David numbered the people and set captains of thousands and captains of hundreds (v. 1): the exiled king has an army again, and divides it in three — Joab... Abishai... and Ittai the Gittite (v. 2). The Philistine of 15:21 commands a third of Israel's loyal men beside the sons of Zeruiah. David would go out myself also, and the people stop him: thou art worth ten thousand of us — not a courtier's flattery but a soldier's arithmetic. Absalom's whole aim, by Ahithophel's plan, was the king only (17:2); the people will not give him the chance. The study notes that the men who stayed with David are thinking more clearly about his life than he is.

What seemeth you best I will do (v. 4) — the king yields to his people as he yielded to Ittai and to God, and stood by the gate side as they went out by hundreds and by thousands. Readers should see the picture: the man who was worth ten thousand standing at a gate watching ten thousand go to fight for him, and about to give the order that all of them will hear. The number will matter; verse 7 says twenty thousand fell, and the king who sat between the two gates (v. 24) sent every one of them. His charge in verse 5 is the last thing they hear.

Deal gently for my sake with the young man, even with Absalom. It is the order of a father, given by a king, to an army going out to fight the father's son; the word is of handling softly, and the young man is how David will speak of Absalom to the end (vv. 29, 32). For my sake — not for his, who has deserved nothing. And all the people heard — the narrator records it because it will matter twice: the soldier in verse 12 will refuse to strike because of it, and Joab in verse 14 will strike in spite of it. The study notes that David asks for mercy on a rebel who would have had none on him, and that nothing in the text calls the order foolish.

Readers have asked whether the order was right. A king's duty to twenty thousand men and a father's love for one son pull in opposite directions, and Joab will tell David in 19:5-7 that he has shamed... all thy servants by weeping for the man who would have killed them. The study lets both stand. The order is the heart of a father who, having lost one son to a feast and another to a cradle, cannot bear to order a third one's death — and it is the heart that Scripture, in 18:33, will put at the centre of the chapter. The battle is won in verses 6-8; the chapter is about this verse and the last one.

The battle was in the wood of Ephraim (v. 6) — a puzzle, since Ephraim's land is west of Jordan and the armies are in Gilead. Some suppose a wood named from an old Ephraimite settlement or from the slaughter of Ephraimites at the Jordan fords (Judges 12:4-6); the text does not say, and the study leaves it. Israel — Absalom's levy — were slain before the servants of David: twenty thousand men (v. 7). Hushai's all Israel (17:11), so impressive in council, is a militia; David's servants are veterans who have fought in hills all their lives, and the ground was chosen by them.

The wood devoured more people that day than the sword devoured. Thickets, ravines, pits like the one of verse 17 — a broken country that swallows an army in flight, and the narrator makes the forest a hunter alongside the soldiers. Readers may hear in it the voice of 1 Samuel 14:15, where the earth quaked against the Philistines: the land itself fights for the LORD's anointed. The study does not press that; it notes that Absalom's death in verse 9 is of a piece with the verse — a tree takes the rebel as the wood took his men. The sword of 12:10, the narrator seems to say, was never only a sword.

Absalom rode upon a mule — the royal mount (13:29; 1 Kings 1:33) — and the mule went under the thick boughs of a great oak, and his head caught hold of the oak, and he was taken up between the heaven and the earth; and the mule that was under him went away. The KJV says head, and so does the Hebrew. Readers from Josephus onward have supplied the hair of 14:26, and preachers have made the glory his undoing; the study notes honestly that the hair is inference, natural but not stated. What the text gives is a king's son left hanging between the heaven and the earth, his mount gone from under him — rejected, as it were, by both.

The narrator does not say the oak was God's doing; he has said in 17:14 that the LORD meant to bring evil upon Absalom, and lets the reader connect the two. A certain man tells Joab I saw Absalom hanged in an oak (v. 10), and Joab's answer is money: ten shekels of silver, and a girdle for striking him (v. 11). The man's refusal (vv. 12-13) is one of the chapter's quiet glories — though I should receive a thousand shekels... yet would I not put forth mine hand against the king's son: for in our hearing the king charged thee. He heard verse 5, and he knows Joab heard it, and says so to his face.

I may not tarry thus with thee. Joab will not argue with a soldier's conscience; he goes and does it. Three darts — the Hebrew word is rods or staves, and some take it as sticks or short spears; the study notes the uncertainty — through the heart of Absalom, while he was yet alive in the midst of the oak, and then ten young men that bare Joab's armour compassed about and smote Absalom, and slew him (v. 15). It is an execution, done against the king's express and public order, by the man who brought Absalom home from Geshur (14:23). The narrator reports it as he reported Abner in the gate (3:27) and will report Amasa (20:10): without comment, and without forgetting.

The study weighs it as the book does. Joab ends the war with one death — Ahithophel's own logic (17:3), turned on Absalom — and spares the land further slaughter; Joab held back the people (v. 16) and sounds the retreat. He also kills the king's son against the king's word, and he has now held a letter (11:14) and done this; David will never be free of him, and will say so to Solomon (1 Kings 2:5-6). Readers may conclude that Joab was right for the kingdom and wrong before the king, and that both can be true. Verse 17: a great pit, a very great heap of stones — a traitor's burial, like Achan's (Joshua 7:26) — and all Israel fled every one to his tent.

The narrator steps out of the battle to set two monuments side by side. In the wood, a heap of stones in a pit; in the king's dale — the valley of Shaveh near Jerusalem, if Genesis 14:17 is the same place — a pillar Absalom reared up for himself... to keep my name in remembrance. I have no son — yet 14:27 gave him three; many suppose they died young, and the text does not say. The man who wanted a name has one, in a pit under stones, and the pillar stands empty. The monument in the Kidron valley called Absalom's Tomb today is a much later structure, by every account; the study mentions it only to say so.

Readers have found the verse the saddest line in the chapter after the last one. Absalom's whole career was for remembrance — the chariots, the runners, the hair, the pillar — and the narrator gives him what he wanted in the form of this verse, which remembers that he wanted it. Set it against 7:9, I have made thee a great name, said to his father by God: one name was given, the other reared up. The study notes without moralising that unto this day is the narrator's own phrase, and that whatever stood in the king's dale when he wrote, he did not think it was Absalom's grave.

Ahimaaz the son of Zadok — the runner of 17:17-21 — wants to bear the king tidings, how that the LORD hath avenged him of his enemies (v. 19); he sees a victory. Joab sees what the victory is: because the king's son is dead. He will not send a priest's son, whom David loves, with news that will land as a death; he sends Cushi (v. 21) — perhaps a name, perhaps the Cushite, an African in David's service; the KJV treats it as a name and the study leaves it open. The study notes that Joab, who killed the son, understands the father better than the eager young man does.

Ahimaaz will not be refused: But howsoever, let me run (v. 23), and Joab lets him, with a question that is almost gentle — Wherefore wilt thou run, my son, seeing that thou hast no tidings ready? He runs by the way of the plain — the Jordan valley, longer but faster — and overran Cushi. Readers should hold the two runners as the narrator does: one with good news and no answer to the question that will be asked, one with the answer and no good news. The chapter's last ten verses are built on which of them reaches the gate first.

David sat between the two gates (v. 24) — the outer and inner gate of Mahanaim, waiting — and the watchman went up to the roof over the gate. The scene is told from the wall: a man running alone — a single runner means news, a crowd means flight (v. 25) — then another man running alone, then a gait recognised, like the running of Ahimaaz, and the king's hope: He is a good man, and cometh with good tidings (v. 27). Ahimaaz arrives with All is well and a blessing on the LORD thy God, which hath delivered up the men that lifted up their hand against my lord the king (v. 28). The king asks one question.

Is the young man Absalom safe? — is it peace with the young man? — and Ahimaaz, who had no tidings ready, has none: I saw a great tumult, but I knew not what it was. Whether that is a lie or a kindness or a loss of nerve, the text does not say, and readers have taken it each way; the study only notes that he had seen enough to know he should not say it, and that David sets him aside — Turn aside, and stand here (v. 30) — and waits for the other. Then Cushi (vv. 31-32), with the same joy — the LORD hath avenged thee — and the same question, and the answer, given as courtiers give such news: be as that young man is.

And the king was much moved — shaken, the Hebrew says — and went up to the chamber over the gate, and wept: and as he went, thus he said, O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son! My son five times; Absalom three; no the young man now. He climbs away from the victory to be alone with it. In the Hebrew Bible this is 19:1, and the chapter division there puts the cry at the head of the next chapter rather than the foot of this; readers may find either placement right. The study notes only that the narrator gives no comment, and needs none.

Would God I had died for thee. The cry of a father who would have taken the place of a son who was trying to kill him, said over a son who could not now be reached. The study takes it first as what it is — grief, with no theology in it — and then records the church's reading, old and never forced: that here, at the lowest point of David's house, is the shape of the gospel in a human wish. David could not die for Absalom; the Son of David did die for rebels, while we were yet sinners (Romans 5:8). Joab will come in 19:5-7 and make the king stop weeping, and he will be right about the army, and the reader will not forgive him for it.