2 Samuel 4:7-12

4:7 They had entered ¹  the house while Ish-bosheth ²  was resting on his bed in his bedroom. They mortally wounded him ³  and then cut off his head. ⁴  Taking his head, ⁵  they traveled on the way of the Arabah all that night. 4:8 They brought the head of Ish-bosheth to David in Hebron, saying to the king, “Look! The head of Ish-bosheth son of Saul, your enemy who sought your life! The Lord has granted vengeance to my lord the king this day against ⁶  Saul and his descendants!”

4:9 David replied to Recab and his brother Baanah, the sons of Rimmon the Beerothite, “As surely as the Lord lives, who has delivered my life from all adversity, 4:10 when someone told me that Saul was dead – even though he thought he was bringing good news ⁷  – 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 ⁸  in his own house, should I not now require his blood from your hands and remove ⁹  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 ¹⁰  near the pool in Hebron. But they took the head of Ish-bosheth ¹¹  and buried it in the tomb of Abner ¹²  in Hebron. ¹³ 

[4:7]  ¹ tn After the concluding disjunctive clause at the end of v. 6, the author now begins a more detailed account of the murder and its aftermath.

[4:7]  ² tn Heb “he”; the referent (Ish-bosheth) has been specified in the translation for clarity.

[4:7]  ³ tn Heb “they struck him down and killed him.” The expression is a verbal hendiadys.

[4:7]  ⁴ tn Heb “and they removed his head.” The Syriac Peshitta and Vulgate lack these words.

[4:7]  ⁵ tc The Lucianic Greek recension lacks the words “his head.”

[4:8]  ⁶ tn Heb “from.”

[4:10]  ⁷ tn Heb “and he was like a bearer of good news in his eyes.”

[4:11]  ⁸ tn Heb “on his bed.”

[4:11]  ⁹ tn See HALOT 146 s.v. II בער. Some derive the verb from a homonym meaning “to burn; to consume.”

[4:12]  ¹⁰ 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]  ¹¹ tc 4QSam^a mistakenly reads “Mephibosheth” here.

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

[4:12]  ¹³ tc Some mss of the LXX lack the phrase “in Hebron.”