2 Samuel 3:29

3:29 May his blood whirl over ¹  the head of Joab and the entire house of his father! ²  May the males of Joab’s house ³  never cease to have ⁴  someone with a running sore or a skin disease or one who works at the spindle ⁵  or one who falls by the sword or one who lacks food!”

2 Samuel 21:12

21:12 he ⁶  went and took the bones of Saul and of his son Jonathan ⁷  from the leaders ⁸  of Jabesh Gilead. (They had secretly taken ⁹  them from the plaza at Beth Shan. It was there that Philistines ¹⁰  publicly exposed their corpses ¹¹  after ¹²  they ¹³  had killed Saul at Gilboa.)

[3:29]  ¹ 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.

[3:29]  ² tc 4QSam^a has “of Joab” rather than “of his father” read by the MT.

[3:29]  ³ 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.

[3:29]  ⁴ tn Heb “and may there not be cut off from the house of Joab.”

[3:29]  ⁵ 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).

[21:12]  ⁶ tn Heb “David.” For stylistic reasons the name has been replaced by the pronoun (“he”) in the translation.

[21:12]  ⁷ tn Heb “the bones of Saul and the bones of Jonathan his son.” See also v. 13.

[21:12]  ⁸ tn Heb “lords.”

[21:12]  ⁹ tn Heb “stolen.”

[21:12]  ¹⁰ 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]  ¹¹ tn Heb “had hung them.”

[21:12]  ¹² tn Heb “in the day.”

[21:12]  ¹³ tn Heb “Philistines.”