2 Samuel 3:39

3:39 Today I am weak, even though I am anointed as king. These men, the sons of Zeruiah, are too much for me to bear! ¹  May the Lord punish appropriately the one who has done this evil thing!” ² 

2 Samuel 12:6

12:6 Because he committed this cold-hearted crime, he must pay for the lamb four times over!” ³ 

2 Samuel 15:7

15:7 After four ⁴  years Absalom said to the king, “Let me go and repay my vow that I made to the Lord while I was in Hebron.

2 Samuel 20:19

20:19 I represent the peaceful and the faithful in Israel. You are attempting to destroy an important city ⁵  in Israel. Why should you swallow up the Lord’s inheritance?”

2 Samuel 10:19

10:19 When all the kings who were subject to Hadadezer ⁶  saw they were defeated by Israel, they made peace with Israel and became subjects of Israel. ⁷  The Arameans were no longer willing to help the Ammonites.

¹ tn Heb “are hard from me.”

² tn Heb “May the Lord repay the doer of the evil according to his evil” (NASB similar).

³ tc With the exception of the Lucianic recension, the Old Greek translation has here “sevenfold” rather than “fourfold,” a reading that S. R. Driver thought probably to be the original reading (S. R. Driver, Notes on the Hebrew Text and the Topography of the Books of Samuel, 291). However, Exod 22:1 [21:37 HT] specifies fourfold repayment for a stolen sheep, which is consistent with 2 Sam 12:6. Some mss of the Targum and the Syriac Peshitta exaggerate the idea to “fortyfold.”

⁵ tc The MT has here “forty,” but this is presumably a scribal error for “four.” The context will not tolerate a period of forty years prior to the rebellion of Absalom. The Lucianic Greek recension (τέσσαρα ἔτη, tessara ete), the Syriac Peshitta (’arba’ sanin), and Vulgate (post quattuor autem annos) in fact have the expected reading “four years.” Most English translations follow the versions in reading “four” here, although some (e.g. KJV, ASV, NASB, NKJV), following the MT, read “forty.”

⁷ tn Heb “a city and a mother.” The expression is a hendiadys, meaning that this city was an important one in Israel and had smaller cities dependent on it.

⁹ tn Heb “the servants of Hadadezer.”

¹⁰ tn Heb “and they served them.”