Wrapping Things Up

2 Samuel 21-22

            My study Bible calls the last four chapters of 2 Samuel an appendix on David’s reign. The first and last incidents recall David dealing with God’s wrath over some misbehavior. The second and fifth recount military deeds. The center two sections focus on David as a psalmist.

            The first incident is a famine because the Lord is unhappy over the treatment of the Gibeonites. (There is no chronological statement here but probably the famine happened before Absalom’s rebellion. Strict chronology is not as important in the ancient near East as it is for us.) The Gibeonites were the people who had tricked Joshua out of conquering them. They had been a non-Israelite people living in Israel for centuries. Saul, in his zeal, tried to destroy them. It’s interesting to me that sometimes the most purely religious motivations, in this case, completing the conquest, have the least God-pleasing results. After all, the Israelites had made a covenant with the Gibeonites. In this case, Saul should have kept his promise rather than choosing his own route to show the Lord how faithful he was. There may be a lesson there for us for those times when our zeal for the Lord leads us to act without mercy or grace.

            The second incident focuses on David’s fighting men and their continued exploits against the Philistines, probably early in David’s reign.

            The third scene is a long psalm that David composes, again presumably early in his reign, focusing on the Lord’s deliverance of David from his enemies, David’s own faithfulness, and the kind of help the Lord gave. The psalm is essentially Psalm 18. Maybe we’ll have a chance to look at it when we read the book of Psalms in a few weeks.