1. And it happened thereafter. Once again this vague temporal formula reflects the achronological ordering of the text. Since the Aramean king Hadadezer is reported in 8:3–7 to have been decisively defeated by David and to have become David’s vassal, the campaign that is represented here, in which Hadadezer musters Aramean forces east of the Euphrates in order to confront David, must have taken place as part of David’s victorious struggle with Aram Zobah registered in the summary of chapter 8. This whole account of military operations—given its rather dry technical style, it may well have been drawn from Davidic annals—is meant to establish the facts of continuing armed conflict with the Ammonites, which is the crucial background for the story of David and Bathsheba in the next chapter.

2. Let me keep faith with Hanun son of Nahash as his father kept faith with me. This chapter, like the preceding one, opens with a declaration of David’s desire to keep faith with, or do kindness to, the son of a father toward whom he feels some prior obligation. There is no notice in the previous narrative of Nahash’s having done favors for David, but several scholars have surmised that Nahash’s enmity toward Saul (see 1 Samuel 11) might have led him to provide refuge or logistical support to David and his men when they were being hunted down by Saul.

3. to search out the city. As Moshe Garsiel notes, the walled cities of the ancient Near East often had tunnels, underground conduits, or other points of vulnerability that could provide access to the enemy in a siege. David’s forces may have broken into Jerusalem in this fashion. (See the first comment on 5:8.)

4. shaved off half the beard of each and cut off half their diplomats’ garb. Shaving the beard is an insult to the masculinity of the ambassadors, all the more so because it is done in a disfiguring way, with half the beard left uncut. The exposure of one buttock, by cutting away half the garment vertically, is similarly shaming, perhaps sexually shaming. The garments in question, moreover, are not ordinary clothes, begadim, but madim, garb worn in the performance of an official function (compare the “battle garb,” madim, that Saul gives to David in 1 Samuel 17:38). The Ammonites thus are not merely insulting the ambassadors personally but provocatively violating their diplomatic privilege. In all this, we observe an extravagant reflection of the symbolic violation of Saul by David when he cut off a corner of the king’s robe.

5. Stay here in Jericho. The town of Jericho is in the Jordan Valley just west of the Jordan, and is plausibly the first place of habitation that the ambassadors would come to on crossing back from Ammonite territory.

6. And the Ammonites saw. Shimon Bar-Efrat observes that this narrative sequence is formally structured by the “seeing” of David’s trans-Jordanian adversaries (here, verse 14, verse 15, verse 19), in counterpoint to David’s “hearing.” The latter implies receiving word at a distance, as does the associated locution, “it was told to David,” whereas the former signifies immediate observation. Thus Joab, making out the deployment of hostile forces on the battlefield, is also said to see.

7. David heard and sent out Joab. Throughout this chapter and the next, the verb “to send” is repeatedly linked with David: for the first time, he plays the role not of martial leader but of sedentary king, delegating the military task to his commander. This new state of affairs will have major implications in the Bathsheba story.

the whole army of warriors. This is a slight variant, supported by three ancient versions, of the Masoretic Text, which reads “the whole army, the warriors.”

9. there was a battle line against him in front and behind. The Israelite forces are in danger of being caught in the pincer movement between the Aramean mercenaries advancing on them from the northeast and the Ammonites, presumably to the south. Joab rapidly improvises a counterstrategy, selecting a corp of elite troops to assault the larger force of Arameans and sending his brother Abishai with the rest of the troops against the Ammonites. Such attention to military detail is quite untypical of biblical narrative, as is the rousing battlefield exhortation (verse 12) with which Joab concludes his instructions. The point of such detail is surely to show Joab as a superbly competent and resolute field commander, just before the great pivotal episode in the next chapter in which Joab maintains the siege against Rabbath-Ammon while his commander in chief slumbers, and lusts, in Jerusalem.

10. the rest of the troops he gave. Polzin observes, with puzzlement, that this story proceeds by dividing things in half: beards, clothing, anti-Israelite forces, Israelite troops. One wonders whether this narrative dynamic of mitosis, even though it is a saving strategy in Joab’s case, might be a thematic introduction to all the inner divisions in court and nation, the fractures in the house of David, that take up the rest of the narrative.

14. and went into the town. The town into which they withdraw under pressure from Abishai’s troops is not named. It could be the capital, Rabbath-Ammon (present-day Amman), though some analysts have wondered whether Hanun would be so unwise as to wait until the Israelites were at the gates of his own city before taking a decisive stand. Another candidate that has been proposed is Medbah, an Ammonite town considerably farther to the south.

15. they reassembled. This major regrouping for a second campaign against the Israelites involves the enlisting of greater numbers of troops from the Arameans east of the Euphrates, ethnic kin and in all likelihood political vassals to the people of Aram Zobah.

17. he gathered all Israel. Alerted to the augmented size of the trans-Jordanian forces, David musters his entire national army and this time elects to command it himself.

19. And all the kings who were vassals . . . made peace with Israel. Seeing who has the military upper hand, they take a small and logical step in exchanging vassal status under Hadadezer for vassal status under David. It should be noted that this whole annalistic prelude to the story of David and Bathsheba concludes with an invocation of “all the kings.” The immediately following episode begins by mentioning “the time the kings sally forth”—although, as we shall see, the noun itself there is pointedly ambiguous—and the tale that unfolds will powerfully raise the question of what constitutes kingly behavior.