2 Samuel 3:29

3:29 May his blood whirl over the head of Joab and the entire house of his father! May the males of Joab’s house never cease to have someone with a running sore or a skin disease or one who works at the spindle or one who falls by the sword or one who lacks food!”

2 Samuel 6:20

6:20 When David went home to pronounce a blessing on his own house, Michal, Saul’s daughter, came out to meet him. She said, “How the king of Israel has distinguished himself this day! He has exposed himself today before his servants’ slave girls the way a vulgar fool might do!”

2 Samuel 21:12

21:12 he 10  went and took the bones of Saul and of his son Jonathan 11  from the leaders 12  of Jabesh Gilead. (They had secretly taken 13  them from the plaza at Beth Shan. It was there that Philistines 14  publicly exposed their corpses 15  after 16  they 17  had killed Saul at Gilboa.)

tn Heb “and may they whirl over.” In the Hebrew text the subject of the plural verb is unexpressed. The most likely subject is Abner’s “shed blood” (v. 28), which is a masculine plural form in Hebrew. The verb חוּל (khul, “whirl”) is used with the preposition עַל (’al) only here and in Jer 23:19; 30:23.

tc 4QSama has “of Joab” rather than “of his father” read by the MT.

tn Heb “the house of Joab.” However, it is necessary to specify that David’s curse is aimed at Joab’s male descendants; otherwise it would not be clear that “one who works at the spindle” refers to a man doing woman’s work rather than a woman.

tn Heb “and may there not be cut off from the house of Joab.”

tn The expression used here is difficult. The translation “one who works at the spindle” follows a suggestion of S. R. Driver that the expression pejoratively describes an effeminate man who, rather than being a mighty warrior, is occupied with tasks that are normally fulfilled by women (S. R. Driver, Notes on the Hebrew Text and the Topography of the Books of Samuel, 250-51; cf. NAB “one unmanly”; TEV “fit only to do a woman’s work”; CEV “cowards”). But P. K. McCarter, following an alleged Phoenician usage of the noun to refer to “crutches,” adopts a different view. He translates the phrase “clings to a crutch,” seeing here a further description of physical lameness (II Samuel [AB], 118). Such an idea fits the present context well and is followed by NIV, NCV, and NLT, although the evidence for this meaning is questionable. According to DNWSI 2:915-16, the noun consistently refers to a spindle in Phoenician, as it does in Ugaritic (see UT 468).

tn Heb “and David returned to bless his house.”

tn Heb “David.” The name has been replaced by the pronoun (“him”) in the translation for stylistic reasons.

tn Heb “honored.”

tn Heb “one of the foolish ones.”

11 tn Heb “David.” For stylistic reasons the name has been replaced by the pronoun (“he”) in the translation.

12 tn Heb “the bones of Saul and the bones of Jonathan his son.” See also v. 13.

13 tn Heb “lords.”

14 tn Heb “stolen.”

15 tc Against the MT, this word is better read without the definite article. The MT reading is probably here the result of wrong word division, with the letter ה (he) belonging with the preceding word שָׁם (sham) as the he directive (i.e., שָׁמָּה, samah, “to there”).

16 tn Heb “had hung them.”

17 tn Heb “in the day.”

18 tn Heb “Philistines.”