Three years of famine, and David finally does what he might have done in the first year: he seeks the face of the LORD. The answer reaches back decades: 1"There is bloodguilt on Saul and on his house, because he put the Gibeonites to death." Israel had sworn before the LORD to spare the Gibeonites (Joshua 9:15-20), and Saul in his zeal for Israel and Judah tried to strike them down anyway (verse 2). Zeal for the nation and faithfulness to the LORD's sworn word are not automatically the same, and Saul's whole reign confused them.
The Gibeonites' request is severe, and the text does not soften it: seven of Saul's descendants given to them and hanged before the LORD (verses 5-6). What matters is what David does with it. He asks twice what he can do for them (verses 3-4), and when the moment comes to choose, he spares one man, Mephibosheth, Jonathan's son, 7"because of the oath of the LORD that was between them." Saul's broken oath brought the crisis. David's kept oath is the one thing in the chapter that comes through untouched. He honors an old covenant with the Gibeonites and an old covenant with a dead friend, and he lets neither bend for convenience.
Rizpah appears next, one of Saul's concubines, mother of two of the seven hanged on that mountain. She takes sackcloth, spreads it on the rock beside the bodies, and stays from the beginning of the barley harvest until the rains fall, driving off the birds by day and the wild animals by night with her presence and her grief (verse 10). It is months of exposure to sun and weather, alone on a rock, because someone had to keep watch and no one else would. Hers is a fierce, unyielding love, refusing to let even this dishonor stand over what remains of her sons.
Her vigil reaches David (verse 11), and only then does he act. He recovers the neglected bones of Saul and Jonathan from the men of Jabesh-gilead, gathers the bones of the seven who were hanged, and buries them all together in the tomb of Kish at Zela (verses 12-14). 14"after that God responded to the plea for the land." The land is healed by justice followed all the way through into honor restored, dishonored bones given a resting place, and a mother's watch answered by a king willing to act on what her grief exposed.
There is no tidy comfort in the middle of this chapter, and none should be manufactured. What can be said honestly is that the God who required an ancient oath to be honored is the God who would satisfy every claim justice could bring against us, by giving his own Son, and by demanding seven sons of no one. Every claim justice makes was answered there, fully, and mercy has followed ever since.
Where is there an old promise, yours or your family's, left unkept? Name one, and decide what honoring it would take.
Prayer
Father, thank you for David's careful faithfulness even inside a request this severe, honoring one oath to the Gibeonites without breaking another to Jonathan. Thank you for Rizpah's fierce, unrelenting love, and for every quiet vigil kept by people the world barely notices. And thank you that at the cross your justice and mercy were finally reconciled, so that we need never fear dishonor with no one left to guard against it. In Jesus' name, amen.