2 Samuel16chapter 16

2 Samuel 16:1-4

Ziba meets the fleeing king with provisions and a claim: that Mephibosheth stayed behind at Jerusalem hoping the kingdom would be restored to Saul's house. David grants him all that pertained to Mephibosheth on that one report, without sending to ask the other side. The text withholds its own verdict on Ziba's honesty until Mephibosheth answers him at 19:24-30, and the reader is asked to wait as David did not.

2 Samuel 16:5-8

Shimei is of Saul's own house, and he meets the king at Bahurim with stones and a curse that names David a bloody man twice over. His charge blames David for the blood of Saul's line, though the text elsewhere lays that blood at other doors, and some read into thou bloody man an echo of Uriah, the innocent blood David actually shed. The curse is public and physical, thrown stones and dust alongside words, before David's own mighty men on his right hand and his left.

2 Samuel 16:9-10

Abishai calls Shimei a dead dog and asks leave to take off his head on the spot, the same hot temper the sons of Zeruiah show through both books. David refuses him with a rebuke, what have I to do with you, ye sons of Zeruiah, and reads Shimei's curse as the Lord's own doing rather than a crime to be punished at once. So let him curse, because the Lord hath said unto him ties the curse to providence rather than to a divine command to sin, and Adam Clarke and John Wesley both take care to make that distinction.

2 Samuel 16:11-12

David reasons from the greater grief to the lesser: if his own son, the child of his own body, now seeks his life, how much more may this Benjamite curse him. Let him alone, and let him curse repeats the verdict of verse ten and adds the ground again, for the Lord hath bidden him, before David turns from present pain to a stated hope. It may be that the Lord will look on mine affliction reads a Hebrew word some manuscripts and the Targum give instead as mine eye, meaning the king's own tears, and either way David asks God to answer the curse with good rather than to avenge it himself.

2 Samuel 16:13-14

Shimei keeps pace on the hillside the whole way, stones and dust added to the curse already spoken, so that the abuse is not one outburst but a running accompaniment to the king's flight. Verse fourteen closes the scene on David's side of the chapter with three plain words, came weary, and refreshed themselves there, before the narrative crosses over to Absalom's camp for the rest of the chapter. The chapter's structure itself argues David's case: while the king absorbs curses on a hillside, the son he fled is about to take counsel that will cost him everything.

2 Samuel 16:15

The scene turns from David's hillside to Absalom's arrival at Jerusalem with Ahithophel beside him, the counsellor David had prayed against earlier in his flight, that the Lord would turn his counsel into foolishness. That prayer is not answered in this one clause. It is answered through the man David sent back into the city for exactly this purpose, Hushai, who enters in the very next verse. The chapter now sets two counsellors against each other in Absalom's court while the fate of David's prayer still hangs in the balance.

2 Samuel 16:16-19

Hushai's greeting doubles the very words Israel first shouted over Saul at his coronation, God save the king, God save the king, and this is the phrase's second occurrence in Scripture. He says it to Absalom's face while remaining David's man in his heart, and his answer at verse eighteen, whom the Lord and this people and all the men of Israel choose, is built to let Absalom hear one name while Hushai means another. The older commentators call the dissimulation itself a kind of warfare, fought with words rather than a sword, waged on David's behalf inside the enemy's own council.

2 Samuel 16:20-22

Ahithophel's counsel is aimed at politics, that all Israel shall hear Absalom is abhorred of his father and their hands be made strong for war, but the act itself fulfils a word spoken years before this council ever met. Nathan had told David at 12:11-12 that the sword would not depart from his house and that his own wives would be given to his neighbour and lain with in the sight of the sun, and Absalom's tent is spread on the very roof where David first saw Bathsheba. The narrator states the deed in a single flat verse, in the sight of all Israel, and lets the earlier word do the commenting.

2 Samuel 16:23

Ahithophel's reputation stands so high that the narrator can say his advice was received as if a man had enquired at the oracle of God, the very words the chapter's other counsellor, Hushai, will soon have to overturn by strategy rather than by argument. It is the highest praise Scripture gives any counsellor's wisdom, and Matthew Henry reads it as a warning rather than a compliment, since a man may excel in worldly wisdom while despising the true oracle of the Lord he claims to rival. The chapter closes on Ahithophel at the height of his influence, one step from the defeat that ends in his own hand at 17:23.