Biblion Bible Commentary
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The Murder of Ishbosheth
2 Samuel 4:1-12
1 When Saul’s son heard that Abner was dead in Hebron, his hands became feeble, and all the Israelites were troubled. · WEB
Two officers assassinate their own king in his bed and bring the head to David expecting thanks — the third time a man has misread him, and the last.
When Saul's son heard that Abner was dead in Hebron, his hands became feeble, and all the Israelites were troubled 2 Samuel 4:1.
Without Abner there is no northern kingdom, only a frightened man on a throne he never held. The account gives him no words at all, in this chapter or any other; he is the book's portrait of a figurehead, and his own officers can read the situation as well as anyone.
Now Jonathan, Saul's son, had a son who was lame in his feet... his nurse picked him up and fled. As she hurried to flee, he fell and became lame 2 Samuel 4:4.
The narrator interrupts the assassination to introduce a five-year-old dropped by a nurse on the day of Gilboa. The placement is deliberate: with Ishbosheth about to die, this crippled child is what remains of Saul's house — no threat to anyone, and the only person left for a covenant to reach. Chapter nine is being set up five chapters early.
They came there into the middle of the house as though they would have fetched wheat, and they struck him in the body 2 Samuel 4:6.
The killing is squalid: two captains of raiding bands, a house at noon, a man asleep through the heat of the day, a pretext about grain. Then the beheading and an all-night march down the Jordan valley with the head in a bag.
"Behold, the head of Ishbosheth, the son of Saul, your enemy, who sought your life! Yahweh has avenged my lord the king today" 2 Samuel 4:8.
They have brought a trophy and a theological justification — God's vengeance, delivered by their hands. It is the third time in four chapters that someone has assumed David would be pleased by a rival's death, and the pattern says something about the world these men lived in: everyone around David expects him to behave the way kings behave.
"When someone told me, 'Behold, Saul is dead,' thinking that he brought good news, I seized him and killed him in Ziklag, which was the reward I gave him for his news" 2 Samuel 4:10.
David cites the precedent himself, and then states the aggravating difference: that man claimed to have finished a dying king on a battlefield; these two have slain a righteous person in his own house on his bed 2 Samuel 4:11. Ishbosheth is called righteous — not competent, not legitimate, but innocent of any crime deserving this — and the murder of a sleeping man in his own house is named as what it is.
The execution that follows is severe, with the bodies displayed at the pool of Hebron 2 Samuel 4:12, and the last line of the chapter is the merciful one: the head is buried in Abner's grave. David gives the puppet king the burial of a prince, in the tomb of the general who made him. The road to a united kingdom is now clear, and David has arrived on it with clean hands and two public funerals to prove it.
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