: Sunday Sermonette: Not all is fair it seems in war

Chapter four starts off with some factoids about the ancestry of a couple of minor characters that seem irrelevant to us. The Tanakh is very interested in genealogy as clan and tribe are the organizing principle of the society. Then there is an interpolated bit about Jonathan ' s son Mephibosheth which is a complete non-sequitur. The translators have put it in parentheses. Then we get the murder of Ish-Bosheth, which the perpetrators think will please David as David has been at war with him. On the contrary, David has them killed.David kills people all the time, by the thousands. It is perfectly fine for him to do that if they are not Israelites, (uncircumcised, in the term commonly used in this book); and he can kill Israelites if there is a civil war. But it was not okay for the Amelekite to kill Saul, even though Saul had asked him to and Saul had spent the past few years trying to kill David; and it not okay for these guys to kill Ish-Bosheth even though David and Ish had their soldiers trying to kill each other in the largest numbers possible. So the one thing you can ' t do is kill an Israelite king, a point which no doubt pleased Josiah who was the sponsor of this literary endeavor.4 When Ish-Bosheth son of Saul heard that Abner had died in Hebron, he lost courage, and all Israel became alarmed.2 Now Saul ’s son had two men who were leaders of raiding bands. One was named Baanah and the other Rekab; they were sons of Rimmon the Beerothite from the tribe of ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs