Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to 2 Samuel · About this commentary
The City of David
2 Samuel 5:1-16
1 Then all the tribes of Israel came to David at Hebron and spoke, saying, “Behold, we are your bone and your flesh. · WEB
Twenty years after the oil, the whole nation comes to Hebron — and the new king takes a town nobody had ever taken and makes it his own.
"Behold, we are your bone and your flesh. In times past, when Saul was king over us, it was you who led Israel out and in" 2 Samuel 5:1–2.
The northern elders give three reasons and they are worth separating: kinship, a service record, and last, the word of God — you will be shepherd of my people Israel 2 Samuel 5:2. The order is honest about how nations decide things. And what follows is not simply an acclamation: King David made a covenant with them in Hebron before Yahweh 2 Samuel 5:3 — a negotiated agreement with terms, made in God's presence, before the anointing. Israel's monarchy is contractual from its second king onward, which is why the north can later claim the contract has been broken 1 Kings 12:4.
This is David's third anointing — private in Bethlehem, by Judah at Hebron, now by all Israel — with roughly twenty years between the first and the last.
"The blind and the lame will keep you out of here" 2 Samuel 5:6.
The Jebusites' taunt measures their confidence: the ridge was so defensible that a garrison of invalids could hold it, and it had in fact stood unconquered since the settlement Joshua 15:63 Judges 1:21. David takes it by the watercourse 2 Samuel 5:8 — the shaft that brought water inside the walls, the one weakness of a city on a rock — and the taunt becomes a local saying instead of a defense.
The choice of capital is the shrewdest decision of the reign. Jerusalem sat on the border between Judah and Benjamin, belonging to neither, so a united kingdom got a capital that owed nothing to either bloc. Every king of Judah after him rules from a city taken by his own men, which is why it is called David's city and never the tribe's.
David grew greater and greater, for Yahweh, the God of Armies, was with him 2 Samuel 5:10.
The narrator's explanation is flat and repeated, and the next verses show what it looked like from outside: Tyre sends cedar and craftsmen, a palace goes up, and David perceived that Yahweh had established him king over Israel — with the reason given in the same breath, for his people Israel's sake 2 Samuel 5:12. The office is understood as a trust held for others, which is the theology that makes chapter eleven so grave.
And one line sits in the middle of the success without comment: David took more concubines and wives for himself out of Jerusalem 2 Samuel 5:13. The law had warned against exactly this Deuteronomy 17:17. Solomon's name appears in the list of sons that follows, and so do the rivalries that will tear the house apart.
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