STUDIES IN SAMUEL No. 61

2 Samuel 21:1-22

March 10, 2002

Text Comment

Now chapters 21-24 of 2 Samuel serve as an appendix or epilogue to the account of David's reign. This appendix contains material that was not integrated into the narrator's chronological account of David's reign. For example, look at 21:1, which clearly suggests that the events to be described happened during David's reign but that precisely when they happened is not of interest to the narrator. Rather clearly in this case, the material has been organized not in a chronological way but in a very definite thematic way. Indeed, as we will look at the material as we make our way through these chapters, the impression is that the historical events narrated occurred in the middle of David's reign and not at the end.

First we have a famine story in 21:1-14, an account of a national tragedy in which David intercedes; then an account of the exploits of David's warriors in 21:15-22; this is followed by David's psalm of praise in 22:1-51 which is, in turn followed by David's last words in 23:1-7. That is, in turn followed by another account of the exploits of David's warriors and a list of them and that in turn is followed by an account of a plague against Israel, another national tragedy in which David intercedes. We have disaster, warriors, poem, poem, warriors, disaster. That is an example of chiasmus, a method of organizing material found often in the OT and often in Samuel. ABBA, ABCCBA, are examples of chiasmus and it can be that simple or much more complicated. Frequently chiasmus is a means of emphasizing the middle terms in the outline, in this case, the two psalms of praise to God. As Robert Gordon suggests, "The purpose in the 'Samuel Appendix' is the linking of David's successes with the…patronage of Yahweh." [Com., 45, 298] In other words, we have a general interpretation in these final chapters and the narrator's overarching explanation of David's success: that God was with him.

By the way, Prof. Gordon thinks that the reason this material is placed here, and not at the very end of the account of David's reign, at 1 Kings 2, is because David cuts such a shabby figure in 1 Kings 1-2. It is put here so that the point will not be weakened or missed. We'll get to that over these next several weeks.

v.1 Famines, of course, were not uncommon in Palestine and, as we read elsewhere in the OT, were sometimes God's judgment upon his people for their sins. By the way, one of you asked me, sometime back about the use of the name "Palestine" for the Holy Land. I did some research and the upshot is this. Palestine is not a biblical term, of course. There is no biblical geographical term for the area that was under Israelite control at the height of Israel's power. Even Canaan falls short of a description of that entire region. Palestine, like every other name used for that region, was originally a designation of only a part of the Holy Land, in this case the coastal area inhabited by the Philistines. Palestine comes from Philistine. But, as names will do, it gradually became affixed to larger areas. Josephus uses the term only of Philistia, the coastal lowland, but the Greeks, as far back as Herodotus, used it of the entire southern area of what they called Syria, that is, what we think of Palestine today, including Judea. The Romans then took over the term and their Palestina was first a province and then a more general geographical term. The term Canaan (a term that probably originally meant sunken or low land) also seems first to have been the designation for the same coastal plain and was only later extended to the hill country above.

In this sense, Palestine, in its historical meaning, is a geographical, not a national term and belongs no more to the Arabs than to the Jews. Israel as a nation today inhabits part of what is Palestine but only part. The Palestinian state that is envisaged by the people called today "Palestinians" - by which is meant Arabs who hail from the area of Palestine - would likewise cover only a part, an even smaller part, of what is Palestine geographically speaking. The name itself evokes the complexities of Near-eastern politics and the depth of those animosities that still so terribly trouble that part of the world.

We do not know explicitly from Samuel anything about this ruthless action that Saul took against the Gibeonites, though what we know about Saul certainly makes this report plausible. What is more, the Gibeonites were settled in the territory of Benjamin, Saul's tribe, which makes it even more understandable. He wanted their land for himself and his cronies.

v.2 That history, you may remember is recounted for us in Joshua 9. Though the Gibeonites were in fact local, they deceived Joshua by making it appear that they had come from a great distance. Israel was to destroy the Canaanites, you remember. Joshua, failing to see through their deception, made a covenant with them and in that covenant promised not to harm them. As a result they continued to live in the land, though as slaves.

v.4 The clear suggestion of that remark is that since the Gibeonites are not in a position to see that justice is done, David ought to see to it.

v.6 "the chosen of the Lord" is written almost the same way as "hill of the Lord" and as that occurs again in v. 9, it seems likely that that should be the reading here. "Chosen" is a corruption of "hill".

v.8 Saul had two sons named Mephibosheth.

v.9 There is nothing to suggest that David used this opportunity to get rid of potential rivals in the house of Saul, though that would have been an obvious effect. If all this had happened earlier, as seems likely, Shimei who, as David was fleeing Jerusalem before Absalom, called down curses upon David for the blood he shed in the house of Saul, was probably referring to this event.

v.10 The suggestion may be that the rain, coming after years of famine, was an unseasonable rain, not the usual Autumn rains - the barley harvest in the Spring has just been mentioned in v. 9 - and so indicated the end of God's judgment and his favor on what Rizpah did as an act of maternal love and loyalty. [Hertzberg, Com, 384] Otherwise, the fact that she watched over the corpses from the spring to the autumn proved the depth of Rizpah's love. [Alter, Com., 331]

David exacted vengeance, as God required, but the Gibeonites went too far and desecrated the bodies and refused them burial. Whatever expose means in v. 8, some have suggested crucifixion, the refusal to bury was going too far. Rizpah finally shakes David out of his inaction. Then he pays a proper posthumous respect to Saul's family, as he had done, for Jonathan's sake in caring for Mephibosheth. (Alter, Com, 332]

v.14 This is the sort of thing we would expect from David who at that time in his reign was careful to show due regard for the first king of Israel and was the kind of man who would have been moved by Rizpah's maternal devotion. This was also a way, of course, to deflect the accusation that he had murdered Saul's descendants as a political act.

This brief summary of great exploits over the enemies of Israel is a prelude to David's psalm of praise. [Gordon, Com, 302]

v.15 The "again" suggests once more that the events now being related occurred at other times and are being excerpted from a fuller account of David's wars with the Philistines.

v.17 Now we learn that David owed Abishai a great personal debt. We wonder if David was beguiled by this argument to stay at home instead of lead his army. If so, it was a huge error in judgment with horrific consequences. The narrator obviously does not think David should have done so, as we learn in the first verse of 2 Samuel 11: "In the Spring, at the time when kings go off to war, David sent Joab out with the king's men and they whole Israelite army. The destroyed the Ammonites…but David remained in Jerusalem."

v.19 Perhaps the simplest explanation of this seeming repetition of the Goliath account but with other names is that Elhanan is David's personal name and David the throne name of the king. It is also possible that Jaare might be a corruption of Jesse, the name of David's father, as both names look very much alike when written in the Hebrew square script. [Gordon, Com., 303] 1 Chronicles 20:5, in the parallel text, makes Elhanan the slayer of Lahmi, the brother of Goliath the Gittite. There is obviously some textual corruption here but exactly what the original reading would have been is hard to say.

v.22 Take note of the "David and his men." This is the point. All of these victories won by David's men reflected God's blessing on David himself. The Lord's blessing came upon him through his warriors to whom God gave victory.

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Now, there are many things that could be observed in this passage, but I thought I would draw your attention to a very important fact that is illustrated in this passage, viz. God's visitation of the sins of the fathers upon the children. It is clear enough that David's execution of the sons of Saul was an appropriate response to Saul's crime against the Gibeonites and that God honored David's action by removing the curse of famine from the land. David obeyed the Lord and the Lord rewarded him and the nation. So, whether or not the Gibeonites were inhuman in the treatment of the bodies of Saul's sons, that those young men should die for the sins of their father is not a moral problem in the Bible.

Or, looking at it from the other side, we have largely forgotten about Saul, but here, years later, his sins are still darkening the lives, ruining the lives of his family. And even a mother's love cannot prevent her son from falling under the judgment of those long ago sins.

Indeed, many times the Lord explicitly promises that he will visit the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of those who hate him. I have commonplaced my Bible on that theme at Exodus 20:5 and I have some 24 texts listed in the margin next to it, texts that, in one way or another, repeat, confirm, or illustrate the teaching that children are punished for their parents' sins.

There is, of course, as you know teaching in the Bible that each person shall be punished for his own sins. There was a commandment in the law of God that judges could not punish a son for sins his father had committed. In Deut. 24:16 we read: "Fathers are not to be put to death for their children, nor children put to death for their fathers; each is to die for his own sin." In 2 Kings 14:6, Amaziah, king of Judah, is commended for not putting to death the sons of the officials who had murdered his father, Joash. So, what God may do in visiting sins upon succeeding generations, we are not free to do. In this case, in 2 Sam. 21, God did it and David did it only at God's express command.

But, that God does this is not only a fact of biblical revelation but an observation of life in the world. Frederick Buechner makes a point about the Bible that needs to be remembered in our day.

"The Bible is not first of all a book of moral truth. I would call it instead a book of truth about the way life is. Those strange old Scriptures present life as having been ordered in a certain way, with certain laws as inextricably built into it as the law of gravity is built into the physical universe. When Jesus says that whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life will save it, surely he is not making a statement about how, morally speaking, life ought to be. Rather, he is making a statement about how life is." [In Plantinga, Not the Way it's Supposed to Be, 116]

This is a lesson about the Bible and about life that is very difficult to learn and to accept. I am dealing with people all the time to whom I say, in one way or another, "You are, in effect, saying to God, that you want to gain or save your life and that after you gain it, you will lose it for his sake. But it doesn't work that way. The world does not work that way. God did not make the world to work that way. You must lose your life to save it. There is no other way. You must believe the Lord and his Word and act on it in disregard to your calculations of happiness and success and trust the Lord to give you happiness. That is the way it works. Like it or not, that is the way it works."

There are a host of people today who define a triangle as a three-sided plane figure and then protest that the Pythagorean theorem restricts their freedom. But they can complain all they want; it will not change reality!

Well, in the same way, there will be many, I assure you, who complain that it is not fair for children to suffer for their parents' sins, but complain as you will, the world has always, does today, and will always groan under the weight of the evidence of this truth. It is true always and everywhere. It is true even in a certain way in the kingdom of God. It is not accident that Solomon, for example, took a spiritual swan dive in his later years. His life history was an almost exact reproduction of his father's: a great start, a solid middle, and a pathetic conclusion. He learned that from his father; but, more important, he paid for his father's sins with his own sins.

Sometimes the payment is understandable, even laudable. My grandfather spent the largest part of his adult life paying off the debts of his father who had been a not very successful or financially savvy farmer. In that sense his father's sins were visited upon him. He had to pay for them in the most literal way.

But, much more often and much more sadly, children pay for their parents' sins in bearing the consequence of them to their own harm.

A drug addict or alcoholic mother bears an infant already damaged by the narcotics he or she consumed in the womb; A child who grows up in an abusive home bears the internal scars through adulthood and often repeats the behavior in his or her own family; I saw a picture in Wes Ulrich's missionary letter for last month - Wes is an MTW doctor at a hospital in Jordan - a picture of a little girl with severe and permanent defects because when she was just a baby her father came home drunk one night and, in a fit of anger, grabbed his daughter by the feet and hurled her against a wall; it breaks your heart. Who can explain such things? Human sin is a terrible thing and its awfulness is revealed in how it damages others; In a hundred ways the poor example set for children by foolish, selfish, worldly parents sets the children's course for life; We've all seen it and noticed it: a father's weakness in his sons, a mother's in her daughters; And, of course, the unbelief of parents is the first great cause of the unbelief of generations of human beings.

A friend of mine, a PCA pastor, lost his ministry a few years ago because of troubles in his marriage and, in particular, an infatuation with another woman in the congregation. I had another friend who was close to that pastor, indeed, was an elder in the same church. I asked him once what he thought had caused the problem in this man's life. He was a believing man, a man we both liked very much. My elder friend said, "I hate to say it, but I think it was his family background. The older I get the more patrimony and upbringing seem to me to be powerful influences on the lives of adults I know. He had a troubled relationship with his father; he was always looking for approval and love. I see his fascination with this other woman as simply more of the same." He hated to say this because it can sound as if we don't believe in the power of God's grace to change lives and to break a pattern of sin. And we do believe that and have seen it, seen it wonderfully.

But, the fact is, we also see the other; time and time again we see the sins of parents being visited upon children and, in one way or another, becoming the children's sins as well. This does not excuse the children, of course. There is a very real sense, as anyone can see, that the Israelis and Palestinians are today suffering terribly for sins committed by their fathers and grandfathers years ago. The animus, the hatred, the mistrust is not the product of days and months but of decades and a century. Nevertheless, that does not excuse them for hatred and violence.

"The soul that sins it shall die," Ezekiel reminds us, in a context in which he is rejecting that very argument: that the children are not at fault because they are being punished for their parents sins. The people who were suffering the slings and arrows of Babylon's wrath were excusing themselves. It was their parents who brought this upon them; it was their sins, not ours, that deserved this punishment. There was even an adage that they used to quote to make their point: "the fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children's teeth are set on edge." But Ezekiel will have none of it. These people were as guilty as their fathers and were guilty, in fact, of precisely the same sins. What is more, all they would have to do is repent and God would receive them and bless them, even if, for higher reasons, the Jews still had to go into exile. Remember what God said: that he visited the sins of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of those who hate him. Those who do not hate God, but love him instead, cannot be held in bondage, not finally, to the sins of their parents. Grace will break the chain where it matters most. I do not say that real Christians don't still suffer for their parents' sins, they obviously can and do, but not in the ways that matter most, not in ways that would prevent them from the blessing and the salvation of God.

Sometimes the righteous suffer for their parents sins and are not so much judged for them as they simply suffer for them. I know good people, righteous people, who struggle in life in large part because they bear in their souls the ill-effects of growing up in their parents' households. Their lives are made difficult by their parents' sins, but by faith and repentance they are not guilty of those sins themselves unless they become, through that influence, sinners of the same kind as their parents were. As the Scripture insists over and over again, whenever we want to turn this truth that the sins of parents are visited upon the children into an excuse for ourselves, faith and repentance make all things new.

We Americans want absolute individuality. Much of the rest of the world understands far better than we do that such detachment from others, such liberty from the influence of other human beings does not exist! God made us in community and made that community a formative influence upon human life. This fact, for fact it is, is both a warning and an exhortation to us. It is a warning: our sins stretch! We are not the only ones affected by them. Generations can be affected by our sins. It is one of the most powerful arguments afforded us for doing what is right when doing it is terribly difficult for us. Doing what is wrong may seem an attractive option for us at the moment. We would think less well of it if we could somehow see its consequences stretching out through the lives of our children and their children. Your ministers and your elders have had to make this point to our people from time to time, and we can see how little effect it often has upon their consciences. They are not used to thinking in terms of our inescapable solidarity with our family, with the rising generations, with others whose lives we affect. I'm thinking now of a case in which one woman's unbiblical divorce has given encouragement to her friend to pursue the same course of action; but at what harm to others?

But, it is not only a warning. The Gospel never leaves us with only warnings. Where there is a warning there is always also an encouragement. Where sin abounds grace does much more abound. God does say, and we must hear him say and take him with utmost seriousness when he says that He visits the sins of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of those that hate him. But, even in that same text, there in the second commandment, the Lord hurries on to say, that he shows mercy unto the 1000th generation of those who love and serve him.

We in this congregation have seen plenty of children suffering for parents' sins. But we have seen much more of this divine mercy unto generations. Much, much more.