1. the king’s mind was on Absalom. The preposition ʿal is ambiguous, and it could also mean “against.”

2. Joab sent to Tekoa. Tekoa is a village about ten miles north of Jerusalem. Why does Joab contrive to make David agree to Absalom’s return? Given his relentlessly political character, it seems likely that Joab perceives Absalom’s continuing banishment as a potential source of rebellion against the throne, and concludes that the safest course is to reconcile the king with his son. This calculation will prove to be gravely misguided because Joab does not reckon with David’s ambivalence toward his fratricidal son (see verse 24) or with the impulse to usurpation that the ambivalence will encourage in Absalom.

a wise woman. It should be noted that the whole David story, seemingly dominated by powerful martial men, pivots at several crucial junctures on the intervention of enterprising “wise women.” The first of these is Abigail, though, unlike two of the others, she is not assigned the epithet “wise woman” as a kind of professional title. Later, a resourceful woman hides the two spies who are bringing intelligence of Absalom to David in trans-Jordan. In the subsequent rebellion of Sheba son of Bichri, another wise woman prevents Joab’s massacre of the besieged town of Abel Beth-Maacah.

like a woman a long while mourning over a dead one. The phrasing here pointedly echoes “David mourned for his son all the while” in 13:37.

3. Joab put the words in her mouth. As Robert Polzin observes, the entire episode turns on manipulation of people through language, with abundant repetition of the verb “speak.” In contrast to the common practice elsewhere in biblical narrative, we are not given the actual script that Joab dictates to the woman, which she will then repeat to David. This omission heightens the sense that, using a general outline provided by Joab, the woman is in fact brilliantly improvising—which in some ways she would have to do, given the fact that she is not reciting an uninterrupted speech but responding to David’s declarations, picking up clues from the way he reacts.

4. Rescue, O king! This is a formulaic plea used by petitioners for royal justice.

6. they quarreled in the field . . . and one struck down the other. As several commentators have noted, her formulation aligns the story with the archetypal tale of Cain and Abel. The fratricidal Cain is banished, but also given a sign to protect him from blood vengeance.

7. and let us destroy the heir as well. Although it is unlikely that the clansmen would have actually said these words, there is no need to tamper with the text. The wise woman, in reporting the dialogue, insinuates her own anxious maternal perspective into this last clause. The implication is that the members of the clan would like to kill the remaining son not only to execute justice but in order to get his inheritance.

8. I myself shall issue a charge concerning you. Although David emphatically announces (by adding the first-person pronoun ʾani) that he himself will take up the case, his language remains vague (“issue a charge”), and the Tekoite woman’s response in the next verse clearly indicates that she requires something further of him.

9. Upon me . . . the guilt . . . and the king and his throne shall be blameless. The legal issue involved is bloodguilt. From David’s vagueness, she infers that he is loath to intervene on behalf of the fratricide because by so doing he, and his throne, would take on the guilt of allowing the killing to go unavenged.

10. The man who dares speak to you I will have brought to me. Her declaration that she and her father’s house will bear the guilt for allowing the killer to live—evidently construed by David as a performative speech-act, efficacious once uttered—encourages the king to declare that he will absolutely protect her against the vengeful kinsmen who are seeking out her son.

11. let them not destroy my son. The woman is still not satisfied, for David’s pledge to safeguard her did not mention her son: she wants to extract an explicit declaration from David that he will protect the life of her son.

not a single hair of your son’s shall fall to the ground. Now she has what she has been after, with David’s hyperbolic declaration about guarding the well-being of the fratricidal son, she is prepared to snap shut the trap of the fiction, linking it to David’s life, just as Nathan did with the parable of the poor man’s ewe. We should note that not a single hair of the fictitious son is to fall to the ground, whereas the extravagantly abundant hair of his real-life referent, Absalom, will be cut annually in a kind of public ceremony.

12. Let your servant, pray, speak. She uses these words of entreaty to preface the transition to the real subject, David and Absalom.

13. against God’s people. The implicit key concept here is “inheritance,” which links her fiction to the national political situation. She may be hinting that Absalom is the appropriate heir to the throne. In any case, his banishment is potentially divisive to the kingdom.

in speaking this thing, the king is as though guilty. The Hebrew of this whole sentence is rather crabbed, an effect reproduced in the translation. Rather than reflecting difficulties in textual transmission, her language probably expresses her sense of awkwardness in virtually indicting the king: he is “as though guilty,” for “in speaking this thing,” in declaring his resolution to protect the fratricidal son, he has condemned his own antithetical behavior in the case of Absalom. But the woman is careful not to mention Absalom explicitly by name—she struggles verbally in the crossover from fiction to life, knowing she is treading on dangerous ground.

14. we surely will die, like water spilled to the ground. Moving beyond Absalom to a wise woman’s pronouncement on human fate, she breaks free of her verbal stumbling and becomes eloquent. The spilled water as an image of irreversible mortality is an obvious and effective counterpoint to her previous image of the ember that should not be quenched. It also picks up thematically David’s own bleak reflection on the irreversibility of death after his infant son expires (chapter 12).

God will not bear off the life of him who devises that no one of his be banished. As the wise woman switches back from philosophic statement to the juridical issue confronting David, her language again becomes knotty and oblique. What she is saying is that God will scarcely want to punish the father who brings back his banished son, even though bloodguilt remains unavenged.

15. the reason I have come to speak this thing to the king. The Tekoite woman, having nervously broached the issue of David and Absalom, now hastily retreats to the relative safety of her invented story about two sons, as though that were the real reason for her appearance before the king. The dramatic and psychological logic of this entire speech argues against scholarly attempts to make it more “coherent” by moving around whole swatches of it.

17. respite. The king’s word will give her respite from her persecutors, the would-be killers of her son. The Hebrew term menuḥah also points to a bound locution, menuḥah wenaḥalah, “respite and inheritance,” the very thing the kinsmen would take from her.

19. Is the hand of Joab with you in all this? David rightly infers that a village wise woman would have no motive of her own for undertaking this elaborate stratagem, and so someone in court with political aims must be behind her. Polzin shrewdly proposes that Joab may actually have wanted David to detect him at the bottom of the scheme: “The woman’s eventual admission that she has been sent by Joab (verses 19–20) may itself be part of Joab’s indirect message to David—something like, ‘Bring Absalom back or I may side with him against you.’”

there is no turning right or left from all that my lord the king has spoken. She is saying two things at once—that the king has hit the target in saying that Joab is behind her, and that, having committed himself by his own speech to protect the fratricidal son, he cannot now permit himself to continue Absalom’s banishment.

20. my lord is wise, as with the wisdom of a messenger of God. It is of course she who has been demonstrably wise. David will soon show unwisdom by bringing Absalom back while resisting real reconciliation, and his subsequent blindness to Absalom’s demagogic activities within a stone’s throw of the court indicates that there is much in the land about which he knows nothing.

21. bring back the lad Absalom. Momentarily, David refers to Absalom by a term (naʿar) that is generally an expression of paternal affection. He will use the same word repeatedly during Absalom’s rebellion to stress his concern for Absalom’s safety.

25. there was no man so highly praised for beauty. Both Absalom and his sister Tamar are remarkable for their beauty (as was the young David). For Absalom, this will become an asset he trades on in his appeal for popular support.

26. when he cut his hair . . . he would weigh the hair of his head. There is clearly something narcissistic about this preoccupation with his luxuriant hair. It is of course a foreshadowing of the bizarre circumstances of Absalom’s death (chapter 18:9–15). Beyond that, the spectacular growth of hair invokes a comparison with Samson, who never cut his hair until the cutting of the hair against his will led to his undoing. The parallel with Samson is extended in the burning of Joab’s field, which recalls the foxes with torches tied to their tails used by Samson to set fire to the fields of the Philistines. Perhaps the parallel with Samson is meant to foreshadow Absalom’s fate as a powerful leader whose imprudence brings him to an early death.

27. And three sons were born to Absalom and a daughter named Tamar, she was a beautiful woman. Later, we are informed (18:18) that Absalom was childless. The two reports can be harmonized only with considerable strain, and it is best to view them as contradictory traditions incorporated in the final text. But it is noteworthy that, against patriarchal practice, the sons are left unnamed here, and only the daughter, named after Absalom’s raped sister, is not anonymous. It is unnecessary to assume that this second beautiful Tamar was born after the violation of her aunt by Amnon: here she is represented as a woman, and it seems unlikely that so many years would have passed from the time of Tamar’s rape until Absalom’s resumption of residence in Jerusalem.

29. he did not want to come. Throughout this story, there is a precarious game of power going on. Joab has manipulated David to effect Absalom’s return, but seeing that the king remains estranged from Absalom, Joab does not want to push his luck by interceding at court on Absalom’s behalf. The power of the king may be qualified, but he remains the king.

30. set it on fire. Absalom’s Samson-like burning of the field is a strong indication that he is a man prepared to use violence to achieve his ends: mafia style, he presents Joab with an offer he can’t refuse.

32. if there be guilt in me, let him put me to death. Absalom of course knows he is responsible for the killing of Amnon, but he construes that act as something other than “guilt” because it was done to avenge the violation of Tamar—a crime David left unpunished.

33. he . . . bowed down to him, his face to the ground. Fokkelman notes that there is a series of three acts of prostration before the king—first the Tekoite woman, then Joab, and now Absalom, the third bowing-down ostensibly consummating the reconciliation of father and son toward which all three acts are directed.

and the king kissed Absalom. The noun used (rather than “David”) may suggest that this is more a royal, or official, kiss than a paternal one. It clearly gives Absalom no satisfaction, as his initiative of usurpation in the next episode strongly argues.