And the LORD sent Nathan. Chapter 11 was full of what David sent; the first clause of chapter 12 answers all of it. Nathan comes as he came in chapter 7, with a word, but this time he comes with a story, and he tells it as a case for judgment — two men in one city, a rich man with exceeding many flocks and herds and a poor man with one little ewe lamb that grew up together with him, and with his children... and lay in his bosom, and was unto him as a daughter (v. 3). The lamb is loved like a child. Then the traveller, and the rich man who spared to take of his own flock and took the poor man's lamb (v. 4).

The parable is built to be heard by a shepherd and a judge, and David is both. The study notes the restraint of the picture: nothing in it is about adultery or murder as such; it is about having everything and taking the one thing a poor man had, because it was easier than using your own. That is what Nathan sees at the root. Readers have also noticed that the Hebrew for daughter is bath, the first syllable of Bathsheba's name, and some take it as a deliberate touch; the study mentions it as a reading. By verse 4 the king has forgotten he is being told anything but a story.

David's anger was greatly kindled. The judge pronounces at once and under oath: as the LORD liveth, the man... shall surely die — more than the Law required for sheep-theft, which was restitution (Exodus 22:1); the death sentence is David's own, from his heart, and he adds the Law's fourfold on top (v. 6), because he had no pity. The king has judged himself before he knows it. He is right about the crime and right about what it deserved, and he has sworn it by the LORD, the name he will hear back in the next verse.

Readers have long noticed that David's fourfold fell on his own house: the child, Amnon (13:28-29), Absalom (18:14-15), Adonijah (1 Kings 2:25) — four sons dead. The text does not draw the line itself, and the study offers it as a reading many have made rather than as the narrator's design. What the narrator certainly shows is a man whose moral sense is intact for everyone but himself — the sense that judged the Amalekite and the sons of Rimmon in an hour — and a prophet who has walked him to the edge of it and now says two words.

Thou art the man. Two words in Hebrew, and the whole of chapter 11 falls on them. Then the LORD speaks in the first person, and what He says first is not the crime but the gifts: I anointed thee... I delivered thee out of the hand of Saul... I gave thee thy master's house, and thy master's wives into thy bosom... the house of Israel and of Judah; and if that had been too little, I would moreover have given unto thee such and such things (v. 8). The rich man's exceeding many flocks were all given. The sin is set in the light of grace, which is what makes it despising (v. 9).

Thy master's wives into thy bosom — no record exists of David taking Saul's wives, and the phrase is probably the language of succession: a king's household passed to his successor (cf. 3:7; 16:21-22). The study notes it as a difficulty and takes the plain sense — everything that was Saul's became David's by God's gift. Verse 9 then names the two things: thou hast killed Uriah the Hittite with the sword, and hast taken his wife — murder first, then adultery, the order of weight — and hast slain him with the sword of the children of Ammon. The arrangement by letter fooled no one who mattered.

The sentence (vv. 10-12) answers the crime in its own coin. For the sword: the sword shall never depart from thine house — the rest of 2 Samuel is the record of that, Amnon killed at a feast (13:28), Absalom in the wood (18:14), and after it Adonijah (1 Kings 2:25). For the secret taking of a wife: I will take thy wives before thine eyes, and give them unto thy neighbour, and he shall lie with thy wives in the sight of this sun — fulfilled to the letter when Absalom goes in to his father's concubines in a tent on the roof in the sight of all Israel (16:22), the roof of 11:2. Thou didst it secretly: but I will do this thing before all Israel, and before the sun (v. 12).

The verse says because thou hast despised me. Verse 9 said despised the commandment of the LORD; now it is the LORD Himself. The study notes the step: to take what God forbade is, in the end, to hold God cheap, and the prophet names it so. It also notes what the sentence is not. It is not the removal of the kingdom, nor the breaking of chapter 7; the covenant said if he commit iniquity, I will chasten him with the rod of men (7:14), and this is the rod. Absalom is a rod of men. The mercy that was not taken as from Saul (7:15) is not taken; the chastening falls on the house with full weight.

I have sinned against the LORD. Two words in Hebrew; no excuse, no explanation, no mention of Bathsheba or Uriah or Joab. Set it beside Saul's I have sinned (1 Samuel 15:24, 30), which came with reasons and a request to be honoured before the elders, and the difference between the two kings is in the length of the sentence. Psalm 51's heading — when Nathan the prophet came unto him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba — places that psalm here, and the study presents the heading as the heading; if it is followed, against thee, thee only, have I sinned (Psalm 51:4) is the long form of what David says to Nathan in one short sentence.

The LORD also hath put away thy sin; thou shalt not die. The Law gave death for adultery (Leviticus 20:10) and for murder (Numbers 35:31, which forbids any ransom for a murderer's life); David had sworn death himself in verse 5. The word is grace, spoken in the same breath as the confession — also, as if the forgiveness had been waiting. The study does not explain it beyond what the text says; it notes that no sacrifice is named, no ritual, only a confession and a word. Psalm 32, if it belongs to this time as many think, is the sound of what verse 13 was like from inside: I said, I will confess... and thou forgavest.

Forgiveness is not the end of consequence, and this verse is where readers feel it hardest. Thou hast given great occasion to the enemies of the LORD to blaspheme — the king who bears the LORD's name has given the LORD's enemies something to say; the Hebrew as it stands reads strangely, thou hast despised the enemies of the LORD, and many take it as a scribal softening of despised the LORD, as in verse 10. The child also... shall surely die. The study does not explain why a child dies for a father's sin, because the text does not; it records the sentence, the father's seven days on the ground, and the death.

What the text does show is that David did not treat the sentence as final while the child lived: who can tell whether GOD will be gracious to me, that the child may live? (v. 22). He fasted and lay on the earth and would not be raised (vv. 16-17), and the narrator lets the reader hope with him through seven days. Readers should hold two things the chapter holds: that the sin was put away, and that the child died. Scripture does not resolve those into a formula, and the study will not. It notes that the sword, the wives, and the child are all named in a single oracle, and that the king accepted all three.

The servants are afraid to tell him (v. 18); he reads their whispering (v. 19) and asks, and they say He is dead. Then a sequence of verbs that reverses the mourning: arose... washed... anointed himself... changed his apparel... came into the house of the LORD, and worshipped... he did eat. The house of the LORD is the tent of 6:17; the temple is not yet built. He goes first to God, then to his own house, then to bread. The servants cannot understand it (v. 21) — grief for the living, calm for the dead — and their question gives David the chance to explain, which is why the narrator records it.

The explanation (vv. 22-23) is one of Scripture's plainest statements about prayer and death. While the child lived, prayer might change something; now it cannot. Can I bring him back again? The study notes that David's first act after the sentence is executed is worship, not resentment, and that this is the man of Psalm 51 — thou desirest not sacrifice... the sacrifices of God are a broken spirit — getting up off the floor. He has been forgiven, and he has been chastened, and he goes to the house of the LORD to say so.

I shall go to him, but he shall not return to me. On its face the sentence is about death as the common road: the child has gone where all go, and David will follow, and the road runs one way. Many Christian readers have taken it further, as a word of hope that infants who die are received by God and that David expected to be with his son again, and that reading has comforted many parents. The study offers it as a reading, and is honest that the verse itself says only that David will join the child in death, not what either of them will find there.

What the verse does settle is David's own state: he is not in despair. A man who had been told the child shall surely die, and had pleaded for seven days, accepts the death without bitterness toward God and without pretending it was less than it was. Readers who have buried a child know that this verse is not a lesson but a companion. The narrator then turns, in a single sentence, from a grave to a cradle (v. 24), and the study follows him: the chapter does not end at the child's death, because the covenant does not.

David comforted Bathsheba his wife — she is given her name and her title now, not the wife of Uriah; the narrator has moved her, quietly, into the house of David, and the first thing said of the marriage after the judgment is comfort. She bare a son, and he called his name Solomon — the name is usually connected with shalom, peace, and 1 Chronicles 22:9 ties it to the promise that in his days there would be peace and quietness; the study notes that as Chronicles' own explanation. And the LORD loved him. After the sword, the shame and the dead child, the next word out of this house is that God loved a son born to it.

Verse 25: he sent by the hand of Nathan the prophet; and he called his name Jedidiah, because of the LORD — beloved of the LORD, a second name given through the same prophet who had said Thou art the man. The name is never used again in Scripture; it stands here as God's private word on the child who would build the house of chapter 7 (7:13). Readers should notice what the narrator has done: the son of the covenant, the one through whom thy throne shall be established, is born to the woman David took. Matthew 1:6 keeps both facts in one line. Grace did not choose a cleaner story; it chose this one.

The war of chapter 10 is finished. Joab takes the city of waters (v. 27) — the lower town by the river, or the water-supply — and sends for David to come and take the rest, lest I take the city, and it be called after my name (v. 28): the general, who holds the king's letter, still gives the king the victory, and the study records that loyalty as the text does. The crown of their king weighing a talent of gold (v. 30) — some read Malcam, the Ammonite god, whose idol could bear such a weight better than a man's head — is set on David's head; the reading is open.

Then this verse. The KJV reads that David put them under saws, and under harrows of iron, and under axes of iron, and made them pass through the brick-kiln — a description of torture and execution, and so it has often been understood. The Hebrew can also be read, as many now take it, that he put them to saws and picks and axes and made them labour at the brick-kilns — forced labour, the common fate of a conquered city (cf. Deuteronomy 20:11). 1 Chronicles 20:3 in the KJV reads cut them with saws, but its Hebrew too is read by many as labour. The study presents both and does not choose; on either reading Scripture reports it without comment.