2 Samuel4chapter 4

2 Samuel 4:1

Abner was the whole strength Ish-bosheth's throne had, and when Hebron takes him the son of Saul has nothing left to stand on. The verse answers 3:1 directly, where the house of Saul waxed weaker and weaker while the house of David waxed stronger and stronger, and Ish-bosheth's feeble hands are that sentence made visible. Henry reads the fear spreading through all Israel because it was Abner, not the king, who had carried the kingdom.

2 Samuel 4:2-3

Rechab and Baanah come from Beeroth, one of the four Gibeonite cities Israel had sworn to spare at Joshua 9:17, a town the narrator has to explain still counts as Benjamin's own. Its people have already scattered to Gittaim by the time this book is written, refugees from within Saul's own reign rather than from any foreign army. Two men carrying that history are the ones who walk into the king's house claiming to fetch grain.

2 Samuel 4:4

Jonathan's son enters the story at five years old, crippled in the same flight that killed his father and grandfather, and the verse is planted here for chapter 9, where David will seek him out to show him the kindness of God. Chronicles gives his name as Merib-baal, 1 Chr 8:34, and the shift from baal to bosheth, shame, in Samuel's own text is read by the scholars as a later softening once Baal's name had become an idol's name in Israel's ear. A chapter built around a murder stops to name a crippled five year old boy, and the narrator does not waste that kind of detail.

2 Samuel 4:5-7

The captains walk in as though they would fetch wheat, the ordinary errand that gets two armed men past the door to a sleeping king. Ish-bosheth is struck under the fifth rib, the same wound the narrator gave Asahel falling to Abner's spear at 2:23 and Abner falling to Joab's hand at 3:27, with Amasa struck in the fifth rib at 20:10 the fourth private killing this book measures the same way. Verse 7 adds the detail the confession of verse 8 will need: the captains behead him and carry the head north through the plain all night.

2 Samuel 4:8

Rechab and Baanah bring the head to Hebron expecting the same payment Saul's death earned at Ziklag, and they even borrow the Amalekite's own words, that the Lord hath avenged my lord the king. Clarke and Jamieson, Fausset and Brown both read this as the common coin such men expected a rival's death to buy from a prince, a court custom David is about to refuse to keep.

2 Samuel 4:9-12

David answers by naming the earlier case himself: the man who told him Saul was dead expecting a reward was taken and killed at Ziklag, 1:14-16, for laying hands on the Lord's anointed. Ish-bosheth carried no such anointing, yet David judges the count that does apply, a righteous man killed in his own house on his bed, and rules the same way a second time within one book. He hands the sentence to his own young men rather than to Joab, and the killers' hands and feet are cut off and hung over the pool at Hebron while Ish-bosheth's head is buried in Abner's own grave, the general whose death opened this chapter.