Two chapters, and David’s whole life turns on them. All the tribes come to Hebron and say the words that make a man family and therefore king — “Behold, we are your bone and flesh” — and he is thirty years old, and he will reign forty years. Then a city that no tribe had managed to take falls to him, with a taunt from the wall about the blind and the lame that is so difficult in Hebrew that the ancient versions simply disagree about what it says. Hiram of Tyre sends cedars. The Philistines come up twice and are broken twice, once by going up and once by going round, at the sound of marching in the tops of the balsam trees. And then he goes to fetch the ark. They set it on a new cart. The text does not say why. At the threshing floor the oxen stumble, Uzzah puts out his hand, and — the sentence should not be softened and will not be here — “God struck him down there because of his error, and he died there beside the ark of God.” The three Hebrew words behind “because of his error” occur nowhere else in the Bible and nobody knows what they mean; the oldest Greek does not have them. David is angry. In the next verse David is afraid. The narrator records both and reconciles neither. Three months later the ark comes up with sacrifice every six steps, and the king dances before it with all his might in a linen ephod — and Michal the daughter of Saul watches from a window and despises him in her heart, and the chapter ends with a sentence about her that gives no reason at all. This study works 2 Samuel 5:1–6:23 line by line in Hebrew, Septuagint and ESV, names which section of the Greek it is printing and why that matters in these books, and reports every difference between the columns rather than smoothing it. See the method →
2 Samuel 5:1–6:23 (selections)
Hebrew · LXX (Rahlfs) · ESVThe Shape of the Passage
Parallel panelsBehind these chapters stands the long collapse of Saul’s house and the ark’s twenty years in storage at Kiriath-jearim; ahead of them stands the covenant of 2 Samuel 7, which will answer the word “house” that is repeated fifteen times here. In between: a captured city, a cart, a dead man, and a marriage that does not recover.
Author
A narrator who reports and does not referee. He tells us that God struck Uzzah down and never tells us why the cart was there. He tells us David was angry and then, in the next sentence, that David was afraid, and lets the two stand side by side without a word of reconciliation. He tells us Michal despised her husband in her heart and does not say what she was thinking. This is the technique the whole tradition calls reticence — the deliberate withholding of motive so that the reader has to do the work — and in these two chapters it is at full strength. The gaps are not accidents. Treating them as accidents, and filling them, is how most bad preaching on chapter 6 happens.
He builds by repeating himself. Twice the Philistines “spread out in the Valley of Rephaim” and twice David asks and twice the answer differs. Twice the ark sets out. Seven times in two verses the root pāraṣ, “break through,” and both times a place is named from it — once for a victory, once for a funeral. Fifteen times in chapter 6 the word “ark.” Fifteen times across both chapters the word “house.” If you can count, you can read this writer.
And he is not the only teller of this story. 1 Chronicles 13–16 narrates the same events, and the differences are real: Chronicles adds a whole assembly and a Levitical roll-call, gives a different name to the threshing floor, gives a different reason for Uzzah’s death, and puts into David’s mouth an explanation that 2 Samuel never gives. This page prints both and does not fuse them — not because harmonising is always wrong, but because the fused version is the one thing neither book actually says.
Audience
People for whom Jerusalem was already the city and the ark was already gone. Whoever first heard chapter 5 knew that the stronghold David took became the temple mount, and whoever first heard chapter 6 lived on the far side of that. The narrative is telling them how it started — and it starts with a foreign king’s carpenters, a taunt from a wall, and a procession that had to be abandoned halfway.
People who knew what the ark had already done. This is not the ark’s first appearance. It killed men at Beth-shemesh (1 Samuel 6:19), it broke Dagon in his own temple, and it had sat in a private house for twenty years because nobody quite knew what to do with it. An audience that had heard 1 Samuel 4–6 was not surprised by chapter 6; they were surprised that David tried.
And people who had to be told, out loud, that the kingdom had changed houses. Three times in chapter 6 the narrator calls her Michal the daughter of Saul — not “David’s wife,” which is what she is. David answers her with “your father… and all his house.” The chapter ends with a childless woman. Readers disagree sharply about what that ending means, and this study will say so rather than settle it.
Orient on the ark, Jerusalem and the Jebusites, Zion, Philistines and Rephaim, holiness and taboo, the ephod, and the house of Saul.
Search by topic: Ark of the Covenant; Jerusalem (history and archaeology); Jebusites; Zion; Millo; Warren’s Shaft; Hiram of Tyre; Philistines; Rephaim, Valley of; Baal-perazim; threshing floor; Obed-edom; ephod; holiness and taboo; Uzzah; Michal; Merab; Perez; David (life of); city of David.
Which articles are relevant?
- Anchor Bible Dictionary — “Ark of the Covenant,” “Jerusalem,” “Jebus, Jebusite,” “Zion,” “Millo,” “Hiram,” “Philistines,” “Rephaim, Valley of,” “Baal-perazim,” “Uzzah,” “Obed-edom,” “Michal,” “Ephod,” “David.”
- Dictionary of the OT: Historical Books (IVP) — “Ark of the Covenant,” “David,” “Jerusalem,” “Music and Dance,” “Holy and Holiness, Clean and Unclean,” “Women.”
- NIDOTTE / TDOT — אֲרוֹן (ʾărōn, ark/chest), פָּרַץ (pāraṣ, break through), צִנּוֹר (ṣinnōr), כָּרַר (kārar, whirl), אֵפוֹד (ʾēpḏōḏ), בָּזָה (bāzāh, despise), בָּרַךְ (bāraḵ, bless), קֹדֶשׁ (qōḏeš, holiness).
- On the Greek — Bernard A. Taylor, “2 Reigns: To the Reader,” in NETS, for what Rahlfs prints in this book and where the translation character changes; and Natalio Fernández Marcos, The Septuagint in Context, for the Antiochene text and the kaige problem set out in the codex note.
Bibliography surfaced:
- P. Kyle McCarter Jr., II Samuel (Anchor Bible) — the standard technical commentary in English, and the fullest treatment of the Greek and Qumran evidence for these chapters; Robert Alter, The David Story, for the translation and the literary notes; Walter Brueggemann, First and Second Samuel (Interpretation); A. Graeme Auld, I & II Samuel (OTL).
- Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, and Eugene Ulrich, The Qumran Text of Samuel and Josephus — the two books to read before making any argument from 4QSama. (These are text-critical works, not devotional ones; we take the evidence, not every conclusion.)
A city on a spur with one spring, a divine chest carried in procession, and the retellings that could not leave Uzzah alone.
First the world: why Jerusalem was worth taking and hard to take, what a portable divine throne meant in the ancient Near East, and what a threshing floor was. Then watch what Josephus and Chronicles supply — because what they add tells you exactly which silence they could not bear.
Which parallels shed light on the world of these chapters?
Jerusalem was defensible and unaligned, and that is why David took it. The city sat on a narrow spur between two valleys with its only reliable water — the Gihon spring — outside the wall line, which is the standing puzzle behind 5:8: how do you get in? It also belonged to no tribe. Judah had failed to hold it (Joshua 15:63) and Benjamin had failed to drive out the Jebusites (Judges 1:21), so a king ruling both the north and the south could put his capital there without giving either side the win. That is a political fact, and the text does not comment on it.
A god who travels in a box was not, by itself, strange. Portable shrines and carried divine images are widely attested in the ancient Near East and in Egypt, and processions with music and sacrifice are exactly what one would expect. What is strange in Israel’s version is that the box is empty of any image — it holds tablets (Exodus 25:16) — and that its carriage is legislated in detail: poles through rings, borne by a particular clan, never touched. See Numbers 4:15 and Numbers 7:9, and Stage 4 below, where this page says plainly what the text does and does not draw from it.
A threshing floor is a flat, hard, open, public place — which is why business, judgment and worship all happen on them in the Old Testament, and why the ark’s procession is on one when the disaster comes. It is also worth noticing that the story David’s life ends with is another threshing floor, bought at full price, on which the temple is later built (2 Samuel 24:18–25).
- The Mesha Stele (the Moabite Stone), c. 840 BC — ANET 320–321 (a royal inscription — a witness, not Scripture). A neighbouring king’s own account of war, of a god who is angry with his land, and of carrying off “the vessels of YHWH” before Chemosh. It is the nearest thing we have to hearing how David’s neighbours would have described a campaign like 5:17–25 — in the same theological grammar, about a different god.
- Josephus, Antiquities 7.3.1–2 and 7.4.2–3 (Whiston’s chapter numbering) (Second-Temple — a witness, not Scripture) — and he is extraordinarily useful here, because you can watch him reading a Greek text. He has “the threshing-floor of Chidon” (that is Chronicles’ name, not Samuel’s). He has “seven companies of singers” going before the ark — which is the Greek’s ἑπτὰ χοροί at 6:13, not the Hebrew’s six paces. He has David “himself played upon the harp, and joined in the music” — which is the Greek’s ἀνεκρούετο ἐν ὀργάνοις at 6:14, not the Hebrew’s dancing. He has David and the people “displeased” at Uzzah’s death — which is the Greek’s ἠθύμησεν at 6:8, not the Hebrew’s anger. Four independent agreements with the Greek column above, in one short retelling. He also supplies what the Bible withholds: “Now, because he was not a priest and yet touched the ark, God struck him dead.” The Bible does not say that.
- Josephus on 5:6–8 (a witness, not Scripture) — his reading of the taunt is that the Jebusites “placed the blind, and the lame, and all their maimed persons, upon the wall, in way of derision of the king, and said that the very lame themselves would hinder his entrance.” That is one solution to a genuinely obscure verse, and it is his, not the text’s. He also has Joab first up the shaft and made commander for it — which is 1 Chronicles 11:6, and which 2 Samuel does not say.
- Sirach 47:1–11 (Second-Temple — non-canonical; a witness, never levelled with Scripture) — Ben Sira’s praise of David compresses these chapters to almost nothing: “he wiped out his enemies on every side and scorned his adversaries the Philistines” (47:7), and then jumps to worship — “he placed singers before the altar, to make sweet melody with their voices… he gave beauty to the festivals” (47:9–10). Uzzah is not mentioned. Michal is not mentioned. Praise literature keeps the procession and drops the corpse; that is worth knowing about the genre, and it is worth not imitating.
- 1 Chronicles 13; 15–16 (Scripture — a parallel account, not a commentary on this one) — the same events told by a writer with different concerns. Chronicles adds a national assembly (13:1–5), names the floor Chidon, says Uzzah died “because he put out his hand to the ark” (13:10), then between the two journeys inserts what 2 Samuel does not have at all: “no one but the Levites may carry the ark of God” (15:2) and David’s own verdict, “Because you did not carry it the first time, the Lord our God broke out against us, because we did not seek him according to the rule” (15:13). Read that sentence carefully: it is Scripture, and it is David’s explanation in Chronicles, and it is not in 2 Samuel 6. The honest report is that the Bible contains an explanation of Uzzah’s death and that the book we are reading declines to give it.
Line them up and the pattern is unmistakable. 2 Samuel 6 withholds three things, and almost everyone who has retold it has supplied at least one.
(1) Why a cart. The Bible says “they carried the ark of God on a new cart” and offers not one syllable of comment — no “which was contrary to the law,” no “as the Philistines had done” (though the Philistines had, 1 Samuel 6:7). Chronicles supplies it later, in David’s mouth. Josephus does not need it, because he has a different reason ready.
(2) Why Uzzah. The Hebrew says עַל־הַשַּׁל and no one knows what that means; the Greek does not have the phrase at all; Chronicles says he put out his hand; Josephus says he was not a priest. Four answers is not the same as one answer.
(3) Why Michal had no child. The text says she had none. It does not say why. The tradition, Jewish and Christian alike, has almost always said why — and the reasons given are contradictory.
The rule for these pages, as on every Deep Research study: report what the text approves, report what it merely reports, report what it condemns, and leave the gaps open. The ancient witnesses are worth reading precisely because you can watch them closing gaps, which is the temptation, in every century, of anyone who loves a story too much to let it stay quiet.
One verb that names two places, two words nobody can define, and the word chapter 7 is about to take over.
Count pāraṣ yourself — seven, all in 5:20 and 6:8. Then sit with the two cruxes without solving them, and watch “house” accumulate until chapter 7 picks it up.
“Break through, burst out, breach.” Seven occurrences in this passage and every one of them is in two verses. At 5:20 David says the Lord “has broken through my enemies… like a breaking of waters” and names the place Baal-perazim, “lord of breakings-through.” At 6:8 the Lord “broke out a breaking-out against Uzzah” and the place is Perez-uzzah. Same verb, same subject, a few weeks apart, and a stone left standing at each spot. The word is not moral: a flood pāraṣ-es a dam and a shepherd’s sheep pāraṣ out of a pen. It means the barrier did not hold. The Greek keeps all seven with διακόπτω and its noun, and because it translates both place-names rather than transliterating them, a Greek reader hears the whole play.
The three most argued-over words in the chapter, and the ESV renders them “because of his error.” הַשַּׁל occurs nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible. Proposals connect it to a root meaning “be negligent” or “act rashly,” or emend it toward Chronicles’ wording; the standard lexicons mark it uncertain and the honest commentaries say so. The Greek column does not have it at all — Rahlfs reads “and he died there beside the ark of the Lord, ἐνώπιον τοῦ θεοῦ,” before God. So the single clause that would tell us why Uzzah died is a word nobody can define, in a text the oldest Greek does not attest. That is the situation. This page is not going to improve it.
The other crux. The ESV guesses “water shaft” and prints it without a footnote; the Greek guessed a weapon, παραξιφίδι, a dagger worn at the side. The only other occurrence in the Hebrew Bible is Psalm 42:7 (Hebrew 42:8 · LXX Psalm 41:8), “deep calls to deep at the roar of your waterfalls” — which the Septuagint there renders καταρρακτῶν, cataracts. Two occurrences, two guesses in Greek, and a modern translation that has to pick one. Suggestions have included a water tunnel, a grappling hook, a scaling device and (from a proposed cognate) a throat or windpipe. Nobody knows. The verse is printed above with the difficulty showing.
“Chest, box, coffer” — an ordinary word; the same noun is used of Joseph’s coffin (Genesis 50:26) and of the temple collection box (2 Kings 12:9). Fifteen times in twenty-three verses, which is the surest sign of what chapter 6 is about: not David’s worship style but this object and where it will live. The Greek is κιβωτός throughout — the same word the Septuagint uses for Noah’s ark (Genesis 6:14), which is why English has one word for two very different objects. The Hebrew does not: Noah’s is a תֵּבָה.
“Whirling.” A rare intensive form of a root meaning to go round, and it appears in the Bible only in these two verses. Paired at 6:16 with מְפַזֵּז (məp̄azzēz), “leaping” — also rare. The Hebrew is reaching for words, which is itself a clue about what it is describing. And here the columns part: at 6:14 the Greek does not have a dance verb at all but “he struck up on tuned instruments”; at 6:16 it has ὀρχούμενον, dancing. This page prints both rather than arguing from a Hebrew word its own Greek column does not have in the verse under discussion.
“House.” Fifteen times across the two chapters (counting the adverbial “inward” at 5:9), and the word keeps changing what it means: a building the blind and lame may not enter (5:8), the palace Hiram’s men build (5:11), the house the ark leaves (6:3), the house of Israel (6:5, 15), the house of Obed-edom which is blessed for keeping it (6:10–12), and finally the household David goes home to bless (6:20). Hold onto it: in the very next chapter David will propose to build the Lord a house and be told that the Lord will build him one (2 Samuel 7:11–16). Chapters 5–6 are the run-up to that sentence.
“Bless.” Four times in the second half of chapter 6, and the pattern is the point: the ark that killed a man at the threshing floor spends three months in a Gittite’s house and the house is blessed (6:11), the news of that blessing is what makes David try again (6:12), and when the ark is finally in place David blesses the people and turns to bless his own household (6:18, 20). The Greek adds a fifth: at 6:20 Michal comes out and “εὐλόγησεν αὐτόν, blessed him,” and then says what she says. The Hebrew has no such word there. It is the sharpest single difference between the columns in this chapter.
“Bone and flesh.” Not a compliment but a kinship claim — the formula by which a person is declared family and therefore owed the obligations of family. Adam says it of the woman (Genesis 2:23), Laban says it to Jacob (Genesis 29:14), and later the elders of Judah will have it said back to them (2 Samuel 19:12–13). The northern tribes are not flattering David in 5:1; they are stating the legal ground on which they can make him king. The Greek is a straight rendering: ἰδοὺ ὀστᾶ σου καὶ σάρκες σου ἡμεῖς.
Two things in the Hebrew of these chapters, reported rather than tidied:
- The two ketiv/qere notes. At 5:8 the consonants written are שנאו and the reading tradition says שְׂנוּאֵי (“the hated of”), which is how the ESV takes it. At 5:24 the written form is בשמעך and the reading is כְּשָׁמְעֲךָ (“when you hear” rather than “in your hearing”). Neither changes the sense much; both are printed here because a study that shows its Hebrew should show the marginal notes attached to it.
- The book of Samuel has a rougher textual history than most. This is not a rumour and it is not a scandal: the Masoretic text of Samuel has more places where the sense is hard, more places where the Greek is markedly different, and more places where the Dead Sea manuscripts side with the Greek than almost any other book. Your own ESV footnotes three such places in these two chapters alone (5:4–5, 6:4, 6:5) and follows the Greek in two of them, plus a fourth at 6:22. That is what an honest English Bible looks like, and the reason we print both columns rather than one.
The law about carrying the holy things, the ark’s earlier body-count, Chronicles’ parallel, the Psalms of the procession, and Michal’s whole story.
Four threads: backward to Numbers and to 1 Samuel 4–6, sideways to 1 Chronicles 13–16, forward to 2 Samuel 7 and to the Psalms that sing this procession — and then Michal, read from 1 Samuel 18 forward rather than from 2 Samuel 6 alone.
Which cross-references matter?
- Numbers 4:15 and Numbers 7:9 — the law about moving the holy things. The Kohathites carry them, and “they must not touch the holy things, lest they die” (Num 4:15); when the wagons are handed out, the sons of Kohath get none, “because they were charged with the service of the holy things that had to be carried on the shoulder” (Num 7:9). Also Exodus 25:12–15: the poles stay in the rings. Here is exactly what this page will and will not say. What is true: those laws exist, they are about this object, and they specify shoulders and poles and not carts. What 2 Samuel 6 says about them: nothing. It never cites them, never says the cart was wrong, and never gives them as the reason Uzzah died. What another biblical book says: Chronicles has David cite them, after the fact (1 Chr 15:2, 13, 15). A reader may weigh all of that. What a study must not do is put Chronicles’ sentence into 2 Samuel’s mouth and then preach it as the meaning of a man’s death. Where Scripture gives a reason, we give it. Here this book gives none.
- 1 Samuel 4–6 — the ark’s previous twenty years, and it is not a gentle story. It is captured in battle, Eli’s sons die, Eli dies, Dagon falls twice, the Philistines are afflicted, and when it comes home men die at Beth-shemesh, who then ask the question chapter 6 will ask again: “Who is able to stand before the Lord, this holy God?” (1 Sam 6:20). David’s “How can the ark of the Lord come to me?” (6:9) is that sentence in a different mouth. Whatever 2 Samuel 6 is, it is not a surprise.
- 1 Chronicles 13; 14; 15–16 — the parallel account, and the differences are to be reported, not merged: the assembly at 13:1–5 that 2 Samuel has no trace of; Chidon for Nacon (13:9); “because he put out his hand to the ark” for עַל־הַשַּׁל (13:10); “with all their might, with song” at 13:8 where the Hebrew of 2 Samuel 6:5 has “fir wood” (and the ESV follows Chronicles and the Greek); Gibeon for Geba (14:16); and above all 15:2 and 15:13, which supply the explanation 2 Samuel withholds. Chronicles also gives Michal’s scene (15:29) and then simply stops — it has no confrontation and no 6:23.
- 2 Samuel 7:1–17 — where all of this is going, and it opens with the ark: “the king lives in a house of cedar, but the ark of God dwells in a tent.” The word repeated fifteen times in chapters 5–6 is the word chapter 7 turns inside out. David proposes a house for God; God promises a house to David. Read the three chapters in one sitting; they are one movement. And the chapter after that (2 Samuel 8) returns to the Philistines of 5:17–25 and lists the rest of the wars, so the ark and the campaigns are two halves of one account of how the kingdom was founded.
- Psalm 132 (LXX Psalm 131) and Psalm 24 (LXX Psalm 23) — Israel singing this procession. Psalm 132 is explicitly about it: “Behold, we heard of it in Ephrathah; we found it in the fields of Jaar… Arise, O Lord, and go to your resting place, you and the ark of your might” (132:6–8) — and the Greek there reads ἀνάστηθι, κύριε, εἰς τὴν ἀνάπαυσίν σου, σὺ καὶ ἡ κιβωτὸς τοῦ ἁγιάσματός σου. Psalm 24 is the gate-liturgy: “Lift up your heads, O gates… that the King of glory may come in.” Note the Septuagint numbering: the LXX runs one behind the English through this stretch, so these are Psalms 131 and 23 in a Greek Bible — looked up, not calculated.
- Michal, from the beginning: 1 Samuel 18:20, 27–28; 19:11–17; 25:44; 2 Samuel 3:13–16; 6:16, 20–23; 21:8. Her story is not a footnote to David’s. She is the only woman in the Old Testament of whom it is written that she loved a man (1 Sam 18:20); she saved David’s life by lowering him from a window and lying to her father’s men; she was given to another man, Paltiel, while David was away; and years later she was taken back as a term of a political deal — and the narrator, who tells us almost nothing about her feelings, tells us this: “But her husband went with her, weeping after her all the way to Bahurim” (2 Samuel 3:16). Then a window again, and this time she is inside looking out. The text gives her every reason for what is in her heart at 6:16 and does not tell us that any of them is the reason. One more thread, and it is textual: at 2 Samuel 21:8 the ESV reads “the five sons of Merab” and footnotes “Two Hebrew manuscripts, Septuagint; most Hebrew manuscripts Michal.” Even the number of children she had is a place where the manuscripts differ.
- Leviticus 10:1–3 — the closest companion piece, and Chronicles itself cross-references it. Nadab and Abihu offer unauthorised fire and die at once, and Moses says, “This is what the Lord has said: ‘Among those who are near me I will be sanctified.’” And Aaron held his peace. The parallel is real; note also the difference, which is that Leviticus 10 does state the offence and 2 Samuel 6 does not.
- Joshua 15:63; Judges 1:21; Judges 19:10–12 — Jerusalem before David. Twice the conquest narratives record failure to take it, and in Judges 19 a traveller refuses to spend the night in “the city of foreigners” and goes on to Gibeah instead, where the worst night in the book happens. When 5:7 says David took the stronghold, a reader who has come through those books knows how long that sentence had been waiting.
Read 6:6–9 slowly, because most of us have been taught to hurry past it to a lesson. Uzzah put out his hand to the ark of God and took hold of it, for the oxen stumbled. And the anger of the Lord was kindled against Uzzah, and God struck him down there… and he died there beside the ark of God. A man reached out to keep a holy thing from falling in the dirt, and he died for it, in public, in the middle of a worship service, and the text says God did it.
Now notice everything the chapter does not say. It does not say the cart was unlawful. It does not say Uzzah was presumptuous, or irreverent, or that he had been warned. It does not say “he touched what he was told not to touch” — though Numbers 4:15 exists and says exactly that, and any Israelite hearing this could make the connection for themselves. It does not even give us a word we can define: the clause that ought to carry the reason, עַל־הַשַּׁל, appears nowhere else in the Bible, and the oldest Greek does not have it. Where Scripture gives no reason, we say so and stop.
Two things a reader may honestly do with the gap. First, weigh it: Numbers is in the same Bible, the Philistines used a cart precisely because they did not know better (1 Sam 6:7), and Chronicles has David himself conclude, later, that the failure was procedural (1 Chr 15:13). That is a real line of reasoning and this page has laid it out in full. Second, refuse to close it: because the writer of 2 Samuel had every one of those materials available and used none of them, and the sentence he wrote instead was “God struck him down there.”
And then notice what David does, because it is two things and the narrator will not choose between them. “David was angry” (6:8). “David was afraid of the Lord that day” (6:9). Anger at God and fear of God, in consecutive verses, in the same man, and no correction, no rebuke, no “but he should not have been.” A church that can only hold one of those two verses at a time will be no use at all to the person in the third row whose week has gone like Uzzah’s.
What the chapter does supply, in place of an explanation, is three months and a Gittite. The ark that killed a man sits in Obed-edom’s house — a foreigner’s house — and the house is blessed, and it is the news of that blessing, not a theological breakthrough, that gets David back on the road (6:11–12). The book’s answer to the terror of holiness is not an argument. It is a blessed household, and a second attempt done differently.
The commentaries, the Greek of Kingdoms, the two cruxes, the Chronicles question, and how to read 6:23 without adjudicating it.
McCarter, Alter, Brueggemann and Auld on the text; Barthélemy, Tov, Ulrich and Fernández Marcos on the Greek; then the four live questions these chapters raise — and one of them this page deliberately refuses to answer.
Commentaries & studies:
- P. Kyle McCarter Jr., II Samuel (Anchor Bible) — the fullest English treatment of the text-critical problems in 5:6–8 and 6:6–7, and the place to see what the Greek and the Qumran evidence actually support.
- Robert Alter, The David Story — a fresh translation with running literary notes; the best short guide to the narrator’s reticence and to the Michal scene. (Alter reads these texts as literature and does not share the church’s confession; we take the tools, not the metaphysics.)
- Walter Brueggemann, First and Second Samuel (Interpretation) — strong on the theology of holiness in chapter 6 and unusually unwilling to tidy it; A. Graeme Auld, I & II Samuel (OTL), for the relationship between Samuel and Chronicles, which he handles very differently from most.
- Dominique Barthélemy, Les Devanciers d’Aquila (1963) — the study that identified the kaige revision and thereby made “the LXX of Samuel–Kings” an ambiguous phrase; Natalio Fernández Marcos, The Septuagint in Context, for the Antiochene text; Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible.
- Eugene Ulrich, The Qumran Text of Samuel and Josephus — on the agreements between 4QSama, the Greek, and Josephus that Stage 2 above illustrates from Josephus’s own retelling.
Interpretation notes worth keeping:
- 5:6–8 is genuinely obscure, and translations differ because the Hebrew does. Three separate problems stack up in three verses. (1) What the Jebusites say: the Hebrew כִּי אִם־הֱסִירְךָ is grammatically awkward and the versions split — the Greek has “the blind and the lame withstood him,” the ESV has “the blind and the lame will ward you off,” and older English had “except thou take away the blind and the lame.” (2) What David tells his men to do: וְיִגַּע בַּצִּנּוֹר — “reach the ṣinnōr” — is unrecoverable, and the Greek’s “dagger” is one ancient guess among several. (3) The proverb it produces, “the blind and the lame shall not come into the house,” which the Hebrew leaves as “the house” and the Greek makes “the house of the Lord.” Report the difficulty. Do not preach a resolution the text has not given. And note, since it is often assumed the other way round, that the taunt is the Jebusites’ and the proverb is quoted, not endorsed — nothing here is a divine statement about disabled people, and Scripture’s own final word on the lame at the sanctuary runs the other way (2 Samuel 9; and see the healings in the temple courts, Matthew 21:14).
- The relationship between 2 Samuel and 1 Chronicles is a real scholarly question, and this page does not settle it. Positions range from Chronicles using a text of Samuel close to ours, to Chronicles using a text closer to the one behind the Greek and 4QSama, to more complicated accounts of both. What is not in dispute is that where they differ, they differ — the threshing floor’s name, the instruments, Gibeon and Geba, the reason for Uzzah’s death, and the presence or absence of a Levitical explanation. The church’s standing instruction on this page is the pastor’s: report the difference honestly, show why one column is being printed and what the other says, and do not hide either.
- On 6:23 the discipline is to say less than the tradition. The verse states a fact: “Michal the daughter of Saul had no child to the day of her death.” It gives no cause. Three readings have been common, and each reads something into the silence. (1) It is divine judgment on her contempt — the oldest and most popular Christian reading, and the one that the verse’s position immediately after the confrontation invites; but the narrator does not say it, and he is a writer who says such things when he means them. (2) It is estrangement, not judgment — David simply never went to her again, which the narrative permits and does not state. (3) It is dynastic — the point is not Michal at all but that no descendant of Saul will sit on the throne, which is what David has just said in 6:21. All three are inferences. This page names them and adjudicates none. What can be said without inference is that the text has already given her ample cause for bitterness — she loved him, she saved his life, she was given away, she was taken back as a clause in a treaty, and a man wept behind her the whole road to Bahurim (3:15–16) — and that Scripture, having told us all of that, still declines to tell us what was in her heart at the window. Treat her with the dignity the narrator does: he gives her the last word of the chapter’s dialogue and then a sentence of her own.
- Chapter 6 is about holiness, and holiness in the Old Testament is not a synonym for niceness. The ark is not a symbol; in the narrative it is where God has said he will be met (Exodus 25:22), and proximity to it is dangerous in the way that proximity to fire is dangerous. Two chapters set that out in the plainest terms — Leviticus 10 and this one — and both of them are followed, immediately, by provision for coming near safely. That is the shape of the Old Testament’s answer, and it is not “God is dangerous, be careful”; it is “God is dangerous, and he has made a way.”
- The date and composition of these chapters are debated and nothing here depends on the outcome. The older proposal that 2 Samuel 6 is the tail of a self-contained “Ark Narrative” running from 1 Samuel 4 has been argued and answered many times, and the relationship of both to the wider history is disputed. We name the positions and do not adjudicate. Whether or not chapter 6 once circulated with 1 Samuel 4–6, it is now read where it stands, between a captured city and a covenant.
A city, a cart, a man who died reaching out, a king who danced, and a woman at a window.
Name what you learned, why it matters, and one concrete response.
What should we carry away — and do?
- The same verb does both things. The Lord broke through for David at Baal-perazim and broke out against Uzzah at Perez-uzzah — pāraṣ, seven times, in two verses, with a memorial stone at each end. The God who fights for you is not a different God from the one who is dangerous to handle. That is one of the hardest sentences in the Old Testament and this passage will not let us have half of it.
- Where Scripture gives no reason, say so and stop. The text does not say why the cart was used. The clause that should say why Uzzah died is a word nobody can define, and the oldest Greek does not have it. Numbers 4 and 7 are in the same Bible and say the holy things are carried on the shoulder; Chronicles has David say so himself, afterwards. Lay it all out and let the reader weigh it — but do not manufacture a tidy lesson out of a man’s death, and do not put Chronicles’ sentence into this book’s mouth.
- David was angry and David was afraid, and the narrator resolves neither. Verse 8 and verse 9. Not “first angry, then he repented” — just both, recorded, uncorrected. If your theology has no room for a believer being furious with God on Tuesday and terrified of him on Wednesday, this chapter has more room than your theology does.
- The road back started with somebody else’s blessing. David did not solve the problem; he heard that the ark had been in a foreigner’s house three months and the house had prospered, and he went and got it. Sometimes the thing that gets you moving again is not an answer. It is watching it go well for somebody else and deciding to try again, differently.
- The king took off the king’s clothes. Whatever the columns disagree about at 6:14, they agree that David went before the ark in public without his dignity on, and that he answered the charge by promising to be worse: “I will make myself yet more contemptible than this.” Worship that costs a man nothing socially is not what this chapter is describing.
- And let Michal be a person. She loved him first. She saved his life. She was given away and taken back without being asked, and a man wept behind her all the way to Bahurim. The narrator tells us what her heart did and not one word about why. If you cannot preach David’s joy without inventing her sin, the problem is with the sermon.
A word about typology, clearly labelled — three things, never blurred. (1) What the text says: chapter 6 is about a wooden chest being moved from one house to another, and it makes no claim to be about anything else. (2) What the New Testament itself draws: the ark reappears in Hebrews 9:4, in a passage arguing that the whole apparatus was “symbolic for the present age” and that Christ has entered the true holy place; and in Revelation 11:19 the ark of the covenant is seen in the opened temple in heaven. That is the canon’s own move and it is solid ground. (3) What we see from this side of the cross, offered as ours and not as the text’s: many readers have noticed that Luke 1:39–56 tells its story along the same lines — Mary “arose and went” into the hill country of Judah; Elizabeth cries out “why is this granted to me that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” where David had said “how can the ark of the Lord come to me?”; the babe leaps; and Mary remains “about three months” as the ark remained three months with Obed-edom. Luke never says he is doing this. But the resemblance is really there in the Greek, it has been seen and taught for a very long time, and Luke 24:27 has Christ himself reading the Old Testament this way — so we are not going to pretend we cannot see it. We will simply keep saying which is which: the text does not announce it, and we are meant to see it. And read the whole passage again next year; you will see more than you saw this time.
Step in response: two things this week. First, find the place in your Bible where you have been supplying a reason God did not supply, and take it out for a month. See what the passage says when you stop helping it. Second, do one thing in worship that costs you your dignity in front of people whose opinion you value — and then, when somebody comments, answer as David did, without apology and without contempt for the person who asked.
2 Samuel 5:10 · to share
LXX (Rahlfs) + ESVEvery Deep Research page traces its passage across the whole sweep — the Old Testament, the Second-Temple world between the testaments (historical witnesses, not Scripture), and the New Testament. Follow the thread:
Pleasant Springs Church — Deep Research
Research method after Michael S. Heiser’s Bible Research Method (examine dictionaries → ancient literature → important words → textual connections → academic publications → share), with the Pleasant Springs “Author & Audience” foundation. Scripture set in the Hebrew, the Greek editions named on each page and the ESV (Old Testament), and the Greek New Testament and the ESV (New Testament), per the practice of Pleasant Springs Church. 2 Samuel 5–6 research grounded in McCarter (Anchor), Alter (The David Story), Brueggemann (Interpretation) and Auld (OTL), with Barthélemy, Tov, Ulrich and Fernández Marcos on the Greek. Book name: in the Septuagint this book is 2 Kingdoms — Βασιλειῶν Βʹ — one part of a single four-volume work with 1 Samuel and 1–2 Kings; the note is generated from the shared house helper so the wording is identical across the library. Text, edition and section: Hebrew from the Masoretic Text (with the qere printed and the ketiv reported at 5:8 and 5:24); Greek from Rahlfs’s Septuaginta, printed without editorial punctuation; English ESV. This passage lies in the Old Greek section of 2 Kingdoms. Barthélemy’s kaige revision runs from 2 Samuel 11:2 to 1 Kings 2:11 (and again from 1 Kings 22 to the end of 2 Kings); 2 Samuel 5:1–6:23 falls before it, so “the Greek reads…” on this page means the old translation and not a revision of it — which is why no Antiochene/Lucianic argument is made here, and why the same sentence would need qualifying five chapters later. Numbering: there is no chapter- or verse-offset in these two chapters — Rahlfs has 25 and 23 verses exactly as the Hebrew does, counted rather than assumed. Where a Psalm is cited, the Septuagint number is given alongside (Psalm 24 = LXX 23; Psalm 42 = LXX 41; Psalm 132 = LXX 131), looked up in a Greek text rather than calculated. Divergences: every Hebrew/Greek difference in the verses printed is enumerated in full in the codex note and none is called a “rendering difference” when it is a plus, a minus or a different number — including 6:1 (thirty thousand / seventy thousand), 6:6 (Nacon / Nodab / Chidon), 6:7 (the Greek has no equivalent of עַל־הַשַּׁל), 6:8 (angry / disheartened), 6:13 (six paces / seven choirs), 6:14 (danced with all his might / struck up on instruments; linen ephod / choice robe), 6:20 (the Greek’s “and she blessed him”) and 6:22 (my eyes / your eyes). Verses where there is nothing to report (5:1, 6:9, 6:23) are said to have nothing rather than passed over. Where the ESV itself follows the Greek against the Hebrew (6:4, 6:5, 6:22) its own footnotes are quoted. Chronicles is treated as a parallel biblical witness and never harmonised with Samuel: 1 Chronicles 13:9, 13:10, 13:8, 14:16 and above all 15:2 and 15:13 are reported as saying what 2 Samuel 6 does not say. Qumran: 4QSama (4Q51) is named as a major witness and the ESV’s own footnote at 5:4–5 is quoted, but no textual argument is built on the scroll, because that would require DJD XVII rather than a summary. Second-Temple witnesses (Josephus, Ant. 7.3–4; Sirach 47) are read as witnesses and never levelled with Scripture; where Josephus supplies a reason the narrator withheld, that is pointed out rather than borrowed. On Uzzah, the page says plainly that Scripture gives no reason and stops: Numbers 4:15 and 7:9 are printed and linked, Chronicles’ later explanation is printed and attributed to Chronicles, and no lesson is manufactured out of the death. David’s anger and David’s fear are both reported and left unreconciled, as the text leaves them. On Michal, three readings of 6:23 are named and none is adjudicated, her whole story from 1 Samuel 18 forward is given, the weeping of Paltiel at 3:16 is reported, and the manuscript problem at 21:8 is noted. The Jebusite taunt at 5:6–8 is reported as genuinely obscure, with the versions’ disagreement shown rather than resolved, and it is noted that the taunt is quoted from the Jebusites and is not a divine statement about disabled people. Typology is labelled in three parts per the house position: what the text says, what the New Testament itself draws (Hebrews 9:4; Revelation 11:19), and what we see from this side of the cross — the Luke 1 resemblance offered explicitly as ours and not as Luke’s claim, and neither deleted nor oversold. The literary-structure block rests on two countable facts — the repeated clause at 5:18 and 5:22, and the seven occurrences of pāraṣ in 5:20 and 6:8 — and the panel arrangement is offered as one reading rather than as a fact.
Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. ESV Text Edition: 2016. The ESV text may not be quoted in any publication made available to the public by a Creative Commons license. The ESV may not be translated in whole or in part into any other language. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
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