1. David had crossed over. The verbal motif of “crossing over,” which virtually defines David’s flight eastward from Jerusalem to trans-Jordan, is continued here. It will be given another odd turn in verse 17 when the bloody-minded Abishai volunteers to “cross over” and lop off Shimei’s head.

a little beyond the summit. The summit in question is of course the top of the Mount of Olives, where David has just encountered Hushai and sent him off to Jerusalem as an undercover agent. Polzin acutely observes that the two low points of David’s abasement—his humiliation by Shimei and the sexual possession of his concubines by his son—both take place on an elevation: near the summit and on the palace roof. The Hebrew term for summit used here is roʾsh, which is the ordinary word for “head,” and as Polzin goes on to note, “head” is an organizing image of the entire episode: David goes up the mountainside with his head uncovered in a sign of mourning, as do the people with him. Hushai puts dirt on his head as a related expression of mourning. Both Hushai and Ziba are encountered on or near the head of the mountain. Abishai is prepared to cut off Shimei’s head. And, as in other languages, head also designates political leader—an ironic verbal background to his moment when the head of all Israel has been displaced. Finally, Absalom’s usurpation will come to a violent end when his head—the narrator does not say hair—is caught in the branches of a tree.

2. for the king’s household. That is, for a couple of members of the king’s immediate family. David, it should be recalled, has set off on foot.

the exhausted. The Hebrew term ya ʿef—also, by metathesis, ʿayef, as in verse 14—straddles the two meanings of exhausted and famished.

3. And where is your master’s son? Mephibosheth, who is crippled in both legs, would scarcely have been up to joining the flight from Jerusalem. But David, overwhelmed by betrayals from within his own court, is suspicious of Mephibosheth’s absence, and it is clear that Ziba has been counting on this suspicion in his scheme to discredit Mephibosheth and take over his property. It is noteworthy that, at this late date, David still refers to Mephibosheth as “your master’s son,” still thinks of the long-dead Jonathan as Ziba’s real master.

Today the house of Israel will give back to me my father’s kingdom. There is no corroborating evidence in the story that Mephibosheth actually said these words. What in fact seems to be happening is that Ziba is flatly lying about his master in order to make himself appear to be the only loyal subject worthy of David’s benefactions, and of title to Saul’s property. The notion Ziba puts forth that Absalom would have turned over the throne to the surviving Saulide is highly improbable, but what he proposes to David is that the purportedly treacherous Mephibosheth sees in the general political upheaval of the rebellion an opportunity to reinstate the house of Saul.

5. as far as Bahurim. This is a village in the vicinity of Jerusalem on the eastern slope of the Mount of Olives.

6. and all the troops and all the warriors were at his right and at his left. Perhaps Shimei is counting on the abject mood of David and his men to guarantee his safety in this act of extreme provocation. Yet he is clearly playing a very dangerous game—the history of David’s warriors and of the sons of Zeruiah in particular as ruthless and implacable enemies is well-known to him, as the very language of his words of revilement attest. Only a great, pent-up rage against David, joined now with gloating over David’s being thrust from power, could explain Shimei’s act.

7. Get out, get out, you man of blood, you worthless fellow. The blood that, according to the narrative itself, David has on his hands is that of Uriah the Hittite, and of the fighting men of Israel who perished at Rabbath-Ammon with Uriah. But the Benjaminite Shimei clearly believes what David himself, and the narrative with him, has taken pains to refute—that the blood of the house of Saul is on David’s hands: Abner, Ish-Bosheth, and perhaps even Saul and Jonathan (for David was collaborating with the Philistine Achish when they fell at Gilboa). Hence the phrase Shimei hurls at David in his next sentence, “all the blood of the house of Saul, in whose place you became king,” suggesting a conjunction of murder and usurpation.

8. and here you are, because of your evil. Most translations understand the last phrase (a single word in the Hebrew) to mean “You are in evil circumstances,” but the prefix bet, which can mean “in,” also has a causal meaning, and that makes more sense here: David has come into dire straits, losing the throne, displaced by his own son, because of his own evil actions.

9. Why should this dead dog curse my lord the king? We have seen previously the idiomatic use of “dead dog” to mean the lowest of the low, David applying this designation to himself in his speech to Saul at Ein-Gedi. Here the polar contrast between “dead dog” and “my lord the king” is striking. But Abishai is also reviving the literal force of the idiom, since he proposes to deal swift death to the snarling Shimei. This is not the first time that Abishai has been prepared to kill someone on the spot: when he accompanied David into Saul’s camp (1 Samuel 26:8), he had to be restrained from his impulse to dispatch Saul with a single thrust of the spear.

10. If he curses, it is because the LORD has said to him, “Curse David.” This is one of the most astonishing turning points in this story that abounds in human surprises. The proud, canny, often implacable David here resigns himself to accepting the most stinging humiliation from a person he could easily have his men kill. David’s abasement is not a disguise, like Odysseus’s when he takes on the appearance of a beggar, but a real change in condition—from which, however, he will emerge in more than one surprising way. The acceptance of humiliation is a kind of fatalism: if someone commits such a sacrilegious act against the man who is God’s anointed king, it must be because God has decreed it. Behind that fatalism may be a sense of guilt: I am suffering all this because of what I have done, for taking Bathsheba and murdering her husband, for my inaction in Amnon’s rape of Tamar and Absalom’s murder of Amnon. The guilt is coupled with despair: as David goes on to say, When my own son is trying to kill me, what difference could it make if this man of a rival tribe, who at least has political grounds for hostility toward me, should revile me?

13. cursing and hurling stones at him and flinging dirt. It is with this image that the episode concludes—Shimei walking along, angrily persisting in his insults, the dirt flung a material equivalent of the words uttered.

14. came. Some indication of where he came seems to be required. One version of the Septuagint supplies “to the Jordan” as the answer. That would be a plausible stopping place.

15. And Absalom . . . had come to Jerusalem, and Ahitophel was with him. This brief switch of narrative tracks, in a pluperfect verbal form, lays the ground for the fateful clash of counsels between Ahitophel and Hushai and also provides the necessary indication that David and his people have succeeded in fleeing a good many miles to the east by the time Absalom’s forces enter the city.

16. David’s friend. As we have noted, reaʿ, “friend” or “companion,” is a court title, but when Absalom uses it, he leans on the ordinary sense of friendship.

Long live the king. Fokkelman nicely observes that “what he particularly does not say is ‘long live King Absalom.’” Thus, in a dramatic irony evident to the audience of the story and of course concealed from Absalom, Hushai is really wishing long life to his king—David. And again in his response to Absalom’s question about his disloyalty to David, he avoids the use of Absalom’s name in a sentence that he secretly applies to David: “Whom the LORD has chosen . . . his I will be and with him I will stay.”

19. And, besides, whom should I serve? Should it not be his son? Only now does Hushai invoke the line of explanation that David instructed him to use when he came before Absalom.

20. Give you counsel. Both the verb and the ethical dative “you” are in the plural, though Absalom is said to be speaking to Ahitophel. Shimon Bar-Efrat proposes that the language implies Absalom is addressing both Ahitophel and Hushai, although it is from Ahitophel as his official advisor that he expects to receive counsel. The plural forms, then, suggest that Absalom has been persuaded by Hushai and has accepted him into his circle of court councillors. That inference helps make sense of the immediately following encounter in which both men appear as members of Absalom’s national security council.

21. Come to bed with your father’s concubines. Cohabiting with the sexual consorts of a ruler is an assertion of having taken over all his prerogatives of dominion. Ahitophel’s shrewd counsel especially addresses the effect on public opinion of the action proposed: after it, no one will be able to imagine a reconciliation between Absalom and his father (“let all Israel hear that you have become repugnant to your father”), and so the hand of Absalom’s supporters will be strengthened, for no one will hedge his support, thinking that David and Absalom will somehow come to terms.

22. he came to bed with his father’s concubines before the eyes of all Israel. The tent on the roof ensures sexual privacy, but Absalom’s entering into it with each of the women is a public display of the act of cohabitation. Either this is to be accepted as an unrealistic event, given that there are ten concubines, or Absalom is supposed to be not only beautiful and hirsute but also a sexual athlete. His act, of course, is a fulfillment of Nathan’s dire curse in chapter 12. As several commentators have noted, the usurper’s sexual transgression of David’s women takes place on the very palace roof from which his father first looked lustfully at Bathsheba.

23. the counsel of Ahitophel . . . was as one would inquire of an oracle of God. This quasireligious trust in Ahitophel’s counsel is obviously from the point of view of those who seek it, there being a sour irony in likening the sordid, if pragmatic, counsel to have sex with the king’s concubines to a divine oracle. In any event, this observation throws a retrospective light on David’s disturbance over the news that Ahitophel was among the conspirators and his prayer to God to confound Ahitophel’s counsel (15:31). Ahitophel, it seems, is a kind of Israelite Metternich or Bismarck, and David fears that in losing him he has lost a vital strategic resource. The canniness of Ahitophel’s military advice will be evident in his clash with Hushai.