2:8 Now Abner son of Ner, the general in command of Saul’s army, had taken Saul’s son Ish-bosheth 1 and had brought him to Mahanaim.
4:12 So David issued orders to the soldiers and they put them to death. Then they cut off their hands and feet and hung them 2 near the pool in Hebron. But they took the head of Ish-bosheth 3 and buried it in the tomb of Abner 4 in Hebron. 5
1 sn The name Ish-bosheth means in Hebrew “man of shame.” It presupposes an earlier form such as Ish-baal (“man of the Lord”), with the word “baal” being used of Israel’s God. But because the Canaanite storm god was named “Baal,” that part of the name was later replaced with the word “shame.”
2 tn The antecedent of the pronoun “them” (which is not present in the Hebrew text, but implied) is not entirely clear. Presumably it is the corpses that were hung and not merely the detached hands and feet; cf. NIV “hung the (their NRSV, NLT) bodies”; the alternative is represented by TEV “cut off their hands and feet, which they hung up.”
3 tc 4QSama mistakenly reads “Mephibosheth” here.
4 tc The LXX adds “the son of Ner” by conformity with common phraseology elsewhere.
5 tc Some