Blogging Through the Book of Mormon

Now that Saul’s son was dead, the northern tribes called “Israel” had no king, te elders had a dilemma and decided to go to David and ask him to be the king over the entirety of Israel, consisting of all the northern tribes as well as the southern tribes of Judah and Benjamin that he was already king over. The elders give 4 reasons why they want David to be their king. First, “we are thy bone and thy flesh,” meaning that they are all Israelites by heritage, all descending from Abraham. Second, when Saul was king, David was his military leader and had many victories. Third, he was already a king over Judah and Benjamin, so he already has those qualifications. And fourth, God anointed him to be “captain over Israel.” David accepted and the elders anointed David king over Israel in Hebron. It says that David was 30 years old and that he reigned for 40 years. TB explained that these probably weren’t exact numbers because they are “complete” numbers in Hebrew, which is interesting to me b...

Now that Abner is dead, the people allied with Saul’s son sees the writing on the wall and knows that he can’t be even close to the kind of leader that Abner was. They knew that they were at war with David, the knew that David won his wars, and it’s possible that they even knew that David was anointed by God to be the next king over Israel, so they do the only logical thing, they kill Saul’s son, the king of the northern tribes called Israel. They are so sure that they were right to kill this man that they cut off his head and brought it to David, I’m sure believing that they would be rewarded. To be fair, I think that this is probably how it would have worked with any other leader at that time, so they weren’t wrong to assume that this would benefit them because I’m sure that’s what they’ve seen and understood their whole lives. Unfortunately for them, David was no ordinary leader, so he has these two men who did this, who are brothers by the way, he has them executed. Technically, ...