We have not watched the television news for years. Not because of any specific objection to the bias which the media routinely shows, but simply because of the horrific scenes which they so often show. There is enough pain in my family’s world already without importing more of it to affect their innocence or their dreams. My children will have more than their fill of it when they are older, sadly.
But while we can switch the television news off, we cannot escape gruesomeness in life, nor does the Bible skirt over it. This passage in 2 Samuel 21 confronts a gruesome event during David’s reign, when covenant curses which Saul brought upon Israel had to be dealt with. This same passage contrasts Saul’s covenant breaking with David’s covenant keeping, and reminds us that our own covenant breaking required a gruesome death too – that of David’s greater son, Jesus, for us.
The events in chapters 21 onwards of 2 Samuel do not follow on chronologically from the previous chapters. Rather, they are events which occurred but which help flesh out and sum up aspects of David’s reign as king over Israel.
The first event is the story of how Saul’s actions brought disaster upon Israel, and the solution required. It is likely that these events occurred in the early years of David’s reign over Israel.
Ominously, “there was a famine in the days of David for three years, year after year” (v.1). While our modern interest in weather prediction and meteorology might deceive us, this was actually a sign of God’s displeasure and indicated they had breached the covenant (Deut. 28:23-24).
David did not know what the issue was, so sought an answer from God, who mercifully answered that “there is bloodguilt on Saul and on his house, because he put the Gibeonites to death” (v.1).
The Gibeonites were Canaanites who escaped death at Israel’s hands in Joshua 9 by tricking Israel. As verse 2 states, Israel swore an oath by God’s name to spare the Gibeonites, but Saul in a spate of pro-Israel fervour had tried to wipe them out anyway (v.2).
Effectively, Saul had trashed God’s reputation; he had breached the covenant by blaspheming God’s name (Ex. 20:7). He had also brought the covenant curses of the pledge sworn by Israel upon it (Josh. 9:16-21). As king, what Saul did, Israel did.
David went to the Gibeonites and asked them what he could do to fix it (v.3). The Gibeonites answered that it was not about money, but blood (v.4). Since Saul could not be put to death, the Gibeonites asked for seven of his sons to be handed over to be hung before God to atone for Saul’s acts (vv.5-6).
While this seems cruel to us, this was not an individual sinning but a representative. In these situations, the descendants sometimes bear the cost (cf. Josh 7).
And bear it they did (vv.8-9). But David was a covenant keeper (more than Saul, anyway), and kept his oath before God to Jonathan to spare his son Mephibosheth (v.7). Others were chosen in Mephibosheth’s place.
I am glossing over what was an awful and gruesome event. We know it was, because the bodies were not buried but left out on display for the carrion eaters. Which is why one of Saul’s concubines went and held a grisly vigil for her sons, chasing away the birds and beasts from their bodies from the beginning of the barley harvest to when God sent rain (v.10).
To show David’s respect for her vigil, David took their bodies and buried them along with Saul and Jonathan’s bodies and buried them together in their home territory (vv.11-14). Because God’s anger was satisfied, and he had sent rain again to the land (vv.10, 14).
While we may turn off the news, we should not turn away from these grisly passages. They remind us that covenant breaking brings a terrible price. The sacrifice of animals at the temple was not clean, like meat at the supermarket. Nor was this. A terrible crime committed by Saul, a gruesome penalty to pay by his descendants.
God has mercifully revealed to us our own covenant breaking too. In Adam, who represented us, we all fell. We are all liable to the covenant curse of death, the wrath of God for breaking his laws.
But God has spared us, like David spared Mephibosheth, by substituting his son Jesus, our covenant keeping king, in our place. The empty cross reminds us that Jesus is risen, and has defeated death. But at Calvary, that cross bore Christ in a gruesome and grisly death to satisfy God’s anger at our covenant breaking.
We gloss over this at our peril. It makes the penalty too light and breezy; sin too easy. But our forgiveness came at a terrible cost. It deserves the same loving vigil which a mother showed her sons, while we await the day for the fullness of God’s covenant blessings to rain down on us once again.
