2 Samuel18chapter 18

taken up between the heaven and the earth: Absalom rides his mule under a great oak and his head catches in the boughs, so that he hangs suspended between heaven and earth while the mule runs on without him. Older writers, reading against 14:26, where his hair was cut once a year and weighed two hundred shekels, take the boughs as catching that same hair rather than his head plainly; Wesley calls it the very pride that made him admired turned into the instrument of his ruin. The verse itself says only that his head caught hold and he was left hanging alive, and the hair reading, old and widely held as it is, goes beyond what the text states outright.

2 Samuel 18:10-13

I saw Absalom hanged in an oak: A soldier sees Absalom hanging and reports it to Joab, who asks why he did not strike him down on the spot for a reward of ten shekels of silver and a girdle. The man refuses outright: not for a thousand shekels would he raise his hand against the king's son, because he heard David's charge with his own ears and knows nothing stays hidden from the king. His answer holds the very order Joab is about to break, and the narrator lets an ordinary soldier state a loyalty the commander himself will not keep.

Joab tells the man he would have given a warrior's belt and ten shekels of silver. Matthew Henry reads the belt as a captain's commission, and Adam Clarke adds that the military belt was a soldier's chief honor, the gift Jonathan gave David at 1 Samuel 18:4. Joab offers a reward for disobedience to the king.

a thousand shekels of silver: The soldier multiplies Joab's offer a hundred times and still refuses. Silver was weighed on scales in that age, so he pictures the full weight laid in his palms. His quotation of the king's order at verse 5 shows the whole army took it as binding.

Albert Barnes hears in this aside a witness to David's sharp discernment, the same the wise woman of Tekoa met at 14:19. The soldier also knows Joab well enough to expect no protection from him. Adam Clarke notes that the appeal left Joab unmoved.

2 Samuel 18:14-15

three darts in his hand: Joab will not tarry any longer over the man's excuse; he takes three darts and thrusts them through Absalom's heart while he still hangs alive in the oak, then ten of his own armorbearers close in and finish the killing. Henry will not excuse the plain disobedience to the king's own charge at verse five, while Jamieson Fausset and Brown read Joab as acting from a hard loyalty to David's throne rather than against David the father, a memory 1 Kings 2:5 shows David never let go of. Three darts against one charge is the chapter's plainest collision between mercy commanded and war's own logic.

John Gill has the armor bearers acting on Joab's orders, closing a ring so that no one could rescue Absalom. Adam Clarke doubts any life remained after three darts through the heart. The ten blows spread the deed across Joab's own men.

2 Samuel 18:16-17

Joab held back the people: Joab sounds the trumpet and the pursuit stops; the head of the revolt is dead, and further slaughter serves nothing more. Absalom's body is thrown into a pit in the wood and covered with a great heap of stones, the burial the ancient world gave a rebel rather than a prince, while the rest of Israel scatters to their own tents. Clarke notes the heap of stones was the standing way to mark a memory for good or ill, the same rite by which a hero and a traitor were both remembered on the ground where they fell.

Jamieson, Fausset and Brown note the Eastern custom of throwing stones on the grave of an infamous man, so the heap grows with every passerby. Ambrose of Milan sets this pit beside the pillar Absalom raised for himself in the King's Valley at verse 18. The monument he built stood empty.

I have no son to keep my name in remembrance: Absalom had already built himself a pillar in the king's dale and named it after himself, for he said, I have no son to keep my name in remembrance. It stands against 14:27, which names three sons born to him and one daughter, Tamar; most of the bench reads the pillar's claim as evidence the sons died young, since Scripture never gives their names and Absalom himself, in his own words here, counts himself without an heir. The stone pillar outlives him in Jerusalem, and the narrator leaves the two verses standing together rather than closing the gap between them.

2 Samuel 18:19-23

the Lord hath avenged him of his enemies: Ahimaaz asks to be the one who carries word that the Lord hath avenged him of his enemies, and Joab refuses him because the king's son is dead, sending Cushi instead to tell the king what he has seen. Ahimaaz asks a second time to run after Cushi and Joab lets him go, though he warns him he has no news ready to tell; Ahimaaz takes the way of the plain and outruns Cushi, who has kept to the harder road through the hills. Barnes reads Cushi as a foreign slave, a man Joab did not scruple to send first into whatever anger the news might draw down on the one who carries it.

because the king’s son is dead: Joab knows how David treats bearers of such news, having seen him execute the Amalekite who reported Saul's death at 1:15. Matthew Henry judges tidings of this kind fitter for a footman than a priest. Joab protects Zadok's son.

Matthew Henry reports that some took the Cushite for an Ethiopian by birth, who may have been one of the ten who struck Absalom. John Gill allows that he may instead have been a dark-skinned Israelite. Adam Clarke says Joab told him of the death.

Matthew Henry weighs two motives for Ahimaaz's persistence. He may have been proud of his speed, or he may have meant to prepare David gently before the Cushite's plain report arrived. Joab addresses him as a son, which softens the refusal.

Ahimaaz outran the Cushite by way of the plain. The Hebrew word for plain is ciccar, meaning circle, which Jamieson, Fausset and Brown say is used elsewhere only of the Jordan valley. Albert Barnes and John Gill both think the valley way was longer but easier, so Ahimaaz won the run by his choice of road.

2 Samuel 18:24-27

David sat between the two gates: David sits between the two gates of Mahanaim while a watchman keeps the wall above him, and the first runner is seen alone, which the king reads rightly as a sign of good news, since a rout would send men running in every direction rather than one man running straight. A second runner appears, and then the watchman recognizes the gait of the first as Ahimaaz's own running, specific enough that David calls him a good man who comes with good tidings before a word has reached him. The whole scene is told through a watchman's eyes and a father's guesses, the reader kept exactly as far from the truth as the man waiting at the gate.

Jamieson, Fausset and Brown place David in the tower house over the gate of Mahanaim, with a sentinel posted on the watchtower beside it. The watchman calls down each sighting. The king's hopeful reading of each one prepares for the blow that falls at verse 33.

The watchman calls to the gatekeeper below, who keeps the gate under the watchtower. John Gill notes that armies commonly sent one messenger after another as fresh news came in. David takes a second runner as more good news.

David trusts Ahimaaz son of Zadok, who had already risked his life carrying Hushai's warning at 17:21. Matthew Henry draws the wider rule that good tidings ought to come by good men. The news is good for the king, grievous for the father.

2 Samuel 18:28-29

Blessed be the Lord thy God: Ahimaaz arrives first, falls on his face and blesses the Lord for delivering up the men who rose against the king, but when David asks the one question that matters, is the young man Absalom safe, Ahimaaz answers with a report of a great tumult he says he did not understand. Clarke and Gill both weigh whether Ahimaaz already knew Absalom was dead and simply could not bring himself to say it to the king he loved; either way, the young priest who ran to be first with good news arrives carrying none of the news the king is actually asking for. Every word he brings is true, and none of it answers the only thing David wants to hear.

I saw a great tumult: The king's question turns on the word shalom. John Gill hears the contrast: the army has peace, and David asks whether Absalom has it too. Charles Spurgeon preached the question as a father's anxious enquiry for a son both wicked and still loved, asked over a field of twenty thousand dead.

2 Samuel 18:30-32

Turn aside, and stand here: David sets Ahimaaz aside and waits for Cushi, who is met with the same question: is the young man Absalom safe? Cushi answers as carefully as a man can who must tell his king the truth, the enemies of my lord the king be as that young man is, letting David hear his son's death without the word itself ever being spoken. Gill reads the answer as shaped so David could not turn his anger on the messenger, even though the message itself was the heaviest one Cushi had to bring.

The Cushite frames the victory as the LORD's judgment, the same wording Ahimaaz had asked to carry at verse 19. Salvian reads the deliverance as fuller than David himself wished, since it cost him his son. Albert Barnes renders the opening as a formal greeting.

Matthew Henry notes what the Cushite leaves out: the hanging, the darts and the heap of stones. Adam Clarke thinks David's question, asked twice with no word about the victory, earned the reproof Joab gives at 19:5. The same question had failed with Ahimaaz.

would God I had died for thee: David goes up to the chamber over the gate and weeps, and his words break the ordinary shape of a father's grief: O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom, would God I had died for thee. Barnes calls it the deepest pathos in the whole Old Testament and sets it beside Luke 19:41, a king in tears over a son whose ruin he could not turn back. Wesley reads the grief as David's own sense of Absalom's state at death, dying as he did in his sins, and the verse is left to stand as it is, with no word added to soften it.