The ark has been out of the story since 1 Samuel 7:1-2, when the men of Kirjathjearim fetched it from Bethshemesh and lodged it in the house of Abinadab in the hill. Baale of Judah is another name for Kirjathjearim (Joshua 15:9, 60; 1 Chronicles 13:6). It has sat there through all of Saul's reign — 1 Chronicles 13:3 has David say we enquired not at it in the days of Saul — and David's first great act in his new capital is to bring the LORD's throne into it. Thirty thousand chosen men (v. 1) go: this is a state procession, not an errand.

The narrator pauses to give the ark its full title: the ark of God, whose name is called by the name of the LORD of hosts that dwelleth between the cherubims. The phrase is from 1 Samuel 4:4, the last time the ark was carried out — to Aphek, where it was captured. The reader is meant to remember that the ark is not a lucky box; it is the place where the LORD of hosts sits enthroned (Exodus 25:22), and the name on it is His. What follows at the threshingfloor turns on exactly that.

A new cart. The last people to move the ark on a new cart were the Philistines (1 Samuel 6:7), sending it home with milch kine and no hand on it — and it worked. The Law had said something else: the ark was to be carried on staves, on the shoulders of the Kohathite Levites, who were not to touch the holy things lest they die (Numbers 4:15; 7:9). The narrator does not comment here; 1 Chronicles 15:13 will have David say it himself — the LORD our God made a breach upon us, for that we sought him not after the due order. The study states what both texts say and nothing more.

Gibeah here is the KJV's rendering of the Hebrew for the hill (1 Samuel 7:1), the house of Abinadab on the hill at Kirjathjearim, not Saul's Gibeah. Uzzah and Ahio are the sons of Abinadab — grandsons, perhaps, after so many years; the word allows it. Verse 5 shows the mood: all the house of Israel played before the LORD on every instrument the KJV can name. Nothing in the scene is irreverent. It is joyful, well-meant, and done the wrong way.

At Nachon's threshingfloor — the name is given as Chidon in 1 Chronicles 13:9 — the oxen shook it, and Uzzah put forth his hand to the ark of God, and took hold of it (v. 6). Then this verse. For his error renders a Hebrew word found only here, whose sense is debated; some read for the rashness, and Chronicles says simply because he put his hand to the ark. The text gives no more explanation than that. The study does not invent one — not that Uzzah was proud, or careless, or faithless; Scripture says he touched the ark and died.

What the text does supply is the Law behind it (Numbers 4:15: they shall not touch any holy thing, lest they die) and David's later verdict (1 Chronicles 15:13). The men of Bethshemesh had died for looking into the ark (1 Samuel 6:19). The holiness of God is not a feeling; it is a fact with a boundary, and the boundary does not move for good intentions. Readers who find the verse hard are reading it rightly; David found it hard too (v. 8, displeased), and the next verse shows him afraid.

Two reactions, in order. First displeased (v. 8) — the word is literally that it burned to him; anger, or grief, or both — and he names the place Perezuzzah, the breach of Uzzah, with the same word he had used in triumph at Baalperazim (5:20). The LORD who broke forth on the Philistines has broken forth on Israel's procession. Then afraid: How shall the ark of the LORD come to me? It echoes the question the men of Bethshemesh asked (1 Samuel 6:20), and it is the right question, because the answer exists.

David does not yet know the answer, so he stops. The ark is carried aside into the house of Obededom the Gittite (v. 10) — a man from Gath, on the face of it a Philistine town, though 1 Chronicles 15:18-24 and 26:4-8 name an Obededom among the Levites and gatekeepers, and many take him to be a Levite from Gathrimmon (Joshua 21:24-25). The text here calls him only the Gittite. The ark that David was afraid to bring home goes into the house of a man with a foreign name, and the LORD blessed Obededom, and all his household (v. 11).

Three months, and the LORD blessed Obededom, and all his household. The same ark that killed Uzzah blesses a house. The difference is not in the ark; Obededom did nothing recorded except receive it. Readers have drawn the obvious lesson — that the presence of God is not dangerous in itself but holy, death to presumption and blessing to those who simply make room for it — and the study takes it as fair, while noting that the text explains neither the death nor the blessing beyond what it says.

Verse 12 turns the chapter on this news: it was told king David... The LORD hath blessed the house of Obededom. David hears, and goes. 1 Chronicles 15 fills in what Samuel leaves out — the Levites sanctified, the ark on their shoulders with staves as Moses commanded (15:15) — and that is why the second procession succeeds where the first failed. The study reads the two books together: Samuel gives the event, Chronicles gives the correction, and the correction was to do it the way God had said.

The second procession is told with sacrifice and joy. When they that bare the ark — on their shoulders now, not on a cart — had gone six paces, he sacrificed oxen and fatlings (v. 13): the first steps are tested, and offered. Then the king: David danced before the LORD with all his might. The verb is a whirling, leaping dance; verse 16 adds leaping and dancing. And he is girded with a linen ephod — the simple priestly garment the child Samuel wore (1 Samuel 2:18) and the priests of Nob wore (1 Samuel 22:18), not the king's robes.

Readers have long seen in the linen ephod David setting aside his royal dignity to appear before the ark as a worshipper among worshippers; the text says only what he wore, and his own words in verse 21 — it was before the LORD — give the meaning. With all his might is the phrase of Deuteronomy 6:5, love the LORD thy God... with all thy might, and whether or not the narrator intends the echo, the king is doing it. The chapter that began with a death in a procession ends with the king abandoned in joy in another, because this time it was done rightly.

Michal Saul's daughter — three times in the chapter (vv. 16, 20, 23) she is given her father's name, never David's wife, as she had been in 1 Samuel 19:11 and 25:44. The narrator is telling us something: the woman who once let David down through a window to save him (1 Samuel 19:12) now looks down through a window and despised him in her heart. The last time the book showed Saul's house looking at David's success, it was Saul eyeing him (1 Samuel 18:9); the look has been inherited.

The study does not pretend to know all that was in her. She had been taken from Phaltiel (3:15-16) to serve David's claim; she was the daughter of a king who stood on his dignity; she saw her husband uncovered (v. 20) — stripped to a linen ephod — in front of servant-girls. Her contempt has reasons, and Scripture lets them be felt. But the narrator's phrase stands against the chapter's refrain: everyone else is before the LORD; Michal is at a window, and what she sees is only the king.

The ark is set in the tabernacle that David had pitched for it (v. 17) — a tent in the city of David, not the Mosaic tabernacle, which stood at Gibeon (1 Chronicles 16:39) — with burnt offerings, peace offerings, a blessing in the name of the LORD of hosts, and food for every man and woman in Israel (vv. 17-19; the flagon of wine is more probably a cake of raisins, as many render it). David returned to bless his household, and his household meets him at the door with this.

How glorious was the king of Israel to day — sarcasm, rare in Scripture from a wife to a husband. Uncovered himself... as one of the vain fellows — the empty men, the rabble. She has made the dance a matter of class and of decency, and left God out of the sentence entirely. The study notes how exactly her words repeat the first procession's mistake in another form: the ark treated as David's occasion, not the LORD's. Uzzah's hand and Michal's tongue both reach for something that is not theirs.

David's reply (vv. 21-22) begins where Michal's ended, with God: It was before the LORD, which chose me before thy father, and before all his house. He names the thing between them — the house of Saul was set aside and the shepherd chosen — and that is hard, and the text does not soften it for her. Therefore will I play before the LORD. Then the vow: I will yet be more vile than thus, and will be base in mine own sight. He will go lower, not higher. The maidservants she despised will honour him for it.

The verse has been treasured as the heart of worship: a king content to be nothing before God, and honoured by the lowly for it. The study notes that David's words are also sharp — a husband answering a wife's contempt with contempt for her father's house — and that the narrator records both the worship and the wound. Scripture is not asking the reader to pick a side in the marriage; it is showing what the ark does when it enters a house. It sorts.

Therefore Michal the daughter of Saul had no child unto the day of her death. The verse is a single sentence of record, and the study keeps to it. The text does not say that God made her barren, or that David never went in to her again; it says therefore, and leaves the reader to connect the quarrel and the childlessness without telling him how. Many readers have taken it as judgment; some as the end of the marriage in all but name. What is stated is the outcome: no child of Saul's line will sit on David's throne.

That last point is probably the narrator's interest. A son of David and Michal would have joined the two houses and given Saul's line a claim; there is none. (21:8 in the KJV speaks of the five sons of Michal... whom she brought up for Adriel; Adriel was Merab's husband in 1 Samuel 18:19, and many take the name there as Merab's or the sons as fostered; readers differ.) The chapter that brought God's throne into David's city ends by closing a door on the old house. The next chapter opens with God's promise to the new one.