2. I, too, will surely sally forth with you. The aging David, as we have had occasion to note (see the second comment on 11:1), has long been a sedentary monarch rather than a field commander. In the present crisis, he imagines he can rise again to his old role, but the troops, who diplomatically make no reference to age or infirmity, clearly recognize he is not up to it.

3. should half of us die, they will pay us no mind. Like Ahitophel, the troops assume that the real object of Absalom’s attack is David. But they essentially propose an opposite scenario to Absalom’s: David will remain safe inside the fortified town, well behind the lines, while the troops—not panicked, as Ahitophel would have had it, but strategically deployed—will do battle against Absalom’s army.

for you are like ten thousand of us. This is the reading of numerous Hebrew manuscripts and the Septuagint and Vulgate. The Masoretic Text reads “for now we are like ten thousand.”

4. the king stood by the gate. J. P. Fokkelman has noted a wry correspondence here with the beginning of Absalom’s usurpation, when he took a stance by the gate of the city and accosted each man who came by in order to enlist him to his cause.

5. Deal gently. This is the time-honored and eloquent rendering of the King James Version. But some philologists derive the rare verb here from a root that means “to cover” and hence construe it in context as “protect.” This construction would make it a closer synonym of the verb used in the soldier’s repetition of David’s injunction in verse 12, “watch over.”

7. the troops of Israel were routed there. The elision of the precise details of the battle is entirely consistent with the narrative treatment of battles elsewhere in the Bible. One may assume that the three divisions of seasoned fighters, led by their experienced commanders, attacked the Israelite army from three different sides, panicking it into disorderly flight—an outcome indicated in the “devouring” forest, where presumably the fleeing soldiers lost their way, stumbled, became entangled in the undergrowth, perhaps even slashed at each other in the dark of the wood. Throughout this episode, Absalom’s forces are “Israel” and David’s are his “servants.” The former are numerically superior, but they behave like a poorly organized conscript army facing professional soldiers.

9. his head caught in the terebinth, and he dangled between heaven and earth, while the mule which was beneath him passed on. This striking and bizarre image of Absalom’s penultimate moment provides a brilliant symbolic summation of his story. Most obviously, the head of hair that was his narcissistic glory is now the instrument of his fatal entrapment, Absalom the commander microcosmically enacting the fate of his army “devoured” by the forest. There is nothing supernatural here—David’s forces have shrewdly taken advantage of the irregular terrain—yet there is a sense that nature is conspiring against Absalom and his men. The mule is in this period the usual mount for princes and kings (one should recall that all the king’s sons ride away on their mules after Absalom has Amnon killed), so Absalom’s losing his mule from under him is an image of his losing his royal seat. Having climbed from exile and rejection to the throne, he now dangles helplessly between sky and earth. The mule’s “passing on” (ʿavar), as Polzin notes, picks up the key verb (“cross over”) that has characterized David’s flight from the royal city. Fokkelman brilliantly shows that there is also a whole series of contrastive parallels between Absalom’s fate and that of his councillor Ahitophel: “The councillor rides calmly on his ass to his home while the prince is abandoned by his mule, a fatal loss. He is thrown into an unknown, nameless and ignominious grave while Ahitophel is ‘buried in his father’s grave’. . . . With all these contrasts, they have one detail in common: both finally hang.”

he dangled. The Masoretic Text has “he was given,” but ancient translations into Aramaic, Syriac, Greek, and Latin, now confirmed by the Qumran Samuel scroll, read “dangled,” a difference of a single consonant in the Hebrew.

11. And look, you saw. The contemptuous Joab throws the soldier’s own words back into his face: if that’s what you really saw, why didn’t you have the brains to finish him off on the spot and get the reward I would have given you? Joab, in his unflinching resolution to kill Absalom in defiance of David’s explicit orders to the contrary, remains the consummately calculating political man—something David once was but no longer is. When Joab thought it was politically prudent to reconcile David with Absalom, he took elaborate steps to achieve that end. Now he realizes that an Absalom allowed to survive is likely to be a source of future political dissension and that the only sure way to eliminate this threat is Absalom’s death.

12. were I to heft in my palms a thousand pieces of silver. The soldier responds to Joab’s contempt with righteous indignation, multiplying the hypothetical reward a hundredfold and turning the general act of giving silver into a concrete hefting of its weight in order to express how sacred he holds the king’s injunction, which, we now see, has in fact been heard by “all the troops” (verse 5).

14. he took three sticks in his palm. Over against the soldier’s palms hyperbolically hefting a thousand pieces of silver, Joab’s palm grasps a blunt instrument of violence. The Hebrew shevatim means “sticks,” not “darts,” as it is often translated, and had they been darts, the blow would surely have been fatal. On the contrary, it seems probable that Joab’s intention is not to kill the prince—after all, this military man is an experienced killer—but rather to stun him and hurt him badly, and then to spread the responsibility for the death by ordering the warriors to finish him off. Fokkelman proposes that the three sticks jibe with the three divisions of the army, so that Joab performs a deliberately symbolic act, “executing the rebellious prince on behalf of the whole army.”

into Absalom’s heart, still alive in the heart of the terebinth. The two hearts, one a vulnerable human organ, the other the dense of center of the tangle of branches, produce an unsettling effect.

15. lads. The Hebrew ne‘arim, “lads,” in its sense of elite fighting men, rings dissonantly against David’s repeated paternal designation of Absalom as na‘ar, “lad.”

16. sounded. The Hebrew reflects an untranslatable pun because the verb taqa‘, “to make a piercing sound with a horn,” also means to thrust or stab, and is the word just used to report Joab’s blow to the heart.

17. the big hollow. An alternative rendering is “pit,” but “hollow” is used here to preserve the verbal identity in the Hebrew between this moment and Hushai’s imaginary description in chapter 17 of David’s hiding in “one of the hollows.” To be flung into a hole in the field and covered with a heap of stones is a shameful burial.

18. Absalom had . . . heaped up a cairn. This brief notice, in the pluperfect tense, draws a pointed contrast with Absalom’s ignominious grave. The same verb, “to heap up,” is used for both, and the cairn, or commemorative pile of stones (not a “pillar”) is the grandiose image that is transformed into the pile of stones over Absalom’s body.

I have no son to make my name remembered. Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, with reference to both its David figure and its Absalom figure, beautifully catches the pathos of these words. Those who have sought to harmonize this verse with 14:27, where Absalom is said to have fathered three sons, propose that the sons died, their early death explaining why they are left unnamed.

21. the Cushite. This Nubian is the third foreign messenger introduced into the story (the other two are the Egyptian slave who informs David of the whereabouts of the Amalekite raiding party and the Amalekite who reports Saul’s death to David). Joab appears to exhibit a certain paternal concern for Ahimaaz, a priest and a faithful agent of David’s during the insurrection—in the next verse he addresses him as “my son.” Joab is keenly aware that David has in the past shown himself capable of killing the bearer of ill tidings in a fit of rage, and so the commander prefers to let a foreigner take the risk.

22. yours are not welcome tidings. The Hebrew—literally, “finding tidings”—is anomalous, and has inspired both emendation and excessively ingenious interpretation. The immediate context suggests “welcome” as the most plausible meaning, and this could easily be an idiom for which there are no other occurrences in the biblical corpus, which, after all, provides only a small sampling of ancient Hebrew usage. In fact, these two words, besorah motseiʾt, could well be an idiomatic ellipsis for besorah motseiʾt ḥen, “tidings finding favor (in his eyes).”

23. by the way of the Plain. The Plain in question is the Jordan Valley on the east side of the river. Some have suggested that Ahimaaz overtakes the Cushite not by speed but by running along a flatter, if less direct, route in the Jordan Valley riverbed, but verses 25–27 indicate that Ahimaaz outruns the Cushite.

24. David was sitting between the gates. Walled cities in ancient Israel and environs often had double walls, with an inner and outer gate and a small plaza between them. Moshe Garsiel neatly observes that David’s ambivalence about the armed struggle is spatially figured by his physical location: he wanted to sally forth with the army; the troops wanted him within the town; he stations himself in between. Before the battle he stood by the gate; now he is seated by the gate, awaiting the news from the front—as Polzin notes, exactly like Eli, who is told of the death of his two sons.

the lookout went up on the roof of the gate . . . and he raised his eyes and saw. This moment is quite exceptional, and striking, in representing the arrival of the two messengers visually, from the perspective of the lookout on the wall reporting to David down below in the gate plaza. David’s troubles with all his sons, it should be remembered, began when he himself looked down from a roof and saw a woman bathing.

25. If he’s alone, there are tidings in his mouth. A solitary runner is likely to be a courier. Soldiers, whether in retreat or maneuvering, would travel in groups.

27. He is a good man and with good tidings he must come. This obvious non sequitur suggests that the desperately anxious David is grasping at straws. In fact, as revelatory dialogue, it shows us just how desperate he feels.

28. All is well. This is one word in the Hebrew, shalom. That word is the last two syllables of Absalom’s name in Hebrew, ʾAvshalom, a link David will reinforce when he nervously asks, “Is it well [shalom] with the lad Absalom [ʾAvshalom]?”

Who has delivered over the men who raised their hands against my LORD the king. Ahimaaz hastens to report, in terms that express both his Israelite piety and his loyalty to the king, the general defeat of the usurper’s army. He of course says nothing of Absalom’s fate.

29. Is it well with the lad Absalom? This seems to be David’s overriding concern, not the military victory. Again and again, he insists on the term of affection, “lad,” for the rebel son who would have killed him. The tension between his political role, which, as Joab understood, requires Absalom’s destruction, and his paternal role is painfully palpable. In this connection, it is noteworthy that David, so much the emotionally vulnerable father here, is consistently referred to as “the king,” not as “David.”

I saw a great crowd to send the king’s servant. This is nearly gibberish but not because of any corruption of the text. Ahimaaz has been posed a question he does not dare answer, and so he begins to talk nervously and incoherently (“and I know not what . . .”).

30. Turn aside, stand by. David, realizing he is unlikely to extract anything from the babbling Ahimaaz, decides to wait and interrogate the second messenger, whose arrival is imminent.

31. Let my lord the king receive the tidings. The Cushite is considerably more brusque than his predecessor. He does not begin with a reassuring “All is well.” There is no indication of his bowing down before the king. He proceeds quickly to the report of the victory, and though the language of that report approximately parallels Ahimaaz’s language, it is briefer, and ends with “against you” instead of the more deferential “against my lord the king.”

32. May the enemies of my LORD the king be like the lad. The Cushite promptly and clearly responds by reporting Absalom’s death, although even he has enough sense to phrase it indirectly, neither mentioning Absalom by name nor using the word “died.” In referring to the usurper as “the lad,” he is quoting David, but without having picked up the crucial cue of David’s paternal feelings reflected in the word. He blithely assumes that because Absalom was at the head of “all who have risen against” the king, the news of his death will be welcome. It strikes exactly the right note that the Cushite’s very last word is “evil” (or, “harm”).