The narrator will not even give him his name until verse 5: Saul's son hears that Abner is dead, and his hands were feeble. Everything Ishbosheth had was Abner — Abner took him to Mahanaim, made him king, held the army, frightened him into silence (3:11) — and Abner had already gone over to David before Joab killed him. The king is a man whose only prop has been removed twice. All the Israelites were troubled: the north has no leader and no plan.

The two captains are introduced at once (vv. 2-3), with an aside about Beeroth: reckoned to Benjamin, though its people fled to Gittaim and live there until this day. Beeroth was one of the four Gibeonite towns that tricked Joshua into a covenant (Joshua 9:17), and some readers connect the Beerothites' flight with Saul's slaughter of the Gibeonites (21:1-2), which would give Rimmon's sons a grudge against Saul's house. The text does not say so; the study notes the possibility and leaves it.

The narrator steps out of the story to introduce a child. Jonathan's son was five years old when the news came out of Jezreel — the valley below Gilboa — and in the panic of 1 Samuel 31:7 his nurse snatched him up and ran, and dropped him, and he became lame. The verse is placed here, between Abner's death and Ishbosheth's, to tell the reader that when Ishbosheth falls the house of Saul will not be empty: there is an heir, a crippled boy, and David has sworn an oath to Jonathan's house (1 Samuel 20:14-17).

His name was Mephibosheth. In 1 Chronicles 8:34 and 9:40 he is Meribbaal; as with Ishbosheth (2:8), many take the bosheth form to be a substitution for a name containing baal, though the matter is not certain. Chapter 9 will bring him to David's table as one of the king's sons (9:11). For now the narrator plants him here as a sign that the story of Saul's house does not end with a head in a bag; it ends with kindness, for Jonathan's sake (9:1).

About the heat of the day (v. 5), the hour of rest, the king lay on a bed at noon. The brothers come as though they would have fetched wheat — the Hebrew of this verse is difficult, and the ancient Greek text tells it differently (a woman doorkeeper cleaning wheat had fallen asleep); the KJV follows the Hebrew as it stands. On any reading the captains enter on an ordinary household errand and strike a sleeping man under the fifth rib, the wound of Asahel and Abner (2:23; 3:27).

Verse 7 repeats and completes it: they smote him, and slew him, and beheaded him, and carry the head through the plain all night — the same Jordan valley Abner had marched through after Gibeon (2:29). The study does not pretend this is anything but what it is. Two officers murder their own king in his bed for the reward they expect from his rival, and the narrator tells it flat, without a word for or against, until David speaks.

The speech is the Amalekite's speech again, with theology added. Thine enemy, which sought thy life — it was Saul who sought David's life, not Ishbosheth, who never fought him in person; the brothers transfer the father's guilt to the son. The LORD hath avenged my lord the king this day of Saul, and of his seed — they claim to be instruments of God. Readers should hear how religious the words are, and how false: men who murder in bed and call it the LORD's vengeance.

David had refused to take Saul's life when God delivered him into his hand, as his men put it (1 Samuel 24:4; 26:8), and had told Saul that the LORD would judge between them (1 Samuel 24:12). Now two men bring him the result of taking God's part into their own hands and expect thanks. The chapter is a test of whether David meant what he said in the cave, with no one watching but God and his own men. He did.

David's answer begins with an oath by the LORD... who hath redeemed my soul out of all adversity (v. 9) — the man who has been kept alive through Saul's years will not now be served by murder. Then he reminds them of Ziklag (1:13-16). The Amalekite came thinking to have brought good tidings and expecting a reward; David took hold of him, and slew him. His account here says nothing of the Amalekite's claim to have killed Saul; the offence named is bringing Saul's death as good news for pay.

The repetition is the chapter's argument. What David did to a foreigner who only claimed to have killed Saul, he will do how much more (v. 11) to Israelites who really killed Saul's son. There is a consistency here that the narrator wants seen: the rule was not made up for this occasion. The study notes that David's own hands have been kept from the house of Saul throughout — by restraint in the cave, by Philistine lords at Aphek, by Joab's crime being Joab's — and that he now refuses the last shortcut.

A righteous person — David's word for Ishbosheth, his rival of seven years. He means innocent: a man who had done nothing worthy of death, in his own house upon his bed, the place where a man is least able to defend himself and most entitled to be safe. Wicked men — the brothers get the word David gave Joab's deed (3:34). Require his blood of your hand is the language of Genesis 9:5-6: shed blood is owed, and God requires it through the one who bears the sword.

The verse is also David at his best as a judge, and the study says so plainly, having said plainly where he fell short with Joab (3:39). He judges strangers more easily than his own kin — the honest reader sees that — but the judgment itself is right. He will not let the throne be founded on the murder of the man who sat opposite it. The whole first part of 2 Samuel is built to show that David received the kingdom; he did not take it, and he punished those who tried to hand it to him by blood.

The sentence is carried out at once and its severity is not hidden: killed, their hands and their feet cut off — the hands that struck, the feet that ran all night — and the bodies hanged up over the pool in Hebron, a public place, as a public answer. The study does not call this gentle; it is the justice of the ancient world, and the narrator records it as David's act. What it is meant to say to Israel is plain: no one profits from murdering Saul's house, whatever he brings to Hebron.

Then the last clause, which is the chapter's mercy: they took the head of Ishbosheth, and buried it in the sepulchre of Abner in Hebron. The weak king and the strong general who made and then abandoned him lie in one tomb, honoured by the man they opposed. With Abner and Ishbosheth both dead and both buried by David, the north has nowhere to go but Hebron — and chapter 5 opens with all the tribes of Israel at the door. God has cleared the road without David lifting a hand against the house of Saul, and David has punished every hand that was lifted.