1. there chanced to be there. The narrative is a direct continuation of the end of the previous chapter, and so “there” is the national assembly grounds at Gilgal where the northern tribes, Israel, and the tribe of Judah have just quarreled. The northerners, resentful of the harshness of the Judahites’ words, in which the members of David’s own tribe claimed a special proprietary relationship with the king, are ripe for the appeal of a demagogue such as Sheba, who is at once identified as “a worthless fellow.”

We have no share in David. This is a defiant reversal of the claim just made by the Israelites that they had “ten parts” in the king. Later, in 1 Kings, when the monarchy actually splits in two, the same rallying cry will be used by the secessionists.

2. the men of Judah clung to their king. David is, of course, “their” king because he is from the tribe of Judah. The reach of the tribe stretches west to east, from the Jordan to Jerusalem, and also to the south of Jerusalem, while the rebel forces are to the north.

3. David came to his house in Jerusalem, and . . . took his ten concubine women. The concubines have become taboo to David because they cohabited with Absalom his son. But this whole sad notice suggests that David now cannot fully “come back to his house.” The women he left, perhaps foolishly and surely futilely, “to watch over the house” are now sequestered “in a house under watch.” There is a wry echo in all this of that early moment of David’s investment of Jerusalem when he was confronted by another wife he had left behind who had slept with another man—Michal. She had no child “till her dying day”—an image of interrupted conjugality that is multiplied tenfold here with the concubines.

4. the king said to Amasa. Amasa, Absalom’s commander in the rebellion, has been designated by David to replace Joab. At the margins of the narrative report lurks the question, Where is Joab? The answer forthcoming will be savage.

take your stand. That is, report to me.

6. Now Sheba son of Bichri will do us more harm than Absalom. Although it is not clear why Amasa is late for his appointed meeting with David (perhaps his appearance at Gibeon in verse 8 suggests that he decided, out of military considerations, to pursue Sheba at once without reporting back to the king), David’s unjustified panic is another indication that he has lost his political composure. By sending out Abishai, Joab’s brother, to give chase after Sheba, he sets up the circumstances for Joab’s murder of Amasa and his subsequent return to power.

You, take your master’s servants. The obtrusively imperative “you” is very brusque, at the same time expressing David’s intention to designate Abishai, and not his brother, to command the pursuit.

and elude our gaze. The two Hebrew words here, wehitsil ʿeynenu, are problematic. They might mean “and save [himself] [from] our eyes” (the bracketed words would be implied via ellipsis by the Hebrew); or, if the verb here is vocalized differently, the words might mean “and cast a shadow over our eyes.” Needless to say, many emendations have been proposed. In any case, the idea strongly suggested by the context is that Sheba would place himself beyond the reach of pursuit by withdrawing into fortified towns. In the event, he is trapped inside just such a town.

7. Joab’s men sallied forth. J. P. Fokkelman must be credited with seeing what an extraordinary designation this is. David has dismissed Joab. The elite warriors are in any case David’s men (note how David has just referred to them in addressing Abishai as “your master’s servants”). The fact that they are here called “Joab’s men” suggests where the real power is, and where Joab’s brother Abishai assumes it must be. The clear implication is that the supposedly dismissed Joab is actually leading his men in the pursuit.

8. They were just by the great stone which is in Gibeon. Gibeon, it should be recalled, is the very place where the civil war between the house of Saul (Israel) and the house of David (Judah) began. That first battle (2 Samuel 2) began with a choreographed duel between twelve champions from each side, each warrior clasping the head of his adversary and stabbing him in the side. Joab’s posture in the killing of Amasa strikingly recalls those lethal gestures.

he had on a belt for a sword strapped to his waist . . . and as he came forward, it slipped out. The sword—often, as here, a weapon closer to a long dagger—was customarily strapped against the left thigh, for easy unsheathing across the lower belly by a right-handed fighter. Joab may have deliberately fastened the sword to his waist so that it would slip out of the scabbard as he leaned forward to embrace Amasa. The last two verbs here are rather cryptic in the Hebrew: literally “he/it went out and she/it fell/slipped.” Since “sword” is feminine in Hebrew, that is the only likely subject for “slipped,” and “he” (Joab) is the plausible masculine subject for “went out” (or, “came forward”), though it could also be the scabbard. Josephus’s reading of this verse remains the most persuasive one: the wily Joab, deliberately allowing his dagger to slip to the ground as he bends forward, then snatches it up with his left hand while his right hand grasps Amasa’s beard.

9. so as to kiss him. We remember David’s cool kiss to Absalom, then Absalom’s demagogic kiss, as we witness this kiss, which is a prelude to murder.

10. Amasa did not watch out for the sword which was in Joab’s hand. His attention caught by Joab’s gesture of affection, Amasa does not think to look at Joab’s left hand, which one would not normally expect to hold a weapon. (Has Joab learned the lesson of Ehud, Judges 3, who takes the Moabite king Eglon by surprise with a dagger thrust to the belly delivered by the left hand?) Joab’s manual proficiency as a killer reinforces the perception that he struck at Absalom in the heart with sticks, not “darts,” in order to hurt him badly but deliberately not to finish him off. The phrase “did not watch out” rhymes ironically with the plight of the ten concubines left to watch over the house and condemned to a house under watch.

he struck him with it in the belly and spilled his innards to the ground. It is by a blow to the belly (ḥomesh) that Abner’s brother Asahel died at this same place, Gibeon, and by a thrust to the belly that Joab killed Abner in revenge. The spilling of the innards implies a horrendous welter of blood, and that gruesome image of violent death will then pursue Joab through the story to his own bloody end.

11. Whoever favors Joab and whoever is for David. In dismissing Joab, David had severed himself from his longtime commander. This henchman of Joab’s smoothly sutures the rift by bracketing Joab and David in these parallel clauses, publicly assuming that Joab is once more David’s commander.

12. Amasa was wallowing in blood . . . and . . . all the troops had come to a halt. The soldiers come to a halt because they are confounded by seeing their commander reduced to a bloody corpse, and they also recoil from the idea of treading on the blood of the murdered man, who lies in the midst of the roadway.

14. And he passed through. The switch in scene is effected, in accordance with an established technique of biblical narrative, by a repetition of the verb in a slightly different meaning: the Judahite soldiers “pass on” beyond the corpse at Gibeon; the object of their pursuit “passes through” the territories of the northern tribes.

Abel of Beth-Maacah. “Abel” means “brook.” Thus “Beth-Maacah” is required in order to distinguish it from other place-names that have a brook component. This fortified town is located near the northern border of ancient Israel.

they, too, came in after him. That is, they withdraw with him into the shelter of the fortified town.

15. savaging the wall. This is the first of several verbal clues intended to establish a link between this episode involving a “wise woman” and the episode of the wise woman of Tekoa that prepared the way for Absalom’s return to Jerusalem, which then eventuated in the rebellion. Both women seek to deflect an impulse of vengeful violence. The Tekoite implores the king to take steps “that the blood avenger not savage this much” (2 Samuel 14:11). She fears those bent on “destroying me and my son together from God’s heritage” (14:16), just as the wise woman of Abel of Beth-Maacah asks Joab, “Why should you engulf the LORD’S heritage?” He responds by saying “Far be it from me . . . that I should engulf and that I should destroy”, “destroy” uses the same root as the verb rendered as “savage.”

16. Listen, listen—speak, pray, to Joab. As befits a professional wise woman in a place evidently famous for its oracle (see verse 18), she speaks in poetry, in a style that is elevated, ceremonially repetitive, hieratic, and at least a little obscure.

18. Surely would they speak . . . Surely will they ask counsel. The Hebrew expresses this emphasis by repeating the verbal root, first as infinitive, then in conjugated form: daber yedaberu, shaʾol yeshaʾalu. Since the woman extravagantly uses this sort of initial reiteration three times in four clauses, the effect is incantatory. The burden of what she says here is that Abel has long been a revered city, so why would Joab think of destroying it?

and thus conclude. This might mean, come to a conclusion regarding the question posed to the oracle at Abel, but the Hebrew is rather enigmatic, perhaps because the wise woman herself is quoting an ancient proverb, in archaic language, about the town.

19. I am of the peaceable steadfast of Israel. She at once affirms her loyalty to the national cause (“I am no rebel,” she implies) and her commitment to peace rather than violence. Some interpreters understand the first term of this construct chain, shelumey ʾemuney yisraʾel, as “whole” (from shalem), but the context argues for a reference to peace.

to put to death a mother city in Israel. The literal Hebrew is “town and mother,” a hendiadys that clearly means something like “principal town.” (The phrase would remain idiomatic in later Hebrew.) Since in biblical Hebrew the suburbs or outlying villages around a town are called “daughters,” the logic of the idiom is evident. It is, however, an idiom that appears only here in the entire biblical corpus, and there is thematic point in its use. In this narrative reflecting a male warrior culture and acts of terrible violence, from decapitation to evisceration, a series of female figures—Abigail, the Tekoite, the wise woman of Abel—intervene to avert violence. The city itself is figured as a mother; its destruction would be a kind of matricide, and the wise woman speaks on behalf of the childbearers and nurturers of life in Israelite society to turn aside Joab’s terrible swift sword.

21. But a man from the high country of Ephraim. This region is part of the territory of Benjamin, Saul’s tribe. By providing this identification, Joab distinguishes the rebel who is the object of his pursuit from the non-Benjaminite inhabitants of Abel of Beth-Maacah.

against the king, against David. By using this apposition (instead of the usual “King David”) Joab implicitly responds to some doubt as to whether in fact it is David who is the king. Recent political events might well have triggered general questioning about David’s grip on the monarchy.

Look, his head is about to be flung to you. This decisive woman, instead of using a simple future form, employs a participial form introduced by the presentative hineh, as if to say: it’s already on the way to being done.

22. in her wisdom. The wisdom is her shrewdness in finding a way to avert a general massacre (as the wise Abigail had done in mollifying David, bent on vengeance) and perhaps also in the aptness of rhetoric she no doubt employs to persuade the people.

he blew the ram’s horn and they dispersed . . . every man to his tent. These phrases echo the ones used in verse 1 to report the beginning of Sheba’s rebellion, and thus conclude the episode in a symmetric envelope structure.

but Joab came back to Jerusalem. He comes back to Jerusalem, not to his house (“tent”) in nearby Bethlehem. The implication, as Bar-Efrat notes, is that he now resumes his post as David’s commander. David evidently has little say in the matter, being confronted with a fait accompli of military power. This clause then provides a motivation for the introduction of the notice of David’s governing council in the next three verses.

23. Joab was over all the army of Israel. This list of David’s royal bureaucracy parallels the one in 8:16–18, with a couple of instructive differences. The two serve as bookends to David’s reign in Jerusalem. The first is introduced after he has consolidated his mini-empire, and this one after the suppression of two successive rebellions and just before the account of David’s last days in 1 Kings 1–2. (As we shall see, the remaining four chapters of 2 Samuel are actually a series of appendices to the story proper and not a direct continuation of it.) In chapter 8, Joab was simply “over the army.” Here, after the defeat of the secessionist northern tribes, he is said to be “over all the army of Israel.” Adoram as supervisor of the corvée does not appear in the earlier list but is inserted here to anticipate the role he will play in Solomon’s grand building projects, and he may in fact have been a much later appointment by David. The name of the royal scribe, Sheva, is anomalous in the Hebrew, and may be the same person identified in chapter 8 as Seraiah.

26. And Ira the Jairite was also a priest to David. In addition to the hereditary priests of the public cult just mentioned, David has a kind of special royal chaplain. In chapter 8, it is David’s sons who are said to perform this service. Either later editors were uneasy with this intimation of priestly dynasty in the royal family, or David, after all the tribulations he has suffered because of two of his sons, decided to designate someone else as his chaplain.