2 Samuel11chapter 11

2 Samuel 11:6-8

Send me Uriah the Hittite: David's plan starts as concealment. He calls Uriah home under cover of a report on the war, asks after Joab and the army and how the fighting goes, and then sends him down to his own house with a gift of food following him. The design is that Uriah lie with his wife so the coming child could pass as his own. Nothing in the summons names the true reason; David asks about the siege of Rabbah to a man he intends to use, not to consult.

Henry says a messenger of far less rank could have brought this report, and he calls the questions a pretext. Gill says David was at a loss for words. Barnes says the king was forced into falsehood to hide his sin.

Clarke says Uriah had come a long way and needed to wash his feet. Barnes says the gift was the portion of honour a host sends to his chief guest, as at Genesis 43:34. Clarke says David had no thought yet of murder.

2 Samuel 11:9-10

slept at the door: Uriah does not go down. He sleeps at the door of the king's house with the king's own servants, and the first plan fails without a word of protest from him. David hears of it and asks him directly why he did not go down to his house after coming from the field, and the question shows how far David will press a man to cover his own sin. Uriah's silence about his reasons here makes his answer in the next verse land with its full weight.

Clarke hears David telling Uriah that a soldier back from the road should go home to his house and rest. Henry sees the hand of God in Uriah's choice to sleep at the door of the palace. It kept David's sin from being hidden.

abide in tents: Uriah gives the reason himself: the ark, and Israel, and Judah abide in tents, and Joab and his lord's servants camp in the open field, and he will not go down to eat and drink and lie with his wife while they do. The ark's presence with the army ties this verse to its own thread; some read it carried along to rally the troops and to keep enquiry of the Lord near at hand. A foreign-born soldier keeps a stricter loyalty to Israel's war than the king who sent him home to break it. Uriah's oath, as thou livest and as thy soul liveth, is spoken in the very words a man would use to swear before God, to the man already plotting his death.

2 Samuel 11:12-13

to morrow I will let thee depart: David tries once more, keeping Uriah another day and promising to let him depart tomorrow. At the meal David makes him drunk, hoping wine will loosen what conscience and loyalty held firm sober. Even drunk, Uriah goes out to sleep among the king's servants and still does not go down to his house. The soldier's self-command outlasts the king's own scheming, and the older commentators note the irony plainly, that David cannot out-drink a man's integrity.

Adam Clarke says David got Uriah drunk so that he would drop his guard and hurry home to his wife. Matthew Henry calls pressing drink on a man the devil's work.

2 Samuel 11:14-15

wrote a letter to Joab: Concealment fails, so David turns to murder, and Uriah himself carries the letter that orders his own death. The letter's instruction is precise, to set him in the forefront of the hottest battle and then withdraw, that he may be struck down. Adam Clarke likens the scene to the old story of Bellerophon, who carried to his own death the letter meant to destroy him, unknowing. Uriah's last act of obedience to his king becomes the means of his death, the same loyalty that refused to go home to his wife now sent instead to the front line.

Wesley says David laid one sin over another to cover it. Gregory the Dialogist writes that David, who had spared the wicked, now hurried without pause to the death of a good man. Henry says the letter put the men who fought beside Uriah in danger of being killed too.

2 Samuel 11:16-17

where he knew that valiant men were: Joab carries out the order but widens it. He places Uriah where he knows the defenders are strongest, and when the men of the city sally out, soldiers fall alongside him, David's own servants among the dead. A single death might have raised questions; a skirmish with several losses does not. Uriah dies in the company of other men killed to make his own death appear ordinary, the cost of David's scheme paid twice over.

Barnes says the men of the city came out as a lure, to draw the besiegers within reach of the archers on the wall. Henry says Uriah fought on in hope that Joab would come to his aid. Clarke says he gave his life gladly for his king.

2 Samuel 11:18-21

all the things concerning the war: Joab reports the fighting to David and coaches the messenger for the moment David's anger rises over troops sent too near the wall. He is told to answer with the old precedent of Abimelech, killed at Thebez when a woman cast a piece of a millstone from the wall onto him, a story known well enough that naming it would explain why men should not approach a wall so closely. Only after that defense is ready does the messenger have leave to add, almost in passing, that Uriah the Hittite is dead also. Joab manages David's expected reaction before David has reacted at all, and buries Uriah's name inside a report about tactics.

John Gill says the messenger was to read the king's face. The whole news of the war, from the start of the siege, came first, and his last words were to wait on what he saw there.

Adam Clarke suspects that Joab had lost men through his own error at the wall. Joab joined that loss to the death of Uriah, news the king wanted, to turn aside his anger. Every soldier knew the reach of the archers, John Gill observes.

Barnes pairs Jerubbesheth with Jerubbaal, the name Gideon carries at Judges 6:32. He takes the question as a sign that David knew the history of his people and had it read to him. Henry says even the soldiers could quote how a woman on the wall killed Abimelech.

2 Samuel 11:22-25

shewed David all that Joab: The messenger delivers the account exactly as instructed, and Uriah's death lands among the war news rather than at its head. David's reply is chosen already: let not this thing displease thee, for the sword devoureth one as well as another. The words are hypocrisy spoken with full knowledge, since David alone knows the death was ordered and not chance. He closes by telling Joab to press the siege harder, weakening the very war he claims to serve while his own sin has already done the greater damage to it.

John Gill reads the report as one sally from Rabbah, met by a rally that chased the defenders back to their gate. The chase carried the men of Israel under the wall.

Matthew Henry notes that the dead are named the king's servants, which sets their loss against the king who spent them. Uriah's name comes last, as Joab had scripted.

Matthew Henry says that once Uriah was dead, David could make light of every other loss as a common chance of war. Adam Clarke answers that David himself had ordered it. David closes by sending comfort to Joab.

2 Samuel 11:26-27

mourned for her husband: Bathsheba mourns her husband, and the record does not weigh her grief; it states only the outward form, as widows were expected to observe. When the mourning ends David sends for her, marries her, and she bears him a son, the marriage timed to cover what began at verse four. Every step to this point has been told without a word of judgment, sight, taking, covering, killing, marrying. Only the chapter's last clause breaks the silence, that the thing that David had done displeased the Lord, the narrator's one verdict on the whole account, and the sentence that opens directly into Nathan's parable in the chapter that follows.

Adam Clarke puts the mourning at about seven days, which makes the marriage a hurried one. John Wesley notes that the birth of the son means David went months without repentance, all the while keeping up his worship. Clarke reads the last clause as a guard against excuse.