‘The Sword Will Never Depart’: 2 Sam 5–12

Abstract In this chapter, David’s killing of Uriah and the divine response to it are explored. When David makes Uriah’s wife pregnant and cannot persuade him to sleep with her, he orders Joab to contrive Uriah’s death in battle with the Ammonites. Instead of David being angry at the collateral deaths of his servants required by Joab’s adjustment of the plan to kill Uriah, David callously and disingenuously dismisses these as the inevitable cost of warfare. When confronted by Nathan with a parable, David hears it as an indictment of Saul’s taking away of Michal from him. However, the oracle which follows makes clear that while David has successfully avoided ‘bloods’ per se by using the ‘sword’ of warfare with the Ammonites rather than his own sword to kill Uriah, his active contrivance of Uriah’s death has invited divine judgement. The LORD strikes down David’s son, promises to raise up evil from David’s own house, and also inflicts upon David’s house the curse of ‘the sword forever’ (2 Sam 12:10). To underline the message that innocent blood matters, even when ‘bloods’ have been avoided, the LORD promises David consequences strikingly similar to those David himself invoked upon Joab for killing Abner (2 Sam 3). Crucially, however, the LORD’s additional requirement that David’s child must die in his stead, suggests that because David has merely cursed Joab rather than executed him, David’s house still remains at risk from the unremedied ‘bloods’ of Abner.