Discovery Box2 Samuel 21:10-14
Context21:10 Rizpah the daughter of Aiah took sackcloth and spread it out for herself on a rock. From the beginning of the harvest until the rain fell on them, 1 she did not allow the birds of the air to feed 2 on them by day, nor the wild animals 3 by night. 21:11 When David was told what Rizpah daughter of Aiah, Saul’s concubine, had done, 21:12 he 4 went and took the bones of Saul and of his son Jonathan 5 from the leaders 6 of Jabesh Gilead. (They had secretly taken 7 them from the plaza at Beth Shan. It was there that Philistines 8 publicly exposed their corpses 9 after 10 they 11 had killed Saul at Gilboa.) 21:13 David 12 brought the bones of Saul and of Jonathan his son from there; they also gathered up the bones of those who had been executed.
21:14 They buried the bones of Saul and his son Jonathan in the land of Benjamin at Zela in the grave of his father Kish. After they had done everything 13 that the king had commanded, God responded to their prayers 14 for the land.
[21:10] 1 tn Heb “until water was poured on them from the sky.”
[21:10] 3 tn Heb “the beasts of the field.”
[21:12] 4 tn Heb “David.” For stylistic reasons the name has been replaced by the pronoun (“he”) in the translation.
[21:12] 5 tn Heb “the bones of Saul and the bones of Jonathan his son.” See also v. 13.
[21:12] 8 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”).
[21:12] 9 tn Heb “had hung them.”
[21:12] 10 tn Heb “in the day.”
[21:12] 11 tn Heb “Philistines.”
[21:13] 12 tn Heb “he”; the referent (David) has been specified in the translation for clarity.
[21:14] 13 tc Many medieval Hebrew
[21:14] 14 tn Heb “was entreated.” The verb is an example of the so-called niphal tolerativum, with the sense that God allowed himself to be supplicated through prayer (cf. GKC 137 §51.c).
