The north gives three reasons for coming (vv. 1-2), and they are the whole case for David. We are thy bone and thy flesh — kinship; he is an Israelite, not a Philistine vassal. Thou wast he that leddest out and broughtest in Israel — service; even under Saul it was David who fought their wars (1 Samuel 18:13-16). The LORD said to thee — the word of God, which Abner had quoted to the elders (3:17-18). Israel did not come because the house of Saul was dead; the house of Saul died because Israel was always going to come.

Thou shalt feed my people Israel — the verb is the shepherd's, and the title suits the man Samuel found keeping the sheep (1 Samuel 16:11). Psalm 78:70-72 puts the two together: he chose David... from following the ewes... so he fed them. The church has heard in the word the shepherd-king of Ezekiel 34:23 and of John 10, and Matthew 2:6 applies a line like it to Christ; the study frames that as the church's reading of a promise whose first fulfilment was this day at Hebron.

The famous numbers, placed in the text as a summary before the reign has really begun: thirty years old... forty years, divided in verse 5 into seven years and six months in Hebron and thirty and three years in Jerusalem. Seven and a half and thirty-three make forty and a half; forty is a round figure, as 1 Kings 2:11 also gives it. Readers have noted that thirty is the age at which priests entered their service (Numbers 4:3) and Joseph stood before Pharaoh (Genesis 41:46), and Luke 3:23 says Jesus was about thirty when He began; the study notes the correspondences without claiming the text intends them.

The study does not turn the numbers into dates. The Bible gives no absolute year for David's accession, and the dates in reference books (roughly a thousand years before Christ) are reconstructions, not Scripture. What the verse settles is proportion: a long wait between the anointing at Bethlehem and the throne at Hebron, a long reign after. The third anointing (v. 3) — by Samuel, by Judah, by Israel — has taken, by the book's own reckoning, something like fifteen to twenty years from a shepherd boy to a king of all Israel.

Jerusalem had never been taken and held. Joshua defeated its king (Joshua 10) but the city stayed Jebusite (Joshua 15:63; Judges 1:21), a foreign enclave on the border of Judah and Benjamin — which is one reason David chose it: a capital belonging to neither north nor south, won by his own men. The Jebusites' taunt, except thou take away the blind and the lame, thou shalt not come in hither, is usually taken to mean the walls were so strong that cripples could hold them. The Hebrew of verses 6 and 8 is obscure, and the study says so.

Nevertheless David took the strong hold of Zion: the same is the city of David (v. 7). Zion here is the ridge south of the later temple hill, the fortress spur above the Gihon spring; the name will spread in the psalms to the whole city and its hope. The narrator gives the capture in one sentence; 1 Chronicles 11:4-9 adds that Joab went up first and became chief. That is the first appearance of the name Zion in Scripture, and it enters as a fortress taken.

Whosoever getteth up to the gutter — the Hebrew word (tsinnor) occurs only here and in Psalm 42:7, where the KJV has waterspouts. Many take it as a water-shaft or channel by which the city was entered; others as a weapon, a grappling-hook, or part of the wall; the matter is debated and the study does not decide it. 1 Chronicles 11:6 gives the reward and the winner — Joab the son of Zeruiah went first up, and was chief — without mentioning the gutter at all.

The lame and the blind, that are hated of David's soul — the phrase answers the Jebusite taunt, and readers differ on what it means: the defenders David must beat, or the Jebusites' idols, or something else. Wherefore they said, The blind and the lame shall not come into the house is a proverb explained by the story, and its sense, too, is uncertain. The study notes that Scripture elsewhere shows David's tenderness to the lame (9:3, 13), so the saying should not be read as contempt for the disabled; it belongs to the siege and its language.

The narrator's own summary, the sentence the whole rise has been moving toward. David went on, and grew great — the verb is the one from 3:1, stronger and stronger — and the LORD God of hosts was with him. That last clause has followed David since Saul's servant first described him (1 Samuel 16:18) and Saul first feared him (1 Samuel 18:12, 14, 28). It is the book's explanation of everything: not David's skill, nor Abner's defection, nor Joab's sword, but the LORD... with him.

The LORD God of hosts — the name of the God of armies, the title Hannah first used in prayer (1 Samuel 1:11) and David threw at Goliath (1 Samuel 17:45). Millo (v. 9) is some structure or filling, probably a terrace or rampart on the slope of Zion; its exact nature is unknown, and Solomon will build it again (1 Kings 9:15). The city of David is a fortress with a king in it and God beside him. Verse 12 adds David's own understanding: the LORD had established him king... for his people Israel's sake. The throne is for Israel, not for David.

Hiram king of Tyre sends cedar trees, and carpenters, and masons (v. 11), and they build David a house. Tyre was the great Phoenician port, and Hiram will be Solomon's partner in the temple (1 Kings 5:1-12); readers have noticed that Hiram's reign fits better with the end of David's than its beginning, and take this notice as placed here by theme rather than strict sequence. Either way, a foreign king builds the palace of Israel's king — Isaiah 60:10 will speak of the sons of strangers building Zion's walls.

And David perceived — the house of cedar is the sign that makes him understand. Two things: the LORD had established him, and he had exalted his kingdom for his people Israel's sake. Not for David's sake. This is the right reading of a throne, and it will be the ground of the covenant in chapter 7, where David, sitting in this very house of cedar, will want to build God one (7:1-2). The study notes that the perception is recorded before the wives of verse 13, and the reader may feel the order.

The narrator records it: more concubines and wives out of Jerusalem, in addition to the six of Hebron (3:2-5). Eleven sons are named (vv. 14-16); 1 Chronicles 3:5-8 and 14:4-7 give thirteen, with two more names. Solomon is in the list, though he was born of Bathsheba years later (12:24) — the list is a summary of the Jerusalem years, not of this moment, which is how the chapter works throughout. Nathan the son (v. 14) is the ancestor through whom Luke 3:31 traces Jesus' line, as Matthew 1:6 traces it through Solomon.

The Law said of the king, neither shall he multiply wives to himself, that his heart turn not away (Deuteronomy 17:17). The text does not quote it here, and the study does not moralise beyond what the book itself will show — that David's house, built of many wives, will produce Amnon, Absalom and Adonijah, and that his son will go further than he did (1 Kings 11:3-4). Scripture is content to set the king's perception of God's purpose (v. 12) and his multiplication of wives (v. 13) in consecutive verses and let the reader think.

The Philistines had been content with a David who ruled Judah from Hebron under their shadow; a David king over Israel (v. 17) is another matter, and all the Philistines came up to seek David. He went down to the hold — some identify it with Adullam (1 Samuel 22:4), some with Zion itself; the text does not say. They spread in the valley of Rephaim, south-west of Jerusalem, the road up from the coast. And David, who has not asked God a question since Hebron (2:1), asks two: Shall I go up? wilt thou deliver them?

The answer is as full as the one at Ziklag (1 Samuel 30:8): Go up: for I will doubtless deliver. Readers should note that the king over all Israel, in his new capital, with Hiram's palace and a standing army, still enquires before a battle and still gets a plain yes. The pattern of 1 Samuel 23 and 30 has not been outgrown by success. The second enquiry (v. 23) will get a different and stranger answer, which is the point of asking rather than assuming.

The LORD hath broken forth upon mine enemies before me, as the breach of waters — the picture is a dam giving way; the Philistine line went like a wall before flood. David names the place Baalperazim, the lord of breakings-forth (the name's meaning is given by the verse itself). Isaiah 28:21 remembers it: the LORD shall rise up as in mount Perazim. The same word for breach will be used, terribly, in the next chapter for Uzzah (6:8, Perezuzzah): the God who breaks out against Philistines also breaks out against carelessness among His own.

Verse 21: there they left their images, and David and his men burned them. The Hebrew verb here is usually rendered carried them away; the KJV's burned follows 1 Chronicles 14:12, which says they were burned with fire, as the Law required (Deuteronomy 7:5, 25). The study notes the two texts. Either way the scene reverses 1 Samuel 4: once the Philistines carried off Israel's ark; now Israel carries off the Philistines' gods, and does not keep them.

The Philistines return to the same valley (v. 22), and David asks again instead of repeating what worked. The answer is different: Thou shalt not go up — not head-on — but fetch a compass behind them, circle round, and come upon them over against the mulberry trees (v. 23). The tree is uncertain: the Hebrew baca has been taken as mulberry, balsam, aspen or pear, and Psalm 84:6 uses the same word for a valley; the study keeps the KJV's word and notes the doubt.

When thou hearest the sound of a going in the tops of the mulberry trees, then thou shalt bestir thyself: for then shall the LORD go out before thee. A sound in the treetops — wind, or marching, the text does not say — is the signal that the LORD's army has moved; David's army follows. The study takes the verse as it stands: God fights, and David is to move only when God moves. He did so, as the LORD had commanded him (v. 25), and drove them from Geba until thou come to Gazer — 1 Chronicles 14:16 has Gibeon — the whole road down to the coastal plain. The land taken at Gilboa is given back.