Ahithophel's plan (vv. 1-3) is a soldier's: twelve thousand men, this night, strike while he is weary and weak handed — the king had come weary to his halting-place beyond Bahurim (16:14) — scatter the company, and smite the king only. No battle, no civil war; one death, and all the people shall be in peace. It is exactly right. Every reader who has followed David's flight knows that this night he could have been taken, and the narrator has let us know it so that verse 14 will be felt. I will — Ahithophel will lead it himself; the counsellor who once sat with David is ready to kill him with his own hand.

The man whom thou seekest is as if all returned (v. 3) — the Hebrew is obscure; the Septuagint reads something like as a bride returns to her husband, and some take the sense to be that with one man dead all Israel comes home to Absalom like a bride. The study notes the difficulty and does not build on it. Readers have long placed Psalm 41:9 — mine own familiar friend, in whom I trusted, which did eat of my bread, hath lifted up his heel against me — beside this counsel; the psalm names no one, and the reading is the church's, but the wound it describes is here, and verse 4 adds that the plan pleased Absalom well, and all the elders of Israel.

Then Absalom does a strange thing: with a plan already approved, he call[s] now Hushai the Archite also (v. 5), and let us hear likewise what he saith. The narrator does not explain it — vanity, caution, the wish to hear his father's friend agree — and the study takes it as the first visible touch of verse 14. Hushai begins with care: not good at this time — not wrong, only mistimed — and then builds a speech that is one of the finest pieces of persuasion in Scripture, every word of it designed to buy David a night.

His method is to make the plan look dangerous and the alternative look glorious. Thou knowest thy father and his men, that they be mighty men... as a bear robbed of her whelps (v. 8; cf. Proverbs 17:12) — the old Philistine-fighter is not weary, he is cornered. He is hid now in some pit (v. 9) — a night attack finds the wrong men, and one early loss makes the rumour run, there is a slaughter among the people that follow Absalom. Even the lion-hearted will melt (v. 10). All of it plays on fear, and on Absalom's image of his father, and readers should note that David's reputation — built across 1 Samuel — is the weapon Hushai uses.

Now the flattery: all Israel... from Dan even to Beersheba, as the sand that is by the sea for multitude — the whole nation under Absalom's banner, and thou go to battle in thine own person: the king himself at the head, not a counsellor with twelve thousand. The picture is made for a man who bought chariots and fifty runners to be looked at (15:1). Then the poetry (vv. 12-13): we will light upon him as the dew falleth on the ground — silent, total — and if he is in a city, all Israel shall bring ropes... and we will draw it into the river, until there be not one small stone found there. It is magnificent and it is nonsense, and it delays everything.

The study notes what Hushai has done. He has turned a surgical strike into a levy of the whole land, which takes days; he has put Absalom in the field, where Joab can reach him; and he has done it with language that sounds more warlike than Ahithophel's. Readers who know that the right counsel is often the plain one, and the wrong one the thrilling one, have this chapter as their text. Absalom hears as the sand that is by the sea — the promise to Abraham (Genesis 22:17) — applied to his own army, and does not hear that it is being applied by his father's friend.

The chapter's key verse, and one of the plainest statements of providence in the historical books. The human side first: Absalom and all the men of Israel said, The counsel of Hushai the Archite is better — a free decision, made for reasons the reader has just heard. Then the narrator's comment, exactly as he gives it: For the LORD had appointed to defeat the good counsel of Ahithophel, to the intent that the LORD might bring evil upon Absalom. The narrator calls Ahithophel's counsel good — it was the better plan, and it was set aside because the LORD had so appointed. David's prayer of 15:31 is answered here, in a council chamber, by men who did not know they were answering it.

The study draws out what the verse holds together: a prayer, a stratagem, a vain prince, a persuasive speech, and the purpose of God, all in one event, with no seam between them. Scripture elsewhere says the same — the king's heart is in the hand of the LORD (Proverbs 21:1); there is no wisdom nor understanding nor counsel against the LORD (Proverbs 21:30). The verse also states the purpose: to bring evil upon Absalom. The judgment on David's house (12:10) and the judgment on the rebel run on the same track, and the LORD governs both. Readers should note that the narrator does not say God made Absalom choose; he says God appointed the outcome, and Absalom chose.

Hushai does not trust his own success. He tells the priests thus and thus did Ahithophel counsel... and thus and thus have I (v. 15), and sends the urgent word: Lodge not this night in the plains of the wilderness, but speedily pass over — in case Absalom changes his mind back. The chain of 15:35-36 works: Zadok and Abiathar to their sons Jonathan and Ahimaaz, waiting at Enrogel, the spring south of the city (v. 17), by way of a wench — the KJV's word for a servant-girl — who could come and go unnoticed. The study notes how much of God's appointing in verse 14 is carried by people doing small, dangerous errands well.

Nevertheless a lad saw them, and told Absalom (v. 18). Every link holds, and then a boy breaks it; the runners make for Bahurim — Shimei's village — and a man's house... which had a well in his court; whither they went down. The narrator gives the near-failures as fully as the successes. Readers should feel the pace of verses 15-22: the night is the whole stake, Ahithophel asked for this night, and David's crossing by the morning light (v. 22) is the margin. The LORD who appointed the outcome did not spare His servants the running.

A nameless woman of Bahurim saves the kingdom with a cloth and a basket of grain. She covers the well, spreads ground corn on the cover as if drying it, and when Absalom's men ask Where is Ahimaaz and Jonathan? answers, They be gone over the brook of water (v. 20). They search, fail, and go home; the two come up and run (v. 21). Readers will think of Rahab and the flax on the roof (Joshua 2:6) and of Michal and the pillow of goats' hair (1 Samuel 19:13); the book of Samuel has a line of women whose quick wits turn its story, and this is one of them.

The study notes, as it did of Hushai, that the woman's lie is recorded and not judged. Scripture reports it, approves the outcome, and leaves the ethics of deceiving a murderer's search-party to the reader; Christian readers have differed, and the text does not settle it. What the text does make clear is where the LORD's appointment of verse 14 was carried out: not only in the council, but in a courtyard, by a householder who chose a side when the wrong choice would have cost her life. Verse 21's message is exact — thus hath Ahithophel counselled against you — and verse 22 is the result: there lacked not one of them.

The verse is told with a terrible calm: he saddled his ass... gat him home... put his household in order, and hanged himself, and died, and was buried. Why? The text gives only when Ahithophel saw that his counsel was not followed. Readers have supplied the rest — that he knew Absalom was now lost, and what David would do to the man who had counselled his death and the roof; that his pride could not bear being set aside for Hushai; or both. The study notes the orderliness. He is the only man in the Old Testament said to have hanged himself; Saul fell on his sword, and Zimri burned his house. Ahithophel arranges his affairs and goes to his fathers' tomb.

The church has long read Ahithophel beside Judas: the trusted friend who ate at the king's table and turned, whose betrayal is lamented in Psalm 41:9 — mine own familiar friend... hath lifted up his heel against me, the verse Jesus applied to Judas (John 13:18) — and who, when the thing came apart, went and hanged himself (Matthew 27:5). The study frames it as a reading: Psalm 41 does not name Ahithophel, and John 13 does not name him either; but the shape is the same, and the church did not invent it. What the text itself says is that the man whose counsel was like God's oracle ended by his own hand when God's counsel overruled his.

Then David came to Mahanaim (v. 24) — Jacob's two camps (Genesis 32:2), Ishbosheth's old capital (2:8), across the Jordan in Gilead; the house of David shelters where the house of Saul did. Absalom follows with all the men of Israel and makes Amasa captain of the host instead of Joab (v. 25) — a cousin: his mother Abigail is sister to Zeruiah, so Amasa and Joab are first cousins, and David's nephews both. The verse calls Abigail the daughter of Nahash; 1 Chronicles 2:16 makes her David's sister, Jesse's daughter. Some take Nahash as a copying slip, some as a name of Jesse's wife's first husband; the study leaves it open.

Then three names, and each has a story in the book. Shobi the son of Nahash of Rabbah — brother of the Hanun who shamed David's servants (10:1-4), from the city David took and put to labour (12:29-31); the kindness of the old Nahash (10:2) has outlived the war. Machir the son of Ammiel of Lodebar — the man who hid Mephibosheth (9:4), and might have had reason to resent the king who took him; he comes with beds. Barzillai the Gileadite of Rogelim — a very great man and fourscore years old (19:32), whom David will try to take to Jerusalem and whose sons he will commend to Solomon (1 Kings 2:7). Help comes from an Ammonite, a Saulite and a Gileadite.

The list (vv. 28-29) is given in full, and the study reads it slowly because the narrator did: beds, and basons, and earthen vessels, and wheat, and barley, and flour, and parched corn, and beans, and lentiles, and parched pulse, and honey, and butter, and sheep, and cheese of kine. Bedding, bowls, grain, pulse, honey, fat, meat, milk — everything a column of refugees on foot would lack. The reason is in their own words: The people is hungry, and weary, and thirsty, in the wilderness. Psalm 63's heading places that psalm in the wilderness of Judah; if it belongs to this flight, my soul thirsteth for thee... in a dry and thirsty land was prayed by a man who was also, simply, thirsty.

The chapter that opened with a plan to kill a weary king this night ends with three men feeding him. Readers should see the two halves together: in Jerusalem the LORD defeats a counsel; in Gilead He provides a table. The study notes that the providence of verse 14 did not come by miracle at any point — a vain prince, a good speech, a girl at a spring, a woman with a basket, and three landowners with carts. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies (Psalm 23:5) has been read over Mahanaim by many, and the study thinks it fits, as long as the reader remembers who carried the cheese.