3–4. These two relatively long verses are an unusual instance of the intervention of a Deuteronomistic editor in the dialogue of the original David story that was composed perhaps nearly four centuries before him. The language here is an uninterrupted chain of verbal formulas distinctive of the Book of Deuteronomy and its satellite literature: keep what the LORD your God enjoins, walk in His ways, keep His statutes, His commands, and His dictates and admonitions, so that you may prosper in everything you do and in everything to which you turn, walk before Me in truth with their whole heart and with their whole being. The very mention of the Teaching [torah] of Moses is a hallmark of the Deuteronomist, and as phrase and concept did not yet have currency in the tenth century. The long sentences loaded with synonyms are also uncharacteristic of the author of the David story, and there is no one in that story—least of all, David himself—who speaks in this high-minded, long-winded, didactic vein. Why did the Deuteronomistic editor choose to intervene at this penultimate point of the David story? It seems very likely that he was uneasy with David’s pronouncing to Solomon a last will and testament worthy of a dying mafia capo: be strong and be a man, and use your savvy to pay off all my old scores with my enemies. In fact, David’s deathbed implacability, which the later editor tries to mitigate by first placing noble sentiments in his mouth, is powerfully consistent with both the characterization and the imagination of politics in the preceding narrative. The all-too-human David on the brink of the grave is still smarting from the grief and humiliation that Joab’s violent acts caused him and from the public shame Shimei heaped on him, and he wants Solomon to do what he himself was prevented from doing by fear in the one case and by an inhibiting vow in the other. In practical political terms, moreover, either Joab, just recently a supporter of the usurper Adonijah, or Shimei, the disaffected Benjaminite, might threaten Solomon’s hold on power, and so both should be eliminated.

5. what he did to the two commanders of the armies of Israel. David is silent about the third murder perpetrated by Joab, and the one that caused him the greatest grief—the killing of Absalom. Perhaps he does not mention it because it was a murder, unlike the other two, that served a reason of state. But it was surely the one act he could not forgive.

shed the blood of war in peace, and put the blood of war on his belt . . . and on his sandals. Both killings were done on the roadway, Joab approaching his victim with gestures of peace. In the case of Abner, his rival had come to make peace with David, and the phrase “went in peace [shalom]” was attached to Abner in a triple repetition (2 Samuel 3). In the case of Amasa, Joab’s last words to him before stabbing him in the belly were “Is it well [shalom] with you, my brother?” (2 Samuel 20:9). The virtually visual emphasis of blood on belt and sandals recalls in particular the murder of Amasa, who lay in the middle of the road wallowing in blood, while the mention of Joab’s belt looks back to his stratagem of belting his sword to his waist so that it would fall out when he bent over, to be picked up by his left hand. The reference to Joab’s waist and feet conveys an image of a man splashed all over with blood. Beyond this integration of details from the preceding narrative in the words David chooses, the concentration on blood reflects a general belief that blood shed in murder lingers not only over the murderer but also over those associated with the victim like a contaminating miasma until it is “redeemed” or “taken away” by vengeance.

6. you must act in your wisdom. The wisdom of Solomon in the subsequent narrative is proverbial, but what David already has in mind here is political shrewdness: Joab is, after all, a formidable adversary, and Solomon will have to choose the right time and place, when Joab is without allies or protection, to dispatch him.

do not let his gray head go down in peace to Sheol. This proverbial phrase is actualized here because we realize that Joab, after half a century as David’s commander—forty regnal years plus several years before that in David’s guerilla band—is now an old man. He who shed the blood of war in peace will not be allowed to go down in peace to the underworld.

9. for you are a wise man, and you will know what you should do to him. In regard to Shimei, the “wisdom” Solomon must exercise is to find some legal loophole to obviate his father’s vow not to harm the Benjaminite. In the event, Solomon does this with considerable cleverness. David’s vow to Shimei was made at a moment when it seemed politically prudent to include the man who had cursed him in what was probably a general amnesty after the suppression of the rebellion. It is understandable that later on David would regret this binding act of forgiveness to a vile-spirited enemy.

bring his gray head down in blood to Sheol. Shimei had screamed at the fleeing David, “man of blood.” Now David enjoins Solomon to send him to the netherworld in blood. In his long career, David has had noble moments as well as affectingly human ones, but it is a remarkable token of the writer’s gritty realism about men in the vindictive currents of violent politics that the very last words he assigns to David are bedam Sheʾol, “in blood to Sheol.”

11. forty years. One may assume this is no more than an approximation of David’s regnal span since forty years, as the Book of Judges repeatedly shows, is a formulaic number for a full reign.

13. Adonijah son of Haggith. The reappearance of Solomon’s rival follows hard upon the report that his kingdom was unshaken, introducing a potential dissonance. Adonijah was not included in David’s list of enemies to be eliminated because he is Solomon’s problem, not David’s.

Do you come in peace? After Adonijah’s attempt to seize the throne that was then given to her son, Bathsheba is understandably uncertain about Adonijah’s intentions in coming to see her.

15. You yourself know that mine was the kingship . . . yet the kingship was brought round and became my brother’s, for from the LORD was it his. Adonijah tries to have it both ways in his overture to Bathsheba: on the one hand, the kingship really was his, and he enjoyed popular support; on the other hand, he is prepared to be reconciled with the idea that it was God’s determination that the crown should pass on from him to his brother. There may be a note of petulance here: Adonijah speaks of his situation as though he deserved some sort of consolation prize. It will prove a fatal imprudence that he should have addressed this complaint to the mother of the man he sought to anticipate in seizing the throne.

17. that he give me Abishag the Shunamite as wife. The promotion of fruitful ambiguity through narrative reticence so characteristic of the author of the David story is never more brilliantly deployed. What is Adonijah really up to? He approaches Solomon’s mother because he thinks she will have special influence over the king and because he is afraid to go to Solomon himself. Perhaps, Adonijah imagines, as a mother she will have pity for him and do him this favor. But in taking this course, Adonijah betrays the most extraordinary political naïveté. Why does he want Abishag? The political motive would be that by uniting with a woman who had shared the king’s bed, though merely as a bedwarmer, he was preparing the ground for a future claim to the throne. (The act of his brother Absalom in cohabiting with David’s concubines stands in the background.) If this motive were transparent, as it turns out to be in Solomon’s reading of the request, it would be idiotic for Adonijah to ask for Abishag. Perhaps he feels safe because Abishag was not technically David’s consort. Perhaps the political consideration is only at the back of his mind, and he really is seeking consolation in the idea of marrying a beautiful young woman who has, so to speak, a kind of association by contiguity with the throne. In any case, he will pay the ultimate price for his miscalculation.

18. I myself shall speak for you to the king. As with Adonijah, there is no explanation of her motive. But given the shrewdness with which Bathsheba has acted in the previous episode, it is entirely plausible that she immediately agrees to do this favor for Adonijah because she quickly realizes what escapes him—that it will prove to be his death sentence, and thus a threat to her son’s throne will be permanently eliminated.

19. and bowed to her. The Septuagint has “and kissed her” because of the anomaly of a king’s bowing to his subject.

20. There is one small petition that I ask of you. In accordance with the established convention of biblical narrative, she uses the very same words Adonijah has spoken to her, adding only the adjective “small.” This is just a tiny request, she appears to say, full knowing that Solomon is likely to see it, on the contrary, as a huge thing—a device that could be turned into a ladder to the throne on which Solomon sits. One should note that this whole large narrative begins when a woman who is to become a mother (Hannah) puts forth a petition (sheʾeilah, the same word used here).

22. as he is my older brother, and Abiathar . . . and Joab . . . are for him. If he makes the dead king’s consort his wife, that, together with the fact that he is my elder and has powerful supporters in the court, will give him a dangerously strong claim to the throne. In the Hebrew, the second clause appears to say “and for him and for Abiathar . . . and for Joab,” which makes little sense, and so the small emendation, deleting the second and third occurrence of “for” (a single-letter prefix in the Hebrew), is presumed in the translation.

26. to Abiathar the priest. Throughout this episode centering on Adonijah, Solomon shows himself to be decisive, emphatic, and ruthless—a worthy son of his father. The moment he hears of Adonijah’s pretentions to the late king’s nurse-bedmate, he orders him to be killed immediately. He then proceeds to remove from office and banish the key priestly supporter of Adonijah, and he will go on to deal with Joab as well.

on this day I shall not put you to death. There is a veiled threat in this formulation: right now I shall not kill you, and in any case you had better stay away from Jerusalem on the farm at Anathoth.

for you bore the Ark of the LORD . . . and you suffered through all that my father suffered. Solomon is circumspect in not ordering the execution of a priest—in sharp contrast to Saul, who thought he might protect his kingship from a perceived threat by massacring a whole town of priests who he imagined were allied with his rival. Solomon also honors the fact that Abiathar has shared many years of danger and hardship with David, and during that time never betrayed David, as Joab did.

27. so as to fulfill the word of the LORD . . . concerning the house of Eli. One sees how this chapter concludes a grand narrative that begins in 1 Samuel 1, and is not merely the end of a supposedly independent Succession Narrative.

28. And the news reached Joab . . . and Joab fled to the Tent of the LORD. With Adonijah dead and Abiathar banished, Joab realizes that all who remain from the recent anti-Solomon alliance have been isolated and cut off. This relentlessly political general recognizes that he has no power base left to protect him against the resolute young king. He has only the desperate last remedy of seeking sanctuary at the altar.

30. Thus says the king, “Come out.” Solomon’s blunt order was simply to stab Joab, but Benaiah, steely executioner though he has shown himself, is loath to kill a man clinging to the altar, and so he directs Joab to come down out of the Tent of the LORD.

31. stab him and bury him. Solomon’s command is to take Joab’s life in the very place of sanctuary (“for here shall I die”), a decision that is in accordance with biblical law: “And should a man scheme against his fellow man to kill him by cunning, from My altar you shall take him to die” (Exodus 21:14). But Solomon also enjoins Benaiah to see to it that Joab, who was after all a stalwart soldier and once David’s boon companion, should have a proper burial and not be thrown to the scavengers of sky and earth—the ultimate indignity in ancient Mediterranean cultures.

32. for he stabbed two men more righteous and better than himself . . . unbeknownst to my father David. Solomon in his “wisdom” has thus used the purported renewal of the Adonijah conspiracy to carry out the will of vengeance his father conveyed to him, and for the precise reasons David stipulated.

33. their blood will come back on the head of Joab and on the head of his seed. The miasma of blood guilt settles on the house of Joab for all time: a curse on the house of Joab was not part of David’s injunction, but perhaps Solomon means to ward off any prospect that resentful descendants of Joab will seek to marshal forces against the Davidic line.

but for David and his seed and his house there will be peace evermore. There is an emphatic contrast between permanent blessing on the line of David and an everlasting curse on the line of Joab, with “peace” counterpointed to “blood,” as in verse 5.

34. he was buried at his home in the wilderness. This notation has puzzled commentators because one would assume that Joab’s home (like David’s original home) was in the town of Bethlehem. The Hebrew for “wilderness,” midbar, has the basic meaning of uninhabited terrain, and it is not improbable that Joab would have had a kind of hacienda removed from the town. Nevertheless, the report of Joab’s burial in the wilderness concludes his story on a haunting note. That resonance has been nicely caught by the medieval Hebrew commentator Gersonides: “he was buried in the wilderness, which was the home fitting for him, for it would not be meet for a man like him to be part of civil society [lihyot medini] because he had killed men by devious means and by deception.”

37. should you cross the Wadi Kidron. This brook runs at the foot of Jerusalem to the east, and Shimei would have to cross it to go back to his native village of Bahurim.

your blood will be on your own head. Again, behind these words lies the spectacle of Shimei reviling David with the epithet “man of blood” and asking that the blood of the house of Saul come down on his head.

38. The thing is good. Shimei has no alternative but to agree—better virtual confinement in the capital city than death.

40. Shimei arose and saddled his donkey and went to Gath . . . to seek his slaves. According to several ancient Near Eastern codes (though not Israelite law), authorities were obliged to return a runaway slave. Evidently, by this point peaceful relations obtained between Israel and the Philistine cities. Lulled into a false sense of security by the passage of three years (“a long while”), Shimei may be allowing his cupidity for recovering lost property to override the concern he should have preserved about Solomon’s injunction not to leave Jerusalem. Or he may be a bad reader of Solomon’s oral text, construing the ban on crossing the Wadi Kidron as implicit permission to leave the city temporarily in the opposite direction, so long as he does not try to return to his hometown.

42. Did I not make you swear by the LORD. In the actual report, only Solomon swore (the Septuagint supplies an oath for Shimei), though perhaps Shimei’s taking a solemn oath is implied in verse 38.

The thing is good. I do hear it. Solomon adds “I do hear it” (shamaʿti) to the actual report in verse 38 of Shimei’s words, in order to emphasize that Shimei gave full and knowing assent to Solomon’s terms. Fokkelman notes that there is a pun on Shimei’s own name—Shimʿi/shamaʿti.

43. And why have you not kept the LORD’S oath. Here, then, is Solomon’s wisdom in carrying out his father’s will: he has set Shimei up, waiting patiently until he violates the oath, which then frees Solomon of any obligation lingering from David’s earlier oath to do no harm to Shimei.

45. But King Solomon shall be blessed. As in the killing of Joab, the imprecation pronounced over the doomed man is balanced by the invocation of the LORD’s perpetual blessing on the house of David.

46. And the kingdom was unshaken in Solomon’s hand. This seemingly formulaic notice at the very end of the story is a last touch of genius by that unblinking observer of the savage realm of politics who is the author of the David story: Solomon’s power is now firmly established, blessed by the God Who has promised an everlasting covenant with David and his descendants; but the immediately preceding actions undertaken so decisively and so shrewdly by the young king involve the ruthless elimination of all potential enemies. The solid foundations of the throne have been hewn by the sharp daggers of the king’s henchmen.