2 Samuel 1:21 — meaning, Hebrew and Greek word study, commentary
2 Samuel 1:21
Ye mountains of Gilboa, let there be no dew, neither let there be rain, upon you, nor fields of offerings: for there the shield of the mighty is vilely cast away, the shield of Saul, as though he had not been anointed with oil.
a mountain or range of hills (sometimes used figurative… · noun, common masculine plural construct
Gilboa
בַגִּלְבֹּ֗עַva.gil.Bo.a'
H1533
Gilboa · preposition with the article + proper noun, a place name
dew
טַ֧לtal
H2919
dew (as covering vegetation) · noun, common masculine singular absolute
rain
מָטָ֛רma.Tar
H4306
rain · noun, common masculine singular absolute
fields
וּשְׂדֵ֣יu.se.Dei
H7704
a field (as flat) · conjunction + noun, common masculine plural construct
offerings
תְרוּמֹ֑תte.ru.Mot
H8641
a present (as offered up) · noun, common feminine plural absolute
shield
מָגֵ֣ןma.Gen
H4043
a shield (i.e. the small one or buckler) · noun, common masculine singular construct
mighty
גִּבּוֹרִ֔יםgi.bo.Rim
H1368
powerful · noun, common masculine plural absolute
away
נִגְעַל֙nig.'Al
H1602
to detest · verb, niphal perfect, 3rd person masculine singular
shield
מָגֵ֣ןma.Gen
H4043
a shield (i.e. the small one or buckler) · noun, common masculine singular construct
Saul
שָׁא֔וּלsha.'Ul
H7586
Shaul · proper noun, a man's name
anointed
מָשִׁ֥יחַma.Shi.ach
H4899
anointed · noun, common masculine singular absolute
oil
בַּשָּֽׁמֶןba.Sha.men
H8081
grease · preposition with the article + noun, common masculine singular absolute
Strong's Exhaustive Concordance (James Strong, 1890/1894), public domain; digitized by Open Scriptures (CC BY-SA). KJV word tagging: eBible.org (public domain). Original-language text, parsing and brief lexicon: STEPBible.org data from Tyndale House, Cambridge (CC BY 4.0).
Cross-references
1 Samuel 31:1 Now the Philistines fought against Israel: and the men of Israel fled from before the Philistines, and fell down slain in mount Gilboa.
Isaiah 21:5 Prepare the table, watch in the watchtower, eat, drink: arise, ye princes, and anoint the shield.
1 Samuel 10:1 Then Samuel took a vial of oil, and poured it upon his head, and kissed him, and said, Is it not because the LORD hath anointed thee to be c…
Judges 5:23 Curse ye Meroz, said the angel of the LORD, curse ye bitterly the inhabitants thereof; because they came not to the help of the LORD, to the…
1 Chronicles 10:1 Now the Philistines fought against Israel; and the men of Israel fled from before the Philistines, and fell down slain in mount Gilboa.
1 Chronicles 10:8 And it came to pass on the morrow, when the Philistines came to strip the slain, that they found Saul and his sons fallen in mount Gilboa.
Job 3:3-10 Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, There is a man child conceived.
Isaiah 5:6 And I will lay it waste: it shall not be pruned, nor digged; but there shall come up briers and thorns: I will also command the clouds that…
Cross-references from OpenBible.info (CC BY), in the lineage of the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge (public domain).
Commentary
Matthew Henry on 2 Samuel 1:17–end
When David had rent his clothes, mourned, and wept, and fasted, for the death of Saul, and done justice upon him who made himself guilty of it, one would think he had made full payment of the debt of honour he owed to his memory; yet this is not all: we have here a poem he wrote on that occasion; for he was a great master of his pen as well as of his sword. By this elegy he designed both to express his own sorrow for this great calamity and to impress the like on the minds of others, who ought to lay it to heart. The putting of lamentations into poems made them, 1. The more moving and affecting. The passion of the poet, or singer, is, by this way, wonderfully communicated to the readers and…
let there be no dew, neither let there be rain--To be deprived of the genial atmospheric influences which, in those anciently cultivated hills, seem to have reared plenty of first-fruits in the corn harvests, was specified as the greatest calamity the lacerated feelings of the poet could imagine. The curse seems still to lie upon them; for the mountains of Gilboa are naked and sterile.
the shield of the mighty is vilely cast away--To cast away the shield was counted a national disgrace. Yet, on that fatal battle of Gilboa, many of the Jewish soldiers, who had displayed unflinching valor in former battles, forgetful of their own reputation and their country's honor, threw away their shields…
As though he had not been - In stead of בלי beli, Not, I read כלי keley, Instruments.
Anointed with oil - See the observations at the end.
Sa2 1:18, etc.: He bade them teach the children of Judah the use of the bow, קשת kasheth.
The word kasheth is to be understood of the title of the song which immediately follows, and not of the use of the bow, as our translation intimates.
Many of David's Psalms have titles prefixed to them; some are termed Shosannim, some Maschil, Nehiloth, Neginoth, etc., and this one here, Kadesh or The Bow, because it was occasioned by the Philistine archers. Sa1 31:3 : "And the archers hit him."
But especially respecting the bow of Jonathan, "which returned not back…
The Church Fathers
Therefore, nature has justly bestowed judgment upon those places where patricide would occur by depriving them of the gift of her bounty, so that by the condemnation of an innocent land, she might reveal the great punishments that await the guilty. Therefore, both the elements themselves and human beings are condemned because of the wickedness. Finally, David, in the mountains where Jonathan was killed along with his father, desired the punishment of perpetual sterility, saying: O mountains of Gilboa, may neither dew nor rain fall upon you, you mountains of death.
What a virtuous action was that when David wished rather to spare the king his enemy, though he could have injured him! How useful, too, it was, for it helped him when he succeeded to the throne. For all learned to observe faith in their king and not to seize the kingdom but to fear and reverence him. Thus, what is virtuous was preferred to what was useful, and then usefulness followed from what was virtuous. But that he spared him was a small matter; he also grieved for him when slain in war and mourned for him with tears, saying, "You mountains of Gilboa, let neither dew nor rain fall upon you; you mountains of death, for there the shield of the mighty is cast away, the shield of Saul. It is not anointed with oil but with the blood of the wounded and the fat of the warriors. The bow of Jonathan turned not back, and the sword of Saul returned not empty. Saul and Jonathan were lovely and very dear, inseparable in life, and in death they were not divided. They were swifter than eagles, they were stronger than lions. You daughters of Israel, weep over Saul, who clothed you in scarlet with your ornaments, who put on gold upon your apparel. How are the mighty fallen in the midst of the battle! Jonathan was wounded even to death. I am distressed for you, my brother Jonathan; very pleasant have you been to me. Your love came to me like the love of women. How have the mighty fallen and the longed-for weapons perished!" What mother could weep thus for her only son as he wept here for his enemy? Who could follow his benefactor with such praise as that with which he followed the man who plotted against his life? How affectionately he grieved, with what deep feeling he bewailed him! The mountains dried up at the prophet's curse, and a divine power filled the judgment of him who spoke it. Therefore the elements themselves paid the penalty for witnessing the king's death.
The Church Fathers: public-domain translations (Ante-Nicene and Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers), verse-indexed by SermonIndex (CC BY 4.0).
Dictionary and topics
Buckler — (1.) A portable shield (2 Sam. 22:31; 1 Chr. 5:18). (2.) A shield surrounding the person; the targe or round form; used once figuratively (Ps. 91:4). (3.) A large shield protecting the whole body…
David — Beloved, the eighth and youngest son of Jesse, a citizen of Bethlehem. His father seems to have been a man in humble life. His mother’s name is not recorded. Some think she was the Nahash of 2 Sam.…
Dew — “There is no dew properly so called in Palestine, for there is no moisture in the hot summer air to be chilled into dew-drops by the coldness of the night. From May till October rain is unknown, the…
Field — (Heb. sadeh), a cultivated field, but unenclosed. It is applied to any cultivated ground or pasture (Gen. 29:2; 31:4; 34:7), or tillage (Gen. 37:7; 47:24). It is also applied to woodland (Ps. 132:6)…
Gilboa — Boiling spring, a mountain range, now Jebel Fukua’, memorable as the scene of Saul’s disastrous defeat by the Philistines. Here also his three sons were slain, and he himself died by his own hand (1…
Jasher — Upright. “The Book of Jasher,” rendered in the LXX. “the Book of the Upright One,” by the Vulgate “the Book of Just Ones,” was probably a kind of national sacred song-book, a collection of songs in…
Jonathan — Whom Jehovah gave, the name of fifteen or more persons that are mentioned in Scripture. The chief of these are, (1.) A Levite descended from Gershom (Judg. 18:30). His history is recorded in 17:7-13…
Lamentation — (Heb. qinah), an elegy or dirge. The first example of this form of poetry is the lament of David over Saul and Jonathan (2 Sam. 1:17-27). It was a frequent accompaniment of mourning (Amos 8:10). In 2…
Lamentations, Book of — Called in the Hebrew canon ’Ekhah, meaning “How,” being the formula for the commencement of a song of wailing. It is the first word of the book (see 2 Sam. 1:19-27). The LXX. adopted the name…
Poetry — Has been well defined as “the measured language of emotion.” Hebrew poetry deals almost exclusively with the great question of man’s relation to God. “Guilt, condemnation, punishment, pardon,…
Ye mountains of Gilboa,.... On which fell Saul and his sons, and many of the people of Israel, 2 Samuel 1:6,
let there be no dew, neither let there be rain upon you; which is not to understood as a real imprecation; for David would never curse any part of the land of Israel, for which he had so great a regard; but only as a poetical figure, expressing his concern for, and abhorrence of what happened on those mountains; much less did this in reality take place, as some have feigned, as if never dew nor rain descended on them (t) afterwards; which has been refuted by travellers, particularly Borchard (u), who, speaking of this mountain, says, that as he was upon it, there was such a violent s…
Even nature is to join in the mourning. May God withdraw His blessing from the mountains upon which the heroes have fallen, that they may not be moistened by the dew and rain of heaven, but, remaining in eternal barrenness, be memorials of the horrible occurrence that has taken place upon them. בגּלבּע הרי is an address to them; and the preposition בּ with the construct state is poetical: "mountains in Gilboa" (vid., Ewald, 289, b.). In עליכם ... אל the verb יהי is wanting. The following words, תרוּמות וּשׂדי, are in apposition to the foregoing: "and let not fields of first-fruit offerings be upon you," i.e., fields producing fruit, from which offerings of first-fruits were presented. This i…
Saul and Jonathan died in the mountains of Gilboa (1 Sam 31:1). • let there be no dew or rain: David was invoking a curse on the place of their death. In a Canaanite text from the 1300s BC, a father invokes a very similar curse on the place of his son’s death. • The shield of Saul symbolizes his military exploits as king. It would no longer be anointed with oil for the same reason that Saul was no longer the anointed king, because of his death.
Rashi on 2 Samuel 1:21
Mountains in Gilboa. The mountains in Gilboa.
Nor fields [yielding enough for] baking offerings. There will be no harvest among [the fields] that have the amount [that necessitates] making the baking offering.18If one prepares the amount of omer’s worth of dough then one must take off a portion of the mixture and give it to a kohein, see Shelach 15,20. An omer is the equivalent of forty-three and one-fifth eggs by volume.
Because there, the shield of soldiers spit out. They had shields made of skins and when they went to war, they smeared them with oil so that a weapon hitting [the shield] should slip [off of it]. As it is said [in Scriptures] "Get up officers, smear [your] shield with oil…
Shield — Used in defensive warfare, varying at different times and under different circumstances in size, form, and material (1 Sam. 17:7; 2 Sam. 1:21; 1 Kings 10:17; 1 Chr. 12:8, 24, 34; Isa. 22:6; Ezek.…
Elegy · David’s, on Saul and Jonathan — David’s, on Saul and Jonathan
Friendship · .David and Jonathan — .David and Jonathan
Imprecation · .David — .David
Jonathan · .Mourned by David — .Mourned by David
Mountains · Mentioned in scripture: Gilboa — Mentioned in scripture: Gilboa
Mourning · .The — .The
Poetry · .Upon the — .Upon the
Shield · Used by Saul — Used by Saul
Shields · Before war: Anointed — Before war: Anointed
Song · War — War
Dictionary: Easton's (1897) and Smith's (1863), public domain. Topics: Nave's Topical Bible (1896) and Torrey's Topical Textbook (1897), public domain. Both as parsed by NEUU (CC BY 4.0).
