2 Samuel12chapter 12

2 Samuel 12:1-3

Nathan comes to David as a judge is asked to judge, laying out a case rather than an accusation, and David never suspects that he sits as the accused. The poor man's one ewe lamb, fed from his own dish and carried in his bosom like a daughter, gives the rich man's crime its full weight before David hears a single name. Matthew Henry notes that Nathan does not shrink from a king's rank any more than Uriah's low rank shielded him from the king's hand. The parable's method, drawing a right verdict from the very mouth that will be condemned by it, sets the pattern for the chapter that follows.

2 Samuel 12:4-6

A traveller arrives and the rich man spares his own flock to take the poor man's lamb instead, and David's anger is kindled before he sees that the story is his own. His sentence names both the Law's fourfold restitution for a stolen sheep, Exodus 22:1, and his own fitting portion of it, for he will lose four sons to the sword he has just called down on another man. The older writers count that fourfold word against David himself, the child of Bathsheba, then Amnon, Absalom and Adonijah, though the count is their reading of the text and not the text's own arithmetic. Adam Clarke reads David's own mouth as passing his own sentence, the Hebrew calling the man a son of death before the Lord God of Israel need say a word more.

2 Samuel 12:7-9

Thou art the man is Nathan's whole reply, and the phrase occurs nowhere else in Scripture, the parable's judge becoming the accused in three words. Nathan recites what the Lord had given David, the kingdom, the house of Israel and Judah, and more besides for the asking, before naming what David took that was never his to take. The charge is put in the sharpest terms the text allows, thou hast killed Uriah the Hittite with the sword and hast taken his wife, with the Ammonite blade named only as the instrument David chose. Jamieson Fausset and Brown read the rebuke as necessary precisely because David's public standing made a private sin into a public wound on the name of the Lord.

2 Samuel 12:10-12

The sword shall never depart from thine house sets a sentence that the next twelve chapters simply narrate rather than repeat, Amnon dying by his brother's hand, Absalom dying in rebellion, Adonijah dying under Solomon. Verse eleven names the shape it will take, evil raised up out of David's own house and his wives given to his neighbour in the sight of the sun, and 16:22 answers it exactly, Absalom with his father's concubines on the same roof where the whole affair of chapter eleven began. John Gill reads the doubled charge of verse ten, thou hast despised me and hast taken the wife of Uriah, as marking how heinous the offence stood even after the sentence was passed. The public reversal promised in verse twelve, before all Israel and before the sun, is the measure the private sin is held to.

2 Samuel 12:13

David's confession is five words in the Hebrew and Nathan's answer is immediate, the Lord also hath put away thy sin, thou shalt not die. Psalm 51 sets itself in this chapter by its own title, though this database stores the Psalms without their Hebrew titles and the link cannot be shown from the floor by query, and the bench reads Psalm 32 beside it as the same confession in a different key. Matthew Henry notes that David's own line in the psalm, against thee, thee only, have I sinned, takes up the very charge Nathan has just laid, that the sin was first and finally against the Lord. Albert Barnes reads thou shalt not die as the death of the soul turned aside, not an exemption from every consequence that follows.

2 Samuel 12:14

The ground given for the child's death is not the adultery or the murder alone but the occasion David's deed gave the enemies of the Lord to blaspheme, a public reproach on the name he was anointed to serve. Nathan had already pronounced pardon in the verse before, and this verse pronounces a consequence that the pardon does not erase. Matthew Henry reads the two verses together as proof that forgiveness and temporal chastening are not the same mercy, and that God may put away the guilt of sin while still letting its wages fall. The child's coming sickness, three verses ahead, is this sentence taking its course.

2 Samuel 12:15-17

the Lord struck the child: The Lord struck the child in the next clause after Nathan departs, and the sickness that follows is the sentence of verse fourteen already at work. David fasts, lies all night on the earth, and refuses to be raised up by the elders of his own house, a mourning so total that his own household cannot reach him. John Wesley reads the intensity as proof the king was not grieving a possible loss so much as carrying the weight of his own sin before the God who had just named it. The scene stands beside the parable's ewe lamb that lay in the poor man's bosom, another life bound up in a father's love and now under sentence.

2 Samuel 12:18-19

The servants fear to tell David the child has died, reasoning that a man who would not be comforted while there was hope will do himself harm once hope is gone. David reads the answer in their whispering before anyone speaks it, and his question is as plain as Nathan's sentence had been, is the child dead. Matthew Henry notes the household's fear says as much about the seven days just past as anything recorded, for they had watched a king brought lower than any subject by grief for a son not yet named. The answer, he is dead, closes the sentence of verse fourteen exactly as it was spoken.

2 Samuel 12:20-23

David rises, washes, changes his apparel and goes first to the house of the Lord to worship before he eats, reversing every sign of mourning the household had just watched him carry for seven days. His servants ask the plain question, and his answer turns on one line, I shall go to him, but he shall not return to me, spoken while fasting could still move God and set aside once it no longer could. Adam Clarke reads the line as at least the shape of a hope beyond this life, whether or not David meant to state the doctrine outright, and John Wesley reads it as David's own confidence that he would find his son in the state where the dead are kept. The worship before the meal is itself an answer to the household's confusion, for David has already made his case to God and now receives whatever God gives.

2 Samuel 12:24-25

Bathsheba bears a son named Solomon, peaceable, and the Lord loved him, the grace side of the chapter standing beside its judgment. Nathan, the same prophet who had just pronounced the sentence, is sent to give the child a second name, Jedidiah, beloved of the Lord, which Adam Clarke calls the first instance in Scripture of a prophet naming another man's child. The two names carried by one boy hold both halves of the chapter, the household's peace after its sword and the love of God reaching the very union that began in sin. Jamieson Fausset and Brown read the Lord's love for Solomon as a mark of grace measured against the marriage's own beginning, not a verdict that erased it.

2 Samuel 12:26-28

While the household drama of the chapter's first half plays out, the siege of Rabbah has been running in the background since chapter eleven opened with kings going out to battle and David staying home. Joab takes the city of waters, the lower town built on its stream, and sends word to David rather than finishing the conquest himself. John Wesley and Matthew Henry both read Joab's restraint as deference to his king's honour, calling David to the field so that the victory is counted to his name and not to his general's. The request also quietly restores David to the field he had avoided at the start of chapter eleven, the very absence that opened the door to Bathsheba.

2 Samuel 12:29-31

David gathers the people, comes to Rabbah, and finishes what Joab began, taking the Ammonite king's crown, a talent of gold set with precious stones, onto his own head. Matthew Henry notes the irony of a man under such recent conviction reaching for a crown's glory rather than laying it at God's feet, a small echo of the same appetite chapter eleven exposed. The chapter's last verse records David putting the Ammonites to hard labour with saws and axes and the brickkiln, and John Wesley reads the harshness as the mark of a heart not yet fully returned to its former mercy. The chapter that opened with a shepherd's ewe lamb closes with a king's captured crown, the household sentence of verse ten still running its course through the chapters ahead.