1. Let me pick . . . twelve thousand men . . . and pursue David tonight. Ahitophel not only offers counsel but proposes to undertake the command of the expedition himself, in striking contrast to Hushai, who begins with a lengthy descriptive statement and then uses a third-person verbal form (verse 11, “let all Israel gather round you”) to express his recommended course of action. It seems as though the urgent Ahitophel has taken on the attribute of his rival’s name, which carries the verb ḥush, “hurry.”

2. let me come upon him when he is tired and slack-handed. This is, of course, very sound advice: David and his men are in fact fatigued from their flight to the banks of the Jordan (16:14), and are likely to be vulnerable to a surprise attack.

I shall strike down the king alone. Ahitophel seeks to avoid a protracted civil war: if he can panic David’s forces into a general retreat, the death of David will then put an end to the opposition, and his troops are likely to transfer their loyalty to Absalom. The image of one man struck down as the troops flee may ironically echo David’s plan for doing away with Uriah.

3. for it is one man you seek. The Masoretic Text has three simple Hebrew words here that make no sense as a syntactic sequence: keshuv hakol haʾish (“as-return all the-man”). Many modern interpreters follow the Septuagint, which rearranges the Hebrew letters to read keshuv kalah leʾishah, “as a bride returns to her husband.” But, as Bar-Efrat contends, this would be a strange image for the movement of troops to the opposite side and it would violate the pointedly unmetaphoric, businesslike character of Ahitophel’s language, which stands in sharp contrast to Hushai’s elaborately figurative rhetoric of persuasion. This translation therefore adopts Bar-Efrat’s proposal that keshuv hakol is an inadvertent scribal repetition of weʾashiva kol (“let me turn back all”) at the beginning of the verse; that phrase is omitted here, and ʾish ʾeḥad, “one man,” is presumed instead of haʾish ʾasher, “the man who.”

4. the elders of Israel. This term clearly designates an official group, a kind of royal council. Ahitophel, addressing this group, acts as national security advisor.

5. Hushai the Archite, too. Although Hushai does not have Ahitophel’s official standing, he has sufficiently won Absalom’s trust that the usurper is at least curious to see whether Hushai will concur with Ahitophel. This will prove to be a fatal error.

7. not good this time. Shrewdly, Hushai begins by implicity conceding that as a rule Ahitophel’s counsel is good—but in this specific instance, the trusty advisor has exhibited a lapse in judgment.

8. And Hushai said. Absalom is silent, astounded that anyone should deny the self-evident rightness of Ahitophel’s counsel. So the formula for introducing direct discourse, according to the biblical convention, must be repeated, and now Hushai launches upon his cunningly devised argument.

You yourself know. Hushai’s opening rhetorical move is to flatter his interlocutor: I hardly have to tell you what you yourself well know, that your father is a very dangerous adversary who cannot be attacked impulsively, without proper preparation.

warriors . . . bitter men . . . like a bear in the field . . . a seasoned fighter. Hushai uses language that, as Bar-Efrat and others have noted, recapitulates a series of moments from the earlier story of David. What he is doing in effect is invoking the legend of the heroic David, who as a boy slew bear and lion (compare the lion simile in verse 10), and who gathered round him bitter men, warriors, seasoned fighters.

he will not spend the night with the troops. This image of David as the constantly wakeful, elusive guerilla leader scarcely accords with the figure David has cut in the last several years of reported narrative—sleeping through the long afternoon while his army fights in Ammon, sedentary in his palace while internecine struggle goes on between his own children.

9. he will now be hiding in some hollow or some other place. Hushai’s rather vague language once again evokes the time when David was a fugitive from Saul, hiding in caves and wildernesses.

when they fall from the very first. The unspecified subject of the verb—actually emended by some as “the troops”—clearly refers to Absalom’s forces: ambushed by the wily David, they will quickly panic.

10. he will surely quail. The literal meaning of the Hebrew is “he will surely melt.”

11. multitudinous as the sand . . . on the seashore. This traditional simile is used to convey the idea that only overwhelmingly superior numbers, achieved through a general (and time-consuming!) conscription, can prevail against so formidable a foe as David.

12. we shall light upon him as the dew falls upon the ground. Hushai, as Fokkleman has observed, pairs the traditional simile of the sands of the seashore with a more innovative, yet related simile of dew on the field. The dew falls silently, effortlessly, and this is how this huge army will “light upon” David’s forces. Dew, elsewhere an image of peacetime blessing, is here associated with destruction.

not a single one will be left of all the men who are with him. Ahitophel proposed a strategy through which it might be possible to kill David alone and then to enlist the support of his followers. Hushai’s counsel is to annihilate David’s forces, a much more violent means of preventing civil war. The bloodthirsty alternative evidently appeals to something in Absalom, who is unwilling to trust the future loyalty of the troops who have remained with David.

13. should he withdraw into a town. This little addendum to Hushai’s scenario is intended to anticipate an obvious objection to it: the recommended course of action would give David time to pull back his forces to a strong defensive position in a fortified town. Hushai’s counterargument is that with so huge an army, Absalom’s people could easily take down the walls of the town stone by stone.

14. The counsel of Hushai . . . is better than the counsel of Ahitophel. This entire episode turns on an ingenious reversal of values. The straight-talking, clear-seeing advisor is defeated by the lying secret agent who musters the resources of a figurative, psychologically manipulative rhetoric to achieve his ends. Yet it is the master of deception who serves the forces of legitimacy while the plain dealer looks out for the interests of a usurper and would-be parricide.

the LORD had ordained to overturn Ahitophel’s good counsel. This theological explanation can be viewed as adding an overarching perspective, or as merely secondary, to the thoroughly human machinations of Hushai, instigated by David.

16. And now, send quickly and inform David. Although Zadok and Abiathar presumably know that Absalom has chosen to follow Hushai’s counsel, they appear to be nervous that he may change his mind and implement Ahitophel’s strategy, for they urge David not to waste a moment but to flee eastward across the Jordan.

17. Ein-Rogel. The site of this village has not been confidently identified, but it would have to be near Jerusalem to the east.

18. the house of a man in Bahurim. This village on the eastern slope of the Mount of Olives is the hometown of Shimei, who cursed David. What appears to be reflected is a political reality in which the populace is divided between loyalists and supporters of the usurper.

19. And the woman took a cloth. The woman is evidently the wife of the man from Bahurim (the same Hebrew word means both “woman” and “wife,” like femme in French and Frau in German). This is still another instance in the David story in which the enterprising intervention of a shrewd woman saves the day. As has often been noted, this moment alludes to the story told in Joshua 2 of Rahab the harlot, who hides the two spies sent out to Jericho by Joshua. In Joshua, the spies are hidden up above, in the roof thatch; here they hide below in the well. There may be a certain agricultural affinity between the covering of thatch and the cloth covered with groats (if that is what the anomalous Hebrew rifot means) under which the pairs of spies hide. In any case, the destruction of all the men of Jericho who sought Joshua’s spies foreshadows the destruction of Absalom’s army.

20. They’ve crossed over past the water reservoir. Rahab, too, gives the pursuers false directions about where the spies have gone. Here, the thematically crucial “cross over” is again invoked. The meaning of mikhal, the word rendered here as “reservoir,” is a little doubtful, though it could be derived from a verbal root that means “to contain.”

21. cross over the water quickly, for thus has Ahitophel counseled against you. The two couriers now assume the worst-case scenario, that Ahitophel’s counsel will after all be followed. The reference to crossing over the water is a clear indication that David is encamped on the west bank of the Jordan.

23. he saddled his donkey and arose and went to his home to his town, and he left a charge for his household, and he hanged himself. This haunting notice of Ahitophel’s suicide shows him a deliberate, practical man to the very end, making all the necessary arrangements for his family and being sure to do away with himself in his hometown, where he knows he will be readily buried in the ancestral tomb. Ahitophel kills himself not only because, in quasi-Japanese fashion, he has lost face, but also out of sober calculation: he realizes that Hushai’s counsel will enable David to defeat Absalom, and with the old king returned to the throne, an archtraitor like Ahitophel will surely face death. Thus, in tying the noose around his own neck, he anticipates the executioner’s sword.

24. Mahanaim. This is an Israelite walled city in trans-Jordan.

25. Ithra the Ishmaelite. There are two different problems with the identification of Amasa’s progenitors in the Masoretic Text. The Masoretic version has “Israelite,” but this national label (rather than identification by tribe) would be strange here, and the same Ithra in 1 Chronicles 2:17—called there, in a variant of the name, Jether—is said, more plausibly, to be the son of an Ishmaelite. The fact that the father is a member of another national-ethnic group accords with the report that he “had come to bed with Abigail,” for that sexual term by no means necessarily implies marriage. The Masoretic Text makes Nahash, an Ammonite, Abigail’s father, but it looks as though that name may have drifted into this verse in scribal transcription from verse 27. 1 Chronicles 2 more plausibly reports that Jesse was Abigail’s father. She would then be the sister of David and of Zeruiah, Joab’s mother; and so Amasa and Joab, the two army commanders, are first cousins, and both of them David’s nephews.

28. beans and lentils. The received text adds “and parched grain” at the end of the list, an apparent scribal duplication of the word that occurs just before “beans and lentils.” This detailed catalogue of vitally needed victuals, preceded by the utensils required to serve them and something like bedrolls, is a vivid expression of loyalty to David’s beleaguered forces on the part of the trans-Jordanian Israelites and their Ammonite vassals. Barzillai’s faithfulness will be singled out when David returns.

29. curds from the flock. This reflects a very minor emendation of the Masoretic Text, which says “curds and flock.” In the next phrase, the Hebrew word for “cheese” (shefot) has no precedent but is usually understood as cheese because of the alimentary context and the likely root of the word.