Long war — the single phrase covers years, the seven and a half of 2:11 less whatever the two years of 2:10 are taken to mean. The narrator gives no battles after Gibeon; he gives the direction: David waxed stronger and stronger, and the house of Saul waxed weaker and weaker. It is the pattern of 1 Samuel 2:26 and 3:19, where the child Samuel grows while Eli's house fails, told now of two royal houses. God's choice works itself out slowly, and the text is content to say so in one sentence.

Readers should not read the sentence as David winning by force. He fights no recorded battle against Ishbosheth after chapter 2; the house of Saul weakens from within — Abner's quarrel (vv. 7-11), Ishbosheth's fear (v. 11), and finally two of its own captains (4:2). The LORD's promise is fulfilled mostly by the self-destruction of what opposes it. That is a hard mercy, but it keeps David's hands clean of the blood of Saul's house, which he had sworn to Jonathan to spare (1 Samuel 20:15-16; 24:21-22).

Six sons by six mothers (vv. 2-5): Amnon of Ahinoam; Chileab of Abigail; Absalom of Maacah; Adonijah of Haggith; Shephatiah of Abital; Ithream of Eglah. The list is a seed-bed of the book's tragedies. Amnon will wrong Tamar (ch. 13); Absalom will kill him and rebel (chs. 13-18); Adonijah will reach for the throne as David dies (1 Kings 1). Chileab is called Daniel in 1 Chronicles 3:1, and readers explain the two names variously; he is never heard of again, and some suppose he died young. The study notes the difference and does not resolve it.

Maacah the daughter of Talmai king of Geshur — a political marriage with a small Aramean kingdom east of the sea of Galilee (not the southern Geshurites of 1 Samuel 27:8); Absalom will flee to his grandfather there (13:37). Six wives in Hebron is already past the neither shall he multiply wives of Deuteronomy 17:17, and 5:13 will add more. The narrator records it without comment; the sons record it for him, in the chapters to come.

The house of Saul breaks over a woman. Rizpah, the daughter of Aiah — she will appear again, keeping the birds from her sons' bodies on the rock (21:8-11), one of the book's bravest figures. Ishbosheth charges Abner with taking her. In that world a dead king's concubine belonged to his heir, and to take her was to claim his place (cf. 16:21-22; 1 Kings 2:22); whether Abner did it, and whether he meant it so, the text does not say. Abner's reply (v. 8) denies no fact; it attacks the charge.

Am I a dog's head? — Abner's fury is that of a man who has carried a weak king for years and is accused over this woman. His speech (v. 8) is also a confession: he could have delivered thee into the hand of David and did not. Then the oath (vv. 9-10): he will do as the LORD hath sworn to David. Abner knew. The general who propped up Saul's son knew all along whom God had chosen, and says so only when he is insulted. The study notes it without surprise; Scripture is full of men who know the truth and act on it late, for the wrong reasons.

As the LORD hath sworn to David (v. 9) — Abner cites a divine oath, and in verse 18 the elders are told its content: by the hand of my servant David I will save my people Israel. No such words are recorded earlier in Samuel; Abner may be summarising what was widely known from Samuel's anointing (1 Samuel 16) and Saul's own admissions (1 Samuel 24:20), or an oracle the book has not preserved. The study does not supply what the text does not. What is clear is that Israel's general believed the kingdom was David's by God's word.

From Dan even to Beersheba — the whole land, north to south (Judges 20:1). To translate the kingdom is the KJV's word for carrying it over from one house to another. Ishbosheth could not answer Abner a word again, because he feared him (v. 11): the king is afraid of his general, which is the whole state of the house of Saul in one clause. A throne held up by one man falls when that man lets go.

David's one condition for a league with Abner (v. 13) is Michal — and he sends for her not to Abner but to Ishbosheth, the man who holds her, so that Saul's own son must hand Saul's daughter back. Which I espoused to me for an hundred foreskins of the Philistines — Saul's price (1 Samuel 18:25), which David doubled (18:27). She was his lawfully; Saul gave her to Phalti as if David were dead (1 Samuel 25:44). David is reclaiming a wife and, plainly, a claim: the king's son-in-law, restored.

The text records no word about love in the request, and the study will not invent one. Michal had loved David (1 Samuel 18:20) and saved his life (19:11-17); what she feels now is not said until chapter 6, where it is contempt. Verse 16 gives the feeling to the other man: her husband went with her along weeping behind her to Bahurim, until Abner tells him Go, return. Phaltiel's tears are the only tears in the transaction. Scripture lets the reader see the cost of the king's rights on a man who had none.

Her husband — the narrator gives Phaltiel the title, though in David's mouth she is my wife (v. 14). Phaltiel the son of Laish (v. 15) is the Phalti of 1 Samuel 25:44 with the fuller form of his name. He follows her weeping as far as Bahurim, a village on the road east of Jerusalem that will see David on another dark day (16:5; 17:18). Go, return. And he returned. Two words from Abner and a man walks out of Scripture.

The verse is often passed over, and the study stops at it on purpose. The Bible does not approve everything it records; it records this with a tenderness toward Phaltiel that it withholds from the parties who arranged the matter. Readers who hold David in honour, as the book does, should still feel this. Kings have rights, and the exercise of rights has victims, and Scripture names them.

Abner had been sent away in peace — the phrase is repeated three times (vv. 21, 22, 23), so that the reader knows David's word was given. Joab, back from a raid with spoil, rebukes the king (vv. 24-25): Abner came to deceive thee. Perhaps Joab believed it; the narrator gives Abner's dealings with the elders (vv. 17-19) as sincere. Then, without David's knowledge (v. 26), Joab recalls Abner from the well of Sirah, takes him aside in the gate to speak with him quietly, and kills him under the fifth rib — Asahel's wound (2:23).

For the blood of Asahel his brother. The narrator gives Joab's motive, and verse 30 adds Abishai. But Asahel died in battle, after warning, and Hebron was a city of refuge (Joshua 20:7) where even a true manslayer was protected from the avenger until judged (Numbers 35:22-25). Joab's act fits no law of blood-vengeance; it is murder under a pretext of it, and David calls it that (v. 39). Readers have also noted a second motive: Abner would have outranked Joab. The text names only Asahel; the study names only what the text supports.

David's first word on hearing is a declaration: I and my kingdom are guiltless before the LORD for ever from the blood of Abner (v. 28). His second is a curse on Joab's house — disease, lameness, violent death, hunger — the kind of curse the Law pronounced on covenant-breakers (Deuteronomy 28). The study notes the severity and the fact: David does not execute Joab. He curses him, and keeps him as commander. The king who killed the Amalekite in an hour cannot touch his own general.

Verse 39 says why, and it is the most candid sentence of David's reign: I am this day weak, though anointed king; and these men the sons of Zeruiah be too hard for me. The anointing has not made him strong enough to do justice in his own house. He hands Joab over to God — the LORD shall reward the doer of evil — and on his deathbed will hand him to Solomon (1 Kings 2:5-6), who has him killed at the altar (1 Kings 2:28-34). The curse took a generation to fall. Readers should see both the weakness and the honesty with which the text admits it.

David does what he can: orders public mourning, makes Joab himself rend your clothes, and gird you with sackcloth, and mourn before Abner (v. 31), follows the bier, weeps at the grave, and sings a short lament. Died Abner as a fool dieth? — a fool, in the Old Testament sense, is one who comes to a bad end by his own folly; Abner did not. Thy hands were not bound, nor thy feet put into fetters (v. 34): he was not a captured criminal; as a man falleth before wicked men, so fellest thou. The king names the killers as wicked men at the graveside, with the chief of them standing by.

Then the fast till sundown (v. 35), sworn with the oath Abner had used (v. 9). All the people took notice of it, and it pleased them... all Israel understood that day that it was not of the king (vv. 36-37). The narrator is answering a suspicion that must have been in the air — that David had Abner killed once he had served his purpose — and answering it by David's public grief. The study takes the narrator's word, as the people did; and notes that in the ancient world, as now, a king's innocence had to be seen to be believed.

Know ye not that there is a prince and a great man fallen this day in Israel? (v. 38) — David's estimate of Abner, the man who made Ishbosheth king, who was mocked at Hachilah, and who came to Hebron to give David the kingdom. He is called great by the king he opposed for years. Then the confession: I am this day weak, though anointed king. The oil is on his head, Judah has crowned him, Israel is coming over — and he cannot govern his own nephews. The honest reader will find this one of the truest verses about power in Scripture.

The LORD shall reward the doer of evil according to his wickedness. David falls back on the principle of 1 Samuel 24:12 and 26:10 — judgment is God's — but here it is said by a king who should have judged and could not, and the verse has a different sound. The church has read it as both faith and failure: faith, that God will do what the king cannot; failure, that the king did not try. 2 Samuel will show the sons of Zeruiah too hard for David to the end (16:10; 19:22), and Joab's blood-guilt unpaid until another king sits.