The Question of Who Brings David Back
The men of Judah — David's own tribe — have not yet acted to bring him back. The other tribes move first, sending word that the king should return to his house. Then David sends specifically to Zadok and Abiathar, the priests, to tell the elders of Judah: "Why should you be the last to bring the king back to his house, since the word of all Israel has come to the king?" — 2 Samuel 19:11 (ESV). It is a pointed question — his own tribe is lagging behind the tribes that had followed Absalom. He also makes a striking gesture: he promises Amasa, Absalom's military commander, that he will replace Joab as his commander. The gesture is a bid for reconciliation with those who fought against him — and a pointed message to Joab about the consequences of killing Absalom against orders.
The men of Judah respond: they send a delegation to bring the king over the Jordan. The king crosses at Gilgal — the same place where the kingdom was confirmed at the beginning, where Samuel gave his farewell, where Saul made his first public sacrifice — and the people of Judah and half the people of Israel come to meet him.
Shimei, Mephibosheth, and Barzillai
Three encounters at the crossing show the complexity of David's returning world. Shimei, the Benjaminite who had cursed David on his way out of Jerusalem — throwing stones and dirt and calling him a man of blood and a worthless man — now comes down with a thousand men of Benjamin to meet him. He falls before the king and begs for mercy: he has sinned, he says, and he knows it. He is the first of all the house of Joseph to come down to meet the returning king. Abishai wants to execute him for cursing the king. David refuses: "This day I will not put anyone to death, for do I not know that I am this day king over Israel?" — 2 Samuel 19:22 (ESV). He swears to Shimei that he shall not die.
What strikes us here is the restraint again. David had accepted Shimei's cursing without retaliation when he was fleeing — he said the LORD may have sent it. Now he extends the same restraint in the opposite direction: the man who cursed him when he was low will not be executed as a demonstration of returned power. David's grip on power is not tightened by vengeance. He passes over it. Some readers find this frustrating; the text seems to as well, noting that Shimei's word to David will circle back in the story of Solomon. But in this moment, it is grace, however complicated.
Mephibosheth comes out — Jonathan's son, whom David had honored with a place at the royal table — and he has not trimmed his beard or washed his clothes since the day David left. He has been cut off from the king's table because his servant Ziba had told David that Mephibosheth hoped to recover his grandfather's kingdom from the chaos. Now Mephibosheth gives his account: Ziba deceived him. He commanded Ziba to saddle his donkey so he could go with the king; Ziba went without him and slandered him. David does not fully adjudicate who is telling the truth. He divides the estate between Mephibosheth and Ziba. Mephibosheth's response reveals his priority: "Let him take it all, since my lord the king has come home in safety." — 2 Samuel 19:30 (ESV). What the land represented — the covenant restored — matters more to him than the land itself.
Barzillai, an old man of Gilead who had provisioned David generously during the exile, is invited to come to Jerusalem to be honored at the king's table. Barzillai is eighty — he says he cannot taste what he eats, he cannot hear the voice of singing men and women. He would only be a burden. He asks to go home to die in his own city by the graves of his parents. But he sends Chimham, and David takes Chimham with him. There is something lovely in Barzillai's response — he is not falsely modest, and he is not posturing. He simply knows who he is at eighty and what he needs, and he asks for it. He gave what he had to give when it mattered; now he wants to go home. The king honors that.
Tribal Tensions: Judah Against Israel
As David crosses back to Jerusalem, a dispute breaks out between the men of Israel and the men of Judah over the ceremony of the return. The men of Israel resent that the men of Judah brought the king over as though he were theirs exclusively. The men of Judah respond: because the king is near to us in kinship. A worthless man named Sheba, son of Bichri of Benjamin, takes up a trumpet and calls: "We have no portion in David, and we have no inheritance in the son of Jesse; every man to his tents, O Israel!" — 2 Samuel 20:1 (ESV). All the men of Israel follow Sheba. The men of Judah alone follow their king.
This is the fracture named. The dispute at the Jordan crossing — over who had the right to bring the king back — exposes a tribal resentment that has been building since the days of Saul. The northern tribes feel they have more of Israel by number and that the Judeans are appropriating the king as though he were a tribal property. It is a preview of what will split the kingdom permanently after Solomon's death.
David returns to Jerusalem. He makes Amasa the army commander to pursue Sheba. But when Amasa is slow to assemble the men, David sends Abishai instead, and Joab comes with them. When they meet Amasa, Joab's treachery is swift: he greets Amasa as a friend, takes him by the beard to kiss him, and runs him through with his sword. Amasa dies in the middle of the road. A man covers the body when he sees that every passerby is stopping to look at it. With Amasa dead, Joab is again the de facto commander — the king's disavowal of him after Absalom's death has not held.
Sheba takes refuge in Abel of Beth-maacah. Joab besieges the city. A wise woman calls to him from the wall and negotiates: Abel is a mother city in Israel, a place of settled tradition and counsel. Why should Joab destroy it? Joab says he wants only Sheba. She says the head will be thrown over the wall. The woman persuades the city, they cut off Sheba's head and throw it to Joab, and he blows the trumpet and the siege is lifted. The revolt is over. Joab returns to Jerusalem.
We find Joab one of the more disturbing figures in 2 Samuel precisely because he is so often right — right about Absalom needing to die, right about Amasa's slowness — and still entirely unaccountable. Power in service of its own judgment, without submission to anything larger than itself, produces exactly the kind of man Joab is. David cannot control him and cannot remove him; he is too capable and too dangerous at once. He will eventually pass this problem to Solomon rather than solve it himself.
Three characters at the Jordan crossing map the range of responses to David's return: Shimei's calculating reconciliation, Mephibosheth's genuine covenant joy, and Barzillai's honest self-knowledge. None of them is simple. That is one of the things we keep noticing about this book — the people in it are complicated in ways that feel true. Reconciliation requires more than victory, and these chapters are honest about how much harder the peace is than the war.
Last updated: March 3, 2026.
Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.