Biblion Bible Commentary
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Stealing the Hearts of Israel
2 Samuel 15:1-12
1 After this, Absalom prepared a chariot and horses for himself, and fifty men to run before him. · WEB
Four years at the city gate, promising everyone justice he never has to deliver — and a coup launched under cover of a vow.
Absalom prepared a chariot and horses for himself, and fifty men to run before him 2 Samuel 15:1.
The campaign begins with a motorcade. Israel had no royal chariotry to speak of, so the display announces a king before anyone has crowned one — and nobody stops him.
"Behold, your matters are good and right; but there is no man deputized by the king to hear you" 2 Samuel 15:3.
The method is meeting every petitioner at the gate before he reaches the court, agreeing that his case is sound, and blaming the administration for the delay. It is unfalsifiable and it costs nothing: he never has to rule, so he is never wrong, and every man leaves believing he would have won. The charge itself has some truth in it — the king who once executed justice for all his people 2 Samuel 8:15 has been notably unable to judge his own household 2 Samuel 13:21. Absalom, whose own crime went unjudged, campaigns on the failure to judge.
When any man came near to bow down to him, he stretched out his hand, took hold of him, and kissed him 2 Samuel 15:5.
He refuses the homage due a prince and embraces the man instead — the common touch as strategy. So Absalom stole the hearts of the men of Israel 2 Samuel 15:6, and the verb is the narrator's verdict: this is theft, not persuasion.
"Please let me go and pay my vow, which I have vowed to Yahweh, in Hebron" 2 Samuel 15:7.
The coup is launched under the cover of religion — a vow made in exile, now to be paid in the old capital. Hebron is a shrewd choice: David's own first throne, where Absalom was born, in a Judah that may resent the move to Jerusalem. Two hundred guests are invited who went in their simplicity; and they didn't know anything 2 Samuel 15:11, their presence lending the gathering the look of a court in waiting.
Absalom sent for Ahithophel the Gilonite, David's counselor 2 Samuel 15:12.
The last piece is the defection of the king's own strategist, whose advice was reckoned like an oracle 2 Samuel 16:23. His granddaughter, on the book's own genealogy, was Bathsheba 2 Samuel 11:3 2 Samuel 23:34, and Uriah was his colleague on the roll of the mighty men. If that is the reason, the sword of the oracle has reached the cabinet: the counselor David needed most is the one man in Jerusalem with a private account to settle. The conspiracy was strong, for the people increased continually with Absalom.
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