Then — the chapter is not dated, and the closing chapters of the book (21-24) are generally read as an appendix set beside the story rather than after it. Many place this famine earlier in the reign: Shimei's all the blood of the house of Saul (16:8) may presuppose it, and Mephibosheth is known in verse 7; the study offers that as likely, not certain. Three years, year after year — a famine long enough to be read as judgment, and David does what he did not do at the first sign: enquired of the LORD. The answer names a sin no earlier chapter records: It is for Saul, and for his bloody house, because he slew the Gibeonites.

The Gibeonites (v. 2) were of the remnant of the Amorites who had tricked Joshua into a covenant (Joshua 9:3-15), and the children of Israel had sworn unto them by the LORD; Joshua had kept the oath even when deceived (Joshua 9:19). Saul sought to slay them in his zeal to the children of Israel and Judah — a zeal for the nation that broke the nation's oath. The deed is not narrated anywhere else, and the study does not invent its details. What the verse teaches is stated plainly: an oath sworn to the LORD binds the generations, and blood shed in breach of it defileth the land (Numbers 35:33) until it is answered. The famine is the land's answer.

What shall I do for you? and wherewith shall I make the atonement? (v. 3). David puts the remedy in the wronged party's hands. They refuse money — no silver nor gold of Saul — and refuse to have any other Israelite killed (v. 4); then they name their price: seven men of his sons... we will hang them up unto the LORD in Gibeah of Saul, whom the LORD did choose. Seven, the number of completeness; Gibeah of Saul, his own town; whom the LORD did choose — said, perhaps, with an edge. And the king said, I will give them. The study reads the verse with the seriousness it demands, and begins by noting what the text does not say.

It does not say that the LORD commanded the hanging. The LORD named the cause (v. 1); the Gibeonites named the price; David agreed; and after that God was intreated for the land (v. 14) — after the burial, in the narrator's order. Readers have long felt the weight of Deuteronomy 24:16, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers, against the ancient view that a house shares its head's guilt (cf. Joshua 7:24-25). The study does not resolve it. It notes that Scripture records the executions without praising them, that the one thing it does praise in the chapter is a mother's vigil, and that it is the burial, not the hanging, that the text joins to the relenting of God.

But the king spared Mephibosheth, the son of Jonathan (v. 7) — because of the LORD's oath that was between them (1 Samuel 20:14-17; 24:21-22). The chapter turns on two oaths: one Saul broke with the Gibeonites, one David keeps with Jonathan's son. The seven are then named: the two sons of Rizpah the daughter of Aiah — Saul's concubine, the woman over whom Abner and Ishbosheth quarrelled (3:7) — Armoni and Mephibosheth (a second man of that name), and the five sons of Michal the daughter of Saul, whom she brought up for Adriel. The study pauses on Michal, because it is a well-known difficulty.

1 Samuel 18:19 says it was Merab Saul's daughter who was given to Adriel the Meholathite, and 2 Samuel 6:23 says Michal had no child unto the day of her death. Some Hebrew manuscripts and ancient versions read Merab here, and most take that as the original, the KJV's Michal being a scribal slip; others keep Michal and read brought up as meaning she raised her sister's sons. The study inclines to Merab, with the versions, and does not insist. Either way the five are Saul's grandsons, and verse 9 gives the end: they fell all seven together... in the beginning of barley harvest — spring, by the usual reckoning, the time of the sheaf of firstfruits (Leviticus 23:10).

They hanged them in the hill before the LORD. The Hebrew verb is rare, and many take it as exposing the body — impaling or hanging up after death, as the Philistines did with Saul (1 Samuel 31:10) — rather than hanging as a means of execution; the study notes the uncertainty. Before the LORD is the Gibeonites' phrase (v. 6, unto the LORD): the deaths are presented as a public satisfaction for blood, in the sight of the God whose oath had been broken. Readers should hear the Law's own rule, that a hanged body shall not remain all night upon the tree (Deuteronomy 21:22-23), and then read verse 10, where the bodies remain for months.

The study says plainly what Christian readers have long said: this is one of the hard passages of the Old Testament, and it is not made easy by pretending it is not there. The narrator does not explain how a mass execution of a dead king's sons answers to the God who said the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father (Ezekiel 18:20). He records a famine, a divine word naming its cause, a human bargain, seven deaths, and a mother. He gives the mother the longest verse. Readers may conclude, with many, that the chapter shows the world as it was and the Law as it was kept, and that what it approves is in verses 10-14, not verse 9.

And Rizpah the daughter of Aiah took sackcloth, and spread it for her upon the rock. The concubine of chapter 3, over whom men bargained, is now the only person in the chapter who acts for love. She makes the rock her bed from the beginning of harvest until water dropped upon them out of heaven — from barley harvest to the autumn rains, which by the usual reckoning is many months, though the text does not count them — and suffered neither the birds of the air to rest on them by day, nor the beasts of the field by night. One woman keeping the carrion off seven bodies through a whole dry season: one of the great vigils of Scripture.

Why until water dropped? Many take the rain as the sign that the famine was ended and the LORD appeased, so that Rizpah would not leave until heaven itself said the price was paid; the text does not say so, but the inference is natural. What it does say is that her act reached the king (v. 11) and moved him to do what no one had done for Saul in all his reign: bury him. Readers have set Rizpah beside Antigone, beside the women at the cross who beheld where he was laid (Mark 15:47), and beside Tamar and the ten women as those who bore what men decided. The study sets her where the narrator does, at the centre, and lets her sackcloth speak.

It was told David what Rizpah... had done (v. 11), and the king went and took the bones of Saul and the bones of Jonathan from the men of Jabeshgilead, who had stolen them by night from the wall of Bethshan (1 Samuel 31:11-13) — the men whose kindness David had blessed in his first act as king (2:5-7). Now, late, he completes it: the bones are brought up, the bones of them that were hanged gathered with them (v. 13), and all are laid in the sepulchre of Kish his father in Benjamin. The man who sang how are the mighty fallen (1:19) gives Saul and Jonathan a grave, and the seven lie with them. The chapter that began with a broken oath ends with a kept one.

And after that God was intreated for the land. The study notes the narrator's placing of the clause: not after the hanging, but after the burial — after Rizpah's vigil, the gathering of the bones, and the honouring of the dead. Readers may fairly take it that what the text joins to God's relenting is the whole, and that the burial belongs to it as much as the deaths. The verb intreated is the one used of Isaac's prayer for Rebekah (Genesis 25:21) and of the LORD after the plague in 24:25; both halves of the appendix end with it. A land defiled by blood is cleansed, in the end, by an act of mercy toward the house that shed it.

The second half of the chapter gathers four Philistine fights (vv. 15-22), undated, around the sons of the giant — the Hebrew is the Rapha, which some take as a clan-name and the KJV as giant. David waxed faint (v. 15): the man who ran at Goliath is tiring, and Ishbibenob, with a bronze spear-head of three hundred shekels — half Goliath's (1 Samuel 17:7) — and a new sword, thought to have slain David. But Abishai the son of Zeruiah succoured him. The sons of Zeruiah, whom David has spent the book rebuking, save his life; the narrator records it without irony, and the study notes the balance of the ledger.

Thou shalt go no more out with us to battle, that thou quench not the light of Israel. The men swear it — as the people had said at Mahanaim, thou art worth ten thousand of us (18:3). The light — the lamp — of Israel: the figure that 1 Kings 11:36 will make a promise, that David my servant may have a light alway before me in Jerusalem. The study notes that the warrior-king is retired by his own soldiers' oath, and that the chapter which could not avert the hanging of Saul's sons ends with men who will not let David's own life be risked. Verse 22 sums the four: fell by the hand of David, and by the hand of his servants — the king's wars are now his servants' wars.

Elhanan the son of Jaareoregim, a Bethlehemite, slew the brother of Goliath the Gittite. The words the brother of are in italics in the KJV: they are supplied from 1 Chronicles 20:5, which reads Elhanan the son of Jair slew Lahmi the brother of Goliath the Gittite. The Hebrew of Samuel as it stands says that Elhanan slew Goliath. This is a well-known difficulty, and the study names it as such rather than hiding it under the italics. The staff of whose spear was like a weaver's beam is Goliath's description in 1 Samuel 17:7, which makes the identity, on the face of the Hebrew, hard to avoid.

The usual explanations: that Chronicles preserves the original and Samuel's text has been damaged in copying — Jaareoregim contains the Hebrew for weavers, which may have crept up from the end of the verse, and Bethlehemite and Lahmi share letters, so a scribe's eye could have produced the one from the other; that there were two Philistines called Goliath, or that Goliath was a title; or, an old rabbinic view, that Elhanan was another name for David himself. Each has been held by careful readers; none can be shown from the text alone. The study asserts none, notes that 1 Samuel 17 is the fuller account, and leaves the verse as a case where the copies we have do not fully agree.