silence is set against what is by biblical standards a rather long speech—one continuous outburst.
13. see my face. An idiom used for coming into the presence of royalty.
Michal daughter of Saul. The first marriage buttresses David’s claim to reign over all Israel, including the tribe of Benjamin. That is why he identifies Michal to Abner as Saul’s daughter. There is no indication that he has a personal motive of affection as well as a political one in wanting Michal back.
14. sent messengers to Ish-Bosheth. It is to be inferred that Abner has made clear to Ish-Bosheth that he must accede to this demand.
my wife Michal, whom I betrothed with a hundred Philistine foreskins. In turning to the man who has jurisdiction over Michal (and her second husband), David makes clear now that she is his wife, whom he legitimately acquired by providing the bride-price of a hundred Philistine foreskins stipulated by her father, Saul.
15. from her husband. The Masoretic Text has “a husband” (or, “a man”), but the possessive pronoun is supplied in the Septuagint and the Vulgate as well as in at least two Hebrew manuscripts.
16. weeping as he went. There is scarcely a more striking instance of the evocative compactness of biblical narrative. We know almost nothing about Paltiel. He speaks not a word of dialogue. Yet his walking after Michal, weeping all the while, intimates a devoted love that stands in contrast to David’s relationship with her. Paltiel is a man whose fate is imposed on him. Michal was given to him by Saul, evidently without his initiative. He came to love her. Now he must give her up, and confronted by Saul’s strongman with the peremptory order to go back, he has no choice but to go back.
17. Time and again in the past. The idiom for “times gone by,” temol shilshom (literally, “yesterday and the day before”), is reinforced by the emphatic adverb gam, repeated before each of the two components of the idiom, probably as an indication of repeated acts in times past. Most commentators refer the idea of Israel’s wanting David as king to his immense popularity during his early military successes (1 Samuel 18). But there was no intimation then that the people wanted to replace Saul with David on the throne. The suggestion of repeated popular support for David’s claims might well point to an otherwise unreported undercurrent of dissatisfaction with the house of Saul and an interest in going over to David as a result of the losing civil war, if it is not Abner’s own diplomatic invention.
21. And David sent Abner off, and he went in peace. The going in peace befits the feast of reconciliation and the agreed-on pact. The writer contrives to repeat this sentence verbatim three times (here, verse 22, verse 23). But when Joab refers to this very same departure of Abner from Hebron in verse 24, he substitutes for “in peace” (beshalom) the emphatic infinitive halokh (“going off”). This ominous substitution, as I put it in The Art of Biblical Narrative, “falls like the clatter of a dagger after the ringing of bells”—especially because “to go” sometimes occurs in the Bible as a euphemism for dying (see Job 27:21 and Jeremiah 22:10). Polzin has noted that this entire episode is a crowded juncture of comings and goings. The least complicated inference to be drawn from that fact is that this is a crucial moment of transition in the David story: the house of Saul comes to treat with the house of David; the long conflict with Saul, culminating in civil war, comes to an end; David is about to become king of the whole Israelite nation; a new line of division now emerges between David and his chief henchman, Joab. All this flurry of transition and realignment is nicely caught in the multiple comings and goings of Abner and Joab and the troops.
24. Look, Abner has come to you. The simple idiom for arrival (baʾ ʾel) ironically echoes Ish-Bosheth’s use of the very same idiom in its sexual sense (“come into,” “come to bed with”) in his complaint to Abner. The sexual undertone is sustained in the next verse because the prominent verb “to dupe” (pitah) has the primary meaning of “seduce.”
26. the cistern of Sirah. The actual location has not been identified, but it would have to be in the general vicinity of Hebron.
and David did not know. The narrator takes pains to underscore David’s innocence of involvement in Joab’s scheme of murder. David on his part will take extravagant steps to declare his innocence.
27. deceptively. The Hebrew adverb basheli occurs only here. It derives either from the root sh-l-h, “to delude,” or from the root sh-l-w, “to be quiet.” Those who favor the latter root render it, with a small leap of semantic inference, as “privately.”
he struck him there in the belly. Although this is the same part of the body in which the now avenged Asahel received his fatal wound from Abner, there is a world of difference between the two killings. Abner struck down Asahel in a deft maneuver as Asahel was pursuing him on the battlefield with intent to kill. Joab draws Abner aside into the gate under the pretence of speaking confidentially with him, and, catching him unawares, stabs him in the belly.
for the blood of Asahel. Joab’s vendetta is accomplished. But it has not escaped notice that he is also eliminating a rival for the position of commander in the new united monarchy.
28. Innocent am I. David’s first eminently political reflex is to dissociate himself categorically from the killing.
of the blood of Abner son of Ner. The Qumran Samuel text puts a full stop after “before the LORD for all time,” then makes this phrase the subject of the next clause: “May the blood of Abner son of Ner come down on the head of Joab.” The Masoretic Text has simply “May it come down on the head of Joab,” and this translation supplies “blood guilt” (plural of dam, “blood”) for the sake of clarity.
29. discharge from his member. The single Hebrew word zav refers to a man suffering from diseased discharge from the male organ.
running sores on his skin. This is again one word in the Hebrew, metsorʿa, rendered as “leper” in the older translations but now generally thought to indicate a different skin disease.
a man clutching the woman’s spindle. Some prefer to interpret the Hebrew term as “crutch,” thus linking it with the two preceding images of disease. This noun, pelekh, occurs quite infrequently, but there is scant indication in the biblical corpus that as a wooden implement it meant anything but “spindle.” The word “woman’s” is added in the translation to catch the nuance of scorn in a man’s being reduced to woman’s work. All in all, David puts together a first-class curse to emphasize the distance between him and Abner’s killer. This bloodguilt, many times compounded, will indeed come down on Joab’s head, but not until the end of David’s life.
30. had lain in wait for Abner. The Masoretic Text reads “had killed Abner” (hargu leʾavner). There are two problems with that reading. It is a flat repetition of what has already been reported more vividly (only adding the information that Abishai was complicit in the act), and the use of the particle le (as a preposition, it means “to” or “for”) to indicate the direct object of a verb is an Aramaicism generally restricted to Late Biblical Hebrew. The Qumran Samuel scroll has a different verb, evidently (the first consonant is not visible on the parchment) tsafnu, “to lie in wait,” “to hide.”
33. lamented. This is David’s second poetic lament (qinah) in quick sequence in the text. It is much briefer than the lament over Jonathan and Saul and derives its power from the lapidary character of its language.
the death of the base. The term for “base fellow,” naval, is the one encountered in 1 Samuel 25 as an explanation for the name of Nabal, Abigail’s husband. A naval is someone who, as Kyle McCarter Jr. rightly observes, perpetrates nevalah, a contemptible or scandalous act. It is an outrage, David says, that a noble figure such as Abner should have been cut down in stealth as some scoundrel might perish at the hands of hired assassins.
34. Your hands—never bound, / your feet never placed in fetters. The elliptical nature of the language has led to some dispute over interpretation. It is most plausibly understood as a brief retrospection on Abner’s glory days as a martial hero: no one ever succeeded in taking him captive, in putting him in a prisoner’s humiliating fetters.
As one falls before scoundrels you fell. But now the noble Abner has been undone by treachery. In all the grandeur of the poetry, the sharp rebuke to the sons of Zeruiah, who figure as vulgar cutthroats, is clear.
37–38. The vehemence with which David here is repeatedly dissociated from the killing of Abner leads one to suspect that, beyond his desire to exculpate himself on the spot, there may have been a lingering shadow of suspicion that he ordered the killing, a suspicion that the writer takes pains to dispel.
39. I am gentle, and just anointed king. David’s plight as a self-proclaimed “gentle” or “tender” man (rakh) vis-à-vis the “hard” sons of Zeruiah will continue to play a crucial role in the story. But though he dissociates himself from Joab and Abishai and goes so far as to pronounce a scathing curse on them and their descendants, he makes no move to get rid of them, and continues to depend on their activity as strongmen. And what of Joab’s reaction to all this bitter denunciation? Is it possible that he prudently understands it is politic for the king to dissociate himself from the killing by denouncing the killers in poetry and prose? There is also a question here about the relation between the two phrases David uses. Many translations explain the link as “though anointed king.” That construction is possible, although it would be an unusual use of the Hebrew particle we (“and”). The present translation adds “just,” on the assumption that David is dramatizing his predicament as a gentle person on whom the kingship has been newly thrust and who must contend with these hard sons of Zeruiah. In point of fact, he was anointed in Hebron several years earlier, but this might be either rhetorical exaggeration or a reference to his brand-new condition of king of the nation, not just of the tribe of Judah.
1And the son of Saul heard that Abner had died in Hebron, and he was utterly shaken, and all Israel was dismayed. 2And the son of Saul had two men, commanders of raiding parties, the name of the one was Baanah and of the other Rechab, sons of Rimmon the Beerothite, who was of the Benjaminites, for Beeroth, too, was reckoned with Benjamin. 3And the Beerothites fled to Gittaim and have been sojourners there till this day.
4And Jonathan son of Saul had a lame son, five years old he was when the news of Saul and Jonathan came from Jezreel. And his nurse bore him off and fled, and it happened in her haste to flee that he fell and was crippled. And his name was Mephibosheth. 5And the sons of Rimmon the Beerothite, Rechab and Baanah went and came in the heat of the day to the house of Ish-Bosheth as he was taking his midday rest. 6And, look, the woman who kept the gate had been gleaning wheat, and nodded and fell asleep. 7Andthey came into the house as he was lying in his bed in his bedchamber, and they struck him and killed him and cut off his head and took his head and went off through the Arabah all night long. 8And they brought Ish-Bosheth’s head to David in Hebron and said to the king, “Here is the head of Ish-Bosheth son of Saul your enemy, who sought your life. The LORD has granted my lord the king vengeance this day against Saul and his seed.” 9And David answered Rechab and Baanah his brother, the sons of Rimmon the Beerothite, and he said to them, “As the LORD lives, Who saved my life from every strait, 10he who told me, saying ‘Look, Saul is dead,’ and thought he was a bearer of good tidings, I seized him and killed him in Ziklag instead of giving him something for his tidings. 11How much more so when wicked men have killed an innocent man in his bed in his house, and so, will I not requite his blood from you and rid the land of you?” 12And David commanded the lads, and they killed them and chopped off their hands and feet and hung them by the pool in Hebron. And Ish-Bosheth’s head they took and buried in the grave of Abner in Hebron.
CHAPTER 4 NOTES
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1. the son of Saul. The son in question is Ish-Bosheth. Both the Septuagint and the Qumran Samuel scroll read, erroneously, “Mephibosheth.” It has been surmised that scribes deleted the mistaken name without replacing it with the correct one.
was utterly shaken. The Hebrew says literally “his hands grew weak,” the hands being an idiomatic token of strength or courage. The force of the idiom is a little like the colloquial English “lost his grip.”
2. sons of Rimmon the Beerothite, who was of the Benjaminites. The Beerothites are an originally non-Israelite group who have become what we might call naturalized Benjaminites. The two brothers are considered sufficiently Benjaminite to have been entrusted with positions as the commanders of raiding parties—also making them experienced killers—and so we are meant to understand that the pusillanimous Ish-Bosheth is betrayed by his own tribesmen. At the same time, the foreign origin of Baanah and Rechab participates in the recurring pattern of the foreign messenger bringing news of a disaster to David. Finally, the treacherous killing of the king by two brothers echoes the immediately preceding episode, in which two brothers, Joab and Abishai, are said to lie in wait for and kill Abner.
4. Jonathan … had a lame son. The notice is inserted here to make clear that after the murder of Ish-Bosheth, there will be no fit heir left from the house of Saul, for Saul’s one surviving grandson is crippled.
Mephibosheth. As with Ish-Bosheth/Ish-Baal, the original form of the name was Mephibaal, a component meaning “shame” substituted for the theophoric ba‘al with its pagan associations.
6. And, look, the woman who kept the gate. The translation of this entire verse follows the text reflected in the Septuagint, out of a sense that the received text at this point is simply not viable. The Masoretic Text is problematic as idiomatic Hebrew usage, includes one entirely unintelligible phrase, and is redundant with the narrative report of the next verse. It reads: “and they [feminine pronoun!] came into the midst of the house, taking wheat [?], and they struck him in the belly, and Rechab and Baanah his brother got away.”
gleaning wheat. This odd little domestic detail suggests that Ish-Bosheth does not inhabit a grand palace with royal guards but lives in modest homey circumstances.
nodded and fell asleep. Both the king and the gatekeeper are asleep when the assassins arrive, so they can slip by her and easily dispatch him.
7. as he was lying in his bed in his bedchamber. This twice-asserted detail underlines the scurrilousness of the act of assassination. The next time we encounter a king taking his siesta, it will be David before he rises to behold Bathsheba. Again, murder will ensue, although the king himself will be the perpetrator.
8. Ish-Bosheth son of Saul your enemy, who sought your life. The two sons of Rimmon make exactly the same misguided calculation as the Amalekite messenger in chapter 1, imagining that David will be delighted to hear of the destruction of anyone associated with Saul and will reward the bearers of the news.
11. when wicked men have killed an innocent man in his bed in his house. Either this detail has been elided in the dialogue reported for Baanah and Rechab when they come before David, or he has received advance word of the killing and its circumstances from another source. In all this, the common scholarly view is that the narrative is framed as an apology for David, taking pains to clear him of any complicity in the deaths, first of Saul, then of Abner, and now of Ish-Bosheth. But it is still more plausible that the writer is continuing his representation of David as the consummately politic man: whether he really feels moral revulsion against these assassins we have no way of knowing, but he surely is aware, as he was after the murder of Abner, that it is in his political interest to put the greatest possible distance between himself and the killers of Saul’s son, and what better way to do this than to have them executed on the spot? David is nevertheless a beneficiary of the murder, for now there is no claimant to the throne whom the northern tribes might follow instead of him.
12. chopped off their hands and feet. The dismembering of malefactors or prisoners was a common ancient Near Eastern practice, as we have seen before (and compare the first chapter of Judges). Here the corpses are defiled by cutting off the hands that did the killing and the feet that carried the killers into the victim’s bedchamber. The whole episode ends in a strange image cluster of detached body parts: the hands and feet of the two executed assassins and the head of their victim. Even as David is about to assume control of a united monarchy, we have an intimation of mayhem and dismemberment that is an apt thematic prelude to the story of David’s reign.
1And all the tribes of Israel came to David in Hebron, and they said, “Here we are, your bone and your flesh are we. 2Time and again in the past when Saul was king over us you were the one who led Israel into the fray, and the LORD said to you,
‘It is you who will shepherd My people Israel
and it is you who will be prince over Israel.’”
3And all the elders of Israel came to the king in Hebron, and King David made a pact with them in Hebron before the LORD and they anointed David as king over Israel. 4Thirty years old was David when he became king, forty years he was king. 5In Hebron he was king over Judah seven years and six months, and in Jerusalem he was king thirty-three years over all Israel and Judah.
6And the king went, and his men with him, to Jerusalem, to the Jebusite, the inhabitant of the land, and he said to David, saying, “You shall not enter here unless you can remove the blind and the lame,” which is to say, “David shall not enter here!” 7And David captured the stronghold of Zion, which is the City of David. 8And David said on that day, “Whoever strikes down the Jebusite and reaches the conduit and the lame and the blind utterly despised by David …” Therefore do they say, “No blind man nor lame shall enter the House.” 9And David stayed in the stronghold and called it the City of David, and David built round the rampart and within. 10And David grew greater and greater, and the LORD God of Armies was with him.
11And Hiram king of Tyre sent messengers to David with cedarwood and carpenters and stonemasons, and they built a house for David. 12And David knew that the LORD had set him up unshaken as king over Israel and had exalted his kingship for the sake of His people Israel.
13And David took other concubines and wives from Jerusalem after coming from Hebron, and other sons and daughters were born to David. 14And these are the names of those born to him in Jerusalem: Shammua and Shobab and Nathan and Solomon, 15and Ibhar and Elishua and Nepheg and Japhia, 16and Elishama and Eliada and Eliphelet.
17And the Philistines heard that David had been anointed as king over Israel, and all the Philistines came up to seek David. And David heard and went down to the stronghold. 18The Philistines had come and deployed in the Valley of Rephaim. 19And David inquired of the LORD, saying, “Shall I go up against the Philistines? Will You give them into my hand?” And the LORD said, “Go up, for I will surely give the Philistines into your hand.” 20And David came into Baal-Perazim, and David struck them down there, and he said, “The LORD has burst through my enemies before me like a bursting of water!” Therefore did he call the name of that place Baal-Perazim. 21And they abandoned their idols there, and David with his men bore them off. 22And once more the Philistines came up and deployed in the Valley of Rephaim. 23And David inquired of the LORD, and He said, “You shall not go up. Turn around behind them and come at them from opposite the willows. 24And as soon as you hear the sound of marching in the tops of the willows, then you must move boldly, for then shall the LORD go out before you to strike down the camp of the Philistines.” 25And David did just as the LORD had commanded him, and he struck down the Philistines from Geba till you come to Gezer.
CHAPTER 5 NOTES
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1. all the tribes of Israel came to David. “The tribes of Israel,” in keeping with the consistent usage of the preceding narrative, refers to the northern tribes that had been loyal to the house of Saul. With the assassination of Abner and then of Ish-Bosheth, they understandably now turn to David.
2. you were the one … It is you. The language of the tribal representatives puts considerable emphasis on the second-person pronoun: you are the one that we, and God, have chosen. The divine declaration of David’s legitimacy as ruler, quoted by the tribal spokesmen, is appropriately given the elevated status of poetry.
3. all the elders of Israel came to the king. This is not a duplication of the report in verse 1 from another source, as is often claimed. The convention used here is the well-attested one of “resumptive repetition”: when an interrupted narrative strand is resumed, a phrase from the point of interruption is repeated verbatim to mark the return to the main line. Here, the move to confirm David as king of Israel, with which the episode began, after the insertion of the tribes’ dialogue (verses 1–2), is carried forward. It is the role of the tribal rank and file to proclaim fealty, but of the elders to sign a pact and anoint David, and so “elders” is now strategically substituted for “tribes” of the first verse. One should note that the tribes come “to David” whereas the elders come “to the king,” for they are about to consummate the official business of kingmaking.
4. forty years he was king. In biblical usage, this is a formulaic number—in Judges often used to indicate a full term of governing. But the specificity of “seven years and six months” in Hebron has the look of a real number, whether or not it is historically precise.
6. the king went … to Jerusalem. The chronological link between this action and what precedes, as well as the chronology of the subsequent events in the chapter, is not clear. The principle of organization appears to be thematic or ideological rather than temporal. What we have here is a catalogue of salient actions by which David consolidates his new monarchy: the conquest of a capital city in the center of the north-south axis of the country that does not belong to any tribal territory (the same logic that led to the creation of Washington as capital in the District of Columbia, not part of any state); the construction of a palace with the assistance of a Phoenician alliance; the begetting of many offspring, including the future heir to the throne, Solomon; the defeat of the Philistines. The birth of Solomon is the clearest indication that these notices do not follow the chronology of the preceding narrative.
the blind and the lame. This puzzling phrase, together with its even more enigmatic occurrence in verse 8, is a notorious crux. The most disparate theories have been proposed for how to read the words of the text and how to reconstruct what is said to go on in the conquest of the city. The Qumran Samuel scroll for this verse reads: “You shall not enter here, for the blind and the lame have incited [hesitu for Masoretic hesirkha], saying, ‘David shall not enter here.’” This variant has the advantage of fluency, but one suspects it may have been invented to make a difficult traditional text more intelligible. The explanation proposed by Yigal Yadin is probably the most plausible: he points to a Hittite text for the swearing in of troops in which a blind woman and a lame man are set before the men with the monitory imprecation that their fate will be like that of those wretches if they fail in their duty. The Jebusites, then, might have displayed the lame and the blind on the ramparts with an analogous curse against those who would presume to attack the city. This taunting curse would explain why these maimed figures are “despised by David.”
8. Whoever strikes down the Jebusite and reaches the conduit. These words are the other salient element of the crux, with debate still raging over the meaning of “conduit” (tsinor). Some scholars have claimed it refers here to the windpipe, or a lower part of the anatomy, of the Jebusites who are to be struck down, but there is no Hebrew evidence for tsinor as anything but a water channel or tube, and the argument from the analogy of shape is a weak one. Moreover, the verb used here, naga‘, means primarily “to touch,” and in some biblical contexts, “to reach” or “take charge of” but not “to strike.” The most likely reference, then, is to a daring route of surprise access into the city. A frequently proposed candidate is Warren’s Shaft, discovered in 1867, an underground tunnel feeding in from the Gihon Spring on a slope outside the wall to the east. Though everything about this report remains uncertain, David may be saying that whoever manages to crawl through the tunnel, make his way up the vertical shaft that transects it, and cut down the Jebusites within the town together with their loathsome display of lame and blind will be given a great reward. (The reward clause is missing; one is supplied in the parallel verse in Chronicles—“will become a chief and commander.”)
No blind man nor lame shall enter the House. The story is thus given an etiological turn as an explanation for a known taboo, evidently pertaining to the temple but perhaps to David’s “house” (that is, the palace). One wonders whether there is an invitation here to think of Jonathan’s lame son—which would be another gesture for denying the Saulides all future claim to the throne.
11. Hiram king of Tyre. Hiram as a provider of timber and artisans points forward to Solomon’s construction of the Temple. If this is the Hiram with whom Solomon had dealings, David’s palace building would have been undertaken rather late in his own reign in order to coincide with Hiram’s regnal span.
13. from Jerusalem. Some Septuagint versions read “in Jerusalem.”
17. the Philistines heard. David’s assumption of the throne of all the tribes of Israel means that he has decisively cast aside his vassal status, and so the Philistines, who all along have been warring with the northern tribes, assemble their united forces (“all the Philistines”) to suppress the new monarchy.
the stronghold. The claim often made that this refers to the stronghold at Adullam (compare 1 Samuel 22) is unlikely because the battle here is entirely in the immediate vicinity of Jerusalem. This would have to be the stronghold within the city, referred to in verse 9. David can “go down” to it because his residence in Jerusalem could be topographically above the stronghold.
18. the Valley of Rephaim. The location is outside the walls of the Jebusite city, a couple of miles to the west.
20. burst through my enemies … like a bursting of water. The existing place-name is etiologically reinscribed to fit the military victory. Baal-Perazim may mean “god of earthquakes.” The image of bursting through—the Hebrew term means “breach”—could suggest that David’s forces have succeeded in punching a hole in the Philistine lines rather than in producing a general rout.
23. opposite the willows. The Hebrew bekha’im resists botanic identification—mulberry tree, pear tree, mastic bush, and others have been proposed. Some think it is a place-name, but the next verse makes that unlikely.
24. the sound of marching in the tops of the willows. Presumably, this is the wind. But it gives a sense that mysterious unseen agents of the LORD are advancing against the Philistines. More practically, some interpreters have proposed that the sound of the wind in the branches provided a cover for the sound of David’s troops stealthily advancing for their surprise attack from the rear.
25. from Geba till you come to Gezer. Unlike the first victory, David now inflicts a general defeat on the Philistine forces, driving them back from the territory in central Canaan that they had occupied after triumphing over Saul at Gilboa. David has now completed the consolidation of his rule over all the land, and his real troubles are about to begin.
1And David gathered again all the picked men of Israel, thirty thousand. 2And David arose and went, and all the troops who were with him, to Baalah in Judah to bring up from there the Ark of God, over which the name of the LORD of Armies enthroned on the cherubim is called. 3And they mounted the Ark of God on a new cart and carried it off from the house of Abinadab, which is on the Hill, and Uzza and Ahio, the sons of Abinadab, were driving the cart, 4and Ahio was walking before the Ark. 5And David and the whole house of Israel were playing before the LORD with all their might in song on lyres and tambourines and castanets and cymbals. 6And they came to the threshing floor of Nacon, and Uzza reached out to the Ark of God and took hold of it, for the oxen had slipped. 7And the LORD’s wrath flared up against Uzza, and God struck him down there for reaching out his hand to the Ark, and he died there by the Ark of God. 8And David was incensed because the LORD had burst out against Uzza. And that place has been called Perez-Uzza to this day. 9And David was afraid of the LORD on that day and he said, “How can the Ark of the LORD come to me?” 10And David did not want to remove the Ark of the LORD to himself in the City of David, and David had it turned aside to the house of Obed-Edom the Gittite. 11And the Ark of the LORD remained in the house of Obed-Edom three months and the LORD blessed Obed-Edom and all his house. 12And it was told to King David, saying, “The LORD has blessed the house of Obed-Edom and all that he has on account of the Ark of God.” And David went and brought up the Ark of God from the house of Obed-Edom to the City of David with rejoicing.
13And it happened when the bearers of the Ark of the LORD had taken six steps that he sacrificed a fatted bull. 14And David was whirling with all his might before the LORD, girt in a linen ephod. 15And David and the whole house of Israel were bringing up the Ark of the LORD in shouts and with the sound of the ram’s horn. 16And as the Ark of the LORD came into the City of David, Michal daughter of Saul looked out through the window and saw King David leaping and whirling before the LORD, and she scorned him in her heart. 17And they brought the Ark of the LORD and set it up in its place within the tent that David had pitched for it, and David offered up burnt offerings before the LORD and well-being sacrifices. 18And David finished offering up the burnt offerings and the well-being sacrifices, and he blessed the people in the name of the LORD of Hosts. 19And he shared out to all the people, to all the multitude of Israel, every man and woman, one loaf of bread and one date cake and one raisin cake, and every one of the people went to his home.
20And David turned back to bless his house. And Michal daughter of Saul came out to meet David, and she said, “How honored today is the king of Israel who has exposed himself today to the eyes of his servants’ slavegirls as some scurrilous fellow would expose himself!” 21And David said to Michal, “Before the LORD, Who chose me instead of your father and instead of all his house, to appoint me prince over the LORD’S people, over Israel, I will play before the LORD! 22And I will be dishonored still more than this and will be debased in my own eyes! But with the slavegirls about whom you spoke, with them let me be honored!” 23And Michal daughter of Saul had no child till her dying day.
CHAPTER 6 NOTES
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1. thirty thousand. Some modern commentators understand ʾalafim, “thousands,” as “military contingents,” and thus reduce the number of troops to a few hundred elite soldiers. But ʾalafim in a non-numerical sense refers to clans, not military units; and as we have abundantly seen, exaggerated numbers are common in these stories. Polzin, moreover, has aptly observed that thirty thousand is precisely the number of Israelites slain when the Ark was captured by the Philistines (1 Samuel 4).
2. to Baalah in Judah. This place-name is a synonym for the Kiriath-Jearim of 1 Samuel 7:1—see, for example, Joshua 15:9. The Qumran Samuel scroll in fact reads here: “Baalah, which is Kiriath-Jearim in Judah.” The Masoretic Text reads baʿaley yehudah. Because this erroneous phrase was construed to mean “the notables of Judah,” a mem prefix (“from”) was added to it to yield “from the notables of Judah.” But David is clearly going to the place Baalah.
3. a new cart. The new cart is a vehicle unpolluted by any previous secular use.
4. The Masoretic Text begins this verse with a whole clause that is a scribal duplication (dittography) of the first half of verse 3: “And they carried it off from the house of Abinadab which is on the Hill.” This clause is not present in the Qumran Samuel, in the Septuagint, or in the parallel verse in 1 Chronicles 13:7. The Masoretic Text also repeats the adjective “new” (ḥadashah) at the end of verse 3, a repetition not reflected in the other ancient versions.
5. with all their might in song. The translation reads here bekhol ʿoz uveshirim with 1 Chronicles 13:8. The Masoretic Text has bekhol ʿatsey beroshim, “with all cypress woods,” which only by a long interpretive stretch has been made to refer to percussion instruments.
6. the threshing floor of Nacon. The proper name here is in question. The Qumran Samuel reads “Nadon.”
7. the LORD’s wrath flared up … and God struck him down. This is an archaic story that defies later ethical categories: the Ark, as God’s terrestrial throne, is invested with awesome divine power (compare 1 Samuel 6). To touch it, even in an effort to keep it from slipping off the cart, is to risk being consumed by its indwelling mana, as when one comes in contact with a high-voltage electric core. God’s wrath against Uzza triggers an answering wrath (the same verb in the Hebrew) on the part of David, frustrated in his purposes and now wondering whether he will ever manage to bring this symbol and earthly focus of God’s power to his newly conquered capital.
for reaching out his hand to the Ark. The translation follows the parallel version in 1 Chronicles 13:10. The Masoretic Text here has a single incomprehensible word, shal, which might be simply two consonants from the initial words of the lost clause recorded in Chronicles.
8. Perez-Uzza. The Hebrew is construed to mean “bursting out against Uzza.” The naming story forms an antithetical symmetry with the story in 2 Samuel 5 of Baal-Perazim, there associated with God’s “bursting through” the Philistine ranks.
11. Obed-Edom the Gittite. He is a foreigner, perhaps (though this is not certain) from Philistine Gath—conceivably someone who had attached himself to David during his sojourn there.
13. when the bearers of the Ark of the LORD had taken six steps. Some construe this as an imperfect verb: with every six steps David would sacrifice a bull. Apart from the difficulty that these constant sacrifices would make the procession interminable and require scores of thousands of bulls, the imperfect would require the verb “to be” at the beginning of the sentence to appear in the suffix conjugation wehayah, instead of the way it is, in the prefix conjugation, wayehi, which implies a singulative, not an iterative, tense for the verb.
14. girt in a linen ephod. The wearing of the ephod surely underscores the fact that in the procession of the Ark into Jerusalem, David is playing the roles of both priest and king—a double service not unknown in the ancient Near East (compare Melchizedek in Genesis 14:18). The ephod was probably a short garment tied around the hips or waist, and so David whirling and leaping might easily have exposed himself, as Michal will bitterly observe.
16. Michal daughter of Saul looked out through the window and saw King David. The preceding verse reports the shouts of jubilation and the shrill blasts of the ram’s horn: first she hears the procession approaching from the distance, then she looks out and sees David dancing. Strategically, her repeated epithet in this episode of final estrangement is “daughter of Saul,” not “wife of David,” and the figure she sees is not “David her husband” but “King David.” Shimon Bar-Efrat neatly observes that at the beginning of their story a loving Michal helped David escape “through the window” from her father’s henchmen while now she looks at him from a distance “through the window,” in seething contempt.
17–20. Instead of proceeding directly to the confrontation between Michal and David, as we might expect, the narrative lingers for a long moment over David’s cultic ministrations and royal benefactions to the people. One can imagine that Michal continues to watch David from the window, performing his role as the people’s darling, and that she continues to simmer.
19. date cake. The Hebrew ʾeshpar appears nowhere else and so it is only a guess as to what sort of delicacy it might be. Some traditional commentators construe it as a portion of meat.
20. How honored today is the king of Israel. Astoundingly, until this climactic moment, there has been no dialogue between Michal and David—only her urgent instructions for him to flee in 1 Samuel 19 and his silent flight. We can only guess what she may have felt all those years he was away from her, acquiring power and wives, or during the civil war with her father’s family. We are equally ignorant of her feelings toward her devoted second husband, Paltiel son of Laish. Now the royal couple are finally represented meeting, and when Michal speaks out, it is in an explosion of angry sarcasm. Her first significant word “honored” (balanced in David’s rejoinder by two antonyms, “dishonored” and “debased”) is a complex satellite to the story of the grand entry of the Ark with which it is linked. When the Ark was lost to the Philistines (1 Samuel 4), the great cry was that “glory [or honor, kavod—the same verbal root Michal uses here] is exiled from Israel.” Now glory/honor splendidly returns to Israel, but the actual invocation of the term is a sarcastic one, bitterly directed at David, who will then hurl back two antonyms and try to redefine both honor and dishonor to his wife. The logic of the larger story’s moral and historical realism requires that no triumph should be simple and unambiguous, that strife and accusation pursue even the fulfillment of national destiny. One should also note here that Michal speaks to her husband in the third person, not deferentially but angrily, and refers to him by public title, not in any personal relation to her.
who has exposed himself today to the eyes of his servants’ slavegirls. The verb “to expose” is clearly used in the sexual sense. The proud Michal’s reference to the lowly slavegirls’ enjoying the sight of David’s nakedness probably suggests an edge of sexual jealousy as well as political resentment in her rage against him. He has, after all, assembled a harem during their years apart, and there is no indication that he has resumed sexual relations with her after having her brought back to him forcibly for obviously political motives.
as some scurrilous fellow would expose himself. The social thrust of the comparison is evident: she is a king’s daughter, whereas he has now demonstrated that he is no more than riffraff.
21. Before the LORD. Isaac Abravanel, the Hebrew commentator who was also Ferdinand and Isabella’s financial advisor until the expulsion of 1492, aptly explains this: “Had he danced before some person to honor him, it would have been a contemptible act, for his status was higher than any other person’s. But in his leaping before the LORD there is no cause for contempt.” Thus David can go on to say that he will perform ostensibly debasing acts, even debasing in his own eyes (emending this to “His eyes” only clouds matters), acts that in paradoxical fact are the opposite of debasement.
22. with the slavegirls … with them let me be honored. David flings back Michal’s sarcastic “how honored,” suggesting that, unlike Michal, the simple slavegirls will understand that his gyrations before the Ark are an act of reverence and will honor him for it. And there may also be a sexual edge in his rejoinder: I will display myself to whomever I please, and it is I who will decide whether it is honorable or not.
23. And Michal daughter of Saul had no child till her dying day. The whole story of David and Michal concludes on a poised ambiguity through the suppression of causal explanation: Is this a punishment from God, or simply a refusal by David to share her bed, or is the latter to be understood as the agency for the former?
1And it happened when the king was dwelling in his house and the LORD had granted him respite all around from his enemies, 2that the king said to Nathan the prophet, “See, pray, I dwell in a cedarwood house while the Ark of God dwells within curtains.” 3And Nathan said to the king, “Whatever is in your heart, go, do, for the LORD is with you.” 4And it happened on that night, that the word of the LORD came to Nathan, saying, 5“Go, say to My servant, to David, ‘Thus says the LORD: Is it you who would build Me a house for Me to dwell in? 6For I have dwelled in no house from the day I brought up the Israelites out of Egypt until this day, but I have gone about in tent and tabernacle. 7Wherever I went about among all the Israelites, did I speak a word with any of the tribal chiefs of Israel whom I charged to shepherd My people Israel, saying, Why did you not build me a cedarwood house? 8And now, thus shall you say to My servant, to David, Thus says the LORD of Hosts: I Myself took you from the pasture, from following the flocks, to be prince over My people, over Israel. 9And I have been with you wherever you have gone, and I have cut down your enemies before you. And I will make you a great name, like the name of the great of the earth. 10And I will set aside a place for My people, for Israel, and plant them, and they shall abide there and no longer quake, and the wicked shall no more afflict them as before, 11from the day that I appointed judges over My people Israel. And I will grant you respite from all your enemies, and the LORD declares that it is He Who will make you a house. 12When your days are full and you lie with your fathers, I will raise up your seed after you, who will issue from your loins, and I will make his kingship unshaken. 13He it is who will build a house for My name, and I will make the throne of his kingship unshaken forever. 14I will be a father to him and he will be a son to Me, so should he do wrong, I will chastise him with the rod men use and with the afflictions of humankind. 15But My loyalty shall not swerve from him as I made it swerve from Saul whom I removed from before you. 16And your house and your kingship shall be steadfast forever, your throne unshaken forever.’” 17In accordance with all these words and in accordance with all this vision, so did Nathan speak to David.
18And King David came and sat before the LORD and said, “Who am I, LORD God, and what is my house, that you have brought me this far? 19And even this is too little in Your eyes, LORD God, for You have also spoken of Your servant’s house in distant time, and this is a man’s instruction, LORD God. 20And how can David speak more to You, when You know Your servant, LORD God? 21For the sake of Your word, and according to Your heart You have done all these great things, to make known to Your servant. 22Therefore are You great, O LORD God, for there is none like You and there is no god beside You, in all we have heard with our own ears. 23And who is like Your people Israel, a unique nation upon earth, whom a god has gone out to redeem as a people to make Him a name and to do great and awesome things for them, to drive out from before Your people whom You redeemed from Egypt nations with their gods? 24And You made Your own people Israel unshaken forever, and You, O LORD, became their God. 25And now LORD God, the word that You have spoken to Your servant concerning his house—make it stand forever and do as You have spoken. 26And may Your name be great forever, so it be said, ‘The LORD of Armies is God over Israel, and the house of David Your servant shall be unshaken before You.’ 27For You, O LORD of Armies, God of Israel, have revealed to Your servant, saying, ‘A house will I build you.’ Therefore has Your servant found the heart to pray to you this prayer. 28And now, O LORD God, You are God and Your words must be truth, You have spoken of this bounty to Your servant. 29And now, have the goodness to bless the house of Your servant to be before You forever, for it is You, LORD God, Who have spoken, and with Your blessings may Your servant’s house be blessed forever.”
CHAPTER 7 NOTES
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1. And it happened when the king was dwelling in his house. This transitional note establishes a link with the previous episode, in which David brought the Ark into Jerusalem and had his final confrontation with Michal, which in a sense was the final blow to the house of Saul. What follows is a major caesura in the David story—a long pause marked by ideological reflections on the future, before David must deal once again with external enemies and then be engulfed by internecine strife in his court. The language of both Nathan’s night-vision and David’s prayer is strikingly different from that of the surrounding narrative—more hortatory, more formulaic, more reminiscent of the Deuteronomistic school that would come to dominate Israel’s national literature nearly four centuries after the reign of David. The literary archaeology that has been performed on these two long passages remains in contention, some scholars claiming these are late compositions of a Deuteronomistic writer, others arguing that two or more authentically old literary strata have been joined together and framed by a later editor. These are not issues that it will be useful to attempt to resolve here. What is worth noting is the deliberate structural separation effected by these two passages between everything that precedes the ensconcing of throne and Ark in Jerusalem and everything that follows.
respite … from his enemies. The respite is partial, and temporary, because the subsequent chapters report further military campaigns.
2. Nathan the prophet. Not previously mentioned, and of unspecified background, he will play an important role in what follows.
a cedarwood house. The palace would have been a stone structure with cedar paneling within. Cedar was an expensive import item brought from Lebanon (see 5:11).
curtains. The term is an obvious synecdoche for tent (compare 6:17).
3. Whatever is in your heart, go, do. Nathan’s response to the brilliantly successful king, who has demonstrated through his triumphs that God is with him, is perfectly reasonable. But in the night-vision God will give different directions.
5. Thus says the LORD. The “messenger-formula” signals the beginning of explicit prophetic discourse. God’s address to Nathan as a whole emphasizes the act of speech, being constructed as an elaborate nesting of quoted speech within quoted speech.
6. I have dwelled in no house. This is not, as some interpreters have claimed, the expression of a pre-Solomonic anti-temple ideology. The author of this episode is faced with the difficulty of explaining a historical fact, that David did not build the Temple, as we might have expected, but rather it was his son Solomon who carried out the construction. The probable historical reason was that David was too preoccupied with the struggles within his own court and family. In Chronicles, the reason given is that he had shed blood. Here, the argument God makes is that it is an act of presumption for a mere mortal to build a temple for the unhoused God of Israelite history. But this line of reasoning actually enhances the theological importance of Solomon’s temple, for it suggests that God Himself will build a house when He is good and ready, using the human agency He chooses. Thus the Temple that is to be raised up by David’s seed will have a more than human importance, being at once a token of God’s indwelling among His people Israel and a divine underwriting of the Davidic dynasty.
in tent and tabernacle. The latter was a portable shrine made of boards and curtains. Presumably, local sanctuaries such as the one at Shiloh are assimilated into the archetype of tabernacle, being neither cultic centers for the entire nation nor grand edifices like the Solomonic temple.
10–11. no more afflict them as before, from the day that I appointed judges. Although the Judges succeeded in temporarily driving off Israel’s sundry oppressors, the period as a whole was one of instability and recurrent harassment by enemy peoples.
11. it is He Who will make you a house. Both in this prophecy and in David’s prayer the double meaning of “house” is repeatedly exploited. God will grant David a house—that is, a continuing dynasty, and then will have David’s son build Him a house—that is, a temple. The house in which David dwells in the opening verse of this chapter is of course his palace in Jerusalem.
14. the rod men use … the afflictions of humankind. God will discipline the future king as a father disciplines his son, and with familiar human tribulations, not with supernatural bolts from the heavens.
15. My loyalty. The Hebrew ḥesed is the faithfulness and goodwill that one party of a pact owes to the other.
whom I removed. The Hebrew uses the same verb that is rendered here in the immediately preceding phrase as “made it swerve.”
18. David came and sat before the LORD. David comes into the tent in which the Ark has been placed. The verb “sat,” yashav, is identical with the verb at the beginning of the chapter that also means “dwell,” and thus establishes a structural parallel between the passage on the postponed building of the Temple and David’s prayer.
19. You have also spoken of Your servant’s house in distant time. These words refer directly to the prophecy conveyed to Nathan in verses 12–16, and thus undermine the claim of some scholars that David’s prayer was originally part of the story of the introduction of the Ark to Jerusalem (chapter 6), from which it was supposedly separated by the insertion of Nathan’s prophecy.
this is a man’s instruction. That is, he would scarcely think himself worthy of all this divine bounty about which God has just instructed him. But this is no more than an interpretive guess, because the meaning of the Hebrew—zoʾt torat haʾadam—is obscure.
22. Therefore are You great, O LORD God. Although the thread of piety in David’s complex and contradictory character could be perfectly authentic, he does not elsewhere speak in this elevated, liturgical, celebratory style, and so the inference of the presence of another writer in this passage is plausible. Yet it is at least conceivable that the original writer has introduced this celebratory rhetoric to punctuate David’s moment of respite in the story.
23. for them. The Masoretic Text, at several points in these verses problematic, has “for you” (plural). The Qumran Samuel and the Septuagint have no pronoun.
to drive out. The Masoretic Text is syntactically odd and semantically obscure. The parallel verse in Chronicles omits “for your land” and adds “to drive out,” as does this translation.
25. the word that You have spoken to Your servant concerning his house. This word has just been conveyed to David through Nathan as God’s intermediary. It is humanly understandable that David should now fervently pray to God that the grand promise of the night-vision be fulfilled in time to come.
29. it is You, LORD God, Who have spoken, and with Your blessings may Your servant’s house be blessed forever. The fondness of biblical prose for thematic key words is especially prominent in the grand theological performance that is David’s prayer, in which the key words function as formal rhetorical motifs. The salient repeated terms are “speak” (the act of God’s promise and continuing revelation), “house” (dynasty and palace but, in this speech, not temple), “blessing” (in the final sentence it occurs three times in three different forms), and “forever” (the adverbial index of the permanence of God’s promise).
1And it happened thereafter that David struck down the Philistines and subjugated them, and David took Metheg-Ammah from the hand of the Philistines. 2And he struck down Moab, and measured them out with a line, making them lie on the ground, and he measured two lengths of a line to put to death and one full length to keep alive. And Moab became tribute-bearing vassals to David. 3And David struck down Hadadezer son of Rehob, king of Zobah as he went to restore his monument by the Euphrates River. 4And David captured from him one thousand seven hundred horsemen and twenty thousand foot soldiers, and David hamstrung all the chariot horses, leaving aside a hundred of them. 5And the Arameans of Damascus came to aid Hadadezer, king of Zobah, and David struck down twenty-two thousand men from among the Arameans. 6And David set up prefects in Aram-Damascus, and the Arameans became tribute-bearing vassals to David, and the LORD made David victorious wherever he went. 7And David took the golden quivers that had belonged to the servants of Hadadezer and brought them to Jerusalem. 8And from Betah and from Berothai, the towns of Hadadezer, King David took a great abundance of bronze.
9And Toi king of Hamath heard that David had struck down all the forces of Hadadezer. 10And Toi sent Joram his son to King David to ask after his well-being and to salute him for having done battle with Hadadezer and for striking him down, as Hadadezer was Toi’s adversary. And in Joram’s hand there were vessels of silver and vessels of gold and vessels of bronze. 11These, too, did King David consecrate to the LORD, together with the silver and the gold that he consecrated from all the nations he had conquered: 12from Edom and from Moab and from the Ammonites and from the Philistines and from Amalek and from the plunder of Hadadezer son of Rehob, king of Zobah. 13And David made a name when he came back from striking down the Edomites in the Valley of Salt—eighteen thousand of them. 14And he set up prefects in Edom, throughout Edom he set up prefects, and all Edom became vassals to David, and the LORD made David victorious wherever he went.
15And David was king over all Israel, and it was David’s practice to mete out true justice to all his people. 16And Joab son of Zeruiah was over the army, and Jehoshaphat son of Ahilud was recorder. 17And Zadok son of Ahitub and Abiathar son of Ahimelech were priests, and Seraiah was scribe. 18And Benaiah son of Jehoida was over the Cherithites and the Pelethites, and David’s sons served as priests.
CHAPTER 8 NOTES
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1. And it happened thereafter. This characteristically vague temporal reference actually reflects the achronological arrangement of the narrative material at this point. Chapter 7 was a long pause in the progress of the larger story that was devoted to the theological grounds for the postponement of building a temple and to the promise of a perpetual Davidic dynasty. Chapter 8 offers a summary of David’s conquests (which in historical fact would have spanned at least several years) resulting in the establishment of a small empire. We then revert to the intimate story of David.
David struck down the Philistines and subjugated them. Neither the Hebrew terms of the text nor the scant extrabiblical evidence allows one to conclude whether David actually occupied the Philistine cities on the coastal plain or merely reduced them to vassal status. In any case, he put an end to the Philistine military threat and was free to turn his attention to adversaries east of the Jordan.
Metheg-Ammah. There are differences of opinion as to whether this is an otherwise unknown place-name or the designation of some precious trophy (meteg is an equestrian bit, ʾamah is a watercourse) taken from the Philistines.
2. Moab. It should be recalled that Moab, with whom David is linked by ancestry, provided refuge for his parents from Saul. Perhaps now that David has consolidated an Israelite monarchy, each side views the other as a threat. Or perhaps Moab has been compelled by proximity to join forces with the anti-Israelite kingdoms east of the Jordan.
and measured them out with a line. This procedure is not otherwise known.
3. Zobah. Aram Zobah was at this point the large dominant kingdom of Mesopotamia, to the north and east of biblical Israel.
as he went to restore his monument. Presumably, the absence of the king from the Aramean heartland exposed it to David’s attack. The term yad here (usually “hand”) is construed in its occasional sense of “monument” or “stele,” though the idiom heshiv yad (literally, “to bring back the hand”) also has the sense of “strike.” Were that the case here, however, one would probably expect an object to the striking (“brought his hand back against X.”).
4. one thousand seven hundred horsemen. The numbers reflected in Chronicles and in the Septuagint as well as in the Qumran Samuel scroll are “one thousand chariots and seven thousand horsemen.”
David hamstrung all the chariot horses. The most likely explanation for this cruel act is that the Israelites, who initially fought on mountainous terrain, as yet made no significant use of cavalry, and so David’s only concern would be to disable the horses in order that they could not be used against him in the future. The hundred horses left unmaimed might perhaps be for use as a small experiment with cavalry, or as draft animals.
7. the golden quivers. The relatively rare Hebrew term shelatim has often been understood as “shields,” but most of the other biblical occurrences encourage the notion of something that contains arrows, as Rashi observed, and this sense is supported by cognates in Babylonian and Aramaic.
9. Toi king of Hamath. Hamath lay to the northwest of the kingdom of Aram Zobah, in present-day Syria. It was a neo-Hittite state.
10. And Toi sent Joram his son to King David. Sending the prince as emissary is a token of the importance that the king attaches to the mission. The vessels of precious metals are a peace offering to David or, from another perspective, an advance payment of tribute. Toi, as a king who has been threatened by the Arameans, has good reason to pledge fealty to David, but he surely also wants to ward off any possible military thrust of the expansionist Israelites against his own kingdom.
12. from Edom. The Masoretic Text has “from Aram,” but Chronicles, the Septuagint, and the Peshitta all have Edom, a kingdom contiguous with Moab, which immediately follows. Aram (Zobah) is mentioned at the end of the verse.
13. from striking down the Edomites. Again, the Masoretic Text has “Aram” in contradiction to several other ancient versions. Since the Valley of Salt was most probably in the vicinity of the Dead Sea, it would have been Edomite, not Aramean, territory.
15. And David was king over all Israel. The chronicle of David’s conquests is followed by a kind of epilogue—a notice of the royal bureaucracy.
16. recorder. The Hebrew term mazkir could also be represented as “remembrancer.” It is not entirely clear what his duties were, although they obviously went far beyond being a mere clerk. He may have been in control of the royal archives. It has been proposed that he was also chief of protocol in the palace.
17. Abiathar son of Ahimelech. The Masoretic Text makes Ahimelech the son and Abiathar the father, in flat contradiction to the occurrences of these two figures both earlier and later in the narrative.
scribe. As with “recorder,” the responsibilities were more than those of an amanuensis. They might have included diplomatic translation and even counseling in affairs of state.
18. the Cherithites and the Pelethites. There is debate over the national identity of the latter, but the consensus is that the former are people of Cretan origins, part of the wave of so-called Sea Peoples who immigrated to Canaan from the Aegean toward the beginning of the eleventh century B.C.E. David has taken care to set up a special palace guard of foreign mercenaries on whose loyalty he can rely, in contrast to Israelites who might have motives of tribal allegiance or support for some pretender to the throne in an attempt to displace him.
and David’s sons served as priests. This curious detail is probably parallel to the report of a palace guard of foreign origins: just as David creates an elite military contingent outside the framework of the Israelite troops, he invests his own sons with sacerdotal duties within the circle of the court, outside the framework of the hereditary priesthood that controlled the public cult.
1And David said “Is there anyone who is still left from the house of Saul, that I may keep faith with him for the sake of Jonathan?” 2And there was a servant of the house of Saul named Ziba, and they called him to David, and the king said to him, “Are you Ziba?” And he said, “Your servant.” 3And the king said, “Is there anyone at all left from the house of Saul, that I might keep God’s faith with him?” And Ziba said to the king, “There is yet a son of Jonathan’s, who is crippled.” 4And the king said, “Where is he?” And Ziba said, “Why, he is in the house of Machir son of Amiel from Lo-Debar.” 5And King David sent and fetched him from the house of Machir son of Amiel from Lo-Debar. 6And Mephibosheth son of Jonathan son of Saul came to David and flung himself on his face and prostrated himself. And David said, “Mephibosheth!” And he said, “Your servant here.” 7And David said to him, “Fear not, for I will surely keep faith with you for the sake of Jonathan your father, and I will give back to you all the land of Saul your grandfather, and as for you, you shall eat bread at my table always.” 8And he prostrated himself and said, “What is your servant that you should have turned to a dead dog like me?” 9And the king called to Ziba, Saul’s lad, and said to him, “All that was Saul’s and his whole household’s I give to your master’s son. 10And you shall work the soil for him, you and your sons and your slaves, and you shall bring food to your master’s house and they will eat. But Mephibosheth will always eat bread at my table.” And Ziba had fifteen sons and twenty slaves. 11And Ziba said to the king, “Whatever my lord the king commands his servant, thus will his servant do.” And Mephibosheth ate at David’s table like one of the king’s sons. 12And Mephibosheth had a little son named Micah, and all who dwelled in Ziba’s house were servants to Mephibosheth. 13And Mephibosheth dwelled in Jerusalem, for at the king’s table he would always eat. And he was lame in both his feet.
CHAPTER 9 NOTES
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1. And David said. We are immediately alerted to the fact that we are returning from the chronicle summary of chapter 8 (where there is no dialogue) and from the long set speeches of chapter 7 to the main body of the David story because once again the narrative is carried forward to a large extent by dialogue. We are again plunged into a world of personal and political transactions engaged through exchanges of spoken language.
Is there anyone who is still left from the house of Saul. The added emphasis of “still,” ʿod (compare the analogous emphatic phrase in verse 3), reflects David’s genuine uncertainty as to whether, after all the deaths of the Saulides previously reported, there are in fact any surviving descendants of Saul. The courtiers who are queried evidently don’t know, so they propose summoning a retainer of Saul’s in order to put the question to him. The fact that David is later complicit in the execution of seven men of the house of Saul (chapter 21) has led many analysts to conclude that the original place of that episode was before the present chapter. Robert Polzin, on the other hand, argues that the postponement of the report in chapter 21 is deliberately delayed exposition, meant to reveal another troubling facet of David near the end of his story.
3. keep God’s faith. The “faith” in question (ḥesed) is not credal but faithful performance of one’s obligation in a covenant, a term that also has the connotation of “kindness.” “God” here has the force of an intensifier. The covenant that is explicitly alluded to is the one between Jonathan and David (1 Samuel 20:42). That tight link is one of several arguments against the view widely held ever since the 1926 study of Leonhard Rost that this episode marks the beginning of a wholly independent Succession Narrative, which continues until 1 Kings 2.
who is crippled. Ziba’s mention of the surviving Saulide’s handicap is probably intended to assure David that Mephibosheth will not pose any challenge to the throne.
4. Lo-Debar. Mephibosheth was evidently taken to this northern trans-Jordanian town because it was a place of refuge. It is in the general vicinity of Jabesh-Gilead, the town inhabited by Saul’s allies and perhaps kinsmen. Mephibosheth, it will be recalled, was five years old when he was dropped by his nurse and crippled in the flight after the defeat at Gilboa. Since it seems implausible that more than fifteen or so years would have passed since that moment, one may surmise that he is now a man in his twenties.
6. Mephibosheth … flung himself on his face and prostrated himself. These gestures of abasement may have been standard etiquette in approaching a monarch, but Ziba is not reported making them. Mephibosheth is clearly terrified that the king may have summoned him in order to have him put to death—David’s possible complicity in the deaths of other figures associated with the house of Saul might well have been a matter of continuing speculation in Benjaminite circles. As Fokkelman aptly notes, it would have been a particularly painful business for a man crippled in both legs to fling himself down in this fashion.
7. I will give back to you all the land of Saul. With the descendants of Saul fled or dead, the king had expropriated Saul’s ancestral land around Gibeah.
9. Saul’s lad. The Hebrew naʿar denotes subservience, but it is unclear whether, as some have claimed, it indicates Ziba’s role as majordomo (the philological grounds for that construction are shaky) or rather his subaltern status in the house of Saul.
10. your slaves. The Hebrew term ʿeved straddles the sense of freeborn underling and slave. Ziba evidently belongs to the former category, and so the designation ʿeved is rendered as “servant” when it is attached to him. It seems likely that the underlings of a prosperous servant would be slaves. Polzin has noted that different forms of this verbal stem occur ten times in the chapter, which is all about establishing lines of dominance and subservience.
and you shall bring food for your master’s house and they will eat. The translation here follows the text of the Septuagint. The Masoretic Text reads: “and you shall bring and it will be food for your master’s son and he will eat it.” That version can be maintained only with strain, for the very next clause informs us that Mephibosheth was not dependent on the yield of his own land but resided in Jerusalem, sustained at the royal table.
11. And Mephibosheth ate at David’s table. Again, the translation follows the Septuagint. The Masoretic Text has “And Mephibosheth is eating at my table,” but the Bible never gives reported speech without an explicit introduction (“and David said”).
13. for at the king’s table he would always eat. The refrainlike repetition of this clause should give us pause. David is indeed treating Jonathan’s crippled son like one of his own sons, “keeping faith” or “showing kindness” to the offspring of his dead comrade, as he had pledged. He surely means his benefaction to be publicly perceived. At the same time, it is clearly in David’s interest to keep the only conceivable Saulide pretender to the throne close at hand, under easy scrutiny. Mephibosheth’s condition is ostensibly that of an unofficially adopted son, but with an uneasy suspicion that it is really a kind of luxurious house arrest.
And he was lame in both his feet. This emphatic concluding reiteration of his physical impairment might be intended, as some commentators have proposed, to explain why he could not travel back and forth between his estate and Jerusalem. But it surely also strikes a plaintive note at the end, underscoring the vulnerability of Mephibosheth, whether cosseted or held under surveillance in the Jerusalem court. As the court becomes more and more the arena of plots and murderous conflict, Mephibosheth will be victimized by someone close to him. This notice at the end about Mephibosheth’s lameness also underscores the continuing antithesis between the fates of the house of Saul and the house of David: King David came into Jerusalem whirling and dancing before the LORD; the surviving Saulide limps into Jerusalem, crippled in both legs
1And it happened thereafter that the king of the Ammonites died and Hanun his son was king in his stead. 2And David said, “Let me keep faith with Hanun son of Nahash as his father kept faith with me.” And David sent his servants in order to console him for his father, and David’s servants came to the land of the Ammonites. 3And the Ammonite commanders said to Hanun their lord, “Do you imagine David is honoring your father in sending you consolers? Is it not in order to search out the city and to spy on it and to overthrow it that David has sent his servants to you?” 4And Hanun took David’s servants and shaved off half the beard of each and cut off half their diplomat’s garb down to their buttocks, and sent them off. 5And they told David, and he sent to meet them, for the men were very humiliated, and the king said, “Stay here in Jericho until your beards grow back and you can return.”
6And the Ammonites saw that they had become repugnant to David, and the Ammonites sent and hired Arameans from Beth-Rehob and Arameans from Zobah, twenty thousand foot soldiers, and King Maacah with a thousand men, and the men of Tob, twelve thousand men. 7And David heard and sent out Joab together with the whole army of warriors. 8And the Ammonites sallied forth and drew up for battle at the entrance to the gate, and Aram Zobah and Rehob and the men of Tob were apart in the field. 9And Joab saw that there was a battle line against him in front and behind, and he chose from all the picked men of Israel and drew them up to meet the Arameans. 10And the rest of the troops he gave into the hand of Abishai his brother, and he drew them up to meet the Ammonites. 11And he said, “If the Arameans prove too strong for me, you will rescue me, and if the Ammonites prove too strong for you, I shall come to rescue you. 12Be strong, and let us find strength for the sake of our people and for the sake of the towns of our God, and the LORD will do what is good in His eyes!” 13And Joab advanced, and the troops who were with him, to battle against the Arameans, and they fled before him. 14And the Ammonites saw that the Arameans had fled, and they fled from Abishai and went into the town, and Joab turned back from the Ammonites and came to Jerusalem.
15And the Arameans saw that they had been routed by Israel, and they reassembled. 16And Hadadezer sent and brought out the Arameans who were beyond the Euphrates, and their forces came with Shobach the commander of Hadadezer’s army at their head. 17And it was told to David, and he gathered all Israel and crossed the Jordan, and they came to Helam. 18And the Arameans drew up their lines against David and did battle with him. And the Arameans fled before Israel, and David killed seven hundred charioteers of the Arameans and forty thousand horsemen, and Shobach, the commander of their army, he struck down, and he died there. 19And all the kings who were vassals to Hadadezer saw that they had been routed by Israel, and they made peace with Israel and became its vassals, and the Arameans were afraid to rescue the Ammonites again.
CHAPTER 10 NOTES
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1. And it happened thereafter. Once again this vague temporal formula reflects the achronological ordering of the text. Since the Aramean king Hadadezer is reported in 8:3–7 to have been decisively defeated by David and to have become David’s vassal, the campaign that is represented here, in which Hadadezer musters Aramean forces east of the Euphrates in order to confront David, must have taken place as part of David’s victorious struggle with Aram Zobah registered in the summary of chapter 8. This whole account of military operations—given its rather dry technical style, it may well have been drawn from Davidic annals—is meant to establish the facts of continuing armed conflict with the Ammonites, which is the crucial background for the story of David and Bathsheba in the next chapter.
2. Let me keep faith with Hanun son of Nahash as his father kept faith with me. This chapter, like the preceding one, opens with a declaration of David’s desire to keep faith with, or do kindness to, the son of a father toward whom he feels some prior obligation. There is no notice in the previous narrative of Nahash’s having done favors for David, but several scholars have surmised that Nahash’s enmity toward Saul (see 1 Samuel 11) might have led him to provide refuge or logistical support to David and his men when they were being hunted down by Saul.
3. to search out the city. As Moshe Garsiel notes, the walled cities of the ancient Near East often had tunnels, underground conduits, or other points of vulnerability that could provide access to the enemy in a siege. David’s forces may have broken into Jerusalem in this fashion. (See the first comment on 5:8.)
4. shaved off half the beard of each and cut off half their diplomats’ garb. Shaving the beard is an insult to the masculinity of the ambassadors, all the more so because it is done in a disfiguring way, with half the beard left uncut. The exposure of one buttock, by cutting away half the garment vertically, is similarly shaming, perhaps sexually shaming. The garments in question, moreover, are not ordinary clothes, begadim, but madim, garb worn in the performance of an official function (compare the “battle garb,” madim, that Saul gives to David in 1 Samuel 17:38). The Ammonites thus are not merely insulting the ambassadors personally but provocatively violating their diplomatic privilege. In all this, we observe an extravagant reflection of the symbolic violation of Saul by David when he cut off a corner of the king’s robe.
5. Stay here in Jericho. The town of Jericho is in the Jordan Valley just west of the Jordan, and is plausibly the first place of habitation that the ambassadors would come to on crossing back from Ammonite territory.
6. And the Ammonites saw. Shimon Bar-Efrat observes that this narrative sequence is formally structured by the “seeing” of David’s trans-Jordanian adversaries (here, verse 14, verse 15, verse 19), in counterpoint to David’s “hearing.” The latter implies receiving word at a distance, as does the associated locution, “it was told to David,” whereas the former signifies immediate observation. Thus Joab, making out the deployment of hostile forces on the battlefield, is also said to see.
7. David heard and sent out Joab. Throughout this chapter and the next, the verb “to send” is repeatedly linked with David: for the first time, he plays the role not of martial leader but of sedentary king, delegating the military task to his commander. This new state of affairs will have major implications in the Bathsheba story.
the whole army of warriors. This is a slight variant, supported by three ancient versions, of the Masoretic Text, which reads “the whole army, the warriors.”
9. there was a battle line against him in front and behind. The Israelite forces are in danger of being caught in the pincer movement between the Aramean mercenaries advancing on them from the northeast and the Ammonites, presumably to the south. Joab rapidly improvises a counterstrategy, selecting a corp of elite troops to assault the larger force of Arameans and sending his brother Abishai with the rest of the troops against the Ammonites. Such attention to military detail is quite untypical of biblical narrative, as is the rousing battlefield exhortation (verse 12) with which Joab concludes his instructions. The point of such detail is surely to show Joab as a superbly competent and resolute field commander, just before the great pivotal episode in the next chapter in which Joab maintains the siege against Rabbath-Ammon while his commander in chief slumbers, and lusts, in Jerusalem.
10. the rest of the troops he gave. Polzin observes, with puzzlement, that this story proceeds by dividing things in half: beards, clothing, anti-Israelite forces, Israelite troops. One wonders whether this narrative dynamic of mitosis, even though it is a saving strategy in Joab’s case, might be a thematic introduction to all the inner divisions in court and nation, the fractures in the house of David, that take up the rest of the narrative.
14. and went into the town. The town into which they withdraw under pressure from Abishai’s troops is not named. It could be the capital, Rabbath-Ammon (present-day Amman), though some analysts have wondered whether Hanun would be so unwise as to wait until the Israelites were at the gates of his own city before taking a decisive stand. Another candidate that has been proposed is Medbah, an Ammonite town considerably farther to the south.
15. they reassembled. This major regrouping for a second campaign against the Israelites involves the enlisting of greater numbers of troops from the Arameans east of the Euphrates, ethnic kin and in all likelihood political vassals to the people of Aram Zobah.
17. he gathered all Israel. Alerted to the augmented size of the trans-Jordanian forces, David musters his entire national army and this time elects to command it himself.
19. And all the kings who were vassals … made peace with Israel. Seeing who has the military upper hand, they take a small and logical step in exchanging vassal status under Hadadezer for vassal status under David. It should be noted that this whole annalistic prelude to the story of David and Bathsheba concludes with an invocation of “all the kings.” The immediately following episode begins by mentioning “the time the kings sally forth”—although, as we shall see, the noun itself there is pointedly ambiguous—and the tale that unfolds will powerfully raise the question of what constitutes kingly behavior.
1And it happened at the turn of the year, at the time the kings sally forth, that David sent out Joab and his servants with him and all Israel, and they ravaged the Ammonites and besieged Rabbah. And David was sitting in Jerusalem.
2And it happened at eventide that David arose from his bed and walked about on the roof of the king’s house, and he saw from the roof a woman bathing, and the woman was very beautiful. 3And David sent and inquired after the woman, and the one he sent said, “Why, this is Bathsheba daughter of Eliam wife of Uriah the Hittite.” 4And David sent messengers and fetched her and she came to him and he lay with her, she having just cleansed herself of her impurity, and she returned to her house. 5And the woman became pregnant and sent and told David and said, “I am pregnant.” 6And David sent to Joab: “Send me Uriah the Hittite.” And Joab sent Uriah the Hittite to David.
7And Uriah came to him, and David asked how Joab fared and how the troops fared and how the fighting fared. 8And David said to Uriah, “Go down to your house and bathe your feet.” And Uriah went out from the king’s house and the king’s provisions came out after him. 9And Uriah lay at the entrance to the king’s house with all the servants of his master, and he went not down to his house. 10And they told David, saying, “Uriah did not go down to his house.” And David said to Uriah, “Look, you have come from a journey. Why have you not gone down to your house?” 11And Uriah said to David, “The Ark and Israel and Judah are sitting in huts, and my master Joab and my master’s servants are encamped in the open field, and shall I then come to my house to eat and to drink and to lie with my wife? By your life, by your very life, I will not do this thing.” 12And David said to Uriah, “Stay here today as well, and tomorrow I shall send you off.” And Uriah stayed in Jerusalem that day and the next. 13And David called him, and he ate before him and drank, and David made him drunk. And he went out in the evening to lie in the place where he lay with the servants of his master, but to his house he did not go down. 14And it happened in the morning that David wrote a letter to Joab and sent it by the hand of Uriah. 15And he wrote in the letter, saying, “Put Uriah in the face of the fiercest battling and draw back, so that he will be struck down and die.” 16And it happened, as Joab was keeping watch on the town, that he placed Uriah in the place where he knew there were valiant men. 17And the men of the town sallied forth and did battle with Joab, and some of the troops, some of David’s servants, fell, and Uriah the Hittite also died. 18And Joab sent and told David all the details of the battle. 19And Joab charged the messenger, saying, “When you finish reporting all the details of the battle to the king, 20if it should happen that the king’s wrath is roused and he says to you, ‘Why did you approach the town to fight? Did you not know they would shoot from the wall? 21Who struck down Abimelech son of Jerubbesheth? Did not a woman fling down on him an upper millstone from the wall, and he died in Thebez? Why did you approach the wall?’ Then shall you say, ‘Your servant Uriah the Hittite also died.’” 22And the messenger went and came and told David all that Joab had sent him for. 23And the messenger said to David, “The men overpowered us and sallied forth against us into the field, and then we were upon them back to the entrance of the gate. 24And they shot at your servants from the wall, and some of the king’s servants died, and your servant Uriah the Hittite also died.” 25And the king said to the messenger, “Thus shall you say to Joab, ‘Let this thing not seem evil in your eyes, for the sword devours sometimes one way and sometimes another. Battle all the more fiercely against the city and destroy it. And so rouse his spirits.’”
26And Uriah’s wife heard that Uriah her man was dead, and she keened over her husband. 27And when the mourning was over, David sent and gathered her into his house and she became his wife. And she bore him a son, and the thing that David had done was evil in the eyes of the LORD.
CHAPTER 11 NOTES
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Chapters 11 and 12, the story of David and Bathsheba and its immediate aftermath, are the great turning point of the whole David story, as both Meir Sternberg and Robert Polzin have duly observed; and it seems as though the writer has pulled out all the stops of his remarkable narrative art in order to achieve a brilliant realization of this crucially pivotal episode. The deployment of thematic key words, the shifting play of dialogue, the intricate relation between instructions and their execution, the cultivated ambiguities of motive, are orchestrated with a richness that scarcely has an equal in ancient narrative. Although the analytic scholars have variously sought to break up these chapters into editorial frame and Succession Narrative, Prophetic composition and old source, emending patches of the text as they proceed, such efforts are best passed over in silence, for the powerful literary integrity of the text speaks for itself.
1. at the turn of the year. The most plausible meaning is the beginning of the spring, when the end of the heavy winter rains makes military action feasible.
at the time the kings sally forth. There is a cunning ambiguity here in the Hebrew text. The received consonantal text reads malʾakhim, “messengers,” though many manuscripts show melakhim, “kings.” As Polzin observes, the verb “to sally forth” (or, in nonmilitary contexts, “to go forth”) is often attached to kings and never to messengers, so “kings” is definitely the more likely reading, though the ghost of “messengers” shows through in the letters of the text. Polzin beautifully describes this double take: “the verse clearly doubles back on itself in a marvelous display of narrative virtuosity: at a time when kings go forth, David did not, making it a time, therefore, when messengers must go forth; at a time when messengers go forth, David, remaining in Jerusalem, sent Joab, his servants and all Israel to ravage Ammon.” What some see here as a scribal error may well be a deliberate orthographic pun
David sent out Joab. The verb “to send”—the right verb for “messengers”—occurs eleven times in this chapter, framing the beginning and the end. This episode is not a moral parable but a story anchored in the realities of political history. It is concerned with the institutionalization of the monarchy. David, now a sedentary king removed from the field of action and endowed with a dangerous amount of leisure, is seen constantly operating through the agency of others, sending messengers within Jerusalem and out to Ammonite territory. Working through intermediaries, as the story will abundantly show, creates a whole new order of complications and unanticipated consequences.
And David was sitting in Jerusalem. The verb for “sitting” also means “to stay” (compare verse 12), but it is best to preserve the literal sense here because of the pointed sequence—sitting, lying, rising—and because in biblical usage “to sit” is also an antonym of “to go out” (or sally forth).
2. at eventide. The Hebrew term ʿetʿerev echoes ironically with the phrase ʿet tse’t, “at the time of sallying forth” in the previous verse. A siesta on a hot spring day would begin not long after noon, so this recumbent king has been in bed an inordinately long time.
he saw from the roof. The palace is situated on a height, so David can look down on the naked Bathsheba bathing, presumably on her own rooftop. This situation of the palace also explains why David tells Uriah to “go down” to his house. Later in the story, archers deal destruction from the heights of the city wall, the Hebrew using the same preposition, meʾal, to convey the sense of “from above.”
3. the one he sent said. The Hebrew uses an unspecified “he said.”
Bathsheba daughter of Eliam wife of Uriah the Hittite. It is unusual to identify a woman by both father and husband. The reason may be, as Bar-Efrat suggests, that both men are members of David’s elite corps of warriors. Although Uriah’s designation as Hittite has led some interpreters to think of him as a foreign mercenary, the fact that he has a pious Israelite name (“the LORD is my light”) suggests that he is rather a native or at least a naturalized Israelite of Hittite extraction. In any case, there is obvious irony in the fact that the man of foreign origins is the perfect Good Soldier of Israel, whereas the Israelite king betrays and murders him.
4. David sent … and fetched her and she came to him and he lay with her. It is not uncommon for biblical narrative to use a chain of verbs in this fashion to indicate rapid, single-minded action. What is unusual is that one verb in the middle of this sequence switches grammatical subject—from David to Bathsheba. When the verb “come to” or “come into” has a masculine subject and “into” is followed by a feminine object, it designates a first act of sexual intercourse. One wonders whether the writer is boldly toying with this double meaning, intimating an element of active participation by Bathsheba in David’s sexual summons. The text is otherwise entirely silent on her feelings, giving the impression that she is passive as others act on her. But her later behavior in the matter of her son’s succession to the throne (1 Kings 1–2) suggests a woman who has her eye on the main chance, and it is possible that opportunism, not merely passive submission, explains her behavior here as well. In all of this, David’s sending messengers first to ask about Bathsheba and then to call her to his bed means that the adultery can scarcely be a secret within the court.
cleansed herself of her impurity. The reference is to the ritually required bath after the end of menstruation. This explains Bathsheba’s bathing on the roof and also makes it clear that she could not be pregnant by her husband.
5. I am pregnant. Astonishingly, these are the only words Bathsheba speaks in this story. In keeping with the stringent efficiency of biblical narrative, the story leaps forward from the sexual act to the discovery of pregnancy.
8. Go down to your house and bathe your feet. Some interpreters have made this more heavy-handed than it is by construing the final phrase as a euphemism for sex (because “feet” in the Bible is occasionally a euphemism for the male genitals). But in the biblical world, bathing the feet is something travelers regularly do when they come from the dusty road. This bathing of the feet stands in a kind of synecdochic relation to Bathsheba’s bathing of her whole body, discreetly suggesting that after the bathing of the feet, other refreshments of the body will ensue.
the king’s provisions. David has not explicitly mentioned food or wine, but he sends a kind of catered dinner after Uriah, hoping that the feast with Bathsheba will get husband and wife into the desired amorous mood.
9. And Uriah lay at the entrance of the king’s house. The verb “to lie,” according to David’s expectations, should have been followed by “with his wife.” Instead, we have not sex but a soldier’s sleeping with his comrades, who are guarding the king. It should be remembered (compare 1 Samuel 21) that soldiers in combat generally practiced sexual abstinence.
11. sitting in huts. Some construe sukot, “huts,” as a place-name, the city of Succoth a little east of the Jordan. But if the Ark is sent out of Jerusalem to the front, it would make no sense to detain it at a logistics center only halfway to the battlefield, and Uriah’s point is that neither the Ark nor the troops enjoy proper shelter (while David is “sitting in Jerusalem”).
shall I then come to my house to eat and to drink and to lie with my wife? Uriah now spells out all that David left unsaid when he urged him to go down to his house. The crucial detail of sleeping with Bathsheba comes at the very end. Menakhem Perry and Meir Sternberg, in a pioneering Hebrew article in 1968 (revised by Sternberg for his English book of 1985), raised the provocative issue of deliberate ambiguity (comparing the strategy of this story with the two mutually exclusive readings possible for Henry James’s short story “The Turn of the Screw”). In their view, there are two equally viable readings. If Uriah does not know that David has cuckolded him, he is the instrument of dramatic irony—the perfect soldier vis-à-vis the treacherous king who is desperately trying to manipulate him so that the husband will unwittingly cover the traces of his wife’s sexual betrayal. If Uriah does know of the adultery, he is a rather different character—not naïve but shrewdly aware, playing a dangerous game of hints in which he deliberately pricks the conscience of the king, cognizant, and perhaps not caring, that his own life may soon be forfeit. More recently, Moshe Garsiel has proposed a reconciliation of these two readings: when Uriah first arrives from the front, he is unaware of what has occurred; after the first night with his comrades at the palace gate, he has been duly informed of the sexual betrayal, so that in his second dialogue with the king, he cultivates a rhetoric of implicit accusation. Garsiel observes that when Uriah swears emphatically by David’s life (verse 11), he does not add the deferential “my lord the king.”
13. David called him. The verb here has the idiomatic sense of “invite.”
he ate before him. The preposition is an indication of hierarchical distance between subject and king.
David made him drunk. “David” has been added for clarity. The Hebrew says only “he made him drunk.” Plying Uriah with wine is a last desperate attempt, and a rather crude one, to get him to have sex with his wife.
14. sent it by the hand of Uriah. The letter would be in the form of a small scroll with either a seal or threads around it. David is counting on the fact that Uriah as a loyal soldier will not dream of opening the letter. If he does not know of the adultery, he has in any case no personal motive to look at the letter. If he does know, he is accepting his fate with grim resignation, bitterly conscious that his wife has betrayed him and that the king is too powerful for him to contend with.
15. so that he will be struck down and die. With no possibility of making Uriah seem responsible for Bathsheba’s pregnancy, David now gravely compounds the original crime of adultery by plotting to get Uriah out of the way entirely by having him killed. What follows in the story makes it clear that bloodshed, far more than adultery, is David’s indelible transgression.
17. some of the troops … fell, and Uriah the Hittite also died. As Perry and Sternberg have keenly observed, one of the salient features of this story is the repeated alteration of instructions by those who carry them out. It is, indeed, a vivid demonstration of the ambiguous effecting of ends through the agency of others, which is one of the great political themes of the story. The canny Joab immediately sees that David’s orders are impossibly clumsy (perhaps an indication that the Machiavellian David has suddenly lost his manipulative coolness): if the men around Uriah were to draw back all at once, leaving him alone exposed, it would be entirely transparent that there was a plot to get him killed. Joab, then, coldly recognizes that in order to give David’s plan some credibility, it will be necessary to send a whole contingent into a dangerous place and for many others beside Uriah to die. In this fashion, the circle of lethal consequences of David’s initial act spreads wider and wider.
21. Did not a woman fling down on him an upper millstone. The specificity of the prospective dialogue that Joab invents for a wrathful David may at first seem surprising. The story of the ignominious death of Abimelech at the hand of a woman (Judges 9:52–54) may have become a kind of object lesson in siege strategy for professional soldiers—when you are laying siege against a city, above all beware of coming too close to the wall. One suspects also that Joab’s emphasis on a woman’s dealing death to the warrior—Abimelech had asked his armor bearer to run him through so that it would not be said he was killed by a woman!—points back to Bathsheba as the ultimate source of this chain of disasters. (This would be Joab’s soldierly judgment, not necessarily the author’s.)
Your servant Uriah the Hittite also died. Joab obviously knows that this is the message for which David is waiting. By placing it in the anticipatory “script” that he dictates to the messenger, he is of course giving away the secret, more or less, to the messenger. Might this, too, be calculated, as an oblique dissemination of David’s complicity in Uriah’s death, perhaps to be used at some future point by Joab against the king? In any case, given David’s track record in killing messengers who bear tidings not to his liking, Joab may want to be sure that this messenger has the means to fend off any violent reaction from the king, who would not have been expecting a report of multiple casualties.
23. and then we were upon them back to the entrance of the gate. The astute messenger offers a circumstantial account that justifies the mistake of approaching too close to the wall: the Ammonites came out after the Israelites in hot pursuit; then the Israelites, turning the tide of battle, were drawn after the fleeing Ammonites and so were tricked into coming right up to the gates of the city.
24. and your servant Uriah the Hittite also died. The messenger has divined the real point of Joab’s instructions all too well. He realizes that what David above all wants to hear is the news of Uriah’s death, and rather than risk the whole outburst, indicated by the prospective dialogue invented by Joab with the reference to the woman who killed Abimelech, the messenger hastens to conclude his report, before the king can react, by mentioning Uriah’s death. Thus the narrative makes palpable the inexorable public knowledge of David’s crime.
25. the sword devours sometimes one way and sometimes another. The king responds by directing to Joab what sounds like an old soldier’s cliché (on the order of “every bullet has its billet”). These vapid words of consolation to the field commander are an implicit admission that Joab’s revision of David’s orders was necessary: David concedes that many a good man had to die in order to cover up his murder by proxy of Uriah.
Battle all the more fiercely. The Hebrew is literally “make fierce [or strengthen] your battle.” The phrase is an emphatic formal echo of “the fiercest battling” in verse 15.
And so rouse his spirits. Literally, “and strengthen him”—that is, Joab.
27. when the mourning was over. Normally, the mourning period would be seven days. Bathsheba, then, is even more precipitous than Gertrude after the death of Hamlet the elder in hastening to the bed of a new husband. She does, of course, want to become David’s wife before her big belly shows.
David sent and gathered her into his house and she became his wife. Throughout this story, David is never seen anywhere but in his house. This sentence at the end strongly echoes verse 4: “David sent … and fetched her and she came to him and he lay with her.”
the thing that David had done was evil in the eyes of the LORD. Only now, after the adultery, the murder, the remarriage, and the birth of the son, does the narrator make an explicit moral judgment of David’s actions. The invocation of God’s judgment is the introduction to the appearance of Nathan the prophet, delivering first a moral parable “wherein to catch the conscience of the king” and then God’s grim curse on David and his house.
1And the LORD sent Nathan to David, and he came to him and said to him: “Two men there were in a single town, one was rich and the other poor. 2The rich man had sheep and cattle, in great abundance. 3And the poor man had nothing save one little ewe that he had bought. And he nurtured her and raised her with him together with his sons. From his crust she would eat and from his cup she would drink and in his lap she would lie, and she was to him like a daughter. 4And a wayfarer came to the rich man, and it seemed a pity to him to take from his own sheep and cattle to prepare for the traveler who had come to him, and he took the poor man’s ewe and prepared it for the man who had come to him.” 5And David’s anger flared hot against the man, and he said to Nathan, “As the LORD lives, doomed is the man who has done this! 6And the poor man’s ewe he shall pay back fourfold, inasmuch as he has done this thing, and because he had no pity!” 7And Nathan said to David, “You are the man! Thus says the LORD God of Israel. ‘It is I who anointed you king over Israel, and it is I Who saved you from the hand of Saul. 8And I gave you your master’s house and your master’s wives in your lap, and I gave you the house of Israel and of Judah. And if that be too little, I would give you even as much again. 9Why did you despise the word of the LORD, to do what is evil in His eyes? Uriah the Hittite you struck down with the sword, and his wife you took for yourself as wife, and him you have killed by the sword of the Ammonites! 10And so now, the sword shall not swerve from your house evermore, seeing as you have despised Me and have taken the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be your wife.’ 11Thus says the LORD, ‘I am about to raise up evil against you from your own house, and I will take your wives before your eyes and give them to your fellow man, and he shall lie with your wives in the sight of this sun. 12For you did it in secret but I will do this thing before all Israel and before the sun.’” 13And David said to Nathan, “I have offended against the LORD.” And Nathan said to David, “The LORD has also remitted your offense—you shall not die. 14But since you surely spurned the LORD in this thing, the son born to you is doomed to die.”
15And Nathan went to his house, and the LORD afflicted the child whom Bathsheba wife of Uriah the Hittite had borne David, and he fell gravely ill. 16And David implored God for the sake of the lad, and David fasted, and he came and spent the night lying on the ground. 17And the elders of his house rose over him to rouse him up from the ground, but he would not, nor did he partake of food with them. 18And it happened on the seventh day that the child died, and David’s servants were afraid to tell him that the child was dead, for they said, “Look, while the child was alive, we spoke to him and he did not heed our voice, and how can we say to him, the child is dead? He will do some harm.” 19And David saw that his servants were whispering to each other and David understood that the child was dead. And David said to his servants, “Is the child dead?” And they said, “He is dead.”
20And David rose from the ground and bathed and rubbed himself with oil and changed his garments and came into the house of the LORD and worshipped and came back to his house and asked that food be set out for him, and he ate. 21And his servants said to him, “What is this thing that you have done? For the sake of the living child you fasted and wept, and when the child was dead, you arose and ate food?” 22And he said, “While the child was still alive I fasted and wept, for I thought, ‘Who knows, the LORD may favor me and the child will live.’ 23And now that he is dead, why should I fast? Can I bring him back again? I am going to him and he will not come back to me.”
24And David consoled Bathsheba his wife, and he came to her and lay with her, and she bore a son and called his name Solomon, and the LORD loved him. 25And He sent by the hand of Nathan the prophet and called his name Jedidiah, by the grace of the LORD.
26And Joab battled against Rabbah of the Ammonites and he captured the royal town. 27And Joab sent messengers to David and said,
“I have battled against Rabbah.
Yes, I captured the Citadel of Waters.
28And so now, assemble the rest of the troops and encamp against the city and capture it, lest it be I who capture the city and my name be called upon it.” 29And David assembled all the troops and went to Rabbah and battled against it and captured it. 30And he took the crown of their king from his head, and its weight was a talent of gold, with precious stones, and it was set on David’s head. And the booty of the city he brought out in great abundance. 31And the people who were in it he brought out and set them to work with saws and iron threshing boards and iron axes and he put them to the brick mold. Thus did he do to all the Ammonite towns. And David, and all the troops with him, returned to Jerusalem.
CHAPTER 12 NOTES
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1. And the LORD sent. The second stage of the story of David and Bathsheba—the phase of accusation and retribution—begins with a virtual pun on a prominent thematic word of the first half of the story. David was seen repeatedly “sending” messengers, arranging for the satisfaction of his lust and the murder of his mistress’s husband through the agency of others. By contrast, God here “sends” his prophet to David—not an act of bureaucratic manipulation but the use of a human vehicle to convey a divine message of conscience.
Two men there were. Nathan’s parable, from its very first syllables, makes clear its own status as a traditional tale and a poetic construction. The way one begins a storyteller’s tale in the Bible is with the formula “there was a man”—compare the beginning of Job, or the beginning of the story of Hannah and Elkanah in 1 Samuel 1. The Hebrew prose of the parable also is set off strongly from the language of the surrounding narrative by its emphatically rhythmic character, with a fondness for parallel pairs of terms—an effect this translation tries to reproduce. The vocabulary, moreover, includes several terms that are relatively rare in biblical prose narrative: kivsah (ewe), raʾsh (poor), helekh (wayfarer), ʾoreaḥ (traveler). Finally the two “men” of the opening formula are at the end separated out into “rich man,” “poor man,” and “the man who had come” (in each of these cases, Hebrew ʾish is used). This formal repetition prepares the way, almost musically, for Nathan’s two-word accusatory explosion, ʾatah haʾish, “You are the man!” Given the patently literary character of Nathan’s tale, which would have been transparent to anyone native to ancient Hebrew culture, it is a little puzzling that David should so precipitously take the tale as a report of fact requiring judicial action. Nathan may be counting on the possibility that the obverse side of guilty conscience in a man like David is the anxious desire to do the right thing. As king, his first obligation is to protect his subjects and to dispense justice, especially to the disadvantaged. In the affair of Bathsheba and Uriah, he has done precisely the opposite. Now, as he listens to Nathan’s tale, David’s compensatory zeal to be a champion of justice overrides any awareness he might have of the evident artifice of the story.
3. eat … drink … lie. As Polzin observes, these terms effect full contact with the story of David and Bathsheba, being the three activities David sought to engage Uriah in with his wife (compare Uriah’s words in 11:11). The parable begins to become a little fantastic here in the interest of drawing close to the relationships of conjugal intimacy and adultery to which it refers: the little lamb eats from her master’s crust, drinks from his cup, and lies in his lap (“lap” as a biblical idiom has connotations not merely of parental sheltering but also of sexual intimacy: compare verse 8, “I gave … your master’s wives in your lap”).
4. it seemed a pity to him. The Hebrew uses an active verb, “he pitied,” preparing for a literal ironic reversal in verse 6, “he had no pity”—or, “he did not pity.”
to prepare. The Hebrew is literally “to do” or “to make.” When the verb has as its direct object a live edible animal, it means to slaughter and cook.
5. David’s anger flared hot against the man. Nathan’s rhetorical trap has now snapped shut. David, by his access of anger, condemns himself, and he becomes the helpless target of the denunciation that Nathan will unleash.
doomed is the man. Actually, according to biblical law someone who has illegally taken another’s property would be subject to fourfold restitution (verse 6), not to the death penalty. (The Hebrew phrase is literally “son of death”—that is, deserving death, just as in 1 Samuel 26:16.) David pronounces this death sentence in his outburst of moral indignation, but it also reflects the way that the parable conflates the sexual “taking” of Bathsheba with the murder of Uriah: the addition of Bathsheba to the royal harem could have been intimated simply by the rich man’s placing the ewe in his flock, but as the parable is told, the ewe must be slaughtered, blood must be shed. David himself will not be condemned to die, but death will hang over his house. As the Talmud (Yoma 22B) notes, the fourfold retribution for Uriah’s death will be worked out in the death or violent fate of four of David’s children: the unnamed infant son of Bathsheba, Tamar, Amnon, and Absalom.
7. Thus says the LORD God of Israel. After the direct knife thrust of “You are the man!,” Nathan hastens to produce the prophetic messenger-formula in its extended form, in this way proclaiming divine authorization for the dire imprecation he pronounces against David and his house.
7–8. It is I who anointed you… . And if that be too little, I would give you even as much again. In the first part of this speech, there are several ironic echoes of David’s prayer in chapter 7, in which David thanks God for all His benefactions and professes himself unworthy of them.
8. and your master’s wives in your lap. At least in the account passed down to us, there is no mention elsewhere of David’s having taken sexual possession of his predecessor’s consorts, though this was a practice useful for its symbolic force in a transfer of power, as Absalom will later realize.
9. Uriah the Hittite you struck down with the sword. The obliquity of working through agents at a distance, as David did in contriving the murder of Uriah, is exploded by the brutal directness of the language: it is as though David himself had wielded the sword. Only at the end of the sentence are we given the explanatory qualification “by the sword of the Ammonites.”
10. the sword shall not swerve from your house evermore. As Bar-Efrat notes, David’s rather callous message to Joab, “the sword sometimes consumes one way and sometimes another,” is now thrown back in his face. The story of David’s sons, not to speak of his descendants in later generations, will in fact turn out to be a long tale of conspiracy, internecine struggle, and murder. One of the most extraordinary features of the whole David narrative is that this story of the founding of the great dynasty of Judah is, paradoxically, already a tale of the fall of the house of David. Once again, no one has grasped this tragic paradox more profoundly than William Faulkner in his recasting of the story in Absalom, Absalom! The author of the David story continually exercises an unblinking vision of David and the institution of the monarchy that exposes their terrible flaws even as he accepts their divinely authorized legitimacy.
11. I am about to raise up evil against you from your own house. As befits a predictive curse, the agents of the evil are left unnamed. The disaster announced is clearly the rebellion of Absalom—as the reference to public cohabitation with David’s wives makes clear—and the rape of Tamar and the murder of Amnon that lead up to it. But further “evil” from the house of David will persist to his deathbed, as Absalom’s rebellion is followed by Adonijah’s usurpation.
12. For you did it in secret but I will do this thing before all Israel. The calamitous misjudgments that defined David’s dealings with Bathsheba and Uriah were a chain of bungled efforts at concealment. Now, in the retribution, all his crimes are to be revealed.
14. spurned the LORD. The Masoretic Text has “spurned the enemies of the LORD,” a scribal euphemism to avoid making God the object of a harsh negative verb.
15. Bathsheba wife of Uriah the Hittite. At this point, she is still identified as wife of the husband she betrayed in conceiving this child.
16. fasted … and spent the night lying on the ground. David’s acts pointedly replicate those of the man he murdered, who refused to go home and eat but instead spent the night lying on the ground with the palace guard.
18. on the seventh day. Seven days were the customary period of mourning. In this instance, David enacts a regimen of mourning, in an effort to placate God, before the fact of death.
He will do some harm. Presumably, the courtiers fear that David will do harm to himself in a frenzy of grief.
19. He is dead. In Hebrew, this is a single syllable, met, “dead”—a response corresponding to idiomatic usage because there is no word for “yes” in biblical Hebrew, and so the person questioned must respond by affirming the key term of the question. It should be noted, however, that the writer has contrived to repeat “dead” five times, together with one use of the verb “died,” in these two verses: the ineluctable bleak fact of death is hammered home to us, just before David’s grim acceptance of it.
20. David rose … bathed … rubbed himself with oil … changed his garments … worshipped … ate. This uninterrupted chain of verbs signifies David’s brisk resumption of the activities of normal life, evidently without speech and certainly without explanation, as the courtiers’ puzzlement makes clear. The entire episode powerfully manifests that human capacity for surprise, and for paradoxical behavior, that is one of the hallmarks of the great biblical characters. David here acts in a way that neither his courtiers nor the audience of the story could have anticipated.
23. Can I bring him back again? I am going to him and he will not come back to me. If the episode of Bathsheba and Uriah is the great turning point of the David story, these haunting words are the pivotal moment in the turning point. As we have repeatedly seen, every instance of David’s speech in the preceding narrative has been crafted to serve political ends, much of it evincing elaborately artful rhetoric. Now, after the dire curse pronounced by Nathan, the first stage of which is fulfilled in the death of the child, David speaks for the first time not out of political need but in his existential nakedness. The words he utters have a stark simplicity—there are no elegies now—and his recognition of the irreversibility of his son’s death also makes him think of his own mortality. In place of David the seeker and wielder of power, we now see a vulnerable David, and this is how he will chiefly appear through the last half of his story.
24. David consoled Bathsheba his wife. Now, after the terrible price of the child’s life has been paid for the murder of her husband, the narrator refers to her as David’s wife, not Uriah’s. A specific lapse of time is not mentioned, but one must assume that at least two or three months have passed, during which she recovers from the first childbirth.
she … called his name Solomon, and the LORD loved him. As a rule, it was the mother who exercised the privilege of naming the child. Despite some scholarly efforts to construe the name differently, its most plausible etymology remains the one that links it with the word for “peace” (the Hebrew term Shelomoh might simply mean “His peace”). The LORD’s loving Solomon, who will disappear from the narrative until the struggle for the throne in 1 Kings 1, foreshadows his eventual destiny, and also harmonizes this name giving with the child’s second name, Jedidiah, which means “God’s friend.”
25. Jedidiah, by the grace of the LORD. For the last phrase, this translation adopts a proposal by Kyle McCarter Jr. The usual meaning of the preposition used, baʿavur, is “for the sake of.” It remains something of a puzzlement that the child should be given two names, one by his mother and the other by God through His prophet. One common suggestion is that Jedidiah was Solomon’s official throne name. But perhaps the second name, indicating special access to divine favor, reflects a political calculation on the part of Nathan: he is already aligning himself with Solomon (and with Bathsheba), figuring that in the long run it will be best to have a successor to David under some obligation to him. In the event, Nathan’s intervention will prove crucial in securing the throne for Solomon.
26. Joab battled against Rabbah. It is possible, as many scholars have claimed, that the conquest of Rabbah, in the siege of which Uriah had perished, in fact occurs before the birth of Solomon, though sieges lasting two or more years were not unknown in the ancient world.
27. I have battled against Rabbah. Joab is actually sending David a double message. As dutiful field commander, he urges David (verse 28) to hasten to the front so that the conquest of the Ammonite capital will be attributed to him. And yet, he proclaims the conquest in the triumphal formality of a little victory poem (one line, two parallel versets) in which it is he who figures unambiguously as conqueror. This coy and dangerous game Joab plays with David about who has the real power will persist in the story.
the Citadel of Waters. The reference is not entirely clear, but the narrative context indicates that Joab has occupied one vital part of the town—evidently, where the water supply is—while the rest of the town has not yet been taken.
30. the crown of their king. The Septuagint reads “Milcom” (the Ammonite deity) instead of malkam, “their king.”
31. set them to work with saws and iron threshing boards and iron axes. The meaning of this entire sentence is a little uncertain, but the most plausible reading is that David impressed the male Ammonites into corvée labor. Some have suggested that the Ammonites were forced to tear down the walls of their own cities with the cutting tools listed in the catalogue here, although the reference to the brick mold at the end indicates some sort of construction, not just demolition.
1And it happened thereafter—Absalom, David’s son, had a beautiful sister named Tamar, and Amnon, David’s son, loved her. 2And Amnon was so distressed that he fell sick over Tamar his sister, for she was a virgin and it seemed beyond Amnon to do anything to her. 3And Amnon had a companion named Jonadab son of Shimeah brother of David, and Jonadab was a very wise man. 4And he said to him, “Why are you so poorly, prince, morning after morning? Will you not tell me?” And Amnon said to him, “Tamar the sister of Absalom my brother I do love.” 5And Jonadab said to him, “Lie in your bed and play sick, and when your father comes to see you, say to him, ‘Let Tamar my sister, pray, come and nourish me with food and prepare the nourishment before my eyes, so that I may see and eat from her hand.’” 6And Amnon lay down and played sick, and the king came to see him, and Amnon said to the king, “Let Tamar my sister, pray, come, and shape a couple of heart-shaped dumplings before my eyes, that I may take nourishment from her hand.” 7And David sent to Tamar at home, saying, “Go, pray, to the house of Amnon your brother, and prepare nourishment for him.” 8And Tamar went to the house of Amnon her brother—he lying down—and she took the dough and kneaded it and shaped it into hearts before his eyes and cooked the dumplings. 9And she took the pan and set it before him, but he refused to eat. And Amnon said, “Clear out everyone around me!” and everyone around him cleared out. 10And Amnon said to Tamar, “Bring the nourishment into the inner chamber, that I may take nourishment from your hand.” And Tamar took the dumplings that she had made and brought them to Amnon her brother within the chamber. 11And she offered them to him to eat, and he seized her and said to her, “Come lie with me, my sister.” 12And she said to him, “Don’t, my brother, don’t abuse me, for it should not be done thus in Israel, don’t do this scurrilous thing. 13And I, where would I carry my shame? And you, you would be like one of the scurrilous fellows in Israel. And so, speak, pray, to the king, for he will not withhold me from you.” 14And Amnon did not want to heed her voice, and he overpowered her and abused her and bedded her. 15And Amnon hated her with a very great hatred, for greater was the hatred with which he hated her than the love with which he had loved her. And Amnon said, “Get up, go!” 16And she said to him, “Don’t!—this wrong is greater than the other you did me, to send me away now.” And he did not want to heed her. 17And he called his lad, his attendant, and said, “Send this creature, pray, away from me and bolt the door behind her!” 18And she had on an ornamented tunic, for the virgin princesses did wear such robes. And his attendant took her outside and bolted the door behind her. 19And Tamar put ashes on her head, and the ornamented tunic that she had on she tore, and she put her hand on her head and walked away screaming as she went. 20And Absalom her brother said to her, “Has Amnon your brother been with you? For now, my sister, hold your peace. He is your brother. Do not take this matter to heart.” And Tamar stayed, desolate, in the house of Absalom her brother. 21And King David had heard all these things, and he was greatly incensed. 22And Absalom did not speak with Amnon either evil or good, for Absalom hated Amnon for having abused Tamar his sister.
23And it happened after two years that Absalom had a sheepshearing at Baal-Hazor, which is near Ephraim, and Absalom invited all the king’s sons. 24And Absalom came to the king and said, “Look, pray, your servant has a sheepshearing. Let the king, pray, go, and his servants, with your servant.” 25And the king said to Absalom, “No, my son, we shall not all of us go, and we shall not burden you.” And he pressed him but he did not want to go, and he bade him farewell. 26And Absalom said to him, “If not, pray, let Amnon my brother go with us.” And the king said to him, “Why should he go with you?” 27And Absalom pressed him, and he sent Amnon with him, together with all the king’s sons. 28And Absalom charged his lads, saying, “See, pray, when Amnon’s heart is merry with wine and I say to you, ‘Strike down Amnon,’ you shall put him to death, fear not, for is it not I who charge you? Be strong, and act as valiant men.” 29And Absalom’s lads did to Amnon as Absalom had charged them, and all the king’s sons arose and rode away each on his mule and fled. 30And as they were on the way, the rumor reached David, saying, “Absalom has struck down all the king’s sons, and not one of them remains.” 31And the king arose and tore his garments and lay on the ground, with all his servants standing in attendance in torn garments. 32And Jonadab son of Shimeah brother of David spoke up and said, “Let not my lord think, ‘All the lads, the king’s sons, they have put to death,’ for Amnon alone is dead, for it was fixed upon by Absalom from the day he abused Tamar his sister. 33And now, let not my lord the king take the matter to heart, saying, ‘All the king’s sons have died,’ but Amnon alone is dead.”
34And Absalom fled. And the lookout lad raised his eyes and saw and, look, a great crowd was going round the side of the mountain from the road behind it. 35And Jonadab said to the king, “Look, the king’s sons have come, as your servant has spoken, so it has come about.” 36And just as he finished speaking, look, the king’s sons came, and they raised their voices and wept, and the king, too, and all his servants wept very grievously. 37And Absalom had fled, and he went to Talmai son of Amihur king of Geshur. And David mourned for his son all the while. 38And Absalom had fled and gone to Geshur, and he was there three years. 39And David’s urge to sally forth against Absalom was spent, for he was consoled over Amnon, who was dead.
CHAPTER 13 NOTES
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1. a beautiful sister. The catastrophic turn in David’s fortune began when he saw a beautiful woman and lusted after her. Now, the curse pronounced by Nathan on the house of David begins to unfold through the very same mechanism: a sexual transgression within the royal quarters resulting in an act of murder elsewhere. Several important terms and gestures here reinforce this link with the story of David and Bathsheba.
Amnon … loved her. The love in question will be revealed by the ensuing events as an erotic obsession—what the early rabbis aptly characterized as “love dependent upon a [material] thing.”
2. she was a virgin and it seemed beyond Amnon to do anything to her. The last phrase here has a definite negative connotation (rather like the British “to interfere with her”) and makes clear the narrow carnal nature of Amnon’s “love” for Tamar. Sexual tampering with a virgin had particularly stringent consequences in biblical law.
3. companion. The Hebrew reaʾ could simply indicate a friend, though in royal contexts it is also the title of someone who played an official role as the king’s, or the prince’s, companion and councillor. The emphasis on Jonadab’s “wisdom”—in biblical usage, often a morally neutral term suggesting mastery of know-how in a particular activity—makes the technical sense of councillor more likely, though one role does not exclude the other.
4. And he said to him. Shimon Bar-Efrat has aptly observed that the whole story of the rape of Tamar is constructed out of seven interlocking scenes with two characters in each, one of whom appears in the next scene. (The story of the stealing of Isaac’s blessing in Genesis 27 has the same structure.) The sequence is: (1) Jonadab–Amnon, (2) Amnon–David, (3) David–Tamar, (4) Tamar–Amnon, (5) Amnon–attendant, (6) attendant–Tamar, (7) Tamar–Absalom. J. P. Fokkelman adds to this observation that the spatial and structural center of this design is the bed in Amnon’s inner chamber (4), where the rape is perpetrated.
Tamar the sister of Absalom my brother. Kyle McCarter Jr. vividly notes that Amnon’s speech with its alliterated initial aspirants in the Hebrew “is a series of gasping sighs” (ʾet-tamarʾ aḥot ʾavshalom ʾaḥi ʾani ʾohev).
5. Lie in your bed and play sick. David at the beginning of the Bathsheba story was first seen lying in bed, and then he arranged to have the desired woman brought to his chamber. Jonadab on his part observes that Amnon already looks ill (verse 2) and so suggests that he play up this condition by pretending to be dangerously ill and in need of special ministrations.
nourish me. The Hebrew verbal root b-r-h and the cognate noun biryah (“nourishment”) denote not eating in general but the kind of eating that is sustaining or restoring to a person who is weak or fasting. When you eat a biryah you become barʾi, healthy or fat, the opposite of “poorly,” dal. The distinction is crucial to this story.
so that I may see and eat from her hand. Perhaps Amnon is encouraged to say this because, as a person supposed to be gravely ill, he would want to see with his own eyes that the vital nourishment is prepared exactly as it should be. The writer is clearly playing with the equivalence between eating and sex, but it remains ambiguous whether Jonadab has in mind the facilitating of a rape, or merely creating the possibility of an intimate meeting between Amnon and Tamar.
6. the king came to see him. As the events work out, David, who sinned through lust, inadvertently acts as Amnon’s pimp for his own daughter.
shape a couple of heart-shaped dumplings. The verb and its object are both transparently cognate with lev (or levav), “heart.” The term could refer to the shape of the dumplings, or to their function of “strengthening the heart” (idiomatic in biblical Hebrew for sustaining or encouraging). In the Song of Songs, this same verb is associated with the idea of sexual arousal.
9. Clear out everyone around me. The identical words are pronounced by another princelike figure, Joseph, just before he reveals his true identity to his brothers (Genesis 45:1). In Genesis, these words preface the great moment of reconciliation between long-estranged brothers. Here they are a prelude to a tale of fraternal rape that leads to fratricide. The story of the rape of Tamar continues to allude to the Joseph story, in reverse chronological order and with pointed thematic reversal. The moment before the rape echoes the encounter between Joseph and Potiphar’s wife (Genesis 39) in the middle of the Joseph story, and the attention drawn to the ornamented tunic that the violated Tamar tears takes us back to Joseph’s ornamented tunic at the beginning of his story (Genesis 37). From such purposeful deployment of allusion, the inference is inevitable that the author of the David story was familiar at least with the J strand of the Joseph story in a textual version very like the one that has come down to us.
11. Come lie with me, my sister. The core of this abrupt command is a citation of the words of Potiphar’s wife to Joseph, “Lie with me.” Perhaps, as some have suggested, “Come” has a slight softening effect. The addition of “my sister” of course highlights the fact that this sexual assault is also incestuous.
12. Don’t, my brother. Tamar’s response constitutes a structural allusion to Joseph and Potiphar’s wife, for he, when confronted by the sexual brusqueness of her terse “lie with me,” also responds, in contrastive dialogue, with a nervous volubility in a relatively lengthy series of breathless objections.
it should not be done thus in Israel … this scurrilous thing. The language here echoes that of another sexual episode in Genesis, the rape of Dinah (Genesis 34). Again, the divergence in the parallel is significant, for Dinah’s rapist comes to love her after violating her and wants to make things good by marriage, whereas Amnon despises Tamar after he possesses her, and drives her away. The rape in both stories leads to murderous fraternal vengeance. But our writer’s brilliant game of literary allusion does not end here, for, as Robert Polzin has pointed out, Tamar’s words are also a precise echo of the plea of the Ephraimite in Gibeah to the mob of rapists: “No, my brothers … do not do this scurrilous thing” (Judges 19:23). That story ended in the woman’s being gang-raped to death, an act that in turn led to bloody civil war—as Tamar’s rape will lead to fratricide and, eventually, rebellion and civil war.
13. speak, pray, to the king, for he will not withhold me from you. Marriage between a half brother and a half sister is explicitly banned by biblical law. Perhaps, it has been suggested, this prohibition was not yet held to be binding in the early tenth century, or in the royal circle in Jerusalem. But it is at least as plausible that the desperate Tamar is grasping at any possibility to buy time and deflect her sexual assailant: why do this vile thing and take me by force when you can enjoy me legitimately?
14. he overpowered her and abused her and bedded her. The three transitive verbs in quick sequence reflect the single-minded assertion of male physical force. In the analogous story of Joseph and the Egyptian woman, because the gender roles are reversed, the sexually assaulted male is strong enough to break free from the woman’s grasp and flee. Here, the assaulted woman cannot break her assailant’s grip (verse 11), and so she now succumbs to brute force. The verb represented as “bedded” (shakhav) is the same one used by Jonadab in verse 5 (“Lie in your bed,” shekhav ʿal-mishkavkha) and in Amnon’s “lie with me.” But when it has a direct feminine object (instead of “lie with”), it suggests sexual violation, and a transitive verb is called for in the English.
15. greater was the hatred with which he hated her than the love with which he had loved her. The psychological insight of this writer is remarkable throughout the story. Amnon has fulfilled his desire for this beautiful young woman—or, given the fact that she is a bitterly resistant virgin, perhaps it has hardly been the fulfillment he dreamed of. In any case, he now has to face the possibly dire consequences to himself from her brother Absalom, or from David. The result is an access of revulsion against Tamar, a blaming of the victim for luring him with her charms into all this trouble.
Get up, go! The brutality of these imperative verbs is evident. They are also, as Bar-Efrat neatly observes, exact antonyms, in reverse order, of the two imperative verbs of sexual invitation he used before, “Come, lie.”
16. Don’t!—this wrong is greater. There is a textual problem here in the Hebrew, which seems to say, “Don’t—about this wrong …” (ʿal-ʾodot haraʿah). Some versions of the Septuagint read here, “Don’t, my brother” (ʿal ʾaḥi), as in verse 12, but this could reflect an attempt to straighten out a difficult text rather than a better Hebrew version used by the ancient Greek translators.
to send me away now. “Now” is added in the translation in order to remove an ambiguity as to when the sending away is done. “Sending away” is an idiom that also has the sense of “divorce”—precisely what the rapist of a virgin is not allowed to do in biblical law. If some modern readers may wonder why being banished seems to Tamar worse than being raped, one must say that for biblical women the social consequence of pariah status, when the law offered the remedy of marriage to the rapist, might well seem even more horrible than the physical violation. Rape was a dire fate, but one that could be compensated for by marriage, whereas the violated virgin rejected and abandoned by her violator was an unmarriageable outcast, condemned to a lifetime of “desolation” (verse 20).
17. Send this creature, pray, away from me. “This creature” reflects the stingingly contemptuous monosyllabic feminine demonstrative pronoun, zoʾt (“this one”). Note that at the same time that Amnon speaks brutally to Tamar, he is polite to his servant, using the particle of entreaty naʾ (“pray”).
and bolt the door behind her. Having devised such an elaborate strategy for drawing Tamar into the inner chamber where he can have his way with her, he now has her thrust out into the open square, with the door bolted against her as though she were some insatiable, clinging thing against which he had to set up a barricade.
18. ornamented tunic. The translation for this term follows a suggestion of E. A. Speiser. (The famous King James Version rendering in Genesis is “coat of many colors.”) Others interpret this as a garment reaching the ankles. In any case, Tamar and Joseph are the only two figures in the Bible said to wear this particular garment. Joseph’s, too, will be torn, by his brothers, after they strip him of it and toss him into the pit, and they will then soak it in kid’s blood. Tamar’s ornamented tunic may well be bloodstained, too, if one considers what has just been done to her as a virgin.
19. put her hand on her head. This is a conventional gesture of mourning, like the rending of the garment and the sprinkling of ashes on the head.
20. Has Amnon your brother been with you? Absalom, addressing his screaming, tearstained, disheveled sister, exercises a kind of delicacy of feeling in using this oblique euphemism for rape.
He is your brother. This identification, which plays back against the heavily fraught, often ironic uses of “brother” and “sister” throughout the story, would hardly be a consolation. What Absalom may be suggesting is that, were it any other man, I would avenge your honor at once, but since he is your brother, and mine, I must bide my time (“For now, my sister, hold your peace.”)
Do not take this matter to heart. The idiom he uses echoes ironically against the making of heart-shaped dumplings to which Amnon enjoined her.
21. King David had heard all these things, and he was greatly incensed. The Qumran Samuel and the Septuagint add here: “but he did not vex the spirit of Amnon his son, for he loved him, since he was his firstborn.” But this looks suspiciously like an explanatory gloss, an effort to make sense of David’s silence. That imponderable silence is the key to the mounting avalanche of disaster in the house of David. Where we might expect some after-the-fact defense of his violated daughter, some rebuke or punishment of his rapist son, he hears, is angry, but says nothing and does nothing, leaving the field open for Absalom’s murder of his brother. In all this, the rape of Tamar plays exactly the same pivotal role in the story of David as does the rape of Dinah in the story of Jacob. Jacob, too, “hears” of the violation and does nothing, setting the stage for the bloody act of vengeance carried out by his sons Simeon and Levi. By the end of the episode, Jacob is seen at the mercy of his intransigent sons, and that is how this once powerful figure will appear through the rest of his story. An analogous fate, as we shall abundantly see, awaits David from this moment on.
23. a sheepshearing. The sheepshearing is a grand occasion for feasting and drinking (compare 1 Samuel 25:2–8), and so it is proper to speak of “having” a sheepshearing as one would have a celebration.
24. Let the king, pray, go. Given David’s increasingly sedentary habits, Absalom appears to count on the fact that his father will refuse the invitation, and this refusal will then give greater urgency to his invitation of Amnon. Had Absalom begun by asking David to help him persuade Amnon to go the festivities, David might have been suspicious about Absalom’s motives, since the grudge he bore his half brother would scarcely have been a secret. In any case, Absalom is making David his go-between to lure Amnon to his death, just as Amnon made David his go-between to lure Tamar to her violation.
27. with all the king’s sons. This phrase recurs like a refrain from this point on: David is haunted by the specter of the ultimate catastrophe, that “all the king’s sons” have perished, a specter that will cast a shadow over the subsequent events of the story as well. The man promised an everlasting house is threatened with the prospect (like his avatar, Faulkner’s Sutpen, in Absalom, Absalom!) of being cut off without surviving progeny.
28. when Amnon’s heart is merry with wine. The heart that lusted after Tamar and asked her to make heart-shaped dumplings will now be befuddled with wine to set up the murder.
29. each on his mule. In this period in ancient Israel, the mule was the customary mount for royal personages.
31. the king arose and tore his garments and lay on the ground. These acts of mourning are reminiscent of Tamar’s and of David’s own when his infant son by Bathsheba was deathly ill. Again there is a resemblance to Jacob, who flings himself into extravagant mourning over a son supposed to be dead who is actually alive (Genesis 37).
32. they have put to death. Jonadab, exercising his “wisdom,” is careful not to condemn Absalom immediately, but instead first uses a plural verb with an unspecified agent. Then he introduces Absalom as the source of the determination to kill Amnon, choosing a verb, “abused,” that concedes the crime of rape. Whether or not this was a possibility he had in mind when he offered counsel to Amnon, he now implicity distances himself from Amnon’s act.
33. let not my lord the king take the matter to heart. This is virtually the same idiom Absalom used to Tamar in consoling her after the rape.
34. going round the side of the mountain from the road behind it. The Hebrew has “the road behind it” before “the side of the mountain,” such proleptic use of pronominal reference sometimes occurring in biblical Hebrew. The Septuagint reads “from the Horonim road” (miderekh ḥoronim) instead of “from the road behind it” (miderekh aḥaraw).
36. wept very grievously. The literal Hebrew phrasing is “wept a very great weeping.”
37. Talmai son of Amihur king of Geshur. Absalom takes refuge in the court of his maternal grandfather in Geshur, to the north and east of the Jordan, outside David’s jurisdiction.
David mourned for his son all the while. As verse 39, which will mark the beginning of a new narrative episode, makes clear, the son he is mourning is the dead Amnon, not the absent Absalom.
39. David’s urge to sally forth against Absalom was spent. The received text is either defective or elliptical at this point. The verb watekhal is feminine, though there is no feminine noun in the clause. Many have construed it as the predicate of an omitted noun, nefesh, which coupled with this verb would yield idiomatically “David pined after Absalom.” Such paternal longings scarcely accord with David’s refusal to see his son once he has returned to Jerusalem, or with the very necessity of elaborate manipulation in order to get him to agree to rescind Absalom’s banishment. The Qumran Samuel scroll, though incomplete at this point, appears to have the feminine noun—ruaḥ—“spirit,” “impulse,” “urge”—as the subject of the verb. An abatement of hostility against Absalom rather than a longing for him makes much more sense in terms of what follows.
1And Joab son of Zeruiah knew that the king’s mind was on Absalom. 2And Joab sent to Tekoa and fetched a wise woman from there and said to her, “Take up mourning, pray, and, pray, don mourning garments, and do not rub yourself with oil, and you shall be like a woman a long while mourning over a dead one. 3And you shall come to the king and speak to him in this manner—” and Joab put the words in her mouth. 4And the Tekoite woman said to the king, and she flung herself on her face to the ground and bowed down, and she said, “Rescue, O king!” 5And the king said to her, “What troubles you?” And she said, “Alas, I am a widow-woman, my husband died. 6And your servant had two sons, and they quarreled in the field, and there was no one to part them, and one struck down the other and caused his death. 7And, look, the whole clan rose against your servant and said, ‘Give over the one who struck down his brother, that we may put him to death for the life of his brother whom he killed, and let us destroy the heir as well. And they would have quenched my last remaining ember, leaving my husband no name or remnant on the face of the earth.” 8And the king said to the woman, “Go to your house and I myself shall issue a charge concerning you. 9And the Tekoite woman said to the king, “Upon me, my lord the king, and upon my father’s house, let the guilt be, and the king and his throne shall be blameless.” 10And the king said, “The man who dares speak to you I will have brought to me, and he will not touch you anymore.” 11And she said, “May the king, pray, keep in mind the LORD your God, that the blood avenger should not savage this much and let them not destroy my son.” And he said, “As the LORD lives, not a single hair of your son’s shall fall to the ground!” 12And the woman said, “Let your servant, pray, speak a word to my lord the king.” And he said, “Speak.” 13And the woman said, “Why did you devise in this fashion against God’s people? And in speaking this thing, the king is as though guilty for the king’s not having brought back his own banished one. 14For we surely will die, like water spilled to the ground, which cannot be gathered again. And God will not bear off the life of him who devises that no one of his be banished. 15And so now, the reason I have come to speak this thing to the king my lord is that the people have made me afraid, and your servant thought, ‘Let me but speak to the king. Perhaps the king will do what his servant asks. 16For the king would pay heed to save his servant from the hand of the person bent on destroying me and my son together from God’s heritage.’ 17And your servant thought, ‘May the word of my lord the king, pray, be a respite, for like a messenger of God, so is my lord the king, understanding good and evil.’ And may the LORD your God be with you.” 18And the king said to the woman, “Pray, do not conceal from me the thing that I ask you.” And the woman said, “Let my lord the king speak, pray.” 19And the king said, “Is the hand of Joab with you in all this?” And the woman answered and said, “By your life, my lord the king, there is no turning right or left from all that my lord the king has spoken! For your servant Joab, he it was who charged me, and he it was who put in your servant’s mouth all these words. 20In order to turn the thing round your servant Joab has done this thing. And my lord is wise, as with the wisdom of a messenger of God, to know everything in the land.” 21And the king said to Joab, “Look, pray, I have done this thing. Go and bring back the lad Absalom.” 22And Joab flung himself on his face to the ground and bowed down. And he blessed the king, and Joab said, “Your servant knows that I have found favor in the eyes of my lord the king, for the king has done what his servant asked.” 23And Joab rose and went to Geshur and he brought Absalom to Jerusalem. 24And the king said, “Let him turn round to his house, and my face he shall not see.” And Absalom turned round to his house, and the king’s face he did not see.
25And there was no man so highly praised for beauty as Absalom in all Israel—from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head, there was no blemish in him. 26And when he cut his hair, for from one year’s end till the next he would cut it, as it grew heavy upon him, he would weigh the hair of his head, two hundred shekels by the royal weight. 27And three sons were born to Absalom and a daughter named Tamar, she was a beautiful woman. 28And Absalom lived in Jerusalem two years, but the king’s face he did not see. 29And Absalom sent to Joab in order to send him to the king, but he did not want to come to him, and he sent still a second time, but he did not want to come. 30And he said to his servants, “See Joab’s field next to mine, in which he has barley—go set it on fire!” And Absalom’s servants set fire to the field. 31And Joab rose and came to Absalom’s house and said to him, “Why did your servants set fire to the field that belongs to me?” 32And Absalom said to Joab, “Look, I sent to you, saying, ‘Come here that I may send you to the king, saying, Why did I come from Geshur? It would be better for me were I still there. And now, let me see the face of the king, and if there be guilt in me, let him put me to death.’” 33And Joab came to the king and told him. And he called to Absalom and he came to the king and bowed down to him, his face to the ground before the king, and the king kissed Absalom.
CHAPTER 14 NOTES
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1. the king’s mind was on Absalom. The preposition ʿal is ambiguous, and it could also mean “against.”
2. Joab sent to Tekoa. Tekoa is a village about ten miles north of Jerusalem. Why does Joab contrive to make David agree to Absalom’s return? Given his relentlessly political character, it seems likely that Joab perceives Absalom’s continuing banishment as a potential source of rebellion against the throne, and concludes that the safest course is to reconcile the king with his son. This calculation will prove to be gravely misguided because Joab does not reckon with David’s ambivalence toward his fratricidal son (see verse 24) or with the impulse to usurpation that the ambivalence will encourage in Absalom.
a wise woman. It should be noted that the whole David story, seemingly dominated by powerful martial men, pivots at several crucial junctures on the intervention of enterprising “wise women.” The first of these is Abigail, though, unlike two of the others, she is not assigned the epithet “wise woman” as a kind of professional title. Later, a resourceful woman hides the two spies who are bringing intelligence of Absalom to David in trans-Jordan. In the subsequent rebellion of Sheba son of Bichri, another wise woman prevents Joab’s massacre of the besieged town of Abel Beth-Maacah.
like a woman a long while mourning over a dead one. The phrasing here pointedly echoes “David mourned for his son all the while” in 13:37.
3. Joab put the words in her mouth. As Robert Polzin observes, the entire episode turns on manipulation of people through language, with abundant repetition of the verb “speak.” In contrast to the common practice elsewhere in biblical narrative, we are not given the actual script that Joab dictates to the woman, which she will then repeat to David. This omission heightens the sense that, using a general outline provided by Joab, the woman is in fact brilliantly improvising—which in some ways she would have to do, given the fact that she is not reciting an uninterrupted speech but responding to David’s declarations, picking up clues from the way he reacts.
4. Rescue, O king! This is a formulaic plea used by petitioners for royal justice.
6. they quarreled in the field … and one struck down the other. As several commentators have noted, her formulation aligns the story with the archetypal tale of Cain and Abel. The fratricidal Cain is banished, but also given a sign to protect him from blood vengeance.
7. and let us destroy the heir as well. Although it is unlikely that the clansmen would have actually said these words, there is no need to tamper with the text. The wise woman, in reporting the dialogue, insinuates her own anxious maternal perspective into this last clause. The implication is that the members of the clan would like to kill the remaining son not only to execute justice but in order to get his inheritance.
8. I myself shall issue a charge concerning you. Although David emphatically announces (by adding the first-person pronoun ʾani) that he himself will take up the case, his language remains vague (“issue a charge”), and the Tekoite woman’s response in the next verse clearly indicates that she requires something further of him.
9. Upon me … the guilt … and the king and his throne shall be blameless. The legal issue involved is bloodguilt. From David’s vagueness, she infers that he is loath to intervene on behalf of the fratricide because by so doing he, and his throne, would take on the guilt of allowing the killing to go unavenged.
10. The man who dares speak to you I will have brought to me. Her declaration that she and her father’s house will bear the guilt for allowing the killer to live—evidently construed by David as a performative speech-act, efficacious once uttered—encourages the king to declare that he will absolutely protect her against the vengeful kinsmen who are seeking out her son.
11. let them not destroy my son. The woman is still not satisfied, for David’s pledge to safeguard her did not mention her son: she wants to extract an explicit declaration from David that he will protect the life of her son.
not a single hair of your son’s shall fall to the ground. Now she has what she has been after, with David’s hyperbolic declaration about guarding the well-being of the fratricidal son, she is prepared to snap shut the trap of the fiction, linking it to David’s life, just as Nathan did with the parable of the poor man’s ewe. We should note that not a single hair of the fictitious son is to fall to the ground, whereas the extravagantly abundant hair of his real-life referent, Absalom, will be cut annually in a kind of public ceremony.
12. Let your servant, pray, speak. She uses these words of entreaty to preface the transition to the real subject, David and Absalom.
13. against God’s people. The implicit key concept here is “inheritance,” which links her fiction to the national political situation. She may be hinting that Absalom is the appropriate heir to the throne. In any case, his banishment is potentially divisive to the kingdom.
in speaking this thing, the king is as though guilty. The Hebrew of this whole sentence is rather crabbed, an effect reproduced in the translation. Rather than reflecting difficulties in textual transmission, her language probably expresses her sense of awkwardness in virtually indicting the king: he is “as though guilty,” for “in speaking this thing,” in declaring his resolution to protect the fratricidal son, he has condemned his own antithetical behavior in the case of Absalom. But the woman is careful not to mention Absalom explicitly by name—she struggles verbally in the crossover from fiction to life, knowing she is treading on dangerous ground.
14. we surely will die, like water spilled to the ground. Moving beyond Absalom to a wise woman’s pronouncement on human fate, she breaks free of her verbal stumbling and becomes eloquent. The spilled water as an image of irreversible mortality is an obvious and effective counterpoint to her previous image of the ember that should not be quenched. It also picks up thematically David’s own bleak reflection on the irreversibility of death after his infant son expires (chapter 12).
God will not bear off the life of him who devises that no one of his be banished. As the wise woman switches back from philosophic statement to the juridical issue confronting David, her language again becomes knotty and oblique. What she is saying is that God will scarcely want to punish the father who brings back his banished son, even though bloodguilt remains unavenged.
15. the reason I have come to speak this thing to the king. The Tekoite woman, having nervously broached the issue of David and Absalom, now hastily retreats to the relative safety of her invented story about two sons, as though that were the real reason for her appearance before the king. The dramatic and psychological logic of this entire speech argues against scholarly attempts to make it more “coherent” by moving around whole swatches of it.
17. respite. The king’s word will give her respite from her persecutors, the would-be killers of her son. The Hebrew term menuḥah also points to a bound locution, menuḥah wenaḥalah, “respite and inheritance,” the very thing the kinsmen would take from her.
19. Is the hand of Joab with you in all this? David rightly infers that a village wise woman would have no motive of her own for undertaking this elaborate stratagem, and so someone in court with political aims must be behind her. Polzin shrewdly proposes that Joab may actually have wanted David to detect him at the bottom of the scheme: “The woman’s eventual admission that she has been sent by Joab (verses 19–20) may itself be part of Joab’s indirect message to David—something like, ‘Bring Absalom back or I may side with him against you.’”
there is no turning right or left from all that my lord the king has spoken. She is saying two things at once—that the king has hit the target in saying that Joab is behind her, and that, having committed himself by his own speech to protect the fratricidal son, he cannot now permit himself to continue Absalom’s banishment.
20. my lord is wise, as with the wisdom of a messenger of God. It is of course she who has been demonstrably wise. David will soon show unwisdom by bringing Absalom back while resisting real reconciliation, and his subsequent blindness to Absalom’s demagogic activities within a stone’s throw of the court indicates that there is much in the land about which he knows nothing.
21. bring back the lad Absalom. Momentarily, David refers to Absalom by a term (naʿar) that is generally an expression of paternal affection. He will use the same word repeatedly during Absalom’s rebellion to stress his concern for Absalom’s safety.
25. there was no man so highly praised for beauty. Both Absalom and his sister Tamar are remarkable for their beauty (as was the young David). For Absalom, this will become an asset he trades on in his appeal for popular support.
26. when he cut his hair … he would weigh the hair of his head. There is clearly something narcissistic about this preoccupation with his luxuriant hair. It is of course a foreshadowing of the bizarre circumstances of Absalom’s death (chapter 18:9–15). Beyond that, the spectacular growth of hair invokes a comparison with Samson, who never cut his hair until the cutting of the hair against his will led to his undoing. The parallel with Samson is extended in the burning of Joab’s field, which recalls the foxes with torches tied to their tails used by Samson to set fire to the fields of the Philistines. Perhaps the parallel with Samson is meant to foreshadow Absalom’s fate as a powerful leader whose imprudence brings him to an early death.
27. And three sons were born to Absalom and a daughter named Tamar, she was a beautiful woman. Later, we are informed (18:18) that Absalom was childless. The two reports can be harmonized only with considerable strain, and it is best to view them as contradictory traditions incorporated in the final text. But it is noteworthy that, against patriarchal practice, the sons are left unnamed here, and only the daughter, named after Absalom’s raped sister, is not anonymous. It is unnecessary to assume that this second beautiful Tamar was born after the violation of her aunt by Amnon: here she is represented as a woman, and it seems unlikely that so many years would have passed from the time of Tamar’s rape until Absalom’s resumption of residence in Jerusalem.
29. he did not want to come. Throughout this story, there is a precarious game of power going on. Joab has manipulated David to effect Absalom’s return, but seeing that the king remains estranged from Absalom, Joab does not want to push his luck by interceding at court on Absalom’s behalf. The power of the king may be qualified, but he remains the king.
30. set it on fire. Absalom’s Samson-like burning of the field is a strong indication that he is a man prepared to use violence to achieve his ends: mafia style, he presents Joab with an offer he can’t refuse.
32. if there be guilt in me, let him put me to death. Absalom of course knows he is responsible for the killing of Amnon, but he construes that act as something other than “guilt” because it was done to avenge the violation of Tamar—a crime David left unpunished.
33. he … bowed down to him, his face to the ground. Fokkelman notes that there is a series of three acts of prostration before the king—first the Tekoite woman, then Joab, and now Absalom, the third bowing-down ostensibly consummating the reconciliation of father and son toward which all three acts are directed.
and the king kissed Absalom. The noun used (rather than “David”) may suggest that this is more a royal, or official, kiss than a paternal one. It clearly gives Absalom no satisfaction, as his initiative of usurpation in the next episode strongly argues.
1And it happened thereafter that Absalom made himself a chariot with horses and fifty men running before him. 2And Absalom would rise early and stand by the gate road, and so, to every man who had a suit to appear in judgment before the king, Absalom would call and say, “From what town are you?” And he would say, “From one of the tribes of Israel is your servant.” 3And Absalom would say to him, “See, your words are good and right, but you have no one to listen to you from the king.” 4And Absalom would say, “Would that I were made judge in the land, and to me every man would come who had a suit in justice, and I would declare in his favor.” 5And so, when a man would draw near to bow down to him, he would reach out his hand and take hold of him and kiss him.
6And Absalom would act in this fashion to all the Israelites who appeared in judgment before the king, and Absalom stole the hearts of the men of Israel.
7And it happened at the end of four years that Absalom said to the king, “Let me go, pray, and pay my vow that I pledged to the LORD in Hebron. 8For your servant made a vow when I was staying in Geshur in Aram, saying, “If the LORD indeed brings me back to Jerusalem, I shall worship the LORD.” 9And the king said to him, “Go in peace to Hebron.” And he arose and went to Hebron. 10And Absalom sent agents through all the tribes of Israel, saying, “When you hear the sound of the ram’s horn, you shall say, ‘Absalom has become king in Hebron.’” 11And with Absalom two hundred men went from Jerusalem, invited guests going in all innocence, and they knew nothing. 12And Absalom sent Ahitophel the Gilonite, David’s councillor, from his town, from Giloh, while he was offering the sacrifices, and the plot was strong, and the people with Absalom were growing in number. 13And the informant came to David, saying, “The hearts of the men of Israel are following Absalom.” 14And David said to all his servants who were with him in Jerusalem, “Rise and let us flee or none of us will escape from Absalom. Hurry and go, lest he hurry and overtake us and bring down harm upon us and strike the town with the edge of the sword.” 15And the king’s servants said to the king, “Whatever my lord the king chooses, look, we are your servants.” 16And the king went out, and all his household with him, on foot, and the king left his ten concubines to watch over the house. 17And the king, and all the people with him, went out on foot, and they stopped by the outlying house. 18And all his servants were crossing over alongside him, and all the Cherithites and the Pelethites and all the Gittites, six hundred men who had come at his heels from Gath, were crossing over before the king. 19And the king said to Ittai the Gittite, “Why should you too go with us? Go back, stay with the king. For you are a foreigner, and you are also in exile from your own place. 20Just yesterday you came, and today should I make you wander with us, when I myself am going to wherever I may go? Turn back, and bring back your brothers. Steadfast kindness to you!” 21And Ittai answered the king and said, “As the LORD lives, and as my lord the king lives, whatever place that my lord the king may be, whether for death or for life, there your servant will be.” And David said, “Go and cross over.” 22And Ittai crossed over, and all his men and all the children who were with him. 23And all the land was weeping loudly and all the people were crossing over, and the king was crossing over the Wadi Kidron, and all the people were crossing over along the road to the wilderness. 24And, look, Zadok and all the Levites were also with him, bearing the Ark of the Covenant of God, and they set down the Ark of God, and Abiathar came up, until all the people had finished crossing over from the town. 25And the king said to Zadok, “Bring back the Ark of God to the town. Should I find favor in the eyes of the LORD, He will bring me back and let me see it and its abode. 26And should He say thus, ‘I want no part of you,’ let Him do to me what is good in His eyes.” 27And the king said to Zadok the priest, “Do you see? Go back to the town in peace, and Ahimaaz your son and Jonathan son of Abiathar—your two sons with you. 28See, I shall be tarrying in the steppes of the wilderness until word from you reaches me to inform me.” 29And Zadok, and Abiathar with him, brought back the Ark of God to Jerusalem, and they stayed there. 30And David was going up the Slope of Olives, going up weeping, his head uncovered, and he walking barefoot, and all the people who were with him, everyone with his head uncovered, went on up weeping the while. 31And to David it was told, saying, “Ahitophel is among the plotters with Absalom.” And David said, “Thwart, pray, the counsel of Ahitophel, O LORD.” 32And David had come to the summit, where one would bow down to God, and, look, coming toward him was Hushai the Archite, his tunic torn and earth on his head. 33And David said, “If you cross over with me, you will be a burden to me. 34But if you go back to the town and say to Absalom, ‘Your servant, O king, I will be. Your father’s servant I always was, and now I am your servant,’ you shall overturn Ahitophel’s counsel for me. 35And are not Zadok and Abiathar the priests there with you? And so, whatever you hear from the king’s house you shall tell to Zadok and to Abiathar the priests. 36Look, there with them are their two sons, Ahimaaz, who is Zadok’s, and Jonathan, who is Abiathar’s, and you shall send to me by their hand whatever you hear.” 37And Hushai, David’s friend, came to the city, as Absalom was coming into Jerusalem.
CHAPTER 15 NOTES
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1. a chariot with horses and fifty men running before him. All this vehicular pomp and circumstance, as other biblical references to chariots, horses, and runners in conjunction with kings suggest, is a claim to royal status. The gestures of usurpation are undertaken in Jerusalem, under David’s nose, yet the king, who has been described by the Tekoite woman as “knowing everything in the land,” does nothing.
2–5. This whole tableau of Absalom standing at the gate to the city, accosting each newcomer, professing sympathy for his cause, and announcing that were he the supreme judicial authority, he would rule in the man’s favor, is a stylized representation of the operation of a demagogue. It is hard to imagine realistically that Absalom would tell each person so flatly that, whatever the legal case, he would declare in his favor, but the point of the stylization is clear: the demagogue enlists support by flattering people’s special interests, leading them to believe that he will champion their cause, cut their taxes, increase their social security benefits, and so forth.
3. you have no one to listen to you from the king. The heart of Absalom’s demagogic pitch is his exploiting what must have been widespread dissatisfaction over the new centralized monarchic bureaucracy with its imposition of taxes and corvées and military conscription: there is no one in this impersonal palace to listen to you with a sympathetic ear, as I do.
5. he would reach out his hand and take hold of him and kiss him. The odd “rhyming” of Absalom’s kiss to each man he seduces and David’s kiss to Absalom at the end of the immediately preceding chapter is obvious. Could it suggest, retrospectively, that David’s kiss has an element of falseness that recurs, grossly magnified, in Absalom’s kiss? It should also be noted that Absalom’s gesture of “taking hold” of each of his political victims is verbally identical with Amnon’s “taking hold” of Tamar before the rape.
7. at the end of four years. The Masoretic Text has “forty years,” an untenable number in this narrative context, but four different ancient versions show “four years.”
pay my vow that I pledged to the LORD in Hebron. Haim Gevaryahu proposes that the vow is to offer an exculpatory sacrifice for the crime of manslaughter. With three years in Geshur and another four in Jerusalem, Absalom would have come to the end of the period of seven years of penance that, according to some ancient parallels, might have applied to such crimes. Absalom of course wants to go off to Hebron—David’s first capital city—in order to proclaim himself king at a certain distance from his father’s palace. It also appears that he feels he can call on a base of support from Judah, his father’s tribe. But why is David not suspicious when his son proposes to pay his cultic vow in Hebron rather than in Jerusalem? Gevaryahu, citing Greek analogues, makes the interesting suggestion that a fratricide who had not yet atoned for his crime was not permitted to worship in the same sanctuary as his father and brothers.
11. invited guests going in all innocence. In a shrewd maneuver, Absalom takes with him a large contingent of people not known to be his partisans, and not willing participants in the conspiracy, and in this way he wards off suspicion about the aim of his expedition. Once in Hebron, the two hundred men would presumably be caught up in the tide of insurrection.
14. Rise and let us flee. Suddenly, under the pressure of crisis, with intelligence that Absalom has overwhelming support, David shakes himself from his slumber of passivity, realizing he must move at once if he is to have any chance of surviving. Against superior forces, the walled city of Jerusalem would be a death trap. As Fokkelman aptly puts it, “Once again he is in contact with his old self… . Once again men seek his death and he enters the wilderness both figuratively and literally.”
15. Whatever my lord the king chooses, look, we are your servants. As the episode unfolds, there is a constant counterpoint between those who reveal their unswerving loyalty to David no matter how grim the outlook and the betrayal of David by his son and all those who have rallied to the usurper.
16. the king left his ten concubines to watch over the house. This gesture sounds as though it might be an expression of hope that David will return to Jerusalem. In the event, it produces a disastrous consequence that fulfills one of the dire terms of Nathan’s curse in chapter 12.
17. the king, and all the people with him, went out on foot. This restatement of the first clause of the previous verse reflects the device that biblical scholars call “resumptive repetition”: after an interruption of the narrative line—here, the introduction of the information about the concubines—the words just before the interruption are repeated as the main line of the narrative resumes. Moreover, the emphasis through repetition on going by foot suggests how David and his entourage have been reduced from royal dignity in this abrupt flight.
the outlying house. The literal meaning of the Hebrew is “the house of distance.” It clearly means the last house in the settled area beyond the walls of the city.
18. all his servants were crossing over. The verb “to cross over” (‘avar), abundantly repeated, is a thematic focus of the episode. David and his followers are crossing over eastward from Jerusalem, headed first up the Mount of Olives and then down the long declivity to the Jordan, which they will cross (the verb ‘avar is often used for Jordan crossing) in their flight. The entire episode is unusual in the leisurely panoramic view it provides of the eastward march from the city. Instead of the preterite verb form ordinarily used for narration, participial forms (“were crossing over”) predominate, imparting a sense of something like a present tense to the report of the action.
Cherithites … Pelethites … Gittites. This elite palace guard, which we have encountered before, are Philistine warriors who became David’s followers, probably when he was residing in Gath. Ittai’s expression of loyalty suggests that they were more than mere mercenaries.
19. Ittai. His name is close to the preposition ʾiti, “with me.” Both Moshe Garsiel and Robert Polzin have proposed that the name has a symbolic function: Ittai is the loyalist who insists on remaining with David. Polzin notes that this preposition is constantly reiterated in the episode, rather than its synonym ʿim: David, for example, says to Ittai, “Why should you too go with us [ʾitanu]?”
stay with the king. This designation of the usurping son would be especially painful for David to pronounce. He does it in order to try to persuade Ittai that he should cast his fate with the person exercising the power of king.
20. Steadfast kindness to you. The translation reproduces the elliptical character of the Masoretic Text at this point. The Septuagint has an easier reading: “May the LORD show steadfast kindness to you.”
21. whether for death or for life. Given the grim circumstances, this loyal soldier unflinchingly puts death before life in the two alternatives he contemplates.
23. and the king was crossing over the Wadi Kidron. In the slow-motion report of the flight, reinforced by the participial verbs, David is now crossing the Kidron brook at the foot of the slope descending eastward from the walled city. He will then make his way up the Mount of Olives.
25. Bring back the Ark of God to the town. Given the difficulties David encountered in bringing the Ark to Jerusalem in the first place, and given the disastrous consequences at the time of Eli in carrying it out to the battlefield, it is understandable that he should want the Ark left in Jerusalem. He makes this act a token of his reiterated fatalism about his predicament.
27. and the king said to Zadok the priest. Again we see the distinctive biblical convention in the deployment of dialogue: when the first party speaks and the second party does not respond, and a second speech of the first party is introduced, there is an intimation of some sort of failure of response. Zadok is nonplussed by David’s instructions to return the Ark and also by David’s fatalism. Now, in his second speech, David provides a practical, strategic rationale for Zadok’s going back to the city with the Ark—he and his two acolytes will then be able to act as spies for David (see the end of his speech in verse 28).
30. his head uncovered. There is a difference of philological opinion as to whether the verb here means covered or uncovered. The usual meaning of the root is “to cover,” but an uncovered head is more likely as a gesture of mourning—which is clearly intended—and this could be an instance of the same term denoting antonyms, like the English verb “cleave.”
31. And to David it was told. The Masoretic Text reads, “And David told,” but both the Qumran Samuel and the Septuagint reflect the more likely idea—a difference of one Hebrew letter—that someone told David.
32. the summit, where one would bow down to God, and, look, coming toward him was Hushai. This crucial moment in the story is an especially deft manifestation of the system of double causation that Gerhard von Rad and others after him have attributed to the David narrative: everything in the story is determined by its human actors, according to the stringent dictates of political realism; yet, simultaneously, everything is determined by God, according to a divine plan in history. David, informed that his own shrewd political advisor Ahitophel is part of Absalom’s conspiracy, urgently and breathlessly invokes God, “Thwart, pray, the counsel of Ahitophel, O LORD.” Then he reaches a holy site, an altar on the crest of the Mount of Olives (“where one would bow down to God”), and here he sees Hushai, his loyalty betokened by the trappings of mourning he has assumed, coming toward him. Theologically, Hushai is the immediate answer to David’s prayer. Politically, David seizes upon Hushai as the perfect instrument to thwart Ahitophel’s counsel, so from a certain point of view David is really answering his own prayer through his human initiative. Yet the encounter with Hushai at a place of worship leaves the lingering intimation that Hushai has been sent by God to David.
34. say to Absalom, “Your servant, O king, I will be.” David, passive to a fault in the preceding episodes, now improvises in the moment of crisis a detailed plan for subverting Absalom, even dictating to Hushai the exact script he is to use when he comes before the usurper.
35. are not Zadok and Abiathar the priests there with you? David is both offering encouragement to Hushai, assuring him that he will not be the sole, isolated undercover agent in Jerusalem, and indicating to him what every spy needs to know, that there will be a reliable network for transmitting intelligence to the command center for which the spy is working.
1And when David had crossed over a little beyond the summit, look, Ziba, Mephibosheth’s lad, was there to meet him, with a yoke of saddled donkeys and on them two hundred loaves of bread and a hundred raisin cakes and a hundred of summer fruit and a jug of wine. 2And the king said to Ziba, “What would you with these things?” And Ziba said, “The donkeys are for the king’s household to ride upon, and the bread and the summer fruit for the lads to eat, and the wine for the exhausted to drink in the wilderness.” 3And the king said, “And where is your master’s son?” And Ziba said to the king, “Why, he is staying in Jerusalem, for he has said, ‘Today the house of Israel will give back to me my father’s kingdom.’” 4And the king said to Ziba, “Look, everything of Mephibosheth’s is yours!” And Ziba said, “I am prostrate! May I find favor in your eyes, my lord the king.”
5And King David came as far as Bahurim, and, look, from there out came a man from the clan of the house of Saul, Shimei son of Gera was his name, and he came cursing. 6And he hurled stones at David and at all King David’s servants, and all the troops and all the warriors were at his right and at his left. 7And thus said Shimei as he cursed, “Get out, get out, you man of blood, you worthless fellow! 8The LORD has brought back upon you all the blood of the house of Saul, in whose place you became king, and the LORD has given the kingship into the hand of Absalom your son, and here you are, because of your evil, for you are a man of blood.” 9And Abishai son of Zeruiah said to the king, “Why should this dead dog curse my lord the king? Let me, pray, cross over and take off his head.” 10And the king said, “What do I have to do with you, O sons of Zeruiah? If he curses, it is because the LORD has said to him, ‘Curse David,’ and who can say, ‘Why have you done this?’” 11And David said to Abishai and to all his servants, “Look—my son, the issue of my loins, seeks my life. How much more so, then, this Benjaminite. Leave him be and let him curse, for the LORD has told him. 12Perhaps the LORD will see my affliction and the LORD may requite me good for his cursing this day.” 13And David, and his men with him, went off on the way, and Shimei was walking round the side of the mountain alongside him, cursing and hurling stones at him and flinging dirt. 14And the king came, and all the troops who were with him, exhausted, and took a breathing stop there. 15And Absalom and all the troops, the men of Israel, had come to Jerusalem, and Ahitophel was with him.
16And it happened when Hushai the Archite, David’s friend, came to Absalom, that Hushai said, “Long live the king, long live the king!” 17And Absalom said to Hushai, “Is this your loyalty to your friend? Why did you not go with your friend?” 18And Hushai said to Absalom, “On the contrary! Whom the LORD has chosen, and this people and every man of Israel—his I will be and with him I will stay. 19And, besides, whom should I serve? Should it not be his son? As I served your father, so will I be in your service.” 20And Absalom said to Ahitophel, “Give you counsel: what shall we do?” 21And Ahitophel said to Absalom, “Come to bed with your father’s concubines whom he left to watch over the house, and let all Israel hear that you have become repugnant to your father, and the hand of all who are with you will be strengthened.” 22And they pitched a tent for Absalom on the roof, and he came to bed with his father’s concubines before the eyes of all Israel. 23And the counsel of Ahitophel that he would give in those days was as one would inquire of an oracle of God, even so was every counsel of Ahitophel, for David and for Absalom as well.
CHAPTER 16 NOTES
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1. David had crossed over. The verbal motif of “crossing over,” which virtually defines David’s flight eastward from Jerusalem to trans-Jordan, is continued here. It will be given another odd turn in verse 17 when the bloody-minded Abishai volunteers to “cross over” and lop off Shimei’s head.
a little beyond the summit. The summit in question is of course the top of the Mount of Olives, where David has just encountered Hushai and sent him off to Jerusalem as an undercover agent. Polzin acutely observes that the two low points of David’s abasement—his humiliation by Shimei and the sexual possession of his concubines by his son—both take place on an elevation: near the summit and on the palace roof. The Hebrew term for summit used here is roʾsh, which is the ordinary word for “head,” and as Polzin goes on to note, “head” is an organizing image of the entire episode: David goes up the mountainside with his head uncovered in a sign of mourning, as do the people with him. Hushai puts dirt on his head as a related expression of mourning. Both Hushai and Ziba are encountered on or near the head of the mountain. Abishai is prepared to cut off Shimei’s head. And, as in other languages, head also designates political leader—an ironic verbal background to his moment when the head of all Israel has been displaced. Finally, Absalom’s usurpation will come to a violent end when his head—the narrator does not say hair—is caught in the branches of a tree.
2. for the king’s household. That is, for a couple of members of the king’s immediate family. David, it should be recalled, has set off on foot.
the exhausted. The Hebrew term ya ʿef—also, by metathesis, ʿayef, as in verse 14—straddles the two meanings of exhausted and famished.
3. And where is your master’s son? Mephibosheth, who is crippled in both legs, would scarcely have been up to joining the flight from Jerusalem. But David, overwhelmed by betrayals from within his own court, is suspicious of Mephibosheth’s absence, and it is clear that Ziba has been counting on this suspicion in his scheme to discredit Mephibosheth and take over his property. It is noteworthy that, at this late date, David still refers to Mephibosheth as “your master’s son,” still thinks of the long-dead Jonathan as Ziba’s real master.
Today the house of Israel will give back to me my father’s kingdom. There is no corroborating evidence in the story that Mephibosheth actually said these words. What in fact seems to be happening is that Ziba is flatly lying about his master in order to make himself appear to be the only loyal subject worthy of David’s benefactions, and of title to Saul’s property. The notion Ziba puts forth that Absalom would have turned over the throne to the surviving Saulide is highly improbable, but what he proposes to David is that the purportedly treacherous Mephibosheth sees in the general political upheaval of the rebellion an opportunity to reinstate the house of Saul.
5. as far as Bahurim. This is a village in the vicinity of Jerusalem on the eastern slope of the Mount of Olives.
6. and all the troops and all the warriors were at his right and at his left. Perhaps Shimei is counting on the abject mood of David and his men to guarantee his safety in this act of extreme provocation. Yet he is clearly playing a very dangerous game—the history of David’s warriors and of the sons of Zeruiah in particular as ruthless and implacable enemies is well-known to him, as the very language of his words of revilement attest. Only a great, pent-up rage against David, joined now with gloating over David’s being thrust from power, could explain Shimei’s act.
7. Get out, get out, you man of blood, you worthless fellow. The blood that, according to the narrative itself, David has on his hands is that of Uriah the Hittite, and of the fighting men of Israel who perished at Rabbath-Ammon with Uriah. But the Benjaminite Shimei clearly believes what David himself, and the narrative with him, has taken pains to refute—that the blood of the house of Saul is on David’s hands: Abner, Ish-Bosheth, and perhaps even Saul and Jonathan (for David was collaborating with the Philistine Achish when they fell at Gilboa). Hence the phrase Shimei hurls at David in his next sentence, “all the blood of the house of Saul, in whose place you became king,” suggesting a conjunction of murder and usurpation.
8. and here you are, because of your evil. Most translations understand the last phrase (a single word in the Hebrew) to mean “You are in evil circumstances,” but the prefix bet, which can mean “in,” also has a causal meaning, and that makes more sense here: David has come into dire straits, losing the throne, displaced by his own son, because of his own evil actions.
9. Why should this dead dog curse my lord the king? We have seen previously the idiomatic use of “dead dog” to mean the lowest of the low, David applying this designation to himself in his speech to Saul at Ein-Gedi. Here the polar contrast between “dead dog” and “my lord the king” is striking. But Abishai is also reviving the literal force of the idiom, since he proposes to deal swift death to the snarling Shimei. This is not the first time that Abishai has been prepared to kill someone on the spot: when he accompanied David into Saul’s camp (1 Samuel 26:8), he had to be restrained from his impulse to dispatch Saul with a single thrust of the spear.
10. If he curses, it is because the LORD has said to him, “Curse David.” This is one of the most astonishing turning points in this story that abounds in human surprises. The proud, canny, often implacable David here resigns himself to accepting the most stinging humiliation from a person he could easily have his men kill. David’s abasement is not a disguise, like Odysseus’s when he takes on the appearance of a beggar, but a real change in condition—from which, however, he will emerge in more than one surprising way. The acceptance of humiliation is a kind of fatalism: if someone commits such a sacrilegious act against the man who is God’s anointed king, it must be because God has decreed it. Behind that fatalism may be a sense of guilt: I am suffering all this because of what I have done, for taking Bathsheba and murdering her husband, for my inaction in Amnon’s rape of Tamar and Absalom’s murder of Amnon. The guilt is coupled with despair: as David goes on to say, When my own son is trying to kill me, what difference could it make if this man of a rival tribe, who at least has political grounds for hostility toward me, should revile me?
13. cursing and hurling stones at him and flinging dirt. It is with this image that the episode concludes—Shimei walking along, angrily persisting in his insults, the dirt flung a material equivalent of the words uttered.
14. came. Some indication of where he came seems to be required. One version of the Septuagint supplies “to the Jordan” as the answer. That would be a plausible stopping place.
15. And Absalom … had come to Jerusalem, and Ahitophel was with him. This brief switch of narrative tracks, in a pluperfect verbal form, lays the ground for the fateful clash of counsels between Ahitophel and Hushai and also provides the necessary indication that David and his people have succeeded in fleeing a good many miles to the east by the time Absalom’s forces enter the city.
16. David’s friend. As we have noted, reaʿ, “friend” or “companion,” is a court title, but when Absalom uses it, he leans on the ordinary sense of friendship.
Long live the king. Fokkelman nicely observes that “what he particularly does not say is ‘long live King Absalom.’” Thus, in a dramatic irony evident to the audience of the story and of course concealed from Absalom, Hushai is really wishing long life to his king—David. And again in his response to Absalom’s question about his disloyalty to David, he avoids the use of Absalom’s name in a sentence that he secretly applies to David: “Whom the LORD has chosen … his I will be and with him I will stay.”
19. And, besides, whom should I serve? Should it not be his son? Only now does Hushai invoke the line of explanation that David instructed him to use when he came before Absalom.
20. Give you counsel. Both the verb and the ethical dative “you” are in the plural, though Absalom is said to be speaking to Ahitophel. Shimon Bar-Efrat proposes that the language implies Absalom is addressing both Ahitophel and Hushai, although it is from Ahitophel as his official advisor that he expects to receive counsel. The plural forms, then, suggest that Absalom has been persuaded by Hushai and has accepted him into his circle of court councillors. That inference helps make sense of the immediately following encounter in which both men appear as members of Absalom’s national security council.
21. Come to bed with your father’s concubines. Cohabiting with the sexual consorts of a ruler is an assertion of having taken over all his prerogatives of dominion. Ahitophel’s shrewd counsel especially addresses the effect on public opinion of the action proposed: after it, no one will be able to imagine a reconciliation between Absalom and his father (“let all Israel hear that you have become repugnant to your father”), and so the hand of Absalom’s supporters will be strengthened, for no one will hedge his support, thinking that David and Absalom will somehow come to terms.
22. he came to bed with his father’s concubines before the eyes of all Israel. The tent on the roof ensures sexual privacy, but Absalom’s entering into it with each of the women is a public display of the act of cohabitation. Either this is to be accepted as an unrealistic event, given that there are ten concubines, or Absalom is supposed to be not only beautiful and hirsute but also a sexual athlete. His act, of course, is a fulfillment of Nathan’s dire curse in chapter 12. As several commentators have noted, the usurper’s sexual transgression of David’s women takes place on the very palace roof from which his father first looked lustfully at Bathsheba.
23. the counsel of Ahitophel … was as one would inquire of an oracle of God. This quasireligious trust in Ahitophel’s counsel is obviously from the point of view of those who seek it, there being a sour irony in likening the sordid, if pragmatic, counsel to have sex with the king’s concubines to a divine oracle. In any event, this observation throws a retrospective light on David’s disturbance over the news that Ahitophel was among the conspirators and his prayer to God to confound Ahitophel’s counsel (15:31). Ahitophel, it seems, is a kind of Israelite Metternich or Bismarck, and David fears that in losing him he has lost a vital strategic resource. The canniness of Ahitophel’s military advice will be evident in his clash with Hushai.
1And Ahitophel said to Absalom, “Let me pick, pray, twelve thousand men, and let me rise and pursue David tonight. 2And let me come upon him when he is tired and slack-handed, and I shall panic him, and all the troops who are with him will flee, and I shall strike down the king alone. 3And let me turn back all the troops to you, for it is one man you seek, and all the troops will be at peace.” 4And the thing seemed right in the eyes of Absalom and in the eyes of all the elders of Israel. 5And Absalom said, “Call, pray, to Hushai the Archite, too, and let us hear what he, too, has to say.” 6And Hushai came to Absalom, and Absalom said to him, saying, “In the following manner Ahitophel has spoken. Shall we act on his word? If not, you must speak.” 7And Hushai said to Absalom, “The counsel that Ahitophel has given is not good this time.” 8And Hushai said, “You yourself know of your father and his men that they are warriors and that they are bitter men, like a bear in the field bereaved of its young. And your father is a seasoned fighter and he will not spend the night with the troops. 9Look, he will now be hiding in some hollow or some other place, and it will happen when they fall from the very first that he who hears of it will say, ‘There’s a rout among the troops who follow Absalom.’ 10And though he be a valiant fellow whose heart is like the heart of a lion, he will surely quail, for all Israel knows that your father is a warrior, and valiant men are those who are with him. 11And so I counsel you—let all Israel gather round you, from Dan to Beersheba, multitudinous as the sand that is on the seashore, and you in person will go forward into battle. 12And we shall come upon him in whatever place that he may be, and we shall light upon him as the dew falls upon the ground, and not a single one will be left of all the men who are with him. 13And should he withdraw into a town, all Israel will bear ropes to the town and haul it away to the wadi until not a stone remains there.” 14And Absalom said, and every man of Israel with him, “The counsel of Hushai the Archite is better than the counsel of Ahitophel.” And the LORD had ordained to overturn Ahitophel’s good counsel in order for the LORD to bring evil upon Absalom.
15And Hushai said to Zadok and to Abiathar the priests, “Such-and-such did Ahitophel counsel Absalom and the elders of Israel, and such-and-such I on my part counseled. 16And now, send quickly and inform David, saying, ‘Spend not the night in the steppes of the wilderness, but rather cross over onward, lest disaster engulf the king and all the troops who are with him.’” 17And Jonathan and Ahimaaz were stationed at Ein-Rogel, and the slavegirl would go and inform them and they would go and inform King David, for they could not be seen coming into the town. 18And a lad saw them and informed Absalom, and the two of them went quickly and came to the house of a man in Bahurim who had a well in his courtyard, and they went down into it. 19And the woman took a cloth and stretched it over the mouth of the well and spread groats on top of it, so that nothing could be noticed. 20And Absalom’s servants came to the woman in the house and said, “Where are Ahimaaz and Jonathan?” And she said to them, “They’ve crossed over past the water reservoir.” And they searched and they found nothing and they went back to Jerusalem. 21And it happened after they had gone that Ahimaaz and Jonathan came up from the well and went and informed King David, and they said to David, “Rise and cross over the water quickly, for thus has Ahitophel counseled against you.” 22And David rose, and all the troops with him, and they crossed over the Jordan. By the light of morning not a single one was missing who had not crossed over the Jordan.
23And Ahitophel saw that his counsel was not acted on, and he saddled his donkey and arose and went to his home to his town, and he left a charge for his household, and he hanged himself and died. And he was buried in the tomb of his father. 24And David had come to Mahanaim when Absalom crossed over the Jordan, he and every man of Israel with him. 25And Absalom had placed Amasa instead of Joab over the army, and Amasa was the son of a man named Ithra the Ishmaelite, who had come to bed with Abigail daughter of Jesse, sister of Zeruiah, Joab’s mother. 26And Israel and Absalom camped in the land of Gilead. 27And it happened when David came to Mahanaim that Shobi son of Nahash from Rabbath-Ammon and Machir son of Amiel from Lo-Debar and Barzillai the Gileadite from Rogelim 28brought couches and basins and earthenware, and wheat and barley and flour and parched grain and beans and lentils 29and honey and curds from the flock and cheese from the herd. These they offered to David and the troops with him to eat, for they thought, “The troops are hungry and exhausted and thirsty in the wilderness.”
CHAPTER 17 NOTES
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1. Let me pick … twelve thousand men … and pursue David tonight. Ahitophel not only offers counsel but proposes to undertake the command of the expedition himself, in striking contrast to Hushai, who begins with a lengthy descriptive statement and then uses a third-person verbal form (verse 11, “let all Israel gather round you”) to express his recommended course of action. It seems as though the urgent Ahitophel has taken on the attribute of his rival’s name, which carries the verb ḥush, “hurry.”
2. let me come upon him when he is tired and slack-handed. This is, of course, very sound advice: David and his men are in fact fatigued from their flight to the banks of the Jordan (16:14), and are likely to be vulnerable to a surprise attack.
I shall strike down the king alone. Ahitophel seeks to avoid a protracted civil war: if he can panic David’s forces into a general retreat, the death of David will then put an end to the opposition, and his troops are likely to transfer their loyalty to Absalom. The image of one man struck down as the troops flee may ironically echo David’s plan for doing away with Uriah.
3. for it is one man you seek. The Masoretic Text has three simple Hebrew words here that make no sense as a syntactic sequence: keshuv hakol haʾish (“as-return all the-man”). Many modern interpreters follow the Septuagint, which rearranges the Hebrew letters to read keshuv kalah leʾishah, “as a bride returns to her husband.” But, as Bar-Efrat contends, this would be a strange image for the movement of troops to the opposite side and it would violate the pointedly unmetaphoric, businesslike character of Ahitophel’s language, which stands in sharp contrast to Hushai’s elaborately figurative rhetoric of persuasion. This translation therefore adopts Bar-Efrat’s proposal that keshuv hakol is an inadvertent scribal repetition of weʾashiva kol (“let me turn back all”) at the beginning of the verse; that phrase is omitted here, and ʾish ʾeḥad, “one man,” is presumed instead of haʾish ʾasher, “the man who.”
4. the elders of Israel. This term clearly designates an official group, a kind of royal council. Ahitophel, addressing this group, acts as national security advisor.
5. Hushai the Archite, too. Although Hushai does not have Ahitophel’s official standing, he has sufficiently won Absalom’s trust that the usurper is at least curious to see whether Hushai will concur with Ahitophel. This will prove to be a fatal error.
7. not good this time. Shrewdly, Hushai begins by implicity conceding that as a rule Ahitophel’s counsel is good—but in this specific instance, the trusty advisor has exhibited a lapse in judgment.
8. And Hushai said. Absalom is silent, astounded that anyone should deny the self-evident rightness of Ahitophel’s counsel. So the formula for introducing direct discourse, according to the biblical convention, must be repeated, and now Hushai launches upon his cunningly devised argument.
You yourself know. Hushai’s opening rhetorical move is to flatter his interlocutor: I hardly have to tell you what you yourself well know, that your father is a very dangerous adversary who cannot be attacked impulsively, without proper preparation.
warriors … bitter men … like a bear in the field … a seasoned fighter. Hushai uses language that, as Bar-Efrat and others have noted, recapitulates a series of moments from the earlier story of David. What he is doing in effect is invoking the legend of the heroic David, who as a boy slew bear and lion (compare the lion simile in verse 10), and who gathered round him bitter men, warriors, seasoned fighters.
he will not spend the night with the troops. This image of David as the constantly wakeful, elusive guerilla leader scarcely accords with the figure David has cut in the last several years of reported narrative—sleeping through the long afternoon while his army fights in Ammon, sedentary in his palace while internecine struggle goes on between his own children.
9. he will now be hiding in some hollow or some other place. Hushai’s rather vague language once again evokes the time when David was a fugitive from Saul, hiding in caves and wildernesses.
when they fall from the very first. The unspecified subject of the verb—actually emended by some as “the troops”—clearly refers to Absalom’s forces: ambushed by the wily David, they will quickly panic.
10. he will surely quail. The literal meaning of the Hebrew is “he will surely melt.”
11. multitudinous as the sand … on the seashore. This traditional simile is used to convey the idea that only overwhelmingly superior numbers, achieved through a general (and time-consuming!) conscription, can prevail against so formidable a foe as David.
12. we shall light upon him as the dew falls upon the ground. Hushai, as Fokkleman has observed, pairs the traditional simile of the sands of the seashore with a more innovative, yet related simile of dew on the field. The dew falls silently, effortlessly, and this is how this huge army will “light upon” David’s forces. Dew, elsewhere an image of peacetime blessing, is here associated with destruction.
not a single one will be left of all the men who are with him. Ahitophel proposed a strategy through which it might be possible to kill David alone and then to enlist the support of his followers. Hushai’s counsel is to annihilate David’s forces, a much more violent means of preventing civil war. The bloodthirsty alternative evidently appeals to something in Absalom, who is unwilling to trust the future loyalty of the troops who have remained with David.
13. should he withdraw into a town. This little addendum to Hushai’s scenario is intended to anticipate an obvious objection to it: the recommended course of action would give David time to pull back his forces to a strong defensive position in a fortified town. Hushai’s counterargument is that with so huge an army, Absalom’s people could easily take down the walls of the town stone by stone.
14. The counsel of Hushai … is better than the counsel of Ahitophel. This entire episode turns on an ingenious reversal of values. The straight-talking, clear-seeing advisor is defeated by the lying secret agent who musters the resources of a figurative, psychologically manipulative rhetoric to achieve his ends. Yet it is the master of deception who serves the forces of legitimacy while the plain dealer looks out for the interests of a usurper and would-be parricide.
the LORD had ordained to overturn Ahitophel’s good counsel. This theological explanation can be viewed as adding an overarching perspective, or as merely secondary, to the thoroughly human machinations of Hushai, instigated by David.
16. And now, send quickly and inform David. Although Zadok and Abiathar presumably know that Absalom has chosen to follow Hushai’s counsel, they appear to be nervous that he may change his mind and implement Ahitophel’s strategy, for they urge David not to waste a moment but to flee eastward across the Jordan.
17. Ein-Rogel. The site of this village has not been confidently identified, but it would have to be near Jerusalem to the east.
18. the house of a man in Bahurim. This village on the eastern slope of the Mount of Olives is the hometown of Shimei, who cursed David. What appears to be reflected is a political reality in which the populace is divided between loyalists and supporters of the usurper.
19. And the woman took a cloth. The woman is evidently the wife of the man from Bahurim (the same Hebrew word means both “woman” and “wife,” like femme in French and Frau in German). This is still another instance in the David story in which the enterprising intervention of a shrewd woman saves the day. As has often been noted, this moment alludes to the story told in Joshua 2 of Rahab the harlot, who hides the two spies sent out to Jericho by Joshua. In Joshua, the spies are hidden up above, in the roof thatch; here they hide below in the well. There may be a certain agricultural affinity between the covering of thatch and the cloth covered with groats (if that is what the anomalous Hebrew rifot means) under which the pairs of spies hide. In any case, the destruction of all the men of Jericho who sought Joshua’s spies foreshadows the destruction of Absalom’s army.
20. They’ve crossed over past the water reservoir. Rahab, too, gives the pursuers false directions about where the spies have gone. Here, the thematically crucial “cross over” is again invoked. The meaning of mikhal, the word rendered here as “reservoir,” is a little doubtful, though it could be derived from a verbal root that means “to contain.”
21. cross over the water quickly, for thus has Ahitophel counseled against you. The two couriers now assume the worst-case scenario, that Ahitophel’s counsel will after all be followed. The reference to crossing over the water is a clear indication that David is encamped on the west bank of the Jordan.
23. he saddled his donkey and arose and went to his home to his town, and he left a charge for his household, and he hanged himself. This haunting notice of Ahitophel’s suicide shows him a deliberate, practical man to the very end, making all the necessary arrangements for his family and being sure to do away with himself in his hometown, where he knows he will be readily buried in the ancestral tomb. Ahitophel kills himself not only because, in quasi-Japanese fashion, he has lost face, but also out of sober calculation: he realizes that Hushai’s counsel will enable David to defeat Absalom, and with the old king returned to the throne, an archtraitor like Ahitophel will surely face death. Thus, in tying the noose around his own neck, he anticipates the executioner’s sword.
24. Mahanaim. This is an Israelite walled city in trans-Jordan.
25. Ithra the Ishmaelite. There are two different problems with the identification of Amasa’s progenitors in the Masoretic Text. The Masoretic version has “Israelite,” but this national label (rather than identification by tribe) would be strange here, and the same Ithra in 1 Chronicles 2:17—called there, in a variant of the name, Jether—is said, more plausibly, to be the son of an Ishmaelite. The fact that the father is a member of another national-ethnic group accords with the report that he “had come to bed with Abigail,” for that sexual term by no means necessarily implies marriage. The Masoretic Text makes Nahash, an Ammonite, Abigail’s father, but it looks as though that name may have drifted into this verse in scribal transcription from verse 27. 1 Chronicles 2 more plausibly reports that Jesse was Abigail’s father. She would then be the sister of David and of Zeruiah, Joab’s mother; and so Amasa and Joab, the two army commanders, are first cousins, and both of them David’s nephews.
28. beans and lentils. The received text adds “and parched grain” at the end of the list, an apparent scribal duplication of the word that occurs just before “beans and lentils.” This detailed catalogue of vitally needed victuals, preceded by the utensils required to serve them and something like bedrolls, is a vivid expression of loyalty to David’s beleaguered forces on the part of the trans-Jordanian Israelites and their Ammonite vassals. Barzillai’s faithfulness will be singled out when David returns.
29. curds from the flock. This reflects a very minor emendation of the Masoretic Text, which says “curds and flock.” In the next phrase, the Hebrew word for “cheese” (shefot) has no precedent but is usually understood as cheese because of the alimentary context and the likely root of the word.
1And David marshaled the troops that were with him and set over them commanders of thousands and commanders of hundreds. 2And David sent out the troops—a third under Joab and a third under Abishai son of Zeruiah, Joab’s brother, and a third under Ittai the Gittite. And the king said to the troops, “I, too, will surely sally forth with you.” 3And the troops said, “You shall not sally forth. For if we must flee, they will pay us no mind, and should half of us die, they will pay us no mind, for you are like ten thousand of us, and so it is better that you be a help for us from the town.” 4And the king said to them, “Whatever is good in your eyes I shall do.” And the king stood by the gate and all the troops sallied forth by their hundreds and their thousands. 5And the king charged Joab and Abishai and Ittai, saying, “Deal gently for me with the lad Absalom.” And all the troops heard when the king charged the commanders concerning Absalom. 6And the troops sallied forth to the field to meet Israel, and the battle took place in the forest of Ephraim. 7And the troops of Israel were routed there by David’s servants, and great was the slaughter there, twenty thousand. 8And the battle spread out over all the countryside, and the forest devoured more of the troops than the sword devoured on that day. 9And Absalom chanced to be in front of David’s servants, Absalom riding on his mule, and the mule came under the tangled branches of a great terebinth, and his head caught in the terebinth, and he dangled between heaven and earth, while the mule which was beneath him passed on. 10And a certain man saw and informed Joab and said, “Look, I saw Absalom dangling from the terebinth.” 11And Joab said to the man informing him, “And look, you saw, and why did you not strike him to the ground there, and I would have had to give you ten pieces of silver and a belt?” 12And the man said to Joab, “Even were I to heft in my palms a thousand pieces of silver, I would not reach out my hand against the king’s son, for within our hearing the king charged you and Abishai and Ittai, saying, ‘Watch for me over the lad Absalom.’ 13Otherwise, I would have wrought falsely with my own life, and nothing can be concealed from the king, while you would have stood aloof.” 14And Joab said, “Not so will I wait for you!” And he took three sticks in his palm and he thrust them into Absalom’s heart, still alive in the heart of the terebinth. 15And ten lads, Joab’s armor bearers, pulled round and struck down Absalom and put him to death. 16And Joab sounded the ram’s horn, and the troops came back from pursuing Israel, for Joab held back the troops. 17And they took Absalom and flung him into the big hollow in the forest, and they heaped up over it a very big mound of stones. And all Israel had fled, each to his tent.
18And Absalom had taken and heaped up a cairn for himself in his lifetime, which is in the Valley of the King, for he said, “I have no son to make my name remembered.” And he called the cairn after his name, and it is called Absalom’s Monument to this day.
19And Ahimaaz son of Zadok had said, “Let me run, pray, and bear tidings to the king that the LORD has done him justice against his enemies.” 20And Joab said to him, “You are no man of tidings this day. You may bear tidings on another day, but this day you shall bear no tidings, for the king’s son is dead.” 21And Joab said to the Cushite “Go, inform the king of what you have seen,” and the Cushite bowed down before Joab and ran off. 22And Ahimaaz son of Zadok once again said to Joab, “Whatever may be, let me, too, pray, run after the Cushite.” And Joab said, “Why should you run, my son, when yours are not welcome tidings?” 23“Whatever may be, I will run!” And he said to him, “Run.” And Ahimaaz ran by the way of the Plain, and he overtook the Cushite.
24And David was sitting between the gates, and the lookout went up on the roof of the gate on the wall, and he raised his eyes and saw and, look, a man was running alone. 25And the lookout called and told the king, and the king said, “If he’s alone, there are tidings in his mouth.” And he came on, drawing nearer. 26And the lookout saw another man running, and the lookout called to the gatekeeper and said, “Look, a man is running alone.” And the king said, “This one, too, bears tidings.” 27And the lookout said, “I see the running of the first one as the running of Ahimaaz son of Zadok,” and the king said, “He is a good man and with good tidings he must come.” 28And Ahimaaz called out and said to the king, “All is well.” And he bowed down to the king, his face to the ground, and he said, “Blessed is the LORD your God Who has delivered over the men who raised their hand against my lord the king.” 29And the king said, “Is it well with the lad Absalom?” And Ahimaaz said, “I saw a great crowd to send the king’s servant Joab, and your servant, and I know not what …” 30And the king said, “Turn aside, stand by!” And he turned aside and took his place. 31And, look, the Cushite had come and the Cushite said, “Let my lord the king receive the tidings that the LORD has done you justice against all who rose against you.” 32And the king said to the Cushite, “Is it well with the lad Absalom?” And the Cushite said, “May the enemies of my lord the king be like the lad, and all who have risen against you for evil!”
CHAPTER 18 NOTES
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2. I, too, will surely sally forth with you. The aging David, as we have had occasion to note (see the second comment on 11:1), has long been a sedentary monarch rather than a field commander. In the present crisis, he imagines he can rise again to his old role, but the troops, who diplomatically make no reference to age or infirmity, clearly recognize he is not up to it.
3. should half of us die, they will pay us no mind. Like Ahitophel, the troops assume that the real object of Absalom’s attack is David. But they essentially propose an opposite scenario to Absalom’s: David will remain safe inside the fortified town, well behind the lines, while the troops—not panicked, as Ahitophel would have had it, but strategically deployed—will do battle against Absalom’s army.
for you are like ten thousand of us. This is the reading of numerous Hebrew manuscripts and the Septuagint and Vulgate. The Masoretic Text reads “for now we are like ten thousand.”
4. the king stood by the gate. J. P. Fokkelman has noted a wry correspondence here with the beginning of Absalom’s usurpation, when he took a stance by the gate of the city and accosted each man who came by in order to enlist him to his cause.
5. Deal gently. This is the time-honored and eloquent rendering of the King James Version. But some philologists derive the rare verb here from a root that means “to cover” and hence construe it in context as “protect.” This construction would make it a closer synonym of the verb used in the soldier’s repetition of David’s injunction in verse 12, “watch over.”
7. the troops of Israel were routed there. The elision of the precise details of the battle is entirely consistent with the narrative treatment of battles elsewhere in the Bible. One may assume that the three divisions of seasoned fighters, led by their experienced commanders, attacked the Israelite army from three different sides, panicking it into disorderly flight—an outcome indicated in the “devouring” forest, where presumably the fleeing soldiers lost their way, stumbled, became entangled in the undergrowth, perhaps even slashed at each other in the dark of the wood. Throughout this episode, Absalom’s forces are “Israel” and David’s are his “servants.” The former are numerically superior, but they behave like a poorly organized conscript army facing professional soldiers.
9. his head caught in the terebinth, and he dangled between heaven and earth, while the mule which was beneath him passed on. This striking and bizarre image of Absalom’s penultimate moment provides a brilliant symbolic summation of his story. Most obviously, the head of hair that was his narcissistic glory is now the instrument of his fatal entrapment, Absalom the commander microcosmically enacting the fate of his army “devoured” by the forest. There is nothing supernatural here—David’s forces have shrewdly taken advantage of the irregular terrain—yet there is a sense that nature is conspiring against Absalom and his men. The mule is in this period the usual mount for princes and kings (one should recall that all the king’s sons ride away on their mules after Absalom has Amnon killed), so Absalom’s losing his mule from under him is an image of his losing his royal seat. Having climbed from exile and rejection to the throne, he now dangles helplessly between sky and earth. The mule’s “passing on” (ʿavar), as Polzin notes, picks up the key verb (“cross over”) that has characterized David’s flight from the royal city. Fokkelman brilliantly shows that there is also a whole series of contrastive parallels between Absalom’s fate and that of his councillor Ahitophel: “The councillor rides calmly on his ass to his home while the prince is abandoned by his mule, a fatal loss. He is thrown into an unknown, nameless and ignominious grave while Ahitophel is ‘buried in his father’s grave’… . With all these contrasts, they have one detail in common: both finally hang.”
he dangled. The Masoretic Text has “he was given,” but ancient translations into Aramaic, Syriac, Greek, and Latin, now confirmed by the Qumran Samuel scroll, read “dangled,” a difference of a single consonant in the Hebrew.
11. And look, you saw. The contemptuous Joab throws the soldier’s own words back into his face: if that’s what you really saw, why didn’t you have the brains to finish him off on the spot and get the reward I would have given you? Joab, in his unflinching resolution to kill Absalom in defiance of David’s explicit orders to the contrary, remains the consummately calculating political man—something David once was but no longer is. When Joab thought it was politically prudent to reconcile David with Absalom, he took elaborate steps to achieve that end. Now he realizes that an Absalom allowed to survive is likely to be a source of future political dissension and that the only sure way to eliminate this threat is Absalom’s death.
12. were I to heft in my palms a thousand pieces of silver. The soldier responds to Joab’s contempt with righteous indignation, multiplying the hypothetical reward a hundredfold and turning the general act of giving silver into a concrete hefting of its weight in order to express how sacred he holds the king’s injunction, which, we now see, has in fact been heard by “all the troops” (verse 5).
14. he took three sticks in his palm. Over against the soldier’s palms hyperbolically hefting a thousand pieces of silver, Joab’s palm grasps a blunt instrument of violence. The Hebrew shevatim means “sticks,” not “darts,” as it is often translated, and had they been darts, the blow would surely have been fatal. On the contrary, it seems probable that Joab’s intention is not to kill the prince—after all, this military man is an experienced killer—but rather to stun him and hurt him badly, and then to spread the responsibility for the death by ordering the warriors to finish him off. Fokkelman proposes that the three sticks jibe with the three divisions of the army, so that Joab performs a deliberately symbolic act, “executing the rebellious prince on behalf of the whole army.”
into Absalom’s heart, still alive in the heart of the terebinth. The two hearts, one a vulnerable human organ, the other the dense of center of the tangle of branches, produce an unsettling effect.
15. lads. The Hebrew ne‘arim, “lads,” in its sense of elite fighting men, rings dissonantly against David’s repeated paternal designation of Absalom as na‘ar, “lad.”
16. sounded. The Hebrew reflects an untranslatable pun because the verb taqa‘, “to make a piercing sound with a horn,” also means to thrust or stab, and is the word just used to report Joab’s blow to the heart.
17. the big hollow. An alternative rendering is “pit,” but “hollow” is used here to preserve the verbal identity in the Hebrew between this moment and Hushai’s imaginary description in chapter 17 of David’s hiding in “one of the hollows.” To be flung into a hole in the field and covered with a heap of stones is a shameful burial.
18. Absalom had … heaped up a cairn. This brief notice, in the pluperfect tense, draws a pointed contrast with Absalom’s ignominious grave. The same verb, “to heap up,” is used for both, and the cairn, or commemorative pile of stones (not a “pillar”) is the grandiose image that is transformed into the pile of stones over Absalom’s body.
I have no son to make my name remembered. Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, with reference to both its David figure and its Absalom figure, beautifully catches the pathos of these words. Those who have sought to harmonize this verse with 14:27, where Absalom is said to have fathered three sons, propose that the sons died, their early death explaining why they are left unnamed.
21. the Cushite. This Nubian is the third foreign messenger introduced into the story (the other two are the Egyptian slave who informs David of the whereabouts of the Amalekite raiding party and the Amalekite who reports Saul’s death to David). Joab appears to exhibit a certain paternal concern for Ahimaaz, a priest and a faithful agent of David’s during the insurrection—in the next verse he addresses him as “my son.” Joab is keenly aware that David has in the past shown himself capable of killing the bearer of ill tidings in a fit of rage, and so the commander prefers to let a foreigner take the risk.
22. yours are not welcome tidings. The Hebrew—literally, “finding tidings”—is anomalous, and has inspired both emendation and excessively ingenious interpretation. The immediate context suggests “welcome” as the most plausible meaning, and this could easily be an idiom for which there are no other occurrences in the biblical corpus, which, after all, provides only a small sampling of ancient Hebrew usage. In fact, these two words, besorah motseiʾt, could well be an idiomatic ellipsis for besorah motseiʾt ḥen, “tidings finding favor (in his eyes).”
23. by the way of the Plain. The Plain in question is the Jordan Valley on the east side of the river. Some have suggested that Ahimaaz overtakes the Cushite not by speed but by running along a flatter, if less direct, route in the Jordan Valley riverbed, but verses 25–27 indicate that Ahimaaz outruns the Cushite.
24. David was sitting between the gates. Walled cities in ancient Israel and environs often had double walls, with an inner and outer gate and a small plaza between them. Moshe Garsiel neatly observes that David’s ambivalence about the armed struggle is spatially figured by his physical location: he wanted to sally forth with the army; the troops wanted him within the town; he stations himself in between. Before the battle he stood by the gate; now he is seated by the gate, awaiting the news from the front—as Polzin notes, exactly like Eli, who is told of the death of his two sons.
the lookout went up on the roof of the gate … and he raised his eyes and saw. This moment is quite exceptional, and striking, in representing the arrival of the two messengers visually, from the perspective of the lookout on the wall reporting to David down below in the gate plaza. David’s troubles with all his sons, it should be remembered, began when he himself looked down from a roof and saw a woman bathing.
25. If he’s alone, there are tidings in his mouth. A solitary runner is likely to be a courier. Soldiers, whether in retreat or maneuvering, would travel in groups.
27. He is a good man and with good tidings he must come. This obvious non sequitur suggests that the desperately anxious David is grasping at straws. In fact, as revelatory dialogue, it shows us just how desperate he feels.
28. All is well. This is one word in the Hebrew, shalom. That word is the last two syllables of Absalom’s name in Hebrew, ʾAvshalom, a link David will reinforce when he nervously asks, “Is it well [shalom] with the lad Absalom [ʾAvshalom]?”
Who has delivered over the men who raised their hands against my LORD the king. Ahimaaz hastens to report, in terms that express both his Israelite piety and his loyalty to the king, the general defeat of the usurper’s army. He of course says nothing of Absalom’s fate.
29. Is it well with the lad Absalom? This seems to be David’s overriding concern, not the military victory. Again and again, he insists on the term of affection, “lad,” for the rebel son who would have killed him. The tension between his political role, which, as Joab understood, requires Absalom’s destruction, and his paternal role is painfully palpable. In this connection, it is noteworthy that David, so much the emotionally vulnerable father here, is consistently referred to as “the king,” not as “David.”
I saw a great crowd to send the king’s servant. This is nearly gibberish but not because of any corruption of the text. Ahimaaz has been posed a question he does not dare answer, and so he begins to talk nervously and incoherently (“and I know not what …”).
30. Turn aside, stand by. David, realizing he is unlikely to extract anything from the babbling Ahimaaz, decides to wait and interrogate the second messenger, whose arrival is imminent.
31. Let my lord the king receive the tidings. The Cushite is considerably more brusque than his predecessor. He does not begin with a reassuring “All is well.” There is no indication of his bowing down before the king. He proceeds quickly to the report of the victory, and though the language of that report approximately parallels Ahimaaz’s language, it is briefer, and ends with “against you” instead of the more deferential “against my lord the king.”
32. May the enemies of my LORD the king be like the lad. The Cushite promptly and clearly responds by reporting Absalom’s death, although even he has enough sense to phrase it indirectly, neither mentioning Absalom by name nor using the word “died.” In referring to the usurper as “the lad,” he is quoting David, but without having picked up the crucial cue of David’s paternal feelings reflected in the word. He blithely assumes that because Absalom was at the head of “all who have risen against” the king, the news of his death will be welcome. It strikes exactly the right note that the Cushite’s very last word is “evil” (or, “harm”).
1And the king was shaken. And he went up to the upper room over the gate and he wept, and thus he said as he went, “My son, Absalom! My son, my son, Absalom! Would that I had died in your stead! Absalom, my son, my son!” 2And it was told to Joab, “Look, the king is weeping and he is grieving over Absalom.” 3And the victory on that day turned into mourning for all the troops, for the troops had heard on that day, saying, “The king is pained over his son.” 4And the troops stole away on that day to come to the town as troops disgraced in their flight from the battle would steal away. 5And the king covered his face, and the king cried out with a loud voice, “My son, Absalom! Absalom, my son, my son!” 6And Joab came to the king within the house and said, “You have today shamed all your servants who have saved your life today and the lives of your sons and daughters and the lives of your wives and the lives of your concubines, 7to love those who hate you and to hate those who love you. For you have said today that you have no commanders or servants. For I know today that were Absalom alive and all of us today dead, then would it have been right in your eyes! 8And now, rise, go out, and speak to the heart of your servants. For by the LORD I have sworn, if you go not out, that not a man shall spend the night with you, and this will be a greater evil for you than any evil that has befallen you from your youth until now.” 9And the king arose and sat in the gate, and to all the troops they told, saying, “Look, the king is sitting in the gate.” And all the troops came before the king, while Israel had fled each man to his tent.
10And all the people were deliberating throughout the tribes of Israel, saying, “The king rescued us from the clutches of our enemies and he saved us from the clutches of the Philistines, but now he has fled the land before Absalom, 11and Absalom, whom we anointed over us, has died in battle. And now why do you not speak up to bring back the king?” 12And King David had sent to Zadok and to Abiathar the priests, saying, “Speak to the elders of Judah, saying, ‘Why should you be the last to bring back the king to his house when the word of all Israel has come to the king regarding his house? 13You are my brothers. You are my bone and my flesh, and why should you be the last to bring back the king?’ 14And to Amasa you shall say, ‘Are you not my bone and my flesh? So may the LORD do to me, and even more, if you will not be commander of the army before me for all time instead of Joab,’” 15And he inclined the heart of all the men of Judah as a single man, and they sent to the king: “Come back, you and all your servants.”
16And the king turned back, and he came to the Jordan, and Judah had come to Gilgal to go to meet the king to bring the king across the Jordan. 17And Shimei son of Gera the Benjaminite from Bahurim hastened and went down with the men of Judah to meet King David. 18And a thousand men were with him from Benjamin, and Ziba, the lad of the house of Saul and his fifteen sons and his twenty slaves with him, and they rushed down to the Jordan before the king. 19And as the crossing over was going on, to bring across the king’s household and to do what was good in his eyes, Shimei son of Gera flung himself before the king as he was crossing the Jordan 20and he said to the king, “Let not my lord reckon it a crime, and do not remember the perverse thing your servant did on the day my lord the king went out from Jerusalem, that the king should pay it mind. 21For your servant knows that it was I who offended, and, look, I have come today first of all the house of Joseph to go down to meet my lord the king.” 22And Abishai son of Zeruiah spoke out and said, “For this should not Shimei be put to death? For he cursed the LORD’s anointed.” 23And David said, “What do I have to do with you, sons of Zeruiah, that you should become my adversary today? Should today a man of Israel be put to death? For I surely know that today I am king over Israel.” 24And the king said to Shimei, “You shall not die.” And the king swore to him.
25And Mephibosheth son of Saul had come down to meet the king, and he had not dressed his feet or trimmed his moustache, and his garments he had not laundered from the day the king had gone until the day he came back safe and sound. 26And it happened when he came from Jerusalem to meet the king, that the king said to him, “Why did you not go with me, Mephibosheth?” 27And he said, “My lord the king! My servant deceived me. For your servant thought, ‘I’ll saddle me the donkey and ride on it and go with the king,’ for your servant is lame. 28And he slandered your servant to my lord the king, and my lord the king is like a messenger of God, and do what is good in your eyes. 29For all my father’s house are but men marked for death to my lord the king, yet you set your servant among those who eat at your table. And what right still do I have to cry out still in appeal to the king?” 30And the king said to him, “Why should you still speak your words? I say—you and Ziba shall divide the field.” 31And Mephibosheth said to the king, “Let him even take all, seeing that my lord the king has come safe and sound to his house.”
32And Barzillai the Gileadite had come down from Rogelim, and he crossed over the Jordan with the king to send him off from the Jordan. 33And Barzillai was very aged, eighty years old, and he had provided for the king during his stay in Mahanaim, for he was a very wealthy man. 34And the king said to Barzillai, “You, cross over with me, and I shall provide for you by me in Jerusalem.” 35And Barzillai said to the king, “How many are the days of the years of my life that I should go up with the king to Jerusalem? 36Eighty years old I am today. Do I know between good and evil? Does your servant taste what I eat and what I drink? Do I still hear the voice of men and women singing? And why should your servant still be a burden on my lord the king? 37Your servant can barely cross over the Jordan, and why should the king give me this recompense? 38Let your servant, pray, turn back, that I may die in my own town by the tomb of my father and my mother, and, look, let your servant Chimham cross over with my lord the king, and do for him what is good in your eyes.” 39And the king said, “With me shall Chimham cross over, and I will do for him what is good in your eyes, and whatever you choose for me, I will do for you.” 40And all the troops crossed over the Jordan, and the king crossed over, and the king kissed Barzillai and blessed him, and he went back to his place. 41And the king crossed over to Gilgal, and Chimham crossed over with him, and all the people of Judah, they brought the king across, and half of the people of Israel as well. 42And, look, all the men of Israel were coming toward the king, and they said to the king, “Why have our brothers, the men of Judah, stolen you away, bringing the king across the Jordan with his household, and all David’s men with him?” 43And all the men of Judah answered the men of Israel, “For the king is kin to us. And why should you be incensed over this thing? Have we eaten anything of the king’s? Have we been given any gift?” 44And the men of Israel answered the men of Judah and they said, “We have ten parts in the king, even in David, more than you, and why have you treated us with contempt? Was not our word first to bring back the king?” And the word of the men of Judah was harsher than the word of the men of Israel.
CHAPTER 19 NOTES
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1. My son, my son, Absalom! Much of the way experience transforms David in the course of his story can be seen through his changing responses to the deaths of those close to him. When Jonathan and Saul died, he intoned an eloquent elegy. When Abner was murdered, he declaimed a much briefer elegy, coupled with a speech dissociating himself from the killing. When his infant son by Bathsheba died, he spoke somber words about his own mortality and the irreversibility of death. Now, the eloquent David is reduced to a sheer stammer of grief, repeating over and over the two Hebrew words, beni ʾAvshalom, “my son, Absalom.” Although the narrator continues to refer to David only as “the king,” in the shifting conflict between his public and private roles the latter here takes over entirely: Absalom is not the usurper who drove him from the throne but only “my son,” and David is the anguished father who would rather have died, that his son might have lived.
3. for the troops had heard on that day. Before the battle they had all heard David’s admonition to his commanders to do no harm to Absalom. Now they hear of his grief and are smitten with shame and apprehension—whether out of empathy for their beloved leader, or guilt over the complicity some of their number share in Absalom’s death, or fear of potential violence between David and Joab.
4. the troops stole away … as troops disgraced in their flight from the battle. This striking image of victory transformed into the bitterness of defeat picks up verbal threads, as Moshe Garsiel has perceptively noted, from the beginning of Absalom’s insurrection (chapter 15). There, the usurper stood at the gate, as David is here made to go out and sit in the gate. Absalom was said to “steal the heart” of the men of Israel as here the men steal away, and in order to recover dominion David is enjoined to speak to their heart (verse 8). The disheartened slipping away of the troops suggests that Joab is addressing an imminent danger of the disintegration of the army.
5. the king covered his face. The gesture makes perfect psychological sense, while the verb used, laʾat, is the same one David chose when he said “Deal gently [leʾat] with the lad Absalom.”
6. within the house. The implication is that Joab speaks with David in private. The thematic opposition to this term is “in the gate,” where Joab will send David.
You have today shamed all your servants who have saved your life today. Again and again here Joab insists on the word “today.” It is this very moment, he suggests, this crucial turning point, that you must seize in order to reestablish your reign. You cannot allow yourself to think of the past, of your history as Absalom’s father: as king, you must confront today, with its challenge and its political responsibilities.
7. to love those who hate you and to hate those who love you. Joab uses rhetorical exaggeration in order to elevate David’s paternal attachment to Absalom into a generalized, perverse political principle: if you show such extravagant fondness for the usurper who sought your life, then you are behaving as though all your enemies were your friends and your friends your enemies.
For you have said today that you have no commanders or servants. That is, by exhibiting such love for your archenemy, you are showing flagrant disregard for the loyal officers and followers to whose devotion you owe your life.
8. speak to the heart of your servants. This personal act of rallying the men is deemed urgently necessary by Joab because the army has already begun to disperse (“steal away”).
if you go not out … not a man shall spend the night with you. These words are a naked threat: if David does not follow Joab’s order, the commander will encourage the army to abandon the king, and he will be alone, without power or troops, engulfed in “a greater evil” than any that has befallen him in his long and arduous career. In all this, Joab’s verbal assault on David, however motivated by pressing considerations of practical politics, is also a defense of his own flouting of David’s injunction to protect Absalom. David at this point knows only the bare fact of his son’s death, not who was responsible for it. This is something that he will inevitably soon learn, and that bitter knowledge is surely registered in his decision to replace Joab with Amasa (verse 14).
9. the king arose and sat in the gate. Fokkelman brilliantly observes the disparity between Joab’s exhortation and the report of David’s action. Joab had said, “go out, and speak to the heart of your servants.” Instead of these active gestures, we see David passively sitting in the gate while the troops come to him, and we are given no reported speech for him. In Fokkelman’s reading, this gap between command and act “call[s] up the image of a man beaten to a pulp, who can barely stand, and does only the minimum requested or expected of him.”
10. deliberating. The verb nadon in this verse is conventionally related to the noun madon, “quarrel” or “contention.” But in fact what the people say is not contentious, and it is preferable to derive the passive (perhaps implicitly reflexive) verbal form here from dun, to judge, consider, or deliberate.
12. Why should you be the last to bring back the king. Throughout this episode, there is a central focus on who will be first and who will be last to show support for the Davidic restoration. The northern tribes, Israel, have already evinced support (verse 10), and David is concerned to enlist the backing of his own tribe, Judah, which had largely swung to Absalom during the insurrection.
regarding his house. Or simply, “to his house.” Many textual critics regard this phrase as a mistaken scribal duplication of the same phrase earlier in this verse.
13. You are my bone and my flesh. That is, you are Judahites, just as I am, and so there is actual kinship between us.
14. to Amasa … “Are you not my bone and my flesh?” Now the phrase is no longer hyperbolic, for Amasa is David’s nephew. The extraordinary offer of the post of commander of the army to Absalom’s general in the rebellion reflects David’s knack for combining personal and political motives. It is a slap in the face to Joab, the killer of David’s son, against whom David evidently does not dare to take any more direct steps of vengeance. At the same time, the hesitation of the Judahites in rallying behind the restored king suggests that an act such as the appointment of Amasa as commander may be required to enlist their support. Joab, not surprisingly, will not quietly acquiesce in his abrupt dismissal from the office he has held since the beginning of David’s career.
15. he inclined the heart. It is not clear whether the Hebrew, characteristically overgenerous in its use of pronouns, intends the “he” to refer to David or to Amasa. In either case, David’s overture succeeds in bringing the tribe of Judah into his camp.
16. to bring the king across the Jordan. The verb ʿavar, “cross over,” and its causative form, haʿavir, “to bring across,” which thematically defined David’s exodus from Jerusalem in chapter 15, dominates this episode, too, as the crossing over in flight to the east is reversed by the crossing over westward back to Jerusalem.
17. Shimei son of Gera. There is an approximate symmetry between David’s encounters in his exodus from Jerusalem and those that now occur in his return. Then he met a hostile Shimei, now he meets a contrite Shimei. Then he met Ziba, who denounced his master Mephibosheth; now he meets Mephibosheth himself, who defends his own loyalty. Then he spoke with Ittai, the loyalist who insisted on accompanying him; now he speaks with Barzillai, the proven loyalist who refuses to accompany him back to the capital. The encounter with Hushai, who becomes David’s secret agent, has no counterpart here.
21. first of all the house of Joseph to go down to meet my lord the king. Shimei, who has rushed down to the Jordan in order to demonstrate his newfound loyalty to David, uses “the house of Joseph” loosely to refer to the northern tribes. He is, of course, actually from the tribe of Benjamin. He “goes down” because his hometown of Bahurim is in the high country near Jerusalem.
22. For this should not Shimei be put to death? Abishai remains true to character, for the third time prepared to kill someone on the impulse of the moment.
23. What do I have to do with you, sons of Zeruiah. These words by now are a kind of refrain, as David seeks to dissociate himself from the murderous sons of Zeruiah. It is noteworthy that though Abishai alone has just spoken, David, mindful of the killing of Absalom, includes Joab as well in his protest by using the plural “sons of Zeruiah.”
Should today a man of Israel be put to death? David’s “today” is an implicit rejoinder to Joab’s “today” in the confrontation over his mourning Absalom. This day of victorious return is a moment for national reconciliation and hence for a general amnesty for both the Saulides and the supporters of Absalom. In the course of time, it will appear that David in effect restricts his pledge not to harm Shimei to an extended “today.”
25. he had not dressed his feet or trimmed his moustache, and his garments he had not laundered. These acts of mourning, reported to us by the authoritative narrator, are an indication that in fact Mephibosheth remained loyal to David throughout the insurrection, and that Ziba’s denunciation was a self-interested calumny. (Some interpret “dressing”—literally “doing”—the feet as cutting the toenails, though the parallel usage often cited from Deuteronomy has “toenails,” not “feet,” as the object of the verb “to do.”)
26. when he came from Jerusalem. The Masoretic Text simply says “Jerusalem” but this encounter presumably takes place down by the Jordan. One version of the Septuagint removes the word from this verse and places it at the end of verse 25.
27. I’ll saddle me the donkey … for your servant is lame. The evident implication is that it would have taken the crippled Mephibosheth some time to get ready to go after the fleeing king. Meanwhile, his servant headed out before him in order to denounce him, perhaps actually leaving his master awaiting his help to saddle the donkey.
29. For all my father’s house are but men marked for death to my lord the king. Mephibosheth’s choice of words—the literal phrasing of the Hebrew is “men of death”—is an oblique, perhaps inadvertent, concession that he shares what must have been the general suspicion among the Saulides that David was responsible for the chain of violent deaths in the house of Saul.
30. Why should you still speak your words? David cuts off Mephibosheth impatiently, picking up the “still” that the anxious supplicant has just twice used.
you and Ziba shall divide the field. This “Solomonic” judgment may actually be another sign that David has lost his ruler’s grip. For if Ziba has told the truth about his master, Mephibosheth as a traitor would deserve nothing, except perhaps capital punishment. And if Ziba was lying, then the servant would deserve nothing except a harsh legal penalty for defamation. Perhaps Mephibosheth is paying a price for having betrayed that he thought David was responsible for the Saulide deaths: in this reading, David knows Mephibosheth is telling the truth, but he punishes him for assuming David was involved in the killings by decreeing Mephibosheth will lose half his property.
31. Let him even take all. By this verbal gesture, Mephibosheth shows himself loyal to David to the end, regardless of personal benefit. These words could well be an implicit judgment on the unwisdom of David’s decree.
32. Barzillai the Gileadite. David’s three encounters at the ford of the Jordan from a progressive series on the scale of loyalty: first Shimei, who has heaped insults on him and now pleads for forgiveness; then Mephibosheth, whose loyalty, although probably genuine, has been called into question by Ziba; and then the unswervingly devoted old man, Barzillai.
35. How many are the days of the years of my life. Though this rhetorical question literally echoes the question that Pharaoh asks the aged Jacob, the meaning is the opposite—not “How long have I lived?” but “How long could I possibly have left to live?”
38. your servant Chimham. This is presumably Barzillai’s son.
40. the king kissed Barzillai. This entire catastrophic sequence in the David story began with David’s cold kiss to the son from whom he had been estranged, followed by Absalom’s calculated kiss for every man he enlisted to his cause at the gate of the city. Now the king bestows a kiss of true affection upon the loyal old man who provided for him and his troops in their moment of need.
41. the king crossed over … and Chimham crossed over with him, and … they brought the king across. The crossing over eastward of the banished king, which never should have occurred, is now decisively reversed, as David and all his people come across the Jordan and head for Jerusalem. But, as the immediately following dialogue intimates, David’s political troubles are far from over.
to Gilgal. This is the gathering place where Saul was consecrated as king and later severed by Samuel from his role as God’s anointed.
half of the people of Israel as well. In all likelihood, “half” is used loosely to indicate simply that some members of the northern tribes took part in bringing David to Gilgal.
42. and they said to the king. Although their complaint is addressed to the king, he never answers them. Instead, as Fokkelman notes, the scene breaks down into a squabble between Israelite and Judahite. Once again, David appears to be losing his regal grip.
43. the king is kin to us. That is, David is actually a member of the tribe of Judah.
44. We have ten parts in the king, even in David, more than you. Though ten to one might merely be idiomatic for great preponderance, it seems likely that they allude to the fact that they are ten tribes to Judah’s one—if David is king of the entire nation, this gives them ten times the claim to the king that Judah has. The phrase “even in David” (or, “also in David”) is a little odd, and the Septuagint reads instead, “also I am firstborn more than you.” It should be noted that all the pronouns in this dialogue in the Hebrew are cast in the first-person singular, referring to a singular, collective “man of Israel” and “man of Judah,” but that usage doesn’t quite work in English.
the word of the men of Judah was harsher than the word of the men of Israel. The episode concludes in a clash of words, to be followed by a clash of swords. The implication of the greater “harshness” (or, “hardness”) of the Judahite words is aptly caught by the medieval Hebrew commentator David Kimchi: “Their word was harsher and stronger than the word of the men of Israel, and the men of Judah spoke harshly to the men of Israel, with the king saying nothing to them. Therefore the men of Israel were incensed and they followed after [the rebel] Sheba son of Bichri.”
1And there chanced to be there a worthless fellow named Sheba son of Bichri, a Benjaminite. And he blew the ram’s horn and said,
no portion have we in Jesse’s son—
every man to his tent, O Israel!”
2And all the men of Israel turned away from David to follow Sheba son of Bichri, but the men of Judah clung to their king from the Jordan to Jerusalem.
3And David came to his house in Jerusalem, and the king took his ten concubine women whom he had left to watch over the house, and he placed them in a house under watch, but he did not come to bed with them, and they were shut up till their dying day in living widowhood.
4And the king said to Amasa, “Muster me the men of Judah, in three days, and you take your stand here.” 5And Amasa went to muster Judah, and he missed the appointed time that was set for him. 6And David said to Abishai, “Now Sheba son of Bichri will do us more harm than Absalom. You, take your master’s servants and pursue him, lest he find him fortified towns, and elude our gaze.” 7And Joab’s men sallied forth after him, and the Cherithites and the Pelethites and all the warriors. And they sallied forth from Jerusalem to pursue Sheba son of Bichri. 8They were just by the great stone which is in Gibeon when Amasa came before them, and Joab was girt in his battle garb, and he had on a belt for a sword strapped to his waist in its sheath, and as he came forward, it slipped out. 9And Joab said to Amasa, “Is it well with you, my brother?” And Joab’s right hand grasped Amasa’s beard so as to kiss him. 10And Amasa did not watch out for the sword which was in Joab’s hand, and he struck him with it in the belly and spilled his innards to the ground—no second blow did he need—and he died. And Joab with Abishai his brother pursued Sheba son of Bichri. 11And a man stood over him, one of Joab’s lads, and said, “Whoever favors Joab and whoever is for David—after Joab!” 12And Amasa was wallowing in blood in the midst of the road, and the man saw that all the troops had come to a halt, and he moved Amasa aside from the road to the field and flung a cloak over him when he saw that all who came upon him had come to a halt. 13When he had been removed from the road, every man passed on after Joab to pursue Sheba son of Bichri. 14And he passed through all the tribes of Israel to Abel of Beth-Maacah, and all the Bichrites assembled and they, too, came in after him. 15And all the troops who were with Joab came and besieged him in Abel of Beth-Maacah, and they heaped up a siege mound against the town and it stood up against the rampart, and they were savaging the wall to bring it down. 16And a wise woman called out from the town,
“Listen, listen—speak, pray, to Joab,
approach here, that I may speak to you.”
17And he approached her, and the woman said, “Are you Joab?” And he said, “I am.” And she said to him, “Listen to the words of your servant.” 18And he said, “I am listening,” And she said, saying,
“Surely would they speak in days of old, saying:
‘Surely will they ask counsel of Abel, and thus conclude.’
19I am of the peaceable steadfast of Israel.
You seek to put to death a mother city in Israel.
Why should you engulf the LORD’s heritage?”
20And Joab answered and said, “Far be it from me, far be it, that I should engulf and that I should destroy. 21It isn’t so. But a man from the high country of Ephraim named Sheba son of Bichri has raised his hand against the king, against David. Give over him alone, that I may turn away from the town.” And the woman said to Joab, “Look, his head is about to be flung to you from the wall.” 22And the woman came in her wisdom to all the people, and they cut off the head of Sheba son of Bichri and flung it to Joab. And he blew the ram’s horn and they dispersed from the town, every man to his tent, but Joab came back to Jerusalem.
23And Joab was over all the army of Israel and Benaiah son of Johoiada was over the Cherithites and the Pelethites. 24And Adoram was over the corvée, and Jehoshaphat son of Ahilud was recorder. 25And Sheva was scribe, and Zadok and Abiathar, priests. 26And Ira the Jairite was also a priest to David.
CHAPTER 20 NOTES
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1. there chanced to be there. The narrative is a direct continuation of the end of the previous chapter, and so “there” is the national assembly grounds at Gilgal where the northern tribes, Israel, and the tribe of Judah have just quarreled. The northerners, resentful of the harshness of the Judahites’ words, in which the members of David’s own tribe claimed a special proprietary relationship with the king, are ripe for the appeal of a demagogue such as Sheba, who is at once identified as “a worthless fellow.”
We have no share in David. This is a defiant reversal of the claim just made by the Israelites that they had “ten parts” in the king. Later, in 1 Kings, when the monarchy actually splits in two, the same rallying cry will be used by the secessionists.
2. the men of Judah clung to their king. David is, of course, “their” king because he is from the tribe of Judah. The reach of the tribe stretches west to east, from the Jordan to Jerusalem, and also to the south of Jerusalem, while the rebel forces are to the north.
3. David came to his house in Jerusalem, and … took his ten concubine women. The concubines have become taboo to David because they cohabited with Absalom his son. But this whole sad notice suggests that David now cannot fully “come back to his house.” The women he left, perhaps foolishly and surely futilely, “to watch over the house” are now sequestered “in a house under watch.” There is a wry echo in all this of that early moment of David’s investment of Jerusalem when he was confronted by another wife he had left behind who had slept with another man—Michal. She had no child “till her dying day”—an image of interrupted conjugality that is multiplied tenfold here with the concubines.
4. the king said to Amasa. Amasa, Absalom’s commander in the rebellion, has been designated by David to replace Joab. At the margins of the narrative report lurks the question, Where is Joab? The answer forthcoming will be savage.
take your stand. That is, report to me.
6. Now Sheba son of Bichri will do us more harm than Absalom. Although it is not clear why Amasa is late for his appointed meeting with David (perhaps his appearance at Gibeon in verse 8 suggests that he decided, out of military considerations, to pursue Sheba at once without reporting back to the king), David’s unjustified panic is another indication that he has lost his political composure. By sending out Abishai, Joab’s brother, to give chase after Sheba, he sets up the circumstances for Joab’s murder of Amasa and his subsequent return to power.
You, take your master’s servants. The obtrusively imperative “you” is very brusque, at the same time expressing David’s intention to designate Abishai, and not his brother, to command the pursuit.
and elude our gaze. The two Hebrew words here, wehitsil ʿeynenu, are problematic. They might mean “and save [himself] [from] our eyes” (the bracketed words would be implied via ellipsis by the Hebrew); or, if the verb here is vocalized differently, the words might mean “and cast a shadow over our eyes.” Needless to say, many emendations have been proposed. In any case, the idea strongly suggested by the context is that Sheba would place himself beyond the reach of pursuit by withdrawing into fortified towns. In the event, he is trapped inside just such a town.
7. Joab’s men sallied forth. J. P. Fokkelman must be credited with seeing what an extraordinary designation this is. David has dismissed Joab. The elite warriors are in any case David’s men (note how David has just referred to them in addressing Abishai as “your master’s servants”). The fact that they are here called “Joab’s men” suggests where the real power is, and where Joab’s brother Abishai assumes it must be. The clear implication is that the supposedly dismissed Joab is actually leading his men in the pursuit.
8. They were just by the great stone which is in Gibeon. Gibeon, it should be recalled, is the very place where the civil war between the house of Saul (Israel) and the house of David (Judah) began. That first battle (2 Samuel 2) began with a choreographed duel between twelve champions from each side, each warrior clasping the head of his adversary and stabbing him in the side. Joab’s posture in the killing of Amasa strikingly recalls those lethal gestures.
he had on a belt for a sword strapped to his waist … and as he came forward, it slipped out. The sword—often, as here, a weapon closer to a long dagger—was customarily strapped against the left thigh, for easy unsheathing across the lower belly by a right-handed fighter. Joab may have deliberately fastened the sword to his waist so that it would slip out of the scabbard as he leaned forward to embrace Amasa. The last two verbs here are rather cryptic in the Hebrew: literally “he/it went out and she/it fell/slipped.” Since “sword” is feminine in Hebrew, that is the only likely subject for “slipped,” and “he” (Joab) is the plausible masculine subject for “went out” (or, “came forward”), though it could also be the scabbard. Josephus’s reading of this verse remains the most persuasive one: the wily Joab, deliberately allowing his dagger to slip to the ground as he bends forward, then snatches it up with his left hand while his right hand grasps Amasa’s beard.
9. so as to kiss him. We remember David’s cool kiss to Absalom, then Absalom’s demagogic kiss, as we witness this kiss, which is a prelude to murder.
10. Amasa did not watch out for the sword which was in Joab’s hand. His attention caught by Joab’s gesture of affection, Amasa does not think to look at Joab’s left hand, which one would not normally expect to hold a weapon. (Has Joab learned the lesson of Ehud, Judges 3, who takes the Moabite king Eglon by surprise with a dagger thrust to the belly delivered by the left hand?) Joab’s manual proficiency as a killer reinforces the perception that he struck at Absalom in the heart with sticks, not “darts,” in order to hurt him badly but deliberately not to finish him off. The phrase “did not watch out” rhymes ironically with the plight of the ten concubines left to watch over the house and condemned to a house under watch.
he struck him with it in the belly and spilled his innards to the ground. It is by a blow to the belly (ḥomesh) that Abner’s brother Asahel died at this same place, Gibeon, and by a thrust to the belly that Joab killed Abner in revenge. The spilling of the innards implies a horrendous welter of blood, and that gruesome image of violent death will then pursue Joab through the story to his own bloody end.
11. Whoever favors Joab and whoever is for David. In dismissing Joab, David had severed himself from his longtime commander. This henchman of Joab’s smoothly sutures the rift by bracketing Joab and David in these parallel clauses, publicly assuming that Joab is once more David’s commander.
12. Amasa was wallowing in blood … and … all the troops had come to a halt. The soldiers come to a halt because they are confounded by seeing their commander reduced to a bloody corpse, and they also recoil from the idea of treading on the blood of the murdered man, who lies in the midst of the roadway.
14. And he passed through. The switch in scene is effected, in accordance with an established technique of biblical narrative, by a repetition of the verb in a slightly different meaning: the Judahite soldiers “pass on” beyond the corpse at Gibeon; the object of their pursuit “passes through” the territories of the northern tribes.
Abel of Beth-Maacah. “Abel” means “brook.” Thus “Beth-Maacah” is required in order to distinguish it from other place-names that have a brook component. This fortified town is located near the northern border of ancient Israel.
they, too, came in after him. That is, they withdraw with him into the shelter of the fortified town.
15. savaging the wall. This is the first of several verbal clues intended to establish a link between this episode involving a “wise woman” and the episode of the wise woman of Tekoa that prepared the way for Absalom’s return to Jerusalem, which then eventuated in the rebellion. Both women seek to deflect an impulse of vengeful violence. The Tekoite implores the king to take steps “that the blood avenger not savage this much” (2 Samuel 14:11). She fears those bent on “destroying me and my son together from God’s heritage” (14:16), just as the wise woman of Abel of Beth-Maacah asks Joab, “Why should you engulf the LORD’S heritage?” He responds by saying “Far be it from me … that I should engulf and that I should destroy”, “destroy” uses the same root as the verb rendered as “savage.”
16. Listen, listen—speak, pray, to Joab. As befits a professional wise woman in a place evidently famous for its oracle (see verse 18), she speaks in poetry, in a style that is elevated, ceremonially repetitive, hieratic, and at least a little obscure.
18. Surely would they speak … Surely will they ask counsel. The Hebrew expresses this emphasis by repeating the verbal root, first as infinitive, then in conjugated form: daber yedaberu, shaʾol yeshaʾalu. Since the woman extravagantly uses this sort of initial reiteration three times in four clauses, the effect is incantatory. The burden of what she says here is that Abel has long been a revered city, so why would Joab think of destroying it?
and thus conclude. This might mean, come to a conclusion regarding the question posed to the oracle at Abel, but the Hebrew is rather enigmatic, perhaps because the wise woman herself is quoting an ancient proverb, in archaic language, about the town.
19. I am of the peaceable steadfast of Israel. She at once affirms her loyalty to the national cause (“I am no rebel,” she implies) and her commitment to peace rather than violence. Some interpreters understand the first term of this construct chain, shelumey ʾemuney yisraʾel, as “whole” (from shalem), but the context argues for a reference to peace.
to put to death a mother city in Israel. The literal Hebrew is “town and mother,” a hendiadys that clearly means something like “principal town.” (The phrase would remain idiomatic in later Hebrew.) Since in biblical Hebrew the suburbs or outlying villages around a town are called “daughters,” the logic of the idiom is evident. It is, however, an idiom that appears only here in the entire biblical corpus, and there is thematic point in its use. In this narrative reflecting a male warrior culture and acts of terrible violence, from decapitation to evisceration, a series of female figures—Abigail, the Tekoite, the wise woman of Abel—intervene to avert violence. The city itself is figured as a mother; its destruction would be a kind of matricide, and the wise woman speaks on behalf of the childbearers and nurturers of life in Israelite society to turn aside Joab’s terrible swift sword.
21. But a man from the high country of Ephraim. This region is part of the territory of Benjamin, Saul’s tribe. By providing this identification, Joab distinguishes the rebel who is the object of his pursuit from the non-Benjaminite inhabitants of Abel of Beth-Maacah.
against the king, against David. By using this apposition (instead of the usual “King David”) Joab implicitly responds to some doubt as to whether in fact it is David who is the king. Recent political events might well have triggered general questioning about David’s grip on the monarchy.
Look, his head is about to be flung to you. This decisive woman, instead of using a simple future form, employs a participial form introduced by the presentative hineh, as if to say: it’s already on the way to being done.
22. in her wisdom. The wisdom is her shrewdness in finding a way to avert a general massacre (as the wise Abigail had done in mollifying David, bent on vengeance) and perhaps also in the aptness of rhetoric she no doubt employs to persuade the people.
he blew the ram’s horn and they dispersed … every man to his tent. These phrases echo the ones used in verse 1 to report the beginning of Sheba’s rebellion, and thus conclude the episode in a symmetric envelope structure.
but Joab came back to Jerusalem. He comes back to Jerusalem, not to his house (“tent”) in nearby Bethlehem. The implication, as Bar-Efrat notes, is that he now resumes his post as David’s commander. David evidently has little say in the matter, being confronted with a fait accompli of military power. This clause then provides a motivation for the introduction of the notice of David’s governing council in the next three verses.
23. Joab was over all the army of Israel. This list of David’s royal bureaucracy parallels the one in 8:16–18, with a couple of instructive differences. The two serve as bookends to David’s reign in Jerusalem. The first is introduced after he has consolidated his mini-empire, and this one after the suppression of two successive rebellions and just before the account of David’s last days in 1 Kings 1–2. (As we shall see, the remaining four chapters of 2 Samuel are actually a series of appendices to the story proper and not a direct continuation of it.) In chapter 8, Joab was simply “over the army.” Here, after the defeat of the secessionist northern tribes, he is said to be “over all the army of Israel.” Adoram as supervisor of the corvée does not appear in the earlier list but is inserted here to anticipate the role he will play in Solomon’s grand building projects, and he may in fact have been a much later appointment by David. The name of the royal scribe, Sheva, is anomalous in the Hebrew, and may be the same person identified in chapter 8 as Seraiah.
26. And Ira the Jairite was also a priest to David. In addition to the hereditary priests of the public cult just mentioned, David has a kind of special royal chaplain. In chapter 8, it is David’s sons who are said to perform this service. Either later editors were uneasy with this intimation of priestly dynasty in the royal family, or David, after all the tribulations he has suffered because of two of his sons, decided to designate someone else as his chaplain.
1And there was a famine in the days of David three years, year after year. And David sought out the presence of the LORD. And the LORD said, “On account of Saul and on account of the house of bloodguilt, because he put the Gibeonites to death.” 2And the king called to the Gibeonites and said to them—and the Gibeonites were not of Israelite stock but from the remnant of the Amorites, and the Israelites had vowed to them, but Saul sought to strike them down in his zeal for the Israelites and for Judah. 3And David said to the Gibeonites, “What shall I do for you and how shall I atone, that you may bless the LORD’s heritage?” 4And the Gibeonites said to him, “We have no claim of silver and gold against Saul and his house, and we have no man in Israel to put to death.” And he said, “Whatever you say, I shall do for you.” 5And they said to the king, “The man who massacred us and who devastated us—we were destroyed from having a stand in all the territory of Israel—6let seven men of his sons be given to us, that we may impale them before the LORD at Gibeah of Saul, the LORD’s chosen.” And the king said, “I will give them.” 7And the king spared Mephibosheth son of Jonathan son of Saul because of the LORD’s vow that was between them, between David and Jonathan son of Saul. 8And the king took the two sons of Rizpah daughter of Aiah, whom she had born to Saul, Armoni and Mephibosheth, and the five sons of Merab daughter of Saul, whom she had born to Adriel son of Barzillai the Meholathite. 9And he gave them into the hands of the Gibeonites, and they impaled them on the hill before the LORD, and the seven of them fell together. And they were put to death in the first days of the harvest, the beginning of the barley harvest. 10And Rizpah daughter of Aiah took sackcloth and stretched it out over herself on the rock from the beginning of the harvest till the waters poured down on them from the heavens, and she did not allow the fowl of the heavens to settle on them by day nor the beasts of the field by night. 11And David was told what Rizpah daughter of Aiah, Saul’s concubine, had done. 12And David went and took the bones of Saul and the bones of Jonathan his son from the notables of Jabesh-Gilead who had stolen them from the square of Beth-Shan, where the Philistines had hanged them on the day the Philistines struck down Saul at Gilboa. 13And he brought up from there the bones of Saul and the bones of Jonathan his son, and they collected the bones of the impaled men. 14And they buried the bones of Saul and of Jonathan his son in the territory of Benjamin in Zela, in the tomb of Kish his father, and they did all that the king had charged. And God then granted the plea for the land.
15And once again there was fighting between the Philistines and Israel, and David went down, and his servants with him, and they did battle with the Philistines, and David grew weary. 16And Ishbi-Benob, who was of the offspring of the titan, the weight of his weapon three hundred weights of bronze, and he was girded with new gear—he meant to strike down David. 17And Abishai son of Zeruiah came to his aid and struck down the Philistine and put him to death. Then David’s men swore to him, saying, “You shall not sally forth with us again to battle, lest you snuff out the lamp of Israel.”
18And it happened thereafter that once again there was fighting with the Philistines, at Gob. Then did Sibbecai the Hushathite strike down Saph, who was of the offspring of the titan. 19And once again there was fighting with the Philistines at Nob, and Elhanan son of Jair the Bethlehemite struck down Goliath the Gittite, and the shaft of his spear was like a weaver’s beam.
20And once again there was fighting, at Gath. And there was a man of huge measure, who had six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot, twenty-four in all, and he, too, was sprung from the titan. 21And he insulted Israel, and Jonathan son of Shimei, David’s kinsman, struck him down. 22These four were sprung from the titan, and they fell at the hand of David and at the hand of his servants.
CHAPTER 21 NOTES
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Chapters 21–24 appear to be a series of appendices to the David story proper, manifestly written by different writers in styles that exhibit notable differences from that of the main narrative, and also certain differences in ideological assumptions and even in what are presumed to be the narrative data of David’s history. It should, however, be kept in mind that creating a collage of disparate sources was an established literary technique used by the ancient Hebrew editors and sometimes by the original writers themselves. Recent critics have abundantly demonstrated the compositional coherence of chapters 21–24 and have argued for some significant links with the preceding narrative. For that reason, it may be preferable to think of this whole unit as a coda to the story rather than as a series of appendices. The structure of the chapters is neatly chiastic, as follows: a story of a national calamity in which David intercedes; a list (chapter 21); a poem (chapter 22); a poem; a list (chapter 23); a story of a national calamity in which David intercedes (chapter 24). The temporal setting of these materials is unclear but they seem to belong somewhere in the middle of David’s career, and do not follow from the late point in his reign reported in the immediately preceding account of the rebellion of Sheba son of Bichri. The editors placed these chapters here, rather than after David’s death, and then set the account of his last days, which they interrupt, at the beginning of 1 Kings in order to underline the dynastic continuity between David’s story and Solomon’s, which then immediately follows as the first large unit of the Book of Kings.
1. David sought out the presence of the LORD. The idiom means to seek an audience (with a ruler), though what is referred to in practical terms is inquiry of an oracle. The rest of the verse gives God’s response to the question put to the oracle. At the very outset, a difference in idiom from the main narrative, where people consistently “inquire of the LORD,” is detectable. The idiom preferred by this new author emphasizes hierarchical relationship rather than the practical business of putting a question to the oracle.
2. and the Gibeonites were not of Israelite stock. The syntactic looseness of this long parenthetical sentence (compare the similar syntax in verse 5) is uncharacteristic of the David story proper.
the Israelites had vowed to them. The story of the vow to do no harm to this group of resident aliens is reported in Joshua 9:15.
but Saul sought to strike them down. There is no way of knowing whether this massacre of Gibeonites by Saul reflects historical fact, but there is not the slightest hint of it in the story of Saul recounted in 1 Samuel. As with the differences of style, one sees here the presence of a distinctly different literary source.
3. What shall I do for you and how shall I atone. The speech and acts of David in this story show nothing of the psychological complexity of the experience-torn David whose story we have been following. He speaks in flat terms, almost ritualistically, fulfilling his public and cultic functions as king. And after this brief initial exchange with the Gibeonites, the writer entirely abandons dialogue, which had been the chief instrument for expressing emotional nuance and complication of motive and theme in the David story.
4. We have no claim of silver and gold … we have no man in Israel to put to death. The second clause is really an opening ploy in negotiation: they say they have no claim to execute any Israelite (“claim” in the first clause is merely implied by ellipsis in the Hebrew), suggesting that they are waiting for David to agree to hand Israelites over to them in expiation of Saul’s crime.
Whatever you say, I shall do for you. David’s submissiveness to the Gibeonites reflects a notion of causation and the role of human action scarcely evident in the main narrative. A famine grips the land because its former ruler violated a national vow. Collective disaster can be averted only by the expiatory—indeed, sacrificial—offering of human lives. This archaic world of divine retribution and ritual response is very far from the historical realm of realpolitik in which the story of David has been played out.
6. impale. There is no scholarly consensus on the exact form of execution, except that it obviously involves exhibiting the corpses. Some understand it as a kind of crucifixion.
before the LORD at Gibeah of Saul, the LORD’s chosen. “Before the LORD” is an explicit indication of the sacrificial nature of the killings. Many scholars have doubted that the Saulides would be executed in Saul’s own town and emend this to read “at Gibeon, on the mount of the LORD.” If the phrase “the LORD’s chosen” is authentic, it would be spoken sarcastically by the Gibeonites.
8. Merab. This is the reading of one version of the Septuagint and of many Hebrew manuscripts. The Masoretic Text has “Michal,” who had no children and who, unlike her sister Merab, was not married to Adriel son of Barzillai.
9. the seven of them fell together. Robert Polzin neatly observes that this phrase precisely echoes “they fell together” of 2:16—the account of the beginning of the civil war at this very same place, Gibeon. He also notes how this whole episode is organized around recurring units of three and seven, the latter number shivʿah punning on the reiterated shevuʿah, vow.
the beginning of the barley harvest. This would be in April. The bereaved Rizpah then watches over the corpses throughout the hot months of the summer, until the rains return—heralding the end of the long famine—in the fall.
10. Rizpah … took sackcloth and stretched it out over herself. The verb here is the one generally used for pitching tents, so the translations that have Rizpah spreading the cloth over the rock are misleading. What she does is to make a little lean-to with the sackcloth to shield herself from the summer sun.
she did not allow the fowl of the heavens to settle on them. The antecedent of “them” is of course the corpses. As in the ancient Greek world, leaving a corpse unburied is a primal sacrilege, a final desecration of the sacredness of the human person. Rizpah, watching over the unburied corpses, is a kind of Hebrew Antigone. David had delivered the seven descendants of Saul to the Gibeonites with the single-minded intention of expiating the crime that had caused the famine. Evidently, he gave no thought to the possibility that the Gibeonites would desecrate the bodies of the Saulides after killing them by denying them burial.
11. And David was told what Rizpah … had done. Rizpah’s sustained act of maternal heroism finally achieves its end: the king is shaken out of his acquiescence in the Gibeonite inhumanity.
12. David went and took the bones of Saul and the bones of Jonathan. According to the account in 1 Samuel 31, they were cremated. Either this report reflects a conflicting tradition or “bones” here has to be understood as “ashes.”
14. they buried the bones of Saul and of Jonathan his son… . And God then granted the plea for the land. It should be noted that the end of the famine does not come with the sacrificial killing of the seven Saulides but only after all of them, together with Saul himself and Jonathan, are given fitting burial in their own place (a biblical desideratum). In this strange story, David is seen handing over the surviving offspring of Saul to be killed, but only for the urgent good of the nation, after which he pays posthumous respect to the line of Saul. It is conceivable that this story reflects an alternative narrative tradition to the more politically complex one of the David story proper through which David is exonerated from what may well have been a widespread accusation that he deliberately liquidated all of Saul’s heirs, with the exception of Mephibosheth.
15. David grew weary. This phrase probably indicates an aging David, though not yet the vulnerable sedentary monarch of the conflict with Absalom.
16. Ishbi-Benob. This name looks as bizarre in the Hebrew as in transliteration and probably betrays a corrupt text. (The textual obscurities that abound in this section in all likelihood reflect the fact that this is an old literary document imperfectly transmitted.) There have been attempts to revocalize the name as a verb, but those in turn necessitate extensive tinkering with other parts of the verse.
of the offspring of the titan. The Hebrew rafah (with a definite article here) elsewhere means “giant.” The ending is feminine and it is not clear whether the reference is to a progenitrix or a progenitor.
the weight of his weapon. The Hebrew for “weapon,” qayin, appears only here, and so the translation is merely inference from context. It might be related to a word that means “metalsmith.” The invocation of the titanic weight of the weapon (spear?) is of course reminiscent of the earlier description of Goliath.
girded with new gear. The Hebrew says simply “girded with new [feminine ending].” Some assume the reference is to sword, which is feminine in Hebrew.
17. You shall not sally forth with us again. This fragmentary episode is obviously remembered because it marks a turning point in David’s career. It is at least consonant with the image of David at Mahanaim asked by his men to stay behind as they go out to the battlefield.
19. Elhanan son of Jair. So he is identified in the parallel report in Chronicles. The Masoretic Text here reads “Elhanan son of Jaʿarey ʾOrgim,” but the last word, ʾorgim, means “weavers,” and seems clearly a scribal duplication of ʾorgim at the very end of the verse.
Elhanan… struck down Goliath the Gittite. This is one of the most famous contradictions in the Book of Samuel. Various attempts, both ancient and modern, have been made to harmonize the contradiction—such as the contention that “Goliath” is not a name but a Philistine title—but none of these efforts is convincing. Of the two reports, this one may well be the more plausible. In the literary shaping of the story of David, a triumph originally attributed, perhaps with good reason, to Elhanan was transferred to David and grafted onto the folktale pattern of the killing of a giant or an ogre by a resourceful young man. The writer used this material, as we have seen, to shape a vivid and arresting portrait of David’s debut.
22. These four were sprung from the titan, and they fell at the hand of David. Stylistically, the entire unit from verse 15 to the end of the chapter has the feel of a deliberately formulaic epic catalogue (rather than an actual epic narrative, which the earlier Goliath story in 1 Samuel 17 more closely approximates). Formally, the predominant number three of the famine story is succeeded by four here—just as in biblical poetic parallelism three is conventionally followed by four (for example, Amos 1:3, “For three trespasses of Damascus / and for four, I will not turn it back”).
1And David spoke to the LORD the words of this song on the day the LORD rescued him from the clutches of all his enemies and from the clutches of Saul, 2and he said:
“The Lord is my crag and my fortress
and my own deliverer.
3God, my rock where I shelter,
my shield and the horn of my rescue,
My bulwark and refuge,
my rescuer, saves me from havoc.
4Praised! did I call the LORD,
and from my enemies I was rescued.
5For the breakers of death beset me,
the underworld’s torrents dismayed me.
6The snares of Sheol coiled round me,
the traps of death sprang against me.
7In my strait I called to the LORD,
to my God I called,
And from His palace He heard my voice,
My cry in His ears.
8The earth heaved and quaked,
the heavens’ foundations shuddered,
they heaved, for He was incensed.
9Smoke went up from His nostrils,
consuming fire from His mouth,
coals before Him blazed.
10He tilted the heavens, came down,
dense mist beneath His feet.
11He mounted a cherub and flew,
He soared on the wings of the wind.
12He set darkness as shelters around Him,
a massing of waters, the clouds of the skies.
13From the radiance before Him,
fiery coals blazed.
14The LORD from the heavens thundered,
the Most High sent forth His voice.
15He let loose arrows and routed them,
lightning, and struck them with panic.
16The channels of the sea were exposed,
the world’s foundations laid bare,
by the LORD’s roaring,
the blast of His nostrils’ breath.
17He reached from on high and He took me,
He drew me out of vast waters,
18saved me from enemies fierce,
from my foes who had overwhelmed me.
19They sprang against me on my most dire day,
but the LORD was a stay then for me.
20He led me out to an open place.
He freed me for He took up my cause.
21The LORD dealt with me by my merit,
by the cleanness of my hands, requited me.
22For I kept the ways of the LORD,
I did no evil before my God.
23For all His statutes are before me,
from His laws I have not swerved.
24I have been blameless before Him,
I kept myself from sin.
25The LORD requited me by my merit,
by the cleanness of my hands before His eyes.
26With the loyal You act in loyalty,
with the blameless warrior You are without blame.
27With the pure You show Your pureness,
with the perverse You twist and turn.
28A lowly people You rescue,
You cast Your eyes down on the haughty.
29For You are my lamp, O LORD!
The LORD has lit up my darkness.
30For through You I rush a barrier,
through my God I vault a wall.
31The God Whose way is blameless,
the LORD’s speech is without taint,
a shield He is to those who shelter in him.
32For who is god but the LORD,
who is a rock but our God?
33The God, my mighty stronghold,
He frees my way to be blameless,
34makes my legs like a gazelle’s,
and stands me on the heights,
35trains my hands for combat,
makes my arms bend a bow of bronze.
36You gave me Your shield of rescue,
37You lengthened my stride beneath me,
and my ankles did not trip.
38I pursued my foes and destroyed them,
never turned back till I cut them down.
39I cut them down, smashed them, they did not rise,
they fell beneath my feet.
40You girt me with might for combat,
those against me You brought down beneath me,
41You showed me my enemies’ nape,
my foes, I demolished them.
42They cried out—there was none to rescue,
to the LORD, He answered them not.
43I crushed them like dust of the earth,
like street mud, I pounded them, stomped them.
44You delivered me from the strife of peoples,
kept me at the head of nations
a people I knew not did serve me.
45Foreigners cowered before me,
by what the ear heard they obeyed me.
46Foreigners did wither,
47The LORD lives and blessed is my Rock,
exalted the God, Rock of my rescue!
48The God Who grants vengeance to me
and brings down peoples beneath me,
49frees me from my enemies,
from those against me You raise me up,
from a man of violence You save me.
50Therefore I acclaim You among nations, O LORD,
and to Your name I would hymn.
51Tower of rescue to His king,
keeping faith with His anointed,
for David and his seed, forever.”
CHAPTER 22 NOTES
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1. And David spoke to the LORD the words of this song. It was a common literary practice in ancient Israel to place a long poem or “song” (shirah) at or near the end of a narrative book—compare Jacob’s Testament, Genesis 49, and the Song of Moses, Deuteronomy 32. In the case of the Book of Samuel, David’s victory psalm and Hannah’s psalm, respectively a song of the male warrior’s triumph and a song contextualized as an expression of maternal triumph, enclose the large narrative like bookends, and there is even some interechoing of language between the two poems. These long concluding poems were presumably selected by the editor or composer of the book from a variety of texts available in the literary tradition and then ascribed to a principal character of the story. There is, of course, a persistent biblical notion of David the poet as well as of David the warrior-king, and the idea that he actually composed this poem, though unlikely, cannot be categorically dismissed. In any case, most scholars (Albright, Cross and Friedman, Robertson) detect relatively archaic language in the poem and date it to the tenth century, David’s time. The archaic character of the language makes the meaning of many terms conjectural. Even in the ancient period, some of the older locutions may already have been obscure to the scribes, who seem to have scrambled many phrases in transmission; but in contrast to the confident practice of many biblical scholars, caution in presuming to reconstruct the “primitive” text is prudent. It should be noted that this same poem occurs in the Book of Psalms as Psalm 18, with a good many minor textual variants. In several instances, the reading in Psalm 18 seems preferable, but here, too, methodological caution is necessary: Psalm 18 appears to be a secondary version of the poem, and its editor at least in some cases may have clarified obscurities through revision.
2. my crag and my fortress. Albright notes that many of the northwest Semitic gods were deified mountains. Thus the imagery of the god as a lofty rock or crag abounds in the poetic tradition upon which the biblical poet drew. It also makes particular sense for a poem of military triumph, since a warrior battling in the mountainous terrain of the land of Israel would keenly appreciate the image of protection of a towering cliff or a fortress situated on a height.
3. horn. The idiom is drawn from the goring horn of a charging ram or bull. In keeping with the precedent of the King James Version, it is worth preserving in English in order to suggest the concreteness and the archaic coloration of the poem.
5. For the breakers of death beset me. The condition of being mortally threatened is regularly figured in the poetry of Psalms as a descent, or virtual descent, into the terrifying shadows of the underworld.
8. The earth heaved and quaked. God’s descent from His celestial palace to do battle on behalf of his faithful servant is imagined as a seismic upheaval of the whole earth.
9. Smoke went up from His nostrils. The poetic representation of God, drawing on premonotheistic literary traditions such as the Ugaritic Baal epic, is unabashedly anthropomorphic. One must be cautious, however, in drawing theological inferences from this fact. Modes of literary expression exert a powerful momentum beyond their original cultural contexts, as Milton’s embrace of the apparatus of pagan epic in Paradise Lost vividly demonstrates. The LORD figures as a fierce warrior, like Baal, because that works evocatively as poetry. This God of earthquakes and battles breathes fire: in an intensifying narrative progression from one verset to the next and then from line to line, smoke comes out of His nostrils, His mouth spews fire, in His awesome incandescence coals ignite before Him, and then He begins his actual descent from on high.
11. He mounted a cherub and flew. The cherub is a fierce winged beast, the traditional mount of the deity.
He soared on the wings of the wind. The translation reads with Psalm 18 wayeda’, instead of the weaker wayera’, “He was seen” (the Hebrew graphemes for d and r being very close).
19. They sprang against me. The verb here—its basic meaning is to meet or greet, sometimes before the person is ready—repeats “the traps of death sprang against me” in verse 6: first that act of being taken by surprise occurs metaphorically, and now again in the literal experience of the speaker on the battlefield.
21. The LORD dealt with me by my merit. It is often claimed that verses 21–25 are a Deuteronomistic interpolation in the poem—that is, seventh century B.C.E. or later. The evidence is not entirely persuasive because the theological notion of God’s rewarding the innocence of the individual by rescuing him from grave danger is by no means a Deuteronomistic innovation, and adherence to “statutes” and “laws” (verse 23), though encouraged in the Deuteronomistic literary environment, is neither its unprecedented invention nor its unique linguistic marker.
25. by the cleanness of my hands. The Masoretic Text has merely “by my cleanness” (kevori), but the parallel version in Psalm 18 shows kevor yadai “by my cleanness of hands,” as do the Septuagint and other ancient translations of this line. The concrete juxtaposition of idioms anchored in body parts—“cleanness of hands” for “innocence” and “before Your eyes” for “in Your sight”—is characteristic of biblical usage.
26. with the blameless warrior You are without blame. Many textual critics consider “warrior” to be an interpolation and either delete it or substitute for gibor, “warrior,” gever, “man.” The parallelism of these four versets, in each of which God, in a verb, answers in kind to the adjectivally defined human agent, is better preserved without “warrior.” The profession of blamelessness scarcely accords with David’s behavior in the body of the story.
27. twist and turn. This English phrase represents a single reflexive verb in the Hebrew. It is the sole instance in this series of four versets in which the verb describing God’s action has a root different from the adjective characterizing the kind of person to whom God responds, although there is still a manifest semantic connection between the two terms here, and this works quite nicely as a small variation on the pattern to conclude the series.
28. A lowly people You rescue, / You cast Your eyes down on the haughty. The opposition between low and high is conventional in the poetry of Psalms—it also figures in Hannah’s Song—but is nonetheless effective. The speaker’s people is “lowly” in the sense that it is miserable, afflicted, endangered by superior forces. God on high looks down on the lofty who seem to have the upper hand and, as the triumphant images from verse 39 onward make clear, brings them low.
30. I rush a barrier … vault a wall. The speaker who has just been seen among “a lowly people” and then vouchsafed a beam from God’s lantern as he gropes in the dark now suddenly takes the offensive, charging the enemies’ ramparts.
33. The God, my mighty stronghold. Although this phrase, ma‘uzi ḥayil, is intelligible as it stands, the variant in Psalm 18, supported by the Qumran Samuel scroll, is more fluent and sustains a parallelism of verbs between the two halves of the line. That reading is hameʾazreni ḥayil, “Who girds me with might.”
He frees my way to be blameless. The verb here, wayater, is problematic. The most obvious construction would be as a term that generally means “to loosen,” though the syntactic link with “blameless” (there is no explicit “to be” in the Hebrew) is obscure. The version in Psalm 18 substitutes wayiten, “he kept” (or “set”), but the use of that all-purpose verb may simply reflect the scribe’s bafflement with the original verb.
34. makes my legs like a gazelle’s, / and stands me on the heights. The swiftness of the gazelle accords nicely with the image in verse 30 of the warrior sprinting in assault against the ramparts of the foe. Standing secure on the heights, then, would mark the successful conclusion of his trajectory of attack: the victorious warrior now stands on the walls, or within the conquered bastion, of the enemy. The ai suffix of bamotai, “heights,” normally a sign of the first-person possessive, is an archaic, or poetic, plural ending. The sense proposed by some scholars of “my back [or, thighs?]” is very strained, and destroys the narrative momentum between versets that is a hallmark of biblical poetry.
35. makes my arms bend a bow of bronze. The verb niḥat has not been satisfactorily explained, nor is its syntactic role in the clause clear. This translation, like everyone else’s, is no more than a guess, based on the possibility that the verb reflects a root meaning “to come down,” and so perhaps refers to the bending down of a bow.
36. Your battle cry. This noun, ‘anotkha, is still another crux. The least farfetched derivation is from the verbal steam ‘-n-h, which means either “to answer,” thus yielding a sense here of “answering power,” or “to call out,” “speak up.” Given the sequence of concrete warfare images in these lines, from bronze bow to saving shield, this translation proposes, conjecturally, “battle cry,” with the established verbal noun ‘anot, “noise” or “calling-out” in mind. Compare Exodus 32:18: “the sound of crying out in triumph” (qol ‘anot gevurah). The battle cry would use God’s name (perhaps something like “sword of the LORD and of David”) with the idea that it had a potency that would infuse the warrior with strength and resolution and strike fear in the enemy. Thus the battle cry makes the solitary fighter, or the handful he leads, “many” against seemingly superior forces.
37. You lengthened my stride beneath me, / and my ankles did not trip. This focus on the long, firm stride jibes with the previous images of rapid running against the enemy and anticipates the evocation in the lines that follow of the victorious warrior’s feet trampling the foe.
38. till I cut them down. The English phrase, chosen to reflect the rhythmic compactness of the original, represents a Hebrew verb that means “to destroy them utterly,” or, “to finish them off,” but the former phrase is too much of a mouthful and the latter is the wrong level of diction. In any event, the narrative sequence of being provided with armor and weapons and charging against a fleeing enemy is now completed as the victor overtakes his adversaries and tramples them to death.
42. there was none to rescue, / to the LORD, He answered them not. The frustration of the enemy’s desperate prayers is meant to be a pointed contrast to the situation of the speaker of the poem, who calls out to the LORD and is saved (verse 4).
44. the strife of peoples. The translation follows the minor variation of the parallel reading in Psalm 18, merivey ‘am, literally, “the strife of people.” The Masoretic Text here reads merivey ‘ami, “the strife of my people,” which may simply mean the battles in which my people is embroiled, but it also inadvertently suggests internal strife. Despite the presence of Saul in the poem’s superscription, the immediately following lines here indicate external enemies.
kept me at the head of nations. This phrase and the language of the next verset are perfectly consonant with David’s creation of an imperial presence among the peoples of the trans-Jordan region.
45. Foreigners cowered before me. All that can be said in confidence about the Hebrew verb is that it indicates something negative. The common meaning of the root is “to deny” or “to lie.” Perhaps that sense is linked in this instance with the foreigners’ fawning on their conqueror.
46. filed out from their forts. The meanings of both the verb and the noun are in dispute. The verb ḥagar usually means “to gird,” but the text in Psalm 18, more plausibly, inverts the second and third consonants, yielding ḥarag, which is generally taken to mean “emerge from,” or “pop out from,” a restrictive framework. The noun misgerotam is clearly derived from the root s-g-r, “to close,” and “fort” (an enclosure) seems fairly plausible. (The proposal of “collar” has little biblical warrant and makes rather bad sense in context.)
50. Therefore I acclaim You … O LORD. In keeping with a formal convention of the thanksgiving psalm, or todah, the poem concludes by explicitly stating that the speaker has acclaimed or given thanks (the verb cognate with the noun todah) to God.
and to your name I would hymn. The pairing in poetic parallelism of the two verbs, hodah, “acclaim,” and zimer, “hymn,” is common in the conclusion of thanksgiving psalms.
51. Tower of rescue. The variant reading in Psalm 18, supported by the consonantal text here but not by its Masoretic vocalization, is “making great the rescues [or victories] of” (instead of the noun, migdol, “tower,” the verb magdil, “to make big”). The one attraction of the Masoretic reading here of this word is that it closes the poem with an image that picks up the multiple metaphors of a lofty stronghold at the beginning.
keeping faith with His anointed, / for David and his seed, forever. Many critics have seen the entire concluding verse as an editorial addition, both because of the switch to a third-person reference to the king and because of the invocation of dynasty, beyond the temporal frame of the warrior-king’s own victories. The inference, however, is not inevitable. Switches in grammatical person, even in a single clause, occur much more easily in biblical Hebrew than in modern Western languages, and if the triumphant speaker of the poem is actually David or in any event is imagined to be David, it is quite possible that he would conclude his account of attaining imperial greatness by a prayer that the dynasty he has founded will continue to enjoy God’s steadfast support for all time.
1And these are the last words of David:
“Thus spoke David son of Jesse,
thus spoke the man raised on high,
anointed of the God of Jacob,
2The LORD’S spirit has spoken in me,
his utterance on my tongue.
3The God of Israel has said,
to me the Rock of Israel has spoken:
4Like morning’s light when the sun comes up,
morning without clouds,
from radiance, from showers—grass from earth.
5For is not thus my house with God?
An eternal covenant He gave me,
drawn up in full and guaranteed.
For all my triumph and all my desire
will He not bring to bloom?
6And the worthless man is like a thorn—
uprooted every one,
they cannot be picked up by hand.
7Should a man touch them,
And in fire they’ll be utterly burned where they are.”
8These are the names of the warriors of David: Josheb-Basshebeth, a Tahchemonite, head of the Three, he is Adino the Eznite. He brandished his spear over eight hundred slain at a single time. 9And after him Eleazar son of Dodo son of Ahohi, of the three warriors with David when they insulted the Philistines gathered there for battle and the Israelites decamped. 10He arose and struck down Philistines until his hand tired and his hand stuck to the sword. And the LORD wrought a great victory on that day, and the troops came back after him only to strip the slain. 11And after him Shammah son of Agei the Ararite. And the Philistines gathered at Lehi, and there was a plot of land there full of lentils, and the troops had fled before the Philistines. 12And he took a stand in the plot and saved it and struck down the Philistines. And the LORD wrought a great victory. 13And three of the Thirty, at the head, went down in the harvest to David at the cave of Adullam, with the Philistine force camped in the Valley of Rephaim. 14And David was then in the stronghold and the Philistine garrison then at Bethlehem. 15And David had a craving and said, “Who will give me water to drink from the well of Bethlehem, which is by the gate?” 16And the three warriors broke through the Philistine camp and drew water from the well of Bethlehem, which is by the gate, and they bore it off and brought it to David. But he would not drink it, and he poured it out in libation to the LORD. 17And he said, “Far be it from me that I should do such a thing. Shall I drink the blood of men who have gone at the risk of their lives?” And he would not drink it. These things did the three warriors do. 18And Abishai brother of Joab son of Zeruiah—he was chief of the Thirty. And he brandished his spear over three hundred slain, and he had a name with the Three. 19Of the Thirty he was most honored and so he became their captain, but he did not attain to the Three. 20And Benaiah son of Jehoida from Kabzeel, son of a valiant man, great in deeds—he struck down the two sons of Ariel of Moab and he went down and killed the lion in the pit on the day of the snow. 21And he struck down an Egyptian man, a man of daunting appearance, a spear was in the hand of the Egyptian. And he went down to him with a staff and stole the spear from the hand of the Egyptian and he killed him with his own spear. 22These things did Benaiah son of Jehoida do, and he had a name with the Three Warriors. 23Of the Thirty he was honored but he did not attain to the Three. And David put him over his royal guard. 24Asahel brother of Joab was in the Thirty, and Elhanan son of Dodo of Bethlehem. 25Shammah the Harodite, Elika the Harodite, 26Helez the Paltite, Ira son of Ikkesh the Tekoite, 27Abiezer the Anathothite, Mebunnai the Hushathite. 28Zalmon the Ahohite, Maharai the Netophathite, 29Heleb son of Baanah the Netophathite, Ittai son of Ribai from Gibeah of the Benjaminites, 30Benaiah the Pirathonite, Hiddai from Nahalei-Gaash, 31Abi-Albon the Anbathite, Azmaveth the Barhumite, 32Eliahba the Shaalbonite, sons of Jashen Jonathan, 33Shammah the Hararite, Ahiam son of Sharar the Ararite, 34Eliphelet son of Ahasbai son of the Maacathite, Eliam son of Ahitophel the Gilonite, 35Hezrai the Carmelite, Paarai the Arbite, 36Igal son of Nathan from Zobah, Bani the Gadite, 37Zelek the Ammonite, Naharai the Beerothite, armor bearer to Joab son of Zeruiah, 38Ira the Ithrite, Gareb the Ithrite, 39Uriah the Hittite—thirty-seven in all.
CHAPTER 23 NOTES
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1. these are the last words of David. David’s victory psalm in the preceding chapter is now followed by a second archaic poetic text, quite different in style, unrelated to the psalm tradition, and a good deal obscurer in many of its formulations. Although there is scholarly debate about the dating of this poem, the consensus puts it in or close to David’s own time in the tenth century B.C.E. The mystifying features of the language certainly suggest great antiquity, and it is just possible that the poem was really by David. The exact application of “the last words of David” is unclear. In terms of the narrative, they are not literally his last words because he will convey a deathbed testament to Solomon (1 Kings 2). The phrase might be intended to designate the last pronouncement in poetry of David the royal poet.
Thus spoke David. This introductory formula is a mark of prophetic or oracular language—compare the beginning of Balaam’s third oracle in Numbers 24:3.
raised on high. The two Hebrew words reflected in this translation, huqam ʿal, have a gorgeous strangeness as compacted idiom—so strange that both the Septuagint and the Qumran Samuel prefer a more common Hebrew locution, heqim ʾel, “God has raised up.” In either case, the phrase refers to David’s elevation to the throne.
sweet singer of Israel. The eloquent and famous wording of the King James Version (KJV) seems worth emulating (though the KJV uses “psalmist”), because the divergent proposals for understanding the phrase are scarcely more certain than that of the KJV. The literal meaning of neʿim zemirot yisraʾel is “sweet one [or favorite] of the chants of Israel.” The root z-m-r has a homonymous meaning—strength—which has encouraged some interpreters to construe this as “preferred of the Strong One [or Stronghold] of Israel” in parallel to “anointed of the God of Israel.” It must be said, however, that there are no instances in which the root z-m-r in the sense of strength serves as an epithet for the deity.
2. The LORD’S spirit has spoken in me. This does not mean, as some have understood, that David is claiming actual status as a prophet but rather that he is attesting to an access of oracular elevation as he proclaims his lofty (and enigmatic!) verse.
3. He who rules men, just. The translation reproduces the cryptic (elliptic?) syntax of the Hebrew, adding a clarifying comma (the Hebrew of course has no punctuation).
who rules in the fear of God. The compacted syntax of the Hebrew has no “in,” but most interpreters assume it is implied.
4. from radiance, from showers—grass from earth. The meaning of these images is much disputed, and some critics move “from radiance” altogether back to the preceding clause. The tentative reading presumed by the translation is as follows: The anointed king has been compared to the brilliant rising sun on a cloudless morning (solar imagery for kings being fairly common in ancient Near Eastern literature). The poet now adds that from the sun’s radiance, coupled with rainfall, grass springs forth from the earth. Thus the rule of the just king is a source of blessed fruitfulness to his subjects.
5. For is not thus my house with God? The Hebrew grammar here is a little confusing. It is most plausible to construe both this clause and the one at the end of the verse not as negative statements but as affirmative questions. The image of bringing to bloom in the concluding clause suggests that David’s dynasty in relation to God is to be imagined like the earth in relation to sun and showers and like the people in relation to the king: because of the everlasting covenant with David, God will make his house blossom.
6. the worthless man is like a thorn— / uprooted every one. The antithesis between flourishing soft grass and the prickly thorn torn from its roots is manifest (though it must be said that “uprooted” for the obscure munad is conjectural, if widely accepted).
7. he must get himself iron. The translation adopts the common proposal that the verb yimale’ (literally, “he will fill”) is an ellipsis for yimaleʾ yado, “he will fill his hand,” “equip himself with”). Others emend it to read ’im lo’, “except [with].”
or the shaft of a spear. The Hebrew is usually construed as “and the shaft,” but the particle waw does occasionally have the force of “or,” which is more plausible here.
in fire they’ll be utterly burned. The only suitable disposition of these nasty thorns is to rake them up with an iron tool or a spear shaft and make a bonfire of them, in order to get entirely rid of the threat they pose. The fact that weapons are used for the raking suggests the political referent of the metaphor. Such will be the fate of mischief makers (“the worthless”)—evidently all who would presume to oppose the legitimate monarchy.
where they are. This phrase reflects a single, highly dubious word in the Masoretic Text, bashavet. That word may well be an inadvertent repetition by a baffled scribe of the seventh Hebrew word in the following verse. The whole phrase in which that term occurs is itself textually problematic.
8. These are the names of the warriors of David. This list of military heroes and their exploits is perhaps the strongest candidate of any passage in the Book of Samuel to be considered a text actually written in David’s lifetime. The language is crabbed, and the very abundance of textual difficulties, uncharacteristic for prose, reflects the great antiquity of the list. These fragmentary recollections of particular heroic exploits do not sound like the invention of any later writer but, on the contrary, like memories of remarkable martial acts familiar to the audience (for example, “he … killed the lion in the pit on the day of the snow” [verse 20]) and requiring only the act of epic listing, not of narrative elaboration. It should also be noted that the list invokes the early phase of David’s career—when the Philistines were the dominant military force in the land, when David was at Adullam and in “the stronghold,” and when Asahel, destined to perish at the hands of Abner at the beginning of the civil war, was an active member of David’s corp of elite fighters.
Josheb-Basshebeth a Tahchemonite. So reads the Masoretic Text. But this looks quite dubious as a Hebrew name. One version of the Septuagint has Ish-Baal (alternately, Jeshbaal), which by scribal euphemism also appears as Ish-Bosheth and hence may have produced the confusion in the Masoretic Text. Many authorities prefer the gentilic “Hachmoni,” in accordance with the parallel verse in Chronicles.
the Three. Throughout the list, there are confusions between three, third, and thirty. The received text at this point seems to read shalishim, “commanders of units of thirty,” but “three” makes far better sense.
He brandished his spear. This whole phrase, which seems strictly necessary to make the sentence intelligible, is lacking in the Masoretic Text but appears in the parallel verse in Chronicles.
10. to strip the slain. No object of the verb “to strip” appears in the Hebrew, but this may be a simple ellipses for a common military idiom rather than a scribal omission.
11. at Lehi. The translation presupposes a minor emendation of the Masoretic laḥayah (meaning obscure, though some understand it as “in a force”) to leḥi, a place-name, which the rest of the clause seems to require.
there was a plot of land there full of lentils. The homey specificity of the detail is another manifestation of the feeling of remembered anecdote in this catalogue of exploits.
13. at the head. The Hebrew says only “head,” but the word seems to have an adverbial function, and so “at the head” is not unlikely.
15. Who will give me water to drink from the well of Bethlehem. Or “Would that I might drink water …” Bethlehem, of course, is David’s hometown, at this juncture a headquarters of the occupying Philistine forces. David expresses a sudden yen to taste the sweet water he remembers from that well by the gate of his native town, although he scarcely intends this as a serious invitation to his men to undertake anything so foolhardy as to attempt breaking through the Philistine lines in order to get it. Presumably, the three warriors—it is unclear as to whether they are identical with the Three just named, for they are said to be part of the Thirty—do not misunderstand David’s intentions. Rather, as daring fighters, they decide to take him at his word and risk their necks in raiding the Philistine garrison at Bethlehem in order to prove they can execute a seemingly impossible mission. It is easy to understand how such an exploit would be vividly recalled and registered in the epic list.
17. Shall I drink the blood of men. The verb (one word in the Hebrew) “shall I drink” is missing from the Masoretic Text, though present in both the parallel verse in Chronicles and in the Septuagint. It is possible that some ancient scribe recoiled from an expression that had David drinking human blood, even in a hyperbolic verbal gesture.
18. he was chief of the Thirty. The received text here and in verse 19 reads “Three,” but this makes no sense, as we are told that Abishai “did not attain to the Three.”
with the Three. Or, “in the three.” Since Abishai is not a member of the Three, this would have to mean that his prowess won him a reputation even among the legendary Three. Another solution is to emend the initial ba (“in,” “among”) to ka (“like”), yielding “he had a name like the Three.”
20. son of a valiant man. Many textual critics conclude that “son of” (ben) is an erroneous scribal addition.
he struck down the two sons of Ariel of Moab. These words are among the most enigmatic in the report of the exploits of David’s heroes. The words “two sons of” (sheney beney) are supplied from the Septuagint in an effort to make this clause at least a little intelligible. “Ariel” is probably a cultic site or object in Moab.
22. he had a name with the Three Warriors. See the comment on verse 18. The same problem is reflected here.
25. the Harodite. All these identifying terms in the list designate the villages from which the warriors come. A likely location of the biblical Harod would be not far from Bethlehem. The earlier names in the list cluster geographically in the territory of Judah, David’s tribe. Some of the later names indicate places in the territories of tribes to the north—perhaps reflecting new recruits to the elite unit after the conclusion of the civil war. Toward the end of the list there are also non-Israelites: these could have been mercenaries, or perhaps rather naturalized subjects of the new monarchy.
32. sons of Jashen Jonathan. This identification definitely looks scrambled. “Sons of” appears not to belong, and many textual critics omit it. “Jonathan,” as a second proper name immediately after “Jashen,” is also problematic, and one wonders whether Jashen (Hebrew yashen means “sleeping”) was ever a name.
34. Eliam son of Ahitophel. One notes that the son of the state councillor who betrayed David for Absalom was a member of David’s elite corps. He might also be the same Eliam who is Bathsheba’s father.
39. Uriah the Hittite. Is it an intended irony that the list of David’s picked warriors concludes with the man he murdered? The irony may be an artifact of the editor, if this list was composed after the events recorded in the Bathsheba story.
thirty-seven in all. As elsewhere in biblical tabulations, it is hard to make this figure compute. One system of counting yields a total of thirty-six, and the addition of Joab—rather surprisingly, omitted from the list—would produce thirty-seven.
1And once more the wrath of the LORD was kindled against Israel, and He incited David against them, saying, “Go, count Israel and Judah.” 2And the king said to Joab, commander of the force that was with him, “Go round, pray, among all the tribes of Israel, from Dan to Beersheba, and take a census of the people, that I may know the number of the people.” 3And Joab said to the king, “May the LORD your God add to the people a hundred times over with the eyes of my lord the king beholding. But why should my lord the king desire this thing?” 4And the king’s word prevailed over Joab and over the commanders of the force, and Joab, and the commanders of the force with him, went out from the king’s presence to take a census of the people, of Israel. 5And they crossed the Jordan and camped in Aroer south of the town, which is in the middle of the Wadi of Gad and by Jazer. 6And they came to Gilead and to the region of Tahtim-Hodshi, and they came to Dan-Jaan and round toward Sidon. 7And they came to the fortress of Tyre and to all the towns of the Hivvite and the Canaanite, and they went out to the Negeb of Judah, to Beersheba. 8And they went round through all the land and returned at the end of nine months and twenty days to Jerusalem. 9And Joab gave the number of the census of the people to the king, and Israel made up eight hundred thousand sword-wielding men, and Judah five hundred thousand men. 10And David was smitten with remorse afterward for having counted the people. And David said to the LORD, “I have offended greatly in what I have done. And now, LORD, remit the guilt of your servant, for I have been very foolish.” 11And David arose in the morning, and the word of the LORD had come to Gad the prophet, David’s seer, saying, 12“Go and speak to David—‘Thus says the LORD: Three things I have taken against you. Choose you one of them, and I shall do it to you. 13Seven years of famine in your land, or three months when you flee before your foes as they pursue you, or let there be three days of plague in your land.’ Now, mark and see, what reply shall I bring back to Him Who sent me?” 14And David said to Gad, “I am in great straits. Let us, pray, fall into the LORD’S hand, for great is His mercy, and into the hand of man let me not fall.” 15And the LORD sent a plague against Israel from morning until the fixed time, and from Dan to Beersheba seventy-seven thousand men of the people died.
16And the messenger reached out his hand against Jerusalem to destroy it, and the LORD regretted the evil and said to the messenger who was sowing destruction among the people, “Enough! Now stay your hand.” And the LORD’s messenger was at the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite. 17And David said to the LORD when he saw the messenger who was striking down the people, thus he said, “It is I who offended, I who did wrong. And these sheep, what have they done? Let your hand be against me and my father’s house.” 18And Gad came to David on that day and said to him, “Go up, raise to the LORD an altar on the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite.” 19And David went up according to the word of Gad, as the LORD had charged. 20And Araunah looked out and saw the king and his servants crossing over toward him, and Araunah went out and bowed down to the king, his face to the ground. 21And Araunah said, “Why has my lord the king come to his servant?” And David said, “To buy the threshing floor from you to build an altar to the LORD, that the scourge may be held back from the people. 22And Araunah said to David, “Let my lord the king take and offer up what is good in his eyes. See the oxen for the burnt offering and the threshing boards and the oxen’s gear for wood. 23All of it Araunah has, O king, given to the king.” And Araunah said to the king, “May the LORD your God show you favor.” 24And the king said to Araunah, “Not so! I will surely buy it from you for a price, and I will not offer up burnt offerings to the LORD my God at no cost.” And David bought the threshing floor and the oxen for fifty shekels of silver. 25And David built there an altar to the LORD and offered up burnt offerings and well-being sacrifices, and the LORD granted the plea for the land and the scourge was pulled back from Israel.
CHAPTER 24 NOTES
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1. And once more the wrath of the LORD was kindled against Israel. The reason for God’s wrath is entirely unspecified, and attempts to link it to events in the preceding narrative are quite unconvincing. In fact, this entire narrative unit (which some scholars claim is itself composite) is strikingly different in theological assumptions, in its imagination of narrative situation and character, and even in its style from the David story proper as well as from the tale of David and the Gibeonites in chapter 21 with which it is symmetrically paired. Perhaps, indeed, there is no discernible reason for God’s fury against Israel. The God of this story has the look of acting arbitrarily, exacting terrible human costs in order to be placated. Unlike the deity of 1 Samuel 1–2 Samuel 20, He is decidedly an interventionist God, pulling the human actors by strings, and He may well be a capricious God, here “inciting” David to carry out a census that will only bring grief to the people.
2. Joab, commander of the force. A different vocabulary is another indication that a different writer is at work here. Throughout the David narrative, Joab is designated sar hatsava’, “commander of the army,” but here the terminology changes to the unusual sar haḥayil, “commander of the force.” Similarly, the verb for “go round,” sh-w-t—it is attached to the Adversary in the frame story of Job—is distinctive of this narrative.
3. But why should my LORD the king desire this thing? Underlying the story is both a cultic and a superstitious fear of the census, reflected in Joab’s objection to it. Several commentators have noted that according to Exodus 30:12 every Israelite counted in a census was required to pay a half shekel as “ransom” (kofer) for his life. Since such payment could not be realistically expected in a total census of the nation, masses of people would be put in a condition of violation of ritual. But there is also a folkloric horror of being counted as a condition of vulnerability to malignant forces. In Rashi’s words: “For the evil eye holds sway over counting.” Beyond these considerations, Joab the commander may have a political concern in mind: the census served as the basis for conscription (compare the notation in verse 9 of those counted as “sword-wielding men”), and thus imposing the census might conceivably have provoked opposition to the threatened conscription and to the king who was behind it. It is noteworthy that the census is carried out by army officers.
5. they crossed the Jordan and camped in Aroer. Aroer is roughly fifteen miles east of the Dead Sea. The trajectory of the census takers describes a large ellipsis: first to the southeast from Jerusalem, then north through trans-Jordan to Gilead and beyond, then west through the northernmost Israelite territory to the sea, then all the way south to Beersheba, and back to Jerusalem. All this, which will lead to wholesale death, is accomplished in nine months and twenty days—the human gestation period.
6. Tahtim-Hodshi. The name is suspect, but efforts to recover an original name behind it remain uncertain.
7. the fortress of Tyre. Evidently a mainland outpost to the south of Tyre proper, which was on an island.
9. sword-wielding. The Hebrew says literally “sword-drawing.”
10. I have offended greatly in what I have done. In contrast to the cogent sense of moral agency and moral responsibility in the David story proper, there is a peculiar contradiction here: David confesses deep contrition, yet he has, after all, been manipulated by God (“incited”) to do what he has done.
11. Gad the prophet, David’s seer. Gad was mentioned earlier (1 Samuel 22:5). His appearance here by no means warrants the claim of Kyle McCarter Jr. and others that this story is the work of a “prophetic” writer. Visionary intermediaries between king and God were a common assumption in the ancient world. Gad is called “seer” (ḥozeh), not the way prophetic writers would ordinarily think of prophets (and also not the term used for Samuel in 1 Samuel 9). Above all, the prophetic current in biblical literature does not presuppose either this kind of arbitrarily punitive God or the accompanying hocus-pocus with choices of punishment and divine messengers of destruction visible to the human characters.
14. Let us … fall into the LORD’s hand … and into the hand of man let me not fall. There is a puzzle in David’s choice because only one of the three punishments—the flight from enemies—clearly involves human agency. Perhaps David has in mind that an extended famine would lead to absolute dependence on those foreign nations unaffected by the famine, as in the story of Joseph’s brothers going down to Egypt. In all this, it should be noted that David is scarcely the same character we have seen in the body of his story. Instead of that figure of conflicting feelings and emotions so remarkable in psychological depth, we have a flat character instigated to act by God, then expressing remorse, then speaking in rather official tones in his role as political ruler and cultic chief responsible for all the people.
15. the fixed time. There is some question about what this refers to, though the grounds for emending the text to solve the problem are shaky. The phrase ought logically to refer to the end of the ordained three days of the plague. Yet David’s intercession to stop the plague short before it engulfs Jerusalem suggests that the plague does not go on for the full three days. The difficulty might be resolved simply by assuming that the initial verb—“and the LORD sent a plague against Israel”—refers to the initiating of the process according to the promised time limitations: God sends a plague against Israel intended to rage for the stipulated time of three days, but after it has devastated the people on a terrible scale for a certain time (perhaps two days?), David, aghast that these horrors should visit his own city as well, takes steps to induce God to cut the plague short.
16. And the messenger reached out his hand against Jerusalem to destroy it. Once again, the apparatus and the theology of this story reflect a different imaginative world from that of the main narrative about David, in which there are no divine emissaries of destruction brandishing celestial swords. The text of the Qumran Samuel scroll, paralleled in 1 Chronicles 21, makes the mythological character of this story even clearer: “and David raised his eyes and saw a messenger of the LORD standing between earth and heaven, his sword unsheathed in his hand reaching out against Jerusalem, and David and the elders fell on their faces, covered with sackcloth.”
stay your hand. Literally, “let your hand go slack, unclench it.”
the LORD’s messenger was at the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite. In this fashion, the last-minute averting of the destruction of Jerusalem is linked with the etiological tale explaining how the site of the future temple was acquired. (Although the Temple is not explicitly mentioned, this acquisition of an altar site in Jerusalem is clearly placed here to prepare the way for the story of Solomon the temple builder that is to follow.) Thus, the first sacrifice offered on this spot is associated with a legendary turning away of wrath from Jerusalem—a token of the future function of the Temple. The name Araunah is not Semitic and is generally thought to be Hittite or Hurrian. Some scholars claim it is a title, not a name. In any event, Araunah’s presence indicates that the conquered Jebusites were not massacred or entirely banished but continued to live in Jerusalem under David as his subjects.
17. It is I who offended. The Qumran text reads here, “It is I, the shepherd, who did evil.” That, of course, neatly complements “these sheep” in the next clause, but it is hard to know whether “shepherd” was original or added by a later scribe to clarify the sheep metaphor.
21. Why has my LORD the king come to his servant? Isaac Abravanel aptly notes that it would not have been customary for the king to come to his subject: “You should have sent for me, for the lesser man goes to the greater and the greater does not go to the lesser.” Abravanel, a councillor to Ferdinand and Isabella who was in the end exiled by them, would have been keenly familiar with such protocol.
to build an altar to the LORD, that the scourge may be held back. According to the ritualistic assumptions of this narrative, it requires not merely contrition but a special sacrifice to placate the deity. This leads one to suspect that the story, far from being prophetic literature, may have originated in some sort of priestly circle.
22. Let my lord … take … what is good in his eyes. In this whole exchange, there is a distinct parallel to Abraham’s bargaining with Ephron the Hittite for the purchase of a gravesite at Hebron in Genesis 23. Ephron, too, first offers to make a gift to Abraham of what he requires, but the patriarch, like David here, insists on paying full price in order to have undisputed possession of the property.
the oxen for the burnt offering and the threshing boards and the oxen’s gear. What Araunah does not offer David is the land itself, which he clearly wants. Both the threshing board and the “gear” (presumably, the yoke) would have been wooden. Since the sacrifice needs to be performed at once in order to avert the plague, Araunah is quick to offer not only the sacrificial beasts but firewood on the spot.
23. All of it Araunah has, O king, given to the king. The Hebrew, with the repeated “king,” looks peculiar, though it is intelligible if the first “king” is construed as a vocative. Some emend the verse to read “all of it has Araunah your servant given to my lord the king.”
25. the LORD granted the plea for the land. This is, of course, a near verbatim repetition of the words that conclude the story of David and the Gibeonites’ execution of the descendants of Saul (21:14). The repetition may well be an editorial intervention intended to underscore the symmetry between the tale of a scourge averted by David’s intercession at the beginning and at the end of this large composite coda to 1 and 2 Samuel. Although neither of these stories is especially continuous with the David story proper, both reflect a connection with it in the emphasis on guilt that the king incurs, which brings disaster on the nation and which requires expiation. But the writer of genius responsible for the larger David narrative imagines guilt in far more probing moral terms and does not assume that the consequences of moral offenses and grave political misjudgments can be reversed by some ritual act.