King James Version · The united kingdom
2 Samuel 21
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Then there was a in the days of three years, year after year; and enquired of . And answered, It is for , and for his bloody house, because he slew the Gibeonites. And the king called the Gibeonites, and said unto them; (now the Gibeonites were not of the , but of of the ; and the had unto them: and sought to them in his to the and Judah.) Wherefore said unto the Gibeonites, What shall I do for you? and wherewith shall I make the atonement, that ye may the of ? And the Gibeonites said unto him, We will have no silver nor gold of , nor of his house; neither for us shalt thou kill any man in Israel. And he said, What ye shall say, that will I do for you. And they answered the king, The man that consumed us, and that devised against us that we should be destroyed from remaining in any of the coasts of Israel, Let seven men of his sons be unto us, and we will hang them up unto in of , whom did choose. And the king said, I will give them. But the king spared , the son of the son of , because of ’s that was between them, between and the son of . But the king took the two sons of the daughter of , whom she unto , Armoni and ; and the five sons of the daughter of , whom she brought up for Adriel the son of the Meholathite: And he them into the hands of the Gibeonites, and they hanged them in the hill before : and they fell all seven together, and were put to in the days of harvest, in the first days, of barley harvest. And the daughter of took , and spread it for her upon , of harvest until water dropped upon them out of , and suffered neither the birds of the air to rest on them by day, nor the of the field by night. And it was told what the daughter of , the of , had done. And went and took the bones of and the bones of his son from the men of , which had stolen them from the street of , where the had hanged them, when the had slain in Gilboa: 13And he brought up from thence the bones of and the bones of his son; and they gathered the bones of them that were hanged. And the bones of and his son buried they in the country of in Zelah, in the of his : and they performed all that the king commanded. And after that was intreated for the land. Moreover the had yet war again with Israel; and went down, and his servants with him, and fought against the : and waxed faint. And Ishbi–benob, which was of the sons of the giant, the weight of whose spear weighed three hundred of brass in weight, he being girded with a new , thought to have slain . But the son of succoured him, and smote the , and killed him. Then the men of sware unto him, saying, Thou shalt go no more out with us to battle, that thou quench not of Israel. And it came to pass after this, that there was again a battle with the at Gob: then Sibbechai the slew Saph, which was of the sons of the giant. And there was again a battle in Gob with the , where the son of Jaare–oregim, a Beth–lehemite, slew the brother of the , the of whose spear was like a weaver’s beam. And there was yet a battle in , where was a man of great stature, that had on every hand six fingers, and on every foot six toes, four and twenty in number; and he also was born to the giant. And when he defied Israel, the son of Shimea the brother of slew him. These four were born to the giant in , and fell by the hand of , and by the hand of his servants.
The 1611 translation, public domain. Its original printing included the Apocrypha, which is why the deuterocanonical books can be read here. Notes and cards are EKLI’s own.
The world at this moment · The united kingdom, 1050 BC to 931 BC ›
Saul, David, and Solomon. A rare window when both Egypt and Mesopotamia are weak, which is how a small kingdom in the corridor between them could briefly become a regional power.
- The power vacuum
- This is the whole political explanation for the united kingdom. Egypt is fragmented, Assyria is recovering but still local, the Hittites are gone, and nobody is in a position to object to a strong state in the corridor. It lasts about a century, and Israel's golden age fits exactly inside it.
- Phoenicia
- Tyre under Hiram is the commercial power of the coast, and supplies the cedar, the craftsmen, and the shipping for Solomon's building programme. The alliance is trade, not charity: Israel had grain and a land route, Tyre had timber and ships.
- Egypt
- Weak enough that a pharaoh gives a daughter in marriage to an Israelite king, which is the opposite of Egyptian practice in stronger centuries. Late in the era it recovers under a new house, and Shishak will invade within five years of Solomon's death.
- Further afield
- Greece is still in its dark age but beginning to recover, and will adopt the Phoenician alphabet within a century or two. Carthage is founded by settlers from Tyre by tradition in 814 BC. In the Americas the Olmec centre shifts to La Venta.