What Does 2 Samuel 15:16 Mean?
And the king went out, and all his house went after him. And the king left ten women, who were concubines, to guard the house.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
And the king went forth, and all his household after him. And the king left ten women, which were concubines, to keep the house.THE KEY
The king’s flight leaves ten women guarding the house he has abandoned.
THE MEANING
The king leaves, and ten women remain responsible for guarding his house. They are named both by their subordinate place in his household and by the work entrusted to them. The sentence records their duty without recording any protection for them.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The lie that assigning a duty means those carrying it are protected dissolves here: the king gives the women a task while leaving them behind.
THE ROOT
לִשְׁמֹר
lishmor
GROWS FROM
שׁמר
To guard, watch over, or keep.
“guard” in this verse is lishmor. English can make this sound like ordinary housework, but שׁמר is the root of guarding and keeping watch. The women are assigned to watch over the king’s house as he leaves them behind, holding their duty and his abandonment together.
ALSO GROWS
shomer: Keeper or watchman.
שֹׁמֵר
This is the same root’s word for someone who guards; it appears in 1 Samuel 17:20 for the keeper David leaves with his sheep.
mishmeret: Charge, watch, or guard duty.
מִשְׁמֶרֶת
This branch names an entrusted watch, showing that the women’s work is a duty of keeping the house while its king is gone.
THE PATTERN
A departure becomes abandonment when the person left with the duty to guard receives no protection in return.
And David rose early in the morning, and left the sheep with a keeper, and carried the load, and went, as Jesse had commanded him; and he came to the circle, as the host was going out to the ranks, and shouted the battle cry.But the hired hand, who is not the shepherd, and whose sheep they are not, sees the wolf coming, and lets go of the sheep, and flees. And the wolf snatches them and scatters them.THE THREAD
And David rose early in the morning, and left the sheep with a keeper, and carried the load, and went, as Jesse had commanded him; and he came to the circle, as the host was going out to the ranks, and shouted the battle cry.The Hebrew calls David’s shepherd-keeper a שֹׁמֵר (shomer), from the same root as the women’s charge “to keep” the house here. David leaves the sheep with an explicit keeper; in this verse, the women themselves are left to keep the king’s house.
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