2 Samuel5chapter 5

2 Samuel 5:1-3

The tribes call David bone and flesh, then recall that even under Saul it was David who led Israel out and brought them in, the shepherd's work the Lord names next: thou shalt feed my people Israel. Verse 3 is the third stage of one anointing, private at Bethlehem in 1 Samuel 16:13, over Judah alone at 2 Samuel 2:4, and now over all Israel here before the Lord at Hebron. The years between the private anointing and this public throne, spent as a hunted outlaw, are read by later writers as a figure of Christ's own time between his anointing and his coming kingdom, a reading Blaikie draws out in his exposition of the outlaw years.

2 Samuel 5:4-5

David is thirty when he begins to reign, the same age at which Luke says the Son of David entered his public ministry, a parallel Gill and Henry both draw without forcing it. Verse 5 breaks the round forty years of verse 4 into its own two halves, seven years and six months over Judah alone in Hebron, then thirty and three years over all Israel and Judah once the capital moves to Jerusalem. The months at Hebron are the residue verse 4 rounds away, a small honesty in the record before the larger reign begins.

2 Samuel 5:6-7

The Jebusites trust Jerusalem's height and defenses enough to taunt David with the boast that even the blind and the lame could hold it against him, thinking David cannot come in hither. He proves them wrong, and verse 7 names what he took in four words that outlast the taunt: the strong hold of Zion, the same is the city of David. This is Zion's first appearance anywhere in Scripture, the name that will carry the temple, the psalms, and the prophets' hope, entering the record as a captured Jebusite fortress rather than anything grander.

2 Samuel 5:8-9

David's men climb up through the water gutter, the only way into the fortress, and the defenders' own taunt becomes his soldiers' watchword: the blind and the lame shall not come into the house. Matthew Henry reads the whole capture as a figure of Christ's kingdom, Zion's old enemies dispossessed before the true King takes his residence there by the Spirit, a reading he states as his own and not as the text's own sense. Verse 9 closes the scene: David dwells in the fort, names it for himself, and builds outward from Millo, the fortress becoming a city he will live in for the rest of the chapter's story.

2 Samuel 5:10-12

the Lord God of hosts: David's rise is credited past his own generalship, the Lord God of hosts was with him, the same title David gave the battle at Elah when no sword was yet drawn. Hiram of Tyre sends cedar and craftsmen who build David a literal house, and that house of cedar is what makes David's own question in the next chapter possible, when he asks why he should live in cedar while the ark sits in curtains. Verse 12 reads David's own reflection on it, that the Lord established the kingdom for his people Israel's sake and not for his own, the note the covenant of chapter seven will expand at length.

2 Samuel 5:13-16

more concubines and wives: After the throne is secure David multiplies wives and concubines from Jerusalem, against the very law given for Israel's king, that he shall not multiply wives to himself, and the older commentators name the fault without excusing it. The sons born there are listed by name, among them Nathan and Solomon, both borne by Bathsheba, and the name Nathan here belongs to a son rather than to the prophet who will confront David over her in the next chapters, two men sharing one name in one household's story. The list is genealogy without comment, but its placement beside the law it breaks is its own quiet judgment.

2 Samuel 5:17-18

News of an anointed king over all Israel draws every Philistine army up at once, and David withdraws to the hold rather than meeting them in the open, the same caution that marks the enquiries to come. Verse 18 names the ground they camp on, the valley of Rephaim, the valley of the giants, the same word that names the four kinsmen of the giant killed at Gath in the next book's roster and the champion David himself once faced there. The map still carries the name a generation after Goliath fell.

2 Samuel 5:19-21

David enquires of the Lord before he moves, the pattern that runs through both books, and the answer here is as direct as the question: Go up, for I will doubtless deliver the Philistines into thine hand. Victory comes at once, and David names the place for what happened there, Baal-perazim, the Lord hath broken forth upon mine enemies before me, as the breach of waters. The Philistines leave their images behind in the flight, and David and his men burn them rather than keep them as spoil, the plain course commanded for Canaan's gods in Deuteronomy 7:25 and too rarely kept elsewhere in Israel's history.

2 Samuel 5:22-25

The Philistines come up a second time to the same valley, and David enquires again, but the Lord gives a different plan for a second victory, not a straight advance but a flanking march, fetch a compass behind them, and wait for a sign, the sound of a going in the tops of the mulberry trees. Older writers read that sound as the marching of an unseen host sent ahead of David, a signal rather than a weapon, and the point either way is the same: he waits for the sound rather than acting on his own timing. Two victories in one chapter come from two different battle plans, and what carries across both is not the tactic but the enquiry that precedes it.