2 Samuel21chapter 21

2 Samuel 21:1-2

Three years of famine drive David to enquire of the Lord rather than assume a cause, continuing the pattern of a king who asks before he acts. The answer reaches back to Joshua 9, where Israel swore an oath to the Gibeonites and was bound to keep it even though the Gibeonites had gained it by deceit. Saul's zeal against them, an act nowhere else told in Scripture, breaks that sworn oath a generation later, and the guilt falls on the whole land for one king's private violence. The parenthesis in verse 2 names the Gibeonites for what they were, not Israelites but the remnant of the Amorites, spared only by a promise Israel could not honestly break.

2 Samuel 21:3-4

David treats the famine as guilt requiring atonement rather than a misfortune to wait out, and he leaves the terms to the party that was wronged instead of setting them himself. The Gibeonites refuse silver and gold, for money was never the ancient payment for shed blood, and the law of Numbers 35 forbids ransoming a life for a price. What they ask is not vengeance on the nation but on Saul's own house, and they say so plainly, that no man in Israel besides Saul's line need answer for it. The distinction holds the rest of the chapter together, for this is Saul's house answering for Saul, not Israel punished in Saul's place.

2 Samuel 21:5-7

The Gibeonites name the offense precisely, a plan to remove them from every part of Israel's land, the same complete destruction Israel itself had once been bound by oath not to bring on them. Seven of Saul's line are handed over to be hanged at Gibeah, Saul's own town, before the Lord, and David grants the number without argument. Verse 7 then draws a line the chapter will not cross: Mephibosheth, Jonathan's son, is spared, and the reason is given in full, the Lord's oath that stood between David and Jonathan. One oath sworn to enemies costs seven lives to keep, and one oath sworn to a friend saves a life from the same reckoning, and the text lets both oaths bind the king equally.

2 Samuel 21:8-9

The seven are named by mother, two sons of Rizpah, Saul's concubine, and five sons of Michal, though Clarke points out that Michal was never given to Adriel and that 1 Samuel 18:19 names her sister Merab as his wife, so the text likely means Michal raised sons she did not bear. Handed to the Gibeonites, all seven are hanged in the hill before the Lord and die together at the start of barley harvest, the same season in which Ruth once gleaned this land. The narrator fixes the date with a precision the rest of the chapter does not need, because the season is about to matter again.

2 Samuel 21:10-11

Rizpah pitches sackcloth on the bare rock and keeps a vigil the law did not require of her, driving off carrion birds by day and wild animals by night across the months from barley harvest until the autumn rain finally falls. Wesley reads her vigil as evidence the bodies had to stay exposed rather than be buried at once, until God's judgment against the land was answered. Word of her watch reaches David, and Gill reads the report as moving him to compassion rather than offense, since a grieving mother's faithfulness could not be mistaken for a grudge against the throne. One woman's unbroken watch over the dead becomes the reason a king finally remembers the unburied bones of a whole family.

2 Samuel 21:12-14

David finally does what Rizpah's vigil moved him to do, closing a debt owed since Saul's death: he sends for the bones the men of Jabesh-gilead had stolen from the wall of Beth-shan the night after Gilboa, an act of loyalty told in full at 1 Samuel 31:11-13. The bones of the seven who were hanged are gathered too, and all are buried together in the family tomb of Kish at Zelah, in Benjamin's own territory rather than left where the Gibeonites' justice had put them. Clarke notes David may have sent messengers rather than travel the distance himself, since Gill records the route at some fifty miles. The chapter's last clause closes the famine that opened it in one line, after that God was intreated for the land, the oath kept and the guilt answered.

2 Samuel 21:15-16

War with the Philistines resumes, and this time David himself grows faint in the field, an old soldier's admission the text states without embarrassment. Ishbi-benob, one of the giant's line, moves to kill him while he is weakened, carrying a spear of three hundred shekels of brass and armed with a new sword. The threat lands at the point where David is most exposed, worn from decades of exactly this kind of war, the same war that began at Gath a generation earlier with one shepherd and one stone.

2 Samuel 21:17

Abishai kills the Philistine before he can kill David, and David's men respond with an oath of their own: he will fight beside them no more. Clarke reads the light of Israel as the lamp by which the whole nation finds its way, so that David's death in a skirmish would leave the kingdom in a darkness he alone had learned to hold back. The oath marks a hinge in the king's own story, the warrior who once ran toward Goliath is now the man his own soldiers must protect from running at all.

2 Samuel 21:18-19

Two more giants fall at Gob, one to Sibbechai and one to Elhanan, and the second name carries the chapter's hardest textual question. The King James reads that Elhanan slew the brother of Goliath, with the words the brother of supplied by the translators to close a gap the Hebrew does not fully explain, while 1 Chronicles 20:5 names the man Elhanan killed as Lahmi, Goliath's brother, plainly. Keil and Delitzsch and most of the bench read the Chronicles text as preserving what Samuel's own text lost in copying, while others hold that Goliath was a title borne by more than one champion of Gath. Barnes states the difficulty as plainly as any of them, that the Hebrew text at this point is corrupt, and the chapter itself settles nothing beyond naming both men dead.

2 Samuel 21:20-21

A third giant appears at Gath itself, a man of great stature with six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot, twenty-four in all, and the text says plainly he also was born to the giant, the same phrase used of the others in this section. Jonathan, son of David's brother Shimea, kills him when he defies Israel, the same verb Goliath used at 1 Samuel 17:10 and the same word David answered there. Clarke notes the trait recurs elsewhere in later history and is not unique to this family, but the text's own interest is not the anatomy. It is that four such men stood against Israel in one generation, all out of Gath, the town Joshua had left unconquered at Joshua 11:22.

2 Samuel 21:22

The chapter closes a count that opened at Gath a generation before: four men born to the giant, and all four now fallen, one by David's own hand at the valley of Elah and three by the hands of his servants here. Henry reads the pairing as deliberate, David began his conquest with one giant and this record closes it with four, the hardest enemies kept for the last conflict. The line of Anakim left in Gath at Joshua 11:22 runs through Goliath to these four and ends in this verse, the last giants named in the historical books.