2 Samuel 18 Bible study: My son, my son

"David counted the people who were with him, and set captains of thousands and captains of hundreds over them" (18:1). He sent them out in three parts, under Joab, under "Abishai the son of Zeruiah, Joab’s brother", and under "Ittai the Gittite" (18:2). Then he said, "I will also surely go out with you myself" (18:2). The people wouldn't have it: "You shall not go out, for if we flee away, they will not care for us, neither if half of us die, will they care for us. But you are worth ten thousand of us" (18:3). They ask him instead to be "ready to help us out of the city" (18:3). The king gives way, "I will do what seems best to you" (18:4), and "The king stood beside the gate, and all the people went out by hundreds and by thousands" (18:4). In the chapter before, Ahithophel's plan had turned on the king too: "I will strike the king only" (17:2). The book doesn't comment on the two; they are set side by side here. Much later David's men will swear to him, "Don’t go out with us to battle any more, so that you don’t quench the lamp of Israel" (21:17).

2 Samuel 18:33→leads toRomans 5:8

David cried over his son, "I wish I had died instead of you, Absalom, my son, my son!" (18:33). Paul writes, "For one will hardly die for a righteous man. Yet perhaps for a good person someone would even dare to die. But God commends his own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us" (Romans 5:7-8). No New Testament passage cites 2 Samuel 18, and Paul doesn't have it in view, so setting the two side by side is a reading, and neither reading makes David or Absalom a picture of anyone. Some set them together for the difference: a father wished he had died in his son's place and could not, and Paul says Christ did die, "while we were yet sinners" (Romans 5:8). Others read David's words only as a grieving father's cry, spoken when Absalom was already dead (18:33), over a son who had risen against him (15:10, 18:31-32), and set nothing beside them; the chapter itself makes nothing more of them.

נַעַרna'arsay NA-ar

Brown-Driver-Briggs gives two senses: "boy, lad, youth" and "servant, retainer". Until 18:33 the king speaks of Absalom by no other title. "Deal gently for my sake with the young man Absalom" (18:5), and to each runner, "Is it well with the young man Absalom?" (18:29, 18:32). The man who wouldn't strike Absalom repeats the king's words, "Beware that no one touch the young man Absalom" (18:12), and the Cushite answers the king with the same word: "be as that young man is" (18:32). The ten "who bore Joab’s armor" (18:15) are ne'arim, young men, the same word in the plural. The king had spoken of Absalom this way before, when he told Joab, "bring the young man Absalom back" (14:21).