2 Samuel 18: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

David organizes his army into three divisions under Joab, Abishai, and Ittai, and the troops keep him from going out to battle himself. He orders the commanders to deal gently with Absalom, but Absalom's head is caught in an oak tree, and Joab kills him there and buries him under a heap of stones. Two runners carry word back to David, and when the king learns that Absalom is dead, he goes up to the room over the gate and weeps for his son.

Claim by Claim

1. 18:1
   • David counted the people who were with him.
   • David appointed commanders of thousands over them.
   • David appointed commanders of hundreds over them.
2. 18:2
   • David sent out a third of the people under the command of Joab.
   • David sent out a third of the people under the command of Abishai son of Zeruiah.
   • Abishai was Joab's brother.
   • David sent out a third of the people under the command of Ittai the Gittite.
   • The king said to the people that he himself would certainly go out with them as well.
3. 18:3
   • The people answered that the king must not go out.
   • The people said that if they fled, the enemy would pay no attention to them.
   • The people said that if half of them died, the enemy would not care.
   • The people said the king was worth ten thousand of them.
   • The people said it was better that the king support them from the city.
4. 18:4
   • The king said he would do whatever seemed best to them.
   • The king stood beside the gate.
   • All the people went out by hundreds and by thousands.
5. 18:5
   • The king commanded Joab, Abishai, and Ittai to deal gently with the young man Absalom for his sake.
   • All the people heard the king give the commanders this order concerning Absalom.
6. 18:6
   • The people went out into the field against Israel.
   • The battle took place in the forest of Ephraim.
7. 18:7
   • The people of Israel were defeated there before David's servants.
   • There was a great slaughter there that day.
   • Twenty thousand men were killed.
8. 18:8
   • The battle spread over the face of the whole countryside.
   • The forest devoured more people that day than the sword devoured.
9. 18:9
   • Absalom met David's servants.
   • Absalom was riding on a mule.
   • The mule went under the thick branches of a great oak.
   • Absalom's head was caught fast in the tree.
   • Absalom was left hanging between the heaven and the earth.
   • The mule that was under him went on.
10. 18:10
    • A certain man saw this.
    • The man told Joab.
    • The man said he had seen Absalom hanging in an oak.
11. 18:11
    • Joab said to the man who told him that he had seen Absalom.
    • Joab asked why the man did not strike Absalom to the ground there.
    • Joab said he would have given the man ten shekels of silver and a belt.
12. 18:12
    • The man said to Joab that even if a thousand shekels of silver were weighed into his hand, he would not put out his hand against the king's son.
    • The man said the king had charged Joab and Abishai and Ittai in their hearing.
    • The man quoted the king's charge as an order to protect the young man Absalom and let no one touch him.
13. 18:13
    • The man said that otherwise he would have acted treacherously against his own life.
    • The man said no matter is hidden from the king.
    • The man said Joab himself would have stood against him.
14. 18:14
    • Joab said he would not wait like this with the man.
    • Joab took three darts in his hand.
    • Joab thrust the darts through Absalom's heart.
    • Absalom was still alive in the middle of the oak when Joab did this.
15. 18:15
    • Ten young men who carried Joab's armor surrounded Absalom.
    • The ten young men struck Absalom.
    • The ten young men killed him.
16. 18:16
    • Joab blew the horn.
    • The people turned back from pursuing Israel.
    • Joab held the people back.
17. 18:17
    • They took Absalom.
    • They threw him into a great pit in the forest.
    • They piled a very great heap of stones over him.
    • All Israel fled, each man to his tent.
18. 18:18
    • During his lifetime Absalom had set up a pillar for himself.
    • The pillar is in the king's valley.
    • Absalom had said he had no son to keep his name in remembrance.
    • Absalom named the pillar after his own name.
    • The pillar is called Absalom's monument to this day.
19. 18:19
    • Ahimaaz son of Zadok asked to run and bring the king news.
    • Ahimaaz said the LORD had avenged the king of his enemies.
20. 18:20
    • Joab told Ahimaaz he would not carry news that day.
    • Joab told Ahimaaz he would carry news on another day.
    • Joab said Ahimaaz would carry no news that day.
    • Joab gave as the reason that the king's son was dead.
21. 18:21
    • Joab told the Cushite to go and tell the king what he had seen.
    • The Cushite bowed to Joab.
    • The Cushite ran.
22. 18:22
    • Ahimaaz son of Zadok spoke to Joab again.
    • Ahimaaz asked to run after the Cushite whatever might happen.
    • Joab asked Ahimaaz why he wanted to run.
    • Joab called Ahimaaz his son.
    • Joab said Ahimaaz had no news to carry; the phrase is ambiguous between having no message to deliver and receiving no reward for it.
23. 18:23
    • Ahimaaz said that whatever might happen, he would run.
    • Joab told him to run.
    • Ahimaaz ran by way of the plain.
    • Ahimaaz outran the Cushite.
24. 18:24
    • David was sitting between the two gates.
    • The watchman went up to the roof over the gate by the wall.
    • The watchman lifted up his eyes and looked.
    • The watchman saw a man running alone.
25. 18:25
    • The watchman called out and told the king.
    • The king said that if the man was alone, there was news in his mouth.
    • The runner came quickly and drew near.
26. 18:26
    • The watchman saw another man running.
    • The watchman called to the gatekeeper.
    • The watchman said another man was running alone.
    • The king said this man also was bringing news.
27. 18:27
    • The watchman said the running of the first man looked to him like the running of Ahimaaz son of Zadok.
    • The king said Ahimaaz was a good man.
    • The king said he was coming with good news.
28. 18:28
    • Ahimaaz called out to the king that all was well.
    • Ahimaaz fell to the ground on his face before the king.
    • Ahimaaz blessed the LORD, the king's God.
    • Ahimaaz said God had delivered up the men who lifted their hand against his lord the king.
29. 18:29
    • The king asked whether the young man Absalom was safe.
    • Ahimaaz said that when Joab sent the king's servant and him, he saw a great tumult.
    • Ahimaaz said he did not know what the tumult was.
30. 18:30
    • The king told him to turn aside and stand there.
    • He turned aside and stood still.
31. 18:31
    • The Cushite arrived.
    • The Cushite announced news to his lord the king.
    • The Cushite said the LORD had that day avenged the king of all who rose up against him.
32. 18:32
    • The king asked the Cushite whether the young man Absalom was safe.
    • The Cushite answered that the king's enemies and all who rise against him to harm him should be as that young man is.
33. 18:33
    • The king was deeply shaken.
    • The king went up to the chamber over the gate.
    • The king wept.
    • As he went the king cried out for his son Absalom, calling him my son, my son.
    • The king said he wished he had died instead of Absalom.

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

18:1

This chapter sits in the middle of a civil war. Absalom, David's own son, has taken the throne in Jerusalem and driven his father out; David has crossed the Jordan River and is based in the town of Mahanaim. The army being counted here is the force loyal to David, and the enemy is the army loyal to his son.

18:2

Zeruiah was David's sister (1 Chronicles 2:16), so Joab and Abishai are the king's nephews. The Hebrew text names them by their mother rather than their father throughout, which is unusual. Ittai came from Gath, a Philistine city; he was a foreign mercenary who had joined David only days before (chapter 15), which makes his command of a third of the army striking.

18:3

The reasoning is military, not flattery. In this kind of warfare the death or capture of the king ended the war at a stroke, and Absalom's advisers had in fact proposed striking at David alone (17:2-3). Kept inside the walled city, David cannot be reached.

18:4

The gateway was the public space of an ancient town, where courts met, business was done and a king would sit to be seen. David standing there as the troops file past is a formal review of the army.

18:5

The king's order is given in public, in front of the whole army as it files past. That detail matters for what happens in verses 11-13.

18:6

"Israel" here means the northern tribes who had gone over to Absalom; David's side is called "David's servants" or "David's men." Both armies are Israelite: this is a civil war. The forest of Ephraim lay east of the Jordan, near Mahanaim where David had taken refuge (17:24), despite Ephraim being a tribe settled west of the river.

18:7

The Hebrew word translated "thousand" can also mean a military unit or contingent of unspecified size, so the scale of the casualty figures in such accounts is uncertain.

18:8

Not a poetic flourish. The country east of the Jordan is cut by deep ravines and rocky gullies under dense scrub; a routed army running through it at speed lost more men to falls, entanglement and stragglers picked off than to the fighting itself.

18:9

Mules were the mount of royalty and princes in Israel (1 Kings 1:33); riding one was a claim to rank. The Hebrew says his head was caught, not his hair, though chapter 14 had made a point of Absalom's famously heavy hair. "Between the heaven and the earth" is a Hebrew way of saying he hung in midair, touching neither.

18:11

A shekel was a weight of silver, roughly 11.5 grams, not a coin, coined money did not yet exist in Israel, and silver was weighed out on scales (see verse 12). Ten shekels was about a year's wages for a hired man (Judges 17:10). The "girdle" is a soldier's belt, a mark of rank that could be awarded as a decoration.

18:12

A thousand shekels is about twenty-five pounds of silver, a deliberately absurd sum, the man's way of saying no price would be enough. He also quotes the king's order back at Joab, who was standing there when it was given.

18:13

The Hebrew here is difficult. Literally the man says he would have "dealt falsely against his own life", acted treacherously at the cost of his own neck. The last clause can be read either as "you would have turned against me" or "you would have stood aloof," that is, kept your distance and let me take the blame alone.

18:14

The word rendered "darts" or "spears" normally means a stick, rod or staff; what exactly Joab threw or drove in is uncertain. "Heart" translates a Hebrew word that can mean the chest or the middle of the body generally. Since Absalom is still alive afterwards and the armor-bearers have to finish him, these were evidently not killing blows.

18:15

An armor-bearer was a young soldier attached to a commander, carrying his weapons and shield and fighting alongside him. The ten of them finishing off a man Joab has already speared spreads the responsibility for the killing across a group.

18:16

The ram's horn was the standard battlefield signal instrument. A single blast was how a commander recalled troops from a pursuit; there was no other way to give an order across a battlefield.

18:17

Heaping stones over a body was the burial given to someone who died in disgrace, the same treatment given to Achan and to the king of Ai (Joshua 7:26; 8:29). It is the deliberate opposite of the monument described in the next verse. "Every one to his tent" is a Hebrew idiom meaning everyone went home, left over from the days when Israel lived in tents.

18:18

In Israel a man's name survived through his sons, who inherited his land and kept his memory in the family line; a man without a son was effectively erased. A stone pillar set up in his own name was the substitute. Chapter 14:27 says Absalom had three sons, so either they died young or the two notices simply stand side by side unreconciled. The King's Valley was near Jerusalem (Genesis 14:17). "To this day" means as of the time the account was written; the monument shown to visitors in Jerusalem today is a much later structure.

18:19

Zadok was one of the two chief priests. He had stayed behind in Jerusalem as David's informant when the king fled, and his son Ahimaaz had already run messages through enemy lines (chapter 17). The Hebrew verb for carrying news is specifically the verb for bringing *good* news; the runner who reached a king first with word of victory expected honor and a reward, which is why Ahimaaz is so eager and why Joab in verse 22 speaks of a reward.

18:20

Joab is protecting Ahimaaz, not insulting him. Bringing a king word of a death he did not want was genuinely dangerous, and David had already executed two men who came to him expecting a reward for reporting the deaths of Saul and of Saul's son.

18:21

Cush was the region on the Nile south of Egypt, roughly modern Sudan. The Hebrew has the definite article, "the Cushite", so this is a description of where the man came from, not a personal name; the King James treats it as the name "Cushi."

18:22

The Hebrew phrase is ambiguous and can mean either "you have no news" or "there is no reward in this news for you." Either way Joab's point is the same: there is nothing in this errand worth having.

18:23

"The plain" is the flat round of the Jordan valley. It is the longer way but level going, while the direct route runs over broken hill country, so the man who starts second arrives first.

18:24

City gates were not a single door but a fortified passage with an outer and an inner gate, guardrooms along the sides and an open space between, the ordinary place for a king to sit and hear business. There was a chamber above it (verse 33) and a flat roof on top, which is where the lookout stands.

18:25

The logic is that of a watchman: a single man running means a messenger sent deliberately. Many men running would mean an army in flight, and therefore defeat.

18:26

The King James "porter" means gatekeeper, the man who controlled the gate, not someone who carries luggage. The word has shifted meaning since 1611.

18:28

"All is well" translates *shalom*, the ordinary greeting-word for peace and safety. It is the same word the king uses in the next verse when he asks whether Absalom is "safe," and again in verse 32, Ahimaaz's cheerful greeting has already used the word the king is about to spend on his son.

18:29

David's question is literally "is there shalom to the young man Absalom?", picking up the word Ahimaaz has just used as a cheerful greeting. Ahimaaz, who does know what happened, retreats into vagueness rather than be the one to say it.

18:32

This is a formal circumlocution, a wish spoken so as to avoid saying the words "he is dead." The king understands it perfectly.

18:33

"Much moved" translates a Hebrew verb meaning to tremble or shake. The chamber over the gate is the room above the gate passage described in verse 24. In printed Hebrew Bibles this verse is numbered 19:1, so verse numbers in chapter 19 run one ahead of the English from here on.