Now Rekab and Baanah, the sons of Rimmon the Beerothite, set out for the house of Ish-Bosheth, and they arrived there in the heat of the day while he was taking his noonday rest. They went into the inner part of the house as if to get some wheat, and they stabbed him in the stomach. Then Rekab and his brother Baanah slipped away.
They had gone into the house while he was lying on the bed in his bedroom. After they stabbed and killed him, they cut off his head. Taking it with them, they traveled all night by way of the Arabah. They brought the head of Ish-Bosheth to David at Hebron and said to the king, “Here is the head of Ish-Bosheth son of Saul, your enemy, who tried to take your life. This day the Lord has avenged my lord the king against Saul and his offspring.”
David answered Rekab and his brother Baanah, the sons of Rimmon the Beerothite, “As surely as the Lord lives, who has delivered me out of every trouble, when someone told me, ‘Saul is dead,’ and thought he was bringing good news, I seized him and put him to death in Ziklag. That was the reward I gave him for his news! How much more—when wicked men have killed an innocent man in his own house and on his own bed—should I not now demand his blood from your hand and rid the earth of you!”
So David gave an order to his men, and they killed them. They cut off their hands and feet and hung the bodies by the pool in Hebron. But they took the head of Ish-Bosheth and buried it in Abner’s tomb at Hebron.
My thoughts -
Reading about the conflict between the house of Saul and the house of David in 2 Samuel is a bit heartbreaking. David wept and mourned when Saul and Jonathan were killed. He refused to eat and was so upset he killed the messenger. Now, that's not an entirely fair statement. The messenger was also the man who killed Saul. But still... What seemed as though it should have been good news, David's enemies were dead, was in fact heart wrenching news.
Here you have wicked men committing murder and trying to pass it off as something else due to the identity of the victim. Saul ran David off, hunted him down, and tried repeatedly to kill him. If that doesn't make him David's enemy then I don't know what would. But like all things it's complicated. David faithfully served Saul. Their relationship was almost like father and son. And David loved Jonathan, Saul's son, like a brother. David had many opportunities to kill Saul, and would have been justified in doing so, and yet he refused. And it wasn't because David was squeamish about killing, either. When David captured a city he liked to leave nothing alive, not even the livestock.
Life is complicated. Relationships are complicated. Sometimes we like to simplify things to try to make them easier to manage. It's easy to segment people off as enemies and friends. But when we do this we tend to dehumanize. David had complicated relationships. He counted the love of Jonathan as being better than "the love of a woman". He called Saul his master. He helped Saul's army defeat the Philistines and then, years later, served in the Philistine army against Saul. Saul in the same breath called David his son, urging him to return to him, and threatened to kill him. First and second Samuel is filled with these heartbreakingly complicated relationships.
What Rekab and Baanah did was indefensible. They murdered a man during his nap. The only way they could have defended their actions was by claiming that they killed their master's enemy. Maybe they believed they were doing right by David. Maybe they were just evil men doing an evil thing. Either way, what they did was far worse than Saul and Jonathan falling in battle. And yet, based on this feud, they tried to justify their actions, and even spin them as having done a good thing.
This could only happen because of the conflict between the two houses. David is angry that an innocent man is killed. He is angry that a crime has been committed. This was an atrocity. But I think he also mourns the loss of the sense of family between the two houses. There is a deep connection here that is tearing. Relationships are being severed. The feud with Saul did not even end with Saul's death. There is a deep, strong relationship there. But like all things in this life, it's complicated.
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