2 Samuel: The King Who Took What He Wanted

At a Glance

Who wrote it: Unknown. Chapters 9 to 20, which continue into 1 Kings 1 and 2, are often called the Court History of David. It is some of the finest storytelling in the ancient world.

When: It is set in the 1000s BC and was edited into its present form in the 600s and 500s BC. In my day it was the second half of the scroll of Samuel.

Where it fits: David’s forty years as king, around 1000 BC (2 Samuel 5:4). It begins with the news of Saul’s death and ends late in David’s reign. His death and Solomon’s rise follow in 1 Kings 1 and 2.

Where I quote it: Not directly. But the title Son of David comes from the promise in 2 Samuel 7, and I was called by it (Mark 10:47) and argued about it (Mark 12:35–37).

If you only read three chapters: 2 Samuel 7, 2 Samuel 11 and 2 Samuel 12.

Words to Know

House — in this book, both a building and a dynasty. David wants to build God a house. God promises to build David a house.

Son of David — the title for the king my people hoped would come from David’s line.

Nathan — the prophet who told David the truth to his face.

Hittite — a foreigner. Uriah, the man David had killed, was one.

The Book in Brief

2 Samuel is the story of David as king.

In chapter 1, a messenger brings David the news that Saul and Jonathan are dead, and David sings a lament for them. In chapters 2 to 4, David is made king of Judah at Hebron, while Saul’s son Ishbosheth rules the other tribes. War drags on between the two royal houses until Saul’s general Abner is murdered, and then Ishbosheth.

In chapter 5, all the tribes make David king. He captures Jerusalem and makes it his capital. In chapter 6 he brings the ark of the covenant there, dancing before it. In chapter 7 he wants to build God a temple, and God, through the prophet Nathan, promises David a dynasty instead. Chapters 8 to 10 tell of his wars and victories, and of his kindness to Jonathan’s lame son, Mephibosheth.

Chapters 11 and 12 are the turning point. David takes Bathsheba, another man’s wife, and has her husband Uriah killed. Nathan confronts him with a parable, and David confesses. The child of that union dies. Bathsheba later bears Solomon.

From then on, trouble fills David’s house. In chapters 13 to 19, his son Amnon rapes his half-sister Tamar, and her brother Absalom kills Amnon and flees. Absalom comes back, wins the people’s hearts and seizes the throne, and David flees Jerusalem. In the battle that follows Absalom is killed, and David weeps for him. In chapter 20, a man named Sheba leads another revolt. It ends when a wise woman of the town where he is trapped has his head thrown over the wall.

Chapters 21 to 24 gather further stories, a list of David’s warriors and two of his poems. The book ends with David counting his fighting men, a plague striking the people, and David buying a threshing floor and building an altar where the plague stopped.

Here is something remarkable about my people’s history. Their greatest king was David. And the book that tells his story tells you that he committed adultery, arranged a murder to cover it up, and lost control of his own family. Then it tells you that one of his sons raped his daughter, and another son killed him for it.

Kings in other countries had their histories carved in stone, and every word was praise. My people kept a history of their king that reads like a confession.

God promises a house

When David is settled in Jerusalem, he looks around his palace and feels ashamed. He lives in a house of cedar, and God lives in a tent. He wants to build God a temple.

God sends the prophet Nathan with an answer that turns the offer upside down. David will not build God a house. God will build David a house, a dynasty. I will set up your offspring after you … I will be his father, and he will be my son … Your house and your kingdom will be made sure forever before you (2 Samuel 7:12–16).

That promise is where the hope for a Son of David comes from. In my day, when David’s line had not ruled for centuries, people still prayed for God to raise up a son of David to drive out the foreigners and rule from Jerusalem.¹

When the blind beggar Bartimaeus shouted at me on the road out of Jericho, that was what he called me: Jesus, you son of David, have mercy on me! (Mark 10:47).

But I also asked a question about that title in the Temple. If the Messiah is David’s son, why does David, in the Psalms, call him my Lord? (Mark 12:35–37). I was asking people what kind of king they were expecting. Another David, with an army? Or something David himself would bow to?

Go deeperThe house of David in stone

For a long time nothing outside the Bible mentioned David at all, and some scholars began to doubt that he had ever lived.

In July 1993, at Tel Dan in the far north of Israel, a member of the archaeologist Avraham Biran’s team noticed a broken slab of black basalt that had been reused as a building stone. It carried lines of writing in Aramaic, the language of Aram, Israel’s neighbor to the north. Two more pieces turned up in 1994. Together they are part of a victory monument from the 800s BC. The name of the king who set it up does not survive, but most scholars think he was Hazael of Damascus, a king the Bible knows well (2 Kings 8:7–15). He boasts that he killed a king of Israel and a king of the “house of David.”²

That phrase is the first widely accepted mention of David outside the Bible. It was written by an enemy, about a hundred and fifty years after David’s time, and it shows that the kings of Judah were known abroad as the house of David, the very dynasty God promises in 2 Samuel 7. A few scholars have read the words differently, as the name of a place or a title of a god. Most accept the plain reading.²

If the broken names of the two kings are filled in as the first editors proposed, they are Joram of Israel and Ahaziah of Judah. The Bible says that both were killed by Jehu, an Israelite commander who seized the throne (2 Kings 9:24, 27). The stone gives the credit to the king of Damascus, and scholars still debate how the two accounts fit together.

The stone does not tell you what David did. It does tell you that within a few generations, foreign kings knew his family by his name.

The roof

2 Samuel 11 begins with a verse that tells you everything. At the return of the year, at the time when kings go out … But David stayed at Jerusalem.

The king was supposed to be with his army. He stayed home. One evening he walks on his roof and sees a woman bathing. He asks who she is. He is told she is Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite, one of his soldiers, who is away at the war. David sends for her and takes her. She becomes pregnant.

The king of Israel could have any woman he wanted. That is what Samuel had warned about.

The soldier who would not go home

David calls Uriah back from the front and tells him to go home and rest, so that the baby will seem to be his.

Uriah will not go. The ark, Israel, and Judah, are staying in tents; and my lord Joab and the servants of my lord, are encamped in the open field. Shall I then go into my house to eat and to drink, and to lie with my wife? (2 Samuel 11:11).

He sleeps at the palace door. David gets him drunk, and he still will not go home.

So David writes a letter to his general, telling him to put Uriah in the front of the hardest fighting and pull back, so that Uriah will be killed. Then David gives the letter to Uriah to carry (2 Samuel 11:14–15).

Uriah carried his own death sentence to the front, and he never opened it. The most faithful man in this chapter is the foreigner. The king is the criminal.

When Matthew lists my ancestors, he does not use Bathsheba’s name. He writes that David became the father of Solomon by her who had been Uriah’s wife (Matthew 1:6). He made sure the crime stayed in my family tree.

You are the man

Then the prophet Nathan comes to David with a story.

There were two men in a city, one rich and one poor. The rich man had many flocks. The poor man had one little ewe lamb, which he raised with his children. It ate from his plate and slept in his arms like a daughter. When a traveler came to the rich man, he did not want to use one of his own animals, so he took the poor man’s lamb and cooked it for his guest (2 Samuel 12:1–4).

David is furious. The man who has done this deserves to die!

And Nathan says, You are the man (2 Samuel 12:7).

That is how a parable works. You tell a story about someone else. The listener judges the man in the story. Then he discovers the man is himself.

I told stories the same way. When the chief priests heard my story about the tenants who killed the owner’s son, Mark says they perceived that he spoke the parable against them (Mark 12:12). Nathan taught my people how to tell a king the truth.

Go deeperHow later readers handled David and Bathsheba

Not everyone who came after was willing to leave this story as it stands.

When Chronicles retells David’s reign, centuries later, it follows Samuel closely in these chapters, up to the sentence But David stayed at Jerusalem (1 Chronicles 20:1). Then it jumps straight to the capture of the Ammonite city of Rabbah. Bathsheba, Uriah, Nathan’s parable and everything that went wrong in David’s house afterward are simply not there.

The book of Psalms went the other way. Psalm 51 begins, Have mercy on me, God, according to your loving kindness (Psalm 51:1), and its heading places it at the moment Nathan came to David after he had gone in to Bathsheba. Most scholars think headings like this one were added to the psalms later, by editors who matched poems to moments in David’s life.³ But because of it, for centuries people who had done wrong have learned to pray in David’s words.

Some of the rabbis tried to clear him. The Talmud records a teacher who said that anyone who says David sinned is simply mistaken. It explains that every man who went to war for David gave his wife a certificate of divorce before he left, so that in law Bathsheba was already divorced. And Uriah, it says, deserved to die as a rebel, because in front of the king he called Joab my lord (2 Samuel 11:11).⁴

The book of Samuel itself will not let David off. At the end of the chapter it says, But the thing that David had done displeased the LORD (2 Samuel 11:27).

What follows

Nathan tells David that the sword will never leave his house (2 Samuel 12:10). Then the book shows you, chapter after chapter.

David’s son Amnon rapes his half-sister Tamar, and David does nothing (2 Samuel 13:1–21). Her brother Absalom murders Amnon. Absalom leads a revolt against his father and drives him out of Jerusalem. David flees across the Mount of Olives, weeping, barefoot, with his head covered (2 Samuel 15:30).

On the night I was arrested, I went out to that same hill.

In the battle, Absalom’s head catches in an oak, and David’s general kills him as he hangs there (2 Samuel 18:9–15). And David, the king who had a man killed for his own convenience, breaks down: My son Absalom! My son, my son Absalom! I wish I had died for you (2 Samuel 18:33).

Go deeperThe story of who would sit on David’s throne

In 1926 a German scholar, Leonhard Rost, argued that 2 Samuel 9 to 20, together with 1 Kings 1 and 2, had once been a single work by one writer. Its question, he said, is the one asked at the end, when David is old and dying: who will sit on the throne of my lord the king after him (1 Kings 1:20)? Amnon, the eldest son, is killed. Absalom is killed. Adonijah tries to take the throne and fails. The son who sits on it in the end is Solomon, the son of Bathsheba. Rost thought the work was written early in Solomon’s reign, to show that his rule was legitimate.⁵

In 1944 Gerhard von Rad went further and called it the beginning of true history writing in Israel. There are no miracles in it. God almost never steps onto the stage. Only now and then does the narrator tell you quietly what God thought, as when he says of the newborn Solomon, The LORD loved him (2 Samuel 12:24), or that the LORD had ordained to defeat the good counsel of Ahithophel (2 Samuel 17:14). The rest is people making choices.⁶

Since then, scholars have argued about nearly every part of this. Some doubt that these chapters were ever a separate book. Some read them not as praise of Solomon at all, since they show a king who takes a woman, has her husband killed and cannot rule his own sons. John Van Seters has argued that the most critical stories about David were written much later, after the fall of Jerusalem, by someone who saw David as a typical eastern despot.⁷

What nobody disputes is the quality of the writing. Whoever wrote these chapters lets you watch a king from very close, and does not look away.

The census

At the very end of the book, David orders a census of his fighting men. The book says, Again the LORD’s anger burned against Israel, and he moved David against them (2 Samuel 24:1). A plague follows.

When Chronicles tells the same story centuries later, it changes who moved David. It says, Satan stood up against Israel, and moved David (1 Chronicles 21:1). I will come back to that in Chronicles. It is one of the clearest windows you have into how my people’s ideas about evil changed over time.

Check It Yourself

Look up: 2 Samuel 12:1–7.

You will find: the parable of the poor man’s lamb, and the moment the prophet tells the king he is the man in the story.

Then read Matthew 1:6. See how Matthew names Bathsheba.

The Short Version

• God promises David a “house,” a dynasty, and that promise is where the hope for a Son of David comes from.
• David takes Bathsheba and has her husband Uriah, a faithful foreigner, killed.
• The prophet Nathan tells David a parable and says “You are the man.” That is how a parable works.
• The rest of the book shows the sword in David’s house: rape, murder and civil war among his children.
• My people kept a history of their greatest king that reads like a confession.