2 Samuel 21: 1-14
Net Spinster
Shipmate
in Kerygmania
A story not likely to show up in the lectionary. Basically the kingdom of David has had three years of famine and "so David sought the face of the Lord. The Lord said, “It is on account of Saul and his blood-stained house; it is because he put the Gibeonites to death.”"
So David goes to the Gibeonites and asks “What shall I do for you? How shall I make atonement so that you will bless the Lord’s inheritance?”
and the Gibeonites ask
“As for the man who destroyed us and plotted against us so that we have been decimated and have no place anywhere in Israel, 6 let seven of his male descendants be given to us to be killed and their bodies exposed before the Lord at Gibeah of Saul—the Lord’s chosen one.”
So "the king took Armoni and Mephibosheth, the two sons of Aiah’s daughter Rizpah, whom she had borne to Saul, together with the five sons of Saul’s daughter Merab,[a] whom she had borne to Adriel son of Barzillai the Meholathite. 9 He handed them over to the Gibeonites, who killed them and exposed their bodies on a hill before the Lord. All seven of them fell together; they were put to death during the first days of the harvest, just as the barley harvest was beginning." [Some manuscripts have Michal instead of Merab {Michal was David's wife}; Rizpah was Saul's concubine and may have become David's concubine as he took Saul's concubines.]
"Rizpah daughter of Aiah took sackcloth and spread it out for herself on a rock. From the beginning of the harvest till the rain poured down from the heavens on the bodies, she did not let the birds touch them by day or the wild animals by night." Note the barley harvest is around April and the rains don't start until late September.
David then gathers the bones of Saul and Jonathan and reburies them in the tomb of Saul's father. He also does something with the bodies exposed though it doesn't explicitly say he buries them. Then the famine ends.
It's a strange story. Do people feel David was right or wrong to kill Saul's sons and grandsons for something they did not do?
So David goes to the Gibeonites and asks “What shall I do for you? How shall I make atonement so that you will bless the Lord’s inheritance?”
and the Gibeonites ask
“As for the man who destroyed us and plotted against us so that we have been decimated and have no place anywhere in Israel, 6 let seven of his male descendants be given to us to be killed and their bodies exposed before the Lord at Gibeah of Saul—the Lord’s chosen one.”
So "the king took Armoni and Mephibosheth, the two sons of Aiah’s daughter Rizpah, whom she had borne to Saul, together with the five sons of Saul’s daughter Merab,[a] whom she had borne to Adriel son of Barzillai the Meholathite. 9 He handed them over to the Gibeonites, who killed them and exposed their bodies on a hill before the Lord. All seven of them fell together; they were put to death during the first days of the harvest, just as the barley harvest was beginning." [Some manuscripts have Michal instead of Merab {Michal was David's wife}; Rizpah was Saul's concubine and may have become David's concubine as he took Saul's concubines.]
"Rizpah daughter of Aiah took sackcloth and spread it out for herself on a rock. From the beginning of the harvest till the rain poured down from the heavens on the bodies, she did not let the birds touch them by day or the wild animals by night." Note the barley harvest is around April and the rains don't start until late September.
David then gathers the bones of Saul and Jonathan and reburies them in the tomb of Saul's father. He also does something with the bodies exposed though it doesn't explicitly say he buries them. Then the famine ends.
It's a strange story. Do people feel David was right or wrong to kill Saul's sons and grandsons for something they did not do?
Comments
The LORD is slow to anger, abounding in love and forgiving sin and rebellion. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation
There are similar passages in Exodus, Deuteronomy and Leviticus.
The Gibeonites are recorded in Joshua 9 as deceiving Joshua and the leaders of Israel into a peace treaty, sworn by the name of the Lord. And, when Joshua learns of the deception he puts honouring his oath above the command of the Lord to destroy all the people of the land. And, so the Gibeonites are spared, and survive in servitude to the people of Israel.
It seems quite reasonable that at some point in the reign of Saul he felt it necessary to demonstrate his zeal, to demonstrate that he's the anointed of the Lord and faithful to God. And, he chose to demonstrate that zeal by finishing off the job of the Conquest by destroying the Gibeonites. What were his intentions in such a demonstration of zeal? Probably it would include trying to bolster his position as king of Israel, and like most kings to secure not only his hold on the throne but also the standing of his family and securing that the throne would pass to his descendants.
The famine recorded here seems to be the verdict of God on that decision - God still seems to consider the leaders of Israel to be bound by the oath sworn by Joshua, and being faithful to that oath being more important than obedience to the command to destroy all the people of Canaan. The blood of those Gibeonites Saul had killed stains his entire family - if the zeal Saul demonstrated was to help secure his dynasty as kings of Israel then his family would gain by the demonstration of zeal, then that sin stains them all.
We don't know the details of the attempt Saul made to destroy the Gibeonites, but maybe we could infer that the specific brutality of killing the seven descendants of Saul and leaving them exposed might reflect the brutal killing of children of Gibeonites without allowing the bodies to be properly buried. It's possible that the penalty reflects the crime, it certainly seems to be written as though it's seen to be appropriate.
Then the story finishes with Rizpah, and her act of repentance in sackcloth watching the fields to keep the birds from the harvest, presumably the first crop to grow after the famine lifts from the land, for months. This seems to close the books, an act of repentance to satisfy the Lord following the judicial execution of the seven to satisfy the Gibeonites.
According to The Bible Project, phrases like “to the third and fourth” is a Hebrew idiom that basically means “as long as it takes” or “as long as it lasts.” The idiomatic meaning here, then, would be that as long as children keep repeating the sins of their parents, they will be punished like their parents.
Compare Deuteronomy 24:16 (which granted is about human justice):
Or Ezekiel 18, which pretty squarely rejects any interpretation of Exodus 35 and related passages that would have God punishing children for their parents’ or grandparents’ sins:
Which isn’t to say that people didn’t continue to believe that children were punished for the sins of their parents, as Jesus referenced when he asked who had sinned—the blind man or his parents. (And then said neither.)
But if The Bible Project is right (and I do tend to trust them on something like this), we’re not talking about polarity with Exodus/Numbers and Ezekiel; we’re looking at consistency. Any apparent inconsistency is the result of our misunderstanding, of reading something literally that the original audience would have understood idiomatically, as a figure of speech. If the idiom explanation is right, we’re dealing with a situation where the original meaning has (literally) been lost in translation.
I want it to be so Nick. But it feels strained. I feel strained by it. It's a very... convenient idiom to stretch over a nasty way of putting things. And the OT and the NT are full of very nasty ways of putting things. The language, the culture, society was suffused with casual and ghastly violence.
Scoring the above with running total:
Exodus 34-5, -1, -1
Numbers, -1, -2
Deuteronomy 24:16, +1, -1
2 Samuel 21: 1-14, -1, -2
Ezekiel 18. +1, -1
the odd one out is Deuteronomy if that was written before 2 Samuel. Nowadays it seems everything was written in or after the Exile!
And I have no trouble with the underlying premise—that (in our case) English speakers who never lived in the ancient Near East might completely miss nuances and idioms of ancient Hebrew, as well as cultural assumptions that the authors would have taken for granted.
That said, I’m aware of rabbis who’ve described the Ezekiel passage as an example of Moses being explicitly “overruled.” Perhaps of note in that claim is that it’s Moses, not God, who’s being overruled.
That Jewish insight is fantastic. Jesus Himself did the same.
I respect the The Bible Project's approach and your take on it, the rabbinical insight (How recent? Not BCE surely?) does ameliorate my feeling inane harmonization.
I'm cautiously encouraged that Jesus was a lot more radical than He let on with regard to the OT, as He was divinely radical in practice as well as oratory. That my take that He had to believe in God the Killer is... false.
Divinely radical in practice as well as oratory, indeed.
Ah, yes, senility strikes again. Ezekiel did overturn Moses. AD rabbis noted it. But no one before? Or was it just assumed by the time of Jesus? So what else was overturned up to Jesus?
Is this really a serious question? Obviously it's a rank injustice and an appalling murder. God alone knows how anyone could ever at any point have thought otherwise, although I'm aware people did. Bizarre.
This is exactly the sort of thing that has me fling the Bible at the wall. There's nothing I can get from this apart from concluding that ancient Israel had a moral sense that was so twisted you could open wine bottles with it.
Some pillock at this point would of course suggest it might be my moral code that's twisted but I'm buggered if I'm going to have it suggested that in the matter of killing innocent people it's my rejection of it that's wrong-headed so I suggest they not waste their time. Ditto the similar line that someone can somehow deserve punishment for "inherited guilt".
And the crap about God lifting a famine because he was now happy that people had been brutally murdered for having the wrong father is just that.
It appears here that most assume Saul's sons were innocent but we don't know that, as Ezekiel 18:17 says.........He will not die for his father’s sin; he will surely live. With this truth in mind perhaps there was bloodguilt on Saul's house because the sons were involved in the attempted genocide of the Gibeonites in some way.
As for the morality of the thing--well, yeah, it's a mess, and the blame can be spread around pretty far. The Gibeonites appear to have come up with the punishment, so that's on them, but David carried it out, so that's on him, and so on and so forth. And of course Saul never should have broken covenant to start with. I don't think this is in here because we're supposed to learn some grand moralizing moral from it, but rather because it's just a thing that happened. And things-that-happen tend to be morally messy.
Again, God is the bastard behind it all. In the 'moral' mind of the story tellers. That Jesus never explicitly refuted.
This is also complicated by the fact that we don't know for sure where chapter 21 fits in to the chronology. If we take the whole thing as being in chronological order (which I admit I did to start with), then certainly Saul was likely to have great-grandchildren by the time of the Gibeonite vengeance. Heck, I suspect David did.
But the ancients did not always write everything in chronological order, and chapter 21 in particular could be a floater--something that the composer decided to throw in as an "oh, and there's this, too"--or because thematically he thought it fit better at this point.
Which is all to say that I can't guarantee you Saul had adult grandchildren at the time of the Gibeonite thing, but I think it highly likely.
Is anyone clear on exactly how long Saul reigned? I gather there's some confusion in the text. By the sheer number of things that happened between his accession and death, I'd take it for about 20 years. Hard to fit it all in otherwise.
1 Samuel 13:1 has numbers for Saul's reign but that verse has a lot of variants.
I am. Here. Some progress had been made in that the degree of enlightenment in the minds of the Bible's contributors may be more exponential in the character of Jesus than appears. If 2 Samuel 21: 1-14 were in the Bamboo Annals or the Mahabharat no Westerner would clothe it in any religious justification as Jews and Christians do. As God in Himself is nothing like the God of that text and there is no allegory in it whatsoever, how do we get to the best case God of Jesus' indirect intent? What was the intent of the contributors of that text? Whitewashing Don David?
In this thread there was a thread of hope that Sophia was at work in the minds of the writers of the first testament (thanks @Crœsos), that the God we see most in Christ is visible one way or another. I see no evidence for that here. And Jesus and Paul never repudiated it. As in never. Their discretion was total.
We cannot get to God in Christ from the first testament. Let alone the best case God we have now.
There seem to be two points at issue. 1. should children (grandchildren etc) pay for the sins of the father? 2. is this particular penalty appropriate?
1. As I said, even if the children and their children did not directly participate in the genocide against the Gibeonites (or even if they weren't born at the time, which for the youngest is possible) the actions of Saul in attempting genocide were in part at least to bolster his position as king, showing zeal for the Lord (albeit misplaced zeal), and to secure his dynasty. The aim was to benefit his children, those very children we're talking about.
In contemporary society we're facing questions which have some similarities. An example could be that a bit over 200 years ago people in various cities in the UK made fortunes shipping people from Africa to the Americas, slaves to work plantations. Others made fortunes trading the sugar, tobacco and cotton from those plantations, also profiting from slavery. That wealth paid for grand buildings in their home towns, filtered down to middle classes and even now there are families who have wealth that can be traced right back to those times and probably millions of people who to some extent are living better because of the wealth of the country that directly or indirectly came from the slave trade. We're living with the fallout of that genocide through ongoing racism and injustice. One of the questions that regularly comes up is reparations - should people today who still to an extent benefit from the sins of ancestors pay to try and repair the ongoing injustices experienced by descendants of slaves and the nations they were taken from? It's a question that is regularly discussed with very few people summarily dismissing it as being unfair because we weren't directly involved in those crimes, we weren't even born then.
For many people it's quite reasonable that those who benefit from crime should pay in some way even if they themselves were totally uninvolved in that, even when the original criminals are long dead. Is it automatically the case that because these descendants of Saul were innocent of his sin that therefore they shouldn't face a penalty for them? Even if the benefits Saul hoped for didn't materialise (his kingship wasn't secured, much less did he establish a dynasty in which his sons would follow him as king and other leaders of the nation with all the wealth and power that comes with that).
2. The punishment inflicted by the Gibeonites seems severe, but it wasn't that long ago that our own judicial systems would have handed out a death penalty for murder, and not that much further back when these executions would have been in public. Would we have the same complaint if Saul had been alive and he was the one put to death? If we accept that execution was considered an appropriate punishment in that culture, why would we think it particularly problematic in this case? Is it just because we're rejecting the concept of any form of descendants participating in the sin of their ancestors (see point above)?
For example, it is one thing to consider reparations for the damage done to black people by slavery. It would be something else to sentence every white person in the USA and UK to the prison term we would consider reasonable for participating in the slave trade today.
Or more directly relevant to the case in hand: "Hi. We've come to take you and your sons to jail for a 30 year armed robbery stretch because your grandfather robbed a bank in 1931 and some of the money wasn't recovered and ultimately financed your house purchase"
That really won't wash. It's incredible anyone is trying to justify it. I'm actually quite genuinely shocked that anyone would.
It's certainly not universal that those who are personally innocent should always avoid any consequences of crimes committed by ancestors. Certainly, the consequences of crime almost always extend down the generations of those who were the victims - children growing up without parents who were murdered, generations of people without the benefits of property that had been stolen or destroyed.
Moreover, what most people would consider reasonable in the case e.g. of reperations is the re-levelling of an unjustly sloping playing field. It is, if you will, in English Law terms very much in the civil rather than criminal area.
There's a big difference between "I want back what your father stole from me" and "I want you to do five years for stealing it"
Quite.
While you're 'ere, I'd like to address another thing:
This is exactly what people like Martin and I are trying to do. Appalled by what we find in a face value reading of various parts of the Bible, we are trying, painfully, with great difficulty, (and I might say against considerable opposition from voices which apparently want God to be a Killer, or cannot see why we'd have a problem with that, or I don't know what; certainly some people get very angry with us for having a problem with it) trying to find a vision of God that makes the words - merciful, slow to anger, loving, full of compassion and all that - fit the actions. Which in the plain readings, they don't.
Would that "working it out between us and God" were as simply done as it is simply spoken. It isn't.
I can't speak for Martin, but this disconnect between words of love, forgiveness and compassion on the one hand and acts that speak of hatred, vicious overkill under the name of judgement and vindictive smouldering vengeance from the apparent homicidal maniac in the Bible on the other fucking hurts.
If it's all over the threads, it's because it's all over the Scriptures.
My apologies again Lamb Chopped, my error appears to be 'which you seemed turn to that they were culpable being of age' with regard to Saul's grandchildren. I'm not aware of any other views I reference to yourself, I'm sure you'll let me know.