: Sunday Sermonette: Not all is fair it seems in war

Chapter four starts off with some factoids about the ancestry of a couple of minor characters that seem irrelevant to us. The Tanakh is very interested in genealogy as clan and tribe are the organizing principle of the society. Then there is an interpolated bit about Jonathan's son Mephibosheth which is a complete non-sequitur. The translators have put it in parentheses. Then we get the murder of Ish-Bosheth, which the perpetrators think will please David as David has been at war with him. On the contrary, David has them killed.

David kills people all the time, by the thousands. It is perfectly fine for him to do that if they are not Israelites, (uncircumcised, in the term commonly used in this book); and he can kill Israelites if there is a civil war. But it was not okay for the Amelekite to kill Saul, even though Saul had asked him to and Saul had spent the past few years trying to kill David; and it not okay for these guys to kill Ish-Bosheth even though David and Ish had their soldiers trying to kill each other in the largest numbers possible. So the one thing you can't do is kill an Israelite king, a point which no doubt pleased Josiah who was the sponsor of this literary endeavor.

4 When Ish-Bosheth son of Saul heard that Abner had died in Hebron, he lost courage, and all Israel became alarmed. ² Now Saul’s son had two men who were leaders of raiding bands. One was named Baanah and the other Rekab; they were sons of Rimmon the Beerothite from the tribe of Benjamin—Beeroth is considered part of Benjamin, ³ because the people of Beeroth fled to Gittaim and have resided there as foreigners to this day.

⁴ (Jonathan son of Saul had a son who was lame in both feet. He was five years old when the news about Saul and Jonathan came from Jezreel. His nurse picked him up and fled, but as she hurried to leave, he fell and became disabled. His name was Mephibosheth.)

⁵ Now Rekab and Baanah, the sons of Rimmon the Beerothite, set out for the house of Ish-Bosheth, and they arrived there in the heat of the day while he was taking his noonday rest. ⁶ They went into the inner part of the house as if to get some wheat, and they stabbed him in the stomach. Then Rekab and his brother Baanah slipped away.

⁷ They had gone into the house while he was lying on the bed in his bedroom. After they stabbed and killed him, they cut off his head. Taking it with them, they traveled all night by way of the Arabah. ⁸ They brought the head of Ish-Bosheth to David at Hebron and said to the king, “Here is the head of Ish-Bosheth son of Saul, your enemy, who tried to kill you. This day the Lord has avenged my lord the king against Saul and his offspring.”

⁹ David answered Rekab and his brother Baanah, the sons of Rimmon the Beerothite, “As surely as the Lord lives, who has delivered me out of every trouble, ¹⁰ when someone told me, ‘Saul is dead,’ and thought he was bringing good news, I seized him and put him to death in Ziklag. That was the reward I gave him for his news! ¹¹ How much more—when wicked men have killed an innocent man in his own house and on his own bed—should I not now demand his blood from your hand and rid the earth of you!”

¹² So David gave an order to his men, and they killed them. They cut off their hands and feet and hung the bodies by the pool in Hebron. But they took the head of Ish-Bosheth and buried it in Abner’s tomb at Hebron.