Theopedia

2 Samuel

And your house and your kingdom shall be made sure forever before you. Your throne shall be established forever.

— 2 Samuel 7:16

Overview

2 Samuel continues the account begun in 1 Samuel, narrating David’s reign, first over Judah alone at Hebron and then over all Israel at Jerusalem, and the LORD’s covenant to establish David’s throne forever.1 1 and 2 Samuel originally formed a single, continuous work; later Greek translators divided the scroll in two, closing the first book at Saul’s death and opening the second with David’s accession.1 Together the two books narrate Samuel’s judgeship, Saul’s rise and fall, and David’s reign, and are counted among the Former Prophets in the Hebrew canon.1

Timeline

  • David mourns Saul and Jonathan: On hearing of their deaths, David executes the Amalekite who claims to have killed Saul and laments both Saul and his friend Jonathan in a formal dirge (2 Sam. 1).
  • David becomes king over Judah; war with Ishbosheth: David is anointed king at Hebron over Judah alone, while Saul’s son Ishbosheth reigns over the rest of Israel until his assassination (2 Sam. 2-4).
  • David anointed king over all Israel: All Israel’s tribes come to Hebron to anoint David king; he captures Jerusalem from the Jebusites and makes it his capital (2 Sam. 5).
  • The ark brought to Jerusalem: David brings the ark to Jerusalem with celebration; Uzzah dies for touching it, and David later dances before the LORD as it enters the city (2 Sam. 6).
  • The Davidic covenant: David’s desire to build the LORD a house is met instead with God’s promise, through Nathan, of an eternal house, throne, and kingdom for David’s line (2 Sam. 7).
  • David’s victories extend the kingdom: David subdues the Philistines, Moab, Ammon, Aram, and Edom, and shows kindness to Jonathan’s crippled son Mephibosheth for his father’s sake (2 Sam. 8-10).
  • David’s adultery and Uriah’s murder: David commits adultery with Bathsheba, wife of his soldier Uriah, then arranges Uriah’s death in battle to conceal her pregnancy (2 Sam. 11).
  • Nathan’s rebuke and David’s confession: The prophet Nathan confronts David with a parable, “You are the man”; David confesses his sin, and the LORD forgives but decrees consequences for his house (2 Sam. 12).
  • Amnon’s crime and Absalom’s revenge: David’s son Amnon rapes his half-sister Tamar; her full brother Absalom waits two years, then has Amnon murdered and flees into exile (2 Sam. 13).
  • Absalom’s rebellion and death: Absalom conspires against his father and seizes Jerusalem; David’s forces defeat him in the forest of Ephraim, where Joab kills him against David’s orders (2 Sam. 15-18).
  • David restored; Sheba’s revolt: David returns to Jerusalem as king, but a Benjamite named Sheba leads a fresh revolt, put down when Joab besieges him at Abel of Beth-maacah (2 Sam. 19-20).
  • David’s census and its plague: David orders a sinful census of Israel’s fighting men; a plague follows until David buys a threshing floor and offers sacrifice, staying the LORD’s judgment (2 Sam. 24).

Author and Date

Like 1 Samuel, 2 Samuel does not name its own author, and no settled tradition in the church identifies one.2 The narrative gives the full length of David’s reign (2 Sam. 5:4-5), implying a vantage point after its close, yet passes over his death in silence, a gap some attribute to the material being taken up instead at the opening of 1 Kings.3 Beyond this, the text does not permit a more exact date or a named final author.

Historical and Literary Context

2 Samuel narrates the height of David’s outward strength as king over a united Israel, delivered from the surrounding nations that had long oppressed it under the judges and under Saul.4 David and his successors were true civil and military rulers in an earthly sense, but their headship over the LORD’s people also foreshadowed the higher headship of the Messiah who was promised, so that the kingly office established in 1 Samuel served the LORD’s redemptive purposes for Israel from the start rather than standing apart from them.5

Structure

2 Samuel falls into several movements, following the narrative’s own sequence:3

  • David’s rise to full kingship (chs. 1-5): David mourns Saul and Jonathan, is anointed king over Judah at Hebron, and, after the war between his house and Saul’s house ends with Ishbosheth’s death, is anointed king over all Israel and takes Jerusalem as his capital.
  • The Davidic covenant (ch. 7): David’s desire to build a house for the LORD is met instead with God’s promise, through the prophet Nathan, to build David a house: an offspring, a throne, and a kingdom established forever (2 Sam. 7:12-16).
  • David’s sin and its consequences (chs. 8-20): military victories extend the kingdom (ch. 8), but David’s adultery with Bathsheba and his arranged killing of her husband Uriah (ch. 11) bring chastisement on his own household, traced through Amnon’s rape of Tamar, Absalom’s killing of Amnon, Absalom’s rebellion, and civil war.3
  • Closing appendices (chs. 21-24): a concluding, non-chronological collection gathers a famine and its resolution, lists of David’s mighty men and their exploits, David’s psalm of praise and last words, and his sinful census of the people and its plague.

Major Themes

The Davidic covenant and its messianic significance

In 2 Samuel 7 God promises David an offspring who will build God’s house, whose kingdom God will establish forever, and to whom God will be a father (2 Sam. 7:12-14, 16). Scripture again presents this promised son as one who must obey where Adam and Israel had failed, with the king’s own obedience bound up in God’s unconditional promise to his line.6 Later Old Testament prophecy builds directly on this promise: 2 Samuel 7:16’s promise of an eternal kingdom underlies Isaiah’s announcement of a Davidic king whose reign never ends (Isa. 9:6-7; 11:1-10).7 The New Testament identifies Jesus Christ as the fulfillment of this covenant, the Messiah descended from David whose throne is established forever.

Sin’s consequences even for a forgiven king

David’s adultery with Bathsheba and his killing of Uriah (2 Sam. 11) are followed by his confession and pardon (2 Sam. 12:13), but not by an escape from temporal consequence: the sword does not depart from his house, and the narrative that follows traces incest, fratricide, and rebellion within his own family.3 Rolf Rendtorff observes that across these chapters, “hardly anything is evident of the divine blessing that was spoken of in the prophecy of Nathan,” even though the covenant promise itself stood unbroken.8 Forgiveness under the covenant does not annul the consequences sin brings on a household, even a royal one.

God’s sovereign faithfulness to his promises

Despite David’s own failures and the turmoil within his house, God’s promise to establish David’s throne forever does not depend on David’s own perfect obedience but on God’s unconditional word, later worked out through an obedient son of David’s own line.9 The kingdom given through David advances God’s purposes for his people in continuity with his covenant with Abraham, extending land and blessing further toward their eventual fulfillment.10

Canonicity

1 and 2 Samuel were originally a single book in the Hebrew canon. The division into two books was introduced by the Greek Septuagint translators as a matter of convenience, closing the first book with Saul’s death and opening the second with David’s accession, was carried into the Latin Vulgate, and was later adopted into printed Hebrew Bibles.1

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Elijah Porter Barrows, Companion to the Bible (New York: American Tract Society, 1867), 249. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  2. Barrows, 251-52. ↩

  3. Barrows, 251. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  4. Barrows, 250. ↩

  5. Barrows, 249-50. ↩

  6. Micah John McCormick, “Messiah’s Obedience for Eternal Life Foreshadowed,” in “The Active Obedience of Jesus Christ” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2010), 199. ↩

  7. Oren Rhea Martin, “The Land Promise in God’s Redemptive Plan: Part 1, The Old Testament,” in “Bound for the Kingdom: The Land Promise in God’s Redemptive Plan” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2013), 172: quoting Paul House, “In 2 Samuel 7:16 the Lord’s initial promise to David includes an eternal kingdom. Isaiah 9:6-7 and 11:1-10 claim that the Davidic king will rule endlessly over a dominion that is free from strife.” ↩

  8. Rolf Rendtorff, The Canonical Hebrew Bible: A Theology of the Old Testament, trans. David E. Orton (Leiden: Deo Publishing, 2005), 563, quoted in Martin, 172. ↩

  9. McCormick, 198. ↩

  10. Martin, 171. ↩