2 Samuel 4:10-12

4:10 when someone told me that Saul was dead – even though he thought he was bringing good news ¹  – I seized him and killed him in Ziklag. That was the good news I gave to him! 4:11 Surely when wicked men have killed an innocent man as he slept ²  in his own house, should I not now require his blood from your hands and remove ³  you from the earth?”

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 ⁴  near the pool in Hebron. But they took the head of Ish-bosheth ⁵  and buried it in the tomb of Abner ⁶  in Hebron. ⁷ 

[4:10]  ¹ tn Heb “and he was like a bearer of good news in his eyes.”

[4:11]  ² tn Heb “on his bed.”

[4:11]  ³ tn See HALOT 146 s.v. II בער. Some derive the verb from a homonym meaning “to burn; to consume.”

[4:12]  ⁴ 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.”

[4:12]  ⁵ tc 4QSam^a mistakenly reads “Mephibosheth” here.

[4:12]  ⁶ tc The LXX adds “the son of Ner” by conformity with common phraseology elsewhere.

[4:12]  ⁷ tc Some mss of the LXX lack the phrase “in Hebron.”