2 Samuel6chapter 6

2 Samuel 6:1-2

David's first act after securing Jerusalem is to gather thirty thousand chosen men and go for the ark, which had rested at Kirjath-jearim, called here Baale of Judah, for nearly fifty years since the days of 1 Samuel 7, as Jamieson, Fausset and Brown reckon it. The full name given the ark, the Lord of hosts that dwelleth between the cherubims, carries a title that first entered Scripture at 1 Samuel 1:3 and now returns with the ark itself toward the throne city. Barnes reads the gathering as part of the same consolidation that filled the two chapters before this one, a king moving to secure his capital's worship as he had already secured its walls.

2 Samuel 6:3-4

David's men set the ark upon a new cart, the exact expedient the Philistines used to send it home from their own territory at 1 Samuel 6:7; the words occur only three times in Scripture, the third in the parallel account at 1 Chronicles 13:7. Numbers 4:15 and 7:9 had assigned the ark to the Kohathites' shoulders under bars, never to a cart or oxen, on pain of death for touching the holy things. Uzzah and Ahio, sons of Abinadab in whose house the ark had rested, drive the cart from a household grown used to the ark's presence, which is part of why the danger goes unnoticed until Nachon's threshingfloor.

2 Samuel 6:5

The procession moves before the Lord on harps, psalteries, timbrels, cornets and cymbals, the first of several times this chapter repeats that phrase, before the Lord, across David's dancing, Michal's window and David's own answer to her. The joy of this verse stands over against the fear that will follow at verse 9, a whole nation's instruments bracketing the disaster still to come. Clarke and Wesley both read the range of instruments as evidence of a full national festival rather than a private rite.

2 Samuel 6:6-8

Uzzah reaches out to steady the ark when the oxen stumble at Nachon's threshingfloor, called Chidon in the parallel at 1 Chronicles 13:9, one of the small naming variants between the two histories. His hand breaks the very prohibition Numbers 4:15 had stated as a matter of life and death, and the anger of the Lord answers it there at the threshingfloor. David's own word for it, error, is left to the reader; the readings divide over whether the fault is Uzzah's presumption alone or David's failure to have the Levites carry the ark as commanded, and both stand in the commentators without one displacing the other. He names the place Perez-uzzah, the breach of Uzzah, a name that stayed on the map to the narrator's own day.

2 Samuel 6:9-11

David's fear is not defiance but the shock of a plan that has just killed a man, and for three months he leaves the ark in the house of Obed-edom rather than risk it further. Obed-edom is called the Gittite, most likely a Levite connected to Gath-rimmon rather than a Philistine of Goliath's city, and 1 Chronicles 15:18 and 24 to 25 place a man of that name among the gatekeepers David later appoints. The report that the Lord has blessed his house for the ark's sake is what turns David back toward Jerusalem, and 1 Chronicles 15:13 preserves his own later confession of what the first attempt had lacked: we sought him not after the due order.

2 Samuel 6:12-13

David goes up a second time with gladness rather than a cart; the parallel at 1 Chronicles 15:15 states what this chapter leaves the reader to infer, that the Levites now bear the ark on their own shoulders with the staves, as Moses had commanded. Six paces is a short first stage of the way home, and the ox and fatling offered there mark relief that the ark has moved at all without a second death. Blaikie and Keil and Delitzsch both read the change of method, not any change in the ark itself, as the real difference between this procession and the one that ended at Perez-uzzah.

2 Samuel 6:14-15

A linen ephod is not royal dress but the garment of consecrated service: the child Samuel wore one at Shiloh, 1 Samuel 2:18, and the eighty-five priests Doeg killed at Nob wore it too, 1 Samuel 22:18, and now the king wears it before the ark. David dances with all his might, and the older writers read the phrase as a king setting aside the dignity of a throne he has worn barely a year for the sake of the ark's homecoming. The whole house of Israel brings it up with shouting and the sound of the trumpet, the public and unrestrained counterpart to the fear that turned the first procession back.

2 Samuel 6:16

The narrator names her Michal Saul's daughter, not David's wife, and that choice announces the conflict before it happens: what she despises is the house of Saul watching the house of David triumph. A window carried her once before, at 1 Samuel 19:12, when she let David down through one to save his life from her father; now she looks through a window and the same woman who once acted for him watches him and judges him. Despised him in her heart is the narrator's own verdict on what is coming, stated before Michal speaks a word.

2 Samuel 6:17-19

The tabernacle David pitches for the ark in Zion is a new tent, not the tabernacle of Moses, which 1 Chronicles 16:39 and 21:29 still locate at Gibeon; for the rest of David's reign Israel's worship runs in two places until Solomon brings both together at the temple. David blesses the people in the name of the Lord of hosts, the same title given the ark back at verse 2, now spoken over the crowd that carried it home. Every person in Israel, women included, receives bread, a portion of meat and a cake of wine, a national meal that turns the ark's homecoming into a feast every household shares.

2 Samuel 6:20-22

Michal's word glorious is sarcasm, and her charge that David uncovered himself plays against the very ephod verse 14 already described; a linen ephod covered the body, and the commentators read her complaint as wounded royal dignity rather than a report of actual exposure. David's answer sets God's choice against her father's house in one breath, it was before the Lord, which chose me before thy father, and before all his house, turning her rebuke back on the reason he dances at all. His last word to her, I will yet be more vile than thus, and will be base in mine own sight, answers contempt with a deliberate choice: honour from the very maidservants she named in scorn.

2 Samuel 6:23

The narrator's last word closes her story on his own terms: not David's wife but Saul's daughter, and childless to the end. A later verse, 2 Samuel 21:8, names five sons of Michal in the Hebrew text as it stands, and many Hebrew manuscripts, the Syriac, and several English translations read Merab there instead, Michal's sister who was given to Adriel; Keil and Delitzsch and most of the bench take the correction as resolving rather than contradicting this verse. Whatever the resolution, 6:23 stands as the verse the narrator meant to be read on its own: the woman who once loved David and saved his life dies with no place in the house God is building.