David now addresses another issue left over from the Saul regime. The most important one had been the return of the ark of the covenant to Jerusalem. Now we come to the Gibeonites. Many years ago the Gibeonites had deceived Israel into giving her protection. By deception or not, God expected Israel to honour the agreement they made with them. However, Saul had not done so.
A famine came upon the land and the Lord told David that this was a result of Saul's blood-stained reign, and in particular his killing of the Gibeonites. This raises a number of interesting points. First here it says "he put the Gibenonites to death". Now clearly not all of them were put to death or they would not have been any Gibeonites left to deal with here. So we must be careful about over-literal reading of the Bible. In fact to be too literal it to be illiterate! This is relevant in some of the discussion of Joshua (see Paul Copan's book). However, at the same time many actually were killed.
The second point is the relationship between "natural" disasters and God's judgement. Our attitude today is that they are never an indication of God's judgement. we do this in the understandable reaction against people who seemingly delight in other's sufffering (by the way, Proverbs warns against gloating over other's misfortune) and a Christian concern for those who suffer. This contains a lot of truth, but it is unbiblical to say that there is never any connection between judgement and behaviour, for here there clearly was, and there are other examples in Scripture as well, including several in the Book of Acts. However, here we come to the key point. If I hear of someone else suffering some great disaster my first reaction (unless God has appointed me as a prophet to those people!) should be "what can I do to help", not "what have they done wrong". If something happens to me, then I might be right to ask the question "what have I done wrong". At the same time I should beware of getting obsessed with this. Sometimes I suffer for my own sin, sometimes I suffer because of other people's sin, and sometimes I suffer just because I live in a fallen world.
David offers to appease the Gibeonites, and they respond in a (given the social norms of the time) reasonable way. David continues to spare Jonathan's son.
There continued to be wars with the Philistines. At first David went to fight with the army, but then his men told him not to as he was now more of a liability than a help. Israel continued to have various victories.
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