1. David inquired of the LORD. In keeping with the repeated emphasis of the preceding narrative, David, at each crucial juncture, solicits guidance from God’s oracle before he makes his move.

go up into one of the towns of Judah. The preposition is used with precision: David does not want to “go up to one of the towns” but “into one of the towns”—that is, to set up headquarters in the town, leaving Ziklag at the edge of Philistine territory.

Where shall I go up? Given the binary character of the oracle’s response, the actual form of the question would have been “Shall I go up to Hebron?” But the question is recast in its present form to emphasize that God has picked out Hebron from all the towns of Judah.

4a. king over the house of Judah. It is a little odd for a single tribe to have a “king,” but the act is deliberately presumptive on David’s part—first the king of Judah, eventually of all the tribes. Saul’s son Ish-Bosheth, by contrast, becomes king of an alliance of northern tribes. The text is silent on the Philistines’ view of David’s move to kingship in Hebron, but one can assume they countenanced it as a reasonable act on the part of their vassal opposing the house of Saul.

5. David sent messengers to the men of Jabesh-Gilead. This is another shrewd political maneuver. The men of Jabesh-Gilead had been closely allied with Saul. David, seizing the occasion of their act of bravery, summons them, praises their burying of Saul, and offers them an unspecified “bounty” (or “benefice”—literally, “good thing”).

7. for your lord Saul is dead, and it is I whom the house of Judah has anointed as king over them. David finesses Saul’s hostility toward him and presents himself as the legitimate successor: just as the men of Jabesh-Gilead have been valorous in burying Saul, they should now show valor in following the newly anointed David.

8. Abner . . . had taken Ish-Bosheth. Abner the commander in chief is clearly the real power here, and this surviving son of Saul is little more than a puppet king. The original name (reflected in Chronicles) was Ish-Baal, with the “baal” component being a general epithet for God (or god), not necessarily referring to the Canaanite deity. But because of its pagan associations, the sternly monotheistic later editors systematically substituted boshet for baʿal, boshet meaning “shame.”

Mahanaim. The location is to the east of the Jordan and hence outside the new area of Philistine conquest.

9. Asherite. The Masoretic Text reads “Ashurite,” which would be, implausibly, a non-Israelite people. Some critics emend to “Geshurite,” but that is a Canaanite group, and so the emendation perpetuates the problem. It is simplest to read this word as a reference to the northern tribe of Asher.

and over Israel altogether. Shimon Bar-Efrat has made the plausible proposal that this final phrase is not a summary of the preceding list but the last stage in a chronological process: Ish-Bosheth extended his rule gradually, beginning with Gilead in trans-Jordan and moving westward into the territory the Philistines had conquered. It was only after a time that he actually ruled “over Israel altogether.”

10. two years did he reign. At first thought, his reign should have been nearly as long as David’s seven and a half years in Hebron. But if it took him five years to consolidate his control over the northern tribes, the reign of two years would make perfect sense.

12. Abner . . . sallied forth from Mahanaim to Gibeon. The reason for this expedition may have been David’s attaching the men of Jabesh-Gilead, who had clearly been in Saul’s camp, to himself. Gibeon is in the territory of Benjamin, just a few miles northwest of Jerusalem.

14. let the lads arise and play before us. The “lads” (neʿarim) are elite warriors. The verb “play” clearly indicates gladiatorial, or representative, combat. (Goliath calling for an Israelite champion to fight him is another instance of combat through designated representative.) It is, however, deadly combat and not just a form of jousting, as the details of the fighting make clear.

15. twelve in number. Throughout this strange episode, as Robert Polzin has aptly observed, there is an “extended ritualization of action as it is described through extensive stylization of language.” The ritual combat is virtually an allegory of the civil war that it inaugurates. (Polzin reads it as an allegory of Israelite monarchy.) The twelve champions on each side recall the twelve tribes of Israel—an image of a nation destructively divided against itself. (The number of fallen soldiers on Abner’s side will be 360—30 times 12—and on Joab’s side 20, an eighteenth part of the other side’s casualties.) The implausibility of the account of combat, then, would have been overridden for the writer by the neatness of its symbolic function.

16. each man grasped the head of the other with his sword at the side of the other. The evidence of artifacts from the ancient world suggests that precisely this mode of ritualized combat was quite widespread. A bas-relief found in Syria, roughly contemporaneous with our story, an Egyptian carving, archaic Greek vase paintings, and a Roman sculpture all show warriors in precisely this posture.

they fell together. All twenty-four warriors were killed—hardly a surprising outcome if each man was free to wield a sword against his adversary’s side. Because there can be no decisive outcome in this encompassing mutual slaughter, general fighting then breaks out.

the Field of Flints. It is not clear whether they were fighting with flint weapons (perhaps because these were archaic and part of the ritualized combat), or whether the old term had become a general designation for knives or swords.

17. Abner with the men of Israel were routed. Given the relatively low number of casualties, it seems likely that fewer than a thousand on each side were engaged. In such limited combat, the veterans of David’s battle-hardened guerilla band of six hundred might have had a distinct advantage.

20. Are you Asahel? Abner, who surely would not have had any compunction about killing some other Judahite, realizes, quite accurately, that it will mean trouble for him to kill one of the sons of Zeruiah. Asahel, the ace sprinter, sounds very much like the youngest of the three, although we are not told specifically about the order of their birth.

21. his armor. This noun, ḥalitsah, appears only here and in the Samson story. It is rendered in modern translations, erroneously, as “tunic,” “garment,” or even “belt,” but as we know from the Iliad, it is rather armor that a warrior takes from a slain foe on the battlefield. (The King James Version actually gets it right here but not in the Samson story.) The word is related to ḥaluts, “vanguard,” and the vanguard fighters would surely have worn armor.

22. Why should I strike you to the ground. Abner, the seasoned warrior, is coolly confident that if necessary he has the skill and the combat experience to kill this impetuous young man.

how would I show my face to Joab your brother? The literal wording of the Hebrew is “lift up my face.” What is at stake here is not merely a question of diplomatic relations with the opposing commander but vendetta justice (Hebrew, geʾulat hadam, “redemption of the blood”): if Abner sheds the blood of Joab’s brother, Joab will feel honor-bound to shed the blood of the killer in return.

23. struck him in the belly with the butt of the spear. Asahel is pursuing Abner at top speed. Abner, to save his own life, uses an old soldier’s trick: he suddenly stops short and thrusts his spear backward, under his pursuer’s shield (if Asahel is carrying one) and into the soft belly. The momentum of Asahel’s rapid running would have contributed to the penetrating force of the spear’s butt.

24. Ammah . . . Giah. The first name means “conduit,” the second “gushing,” and so both may be related to an aqueduct system linked to the pool at Gibeon.

26. You surely know that it will be bitterness in the end. This grim prognostication hovers over not only the continuing civil war but the entire David story. In the previous verse, Abner’s forces were reported regrouping and taking up a defensive position on the hilltop, so they are now, after the rout, in a state to inflict serious casualties on their adversaries if Joab persists. Therefore he agrees to the truce, though he surely has vendetta on his mind.

27. had you but spoken. The Masoretic Text has “had you not spoken.” This has led some interpreters to construe “morning” as “tomorrow morning” (that is, the troops would have gone on pursuing you all night long had you not spoken up now). But this is strained because the Hebrew ʾaz mehaboker (literally, “then from the morning”) idiomatically refers to the morning of the day on which one is speaking. One should either emend “had not” (luleiʾ) to “had” (lu) or, as Rashi proposed long ago, construe the former in the sense of the latter.

29. the Arabah. This is a north-south depression running from the Sea of Galilee all the way to the Gulf of Aqabah.

the ravine. The Hebrew term bitron might conceivably be a place-name. The root means to cleave or split and occurs in the Song of Songs collocated with “mountains,” yielding something like “mountains of the divide.” The scholarly proposal that this word means “middle of the morning” has no warrant in ancient Hebrew usage.

32. all night long. Perhaps the reason for this forced march through the night is that Joab’s troops want to get safely out of Benjaminite territory, not entirely trusting the truce.