Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to 2 Samuel · About this commentary
The Water of the Well of Bethlehem
2 Samuel 23:8-23
8 These are the names of the mighty men whom David had: Josheb Basshebeth, a Tahchemonite, chief of the captains; he was called Adino the Eznite, who killed eight hundred at one time. · WEB
A roll of impossible deeds — a hand frozen to a sword, a lentil field held alone — and a king who will not drink water three men nearly died to fetch.
He arose and struck the Philistines until his hand was weary, and his hand froze to the sword 2 Samuel 23:10.
The hero list opens with three men and three stands, and the detail is what makes them memorable: Eleazar fighting on after the army has run, until his fingers will not release the hilt; Shammah planting himself in the middle of a lentil patch that nobody else thought worth dying for 2 Samuel 23:11–12. Both accounts end with the same phrase — Yahweh worked a great victory — which is the list's theology in miniature. The men are named and the victory is credited elsewhere, and neither cancels the other.
Shammah's field is worth a moment. It is a plot of lentils. There is no strategic value in it, and holding it is simply refusing to let the enemy have one more thing that belongs to Israel. Faithfulness usually looks like this rather than like the valley of Elah.
David said longingly, "Oh that someone would give me water to drink from the well of Bethlehem, which is by the gate!" 2 Samuel 23:15.
The scene is from the Adullam years, with a Philistine garrison in his hometown. It is a wish spoken aloud, not an order — a tired man remembering the taste of home — and three men hear it and go, breaking through an enemy army and back for a jug of water.
But he would not drink of it, but poured it out to Yahweh. He said, "Be it far from me, Yahweh, that I should do this! Isn't this the blood of the men who risked their lives to go?" 2 Samuel 23:16–17.
The refusal could look like ingratitude and is the opposite. To drink it would be to consume something bought with three men's lives for a personal craving; pouring it out as an offering says that what they risked belongs to God rather than to the king's thirst. It is also, quietly, a rebuke of his own idle wish — a leader learning that the things he says out loud have consequences other people pay for. The man who once spent Uriah's life on a private appetite is the same man here, and the two scenes belong side by side.
Benaiah... also went down and killed a lion in the middle of a pit in a time of snow 2 Samuel 23:20.
The second tier gets its own catalogue: Abishai against three hundred, Benaiah against two Moabite champions, a lion in a pit on a snowy day, and an Egyptian giant disarmed with a staff and killed with his own spear 2 Samuel 23:21. These are the men the exile years produced — the distressed and indebted who came to a cave 1 Samuel 22:2 and became this. What David built out of them is a better monument than the pillar in the king's valley.
settled What this mark means