God’s Word for You
1 Chronicles 20:1-3 The siege of Rabbah
by Pastor Timothy Smith on Monday, February 19, 2024
20:1 In the spring of the year, at the time when kings go off to war, Joab led out the army and damaged the country of the Ammonites. Then he went and laid siege to Rabbah (but David remained at Jerusalem). Joab struck Rabbah and overthrew it. 2 Then David took the crown of their king from his head. He found that it weighed a talent of gold, and in it was a precious stone. It was placed on David’s head. He brought out a great deal of plunder from the city. 3 And he also brought out the people who were in it and set them to work with saws and iron picks and axes. David did the same things to all the cities of the Ammonites. Then David and all the troops returned to Jerusalem.
This passage gives us several different things to consider that are not strictly related;
1. Springtime. The verse and its parallel, 2 Samuel 11:1, gives us one of the great keys to understanding ancient warfare. In Israel, rain is the hallmark of winter, from November until the end of March. January and February are usually the rainiest months, with the barley harvest coming in mid-April. When the ground was dry enough for wagons and pack animals (mostly donkeys) to travel in large numbers, armies could move. Other passages that link the arrival of spring with war include 1 Kings 20:22 and 20:26 and 2 Kings 13:20.
2. The siege of Rabbah. Rabbah (modern Amman, Jordan) was located on a steep hill next to a very strong spring which feeds a stream that becomes the River Jabbok, one of the main tributaries of the Jordan River. Ancient cities had walls to keep out attackers, and a city on a hill was almost impossible to defeat without some breach in the wall or water system (1 Chronicles 11:4-6). However, a siege was a way of starving out a city. By capturing the water supply, death and disease would soon cause either surrender or some military blunder to allow the city to be captured.
Ancient siege machinery and tactics were both offensive and defensive. Offensively, an attacker might use ladders, wheeled towers, or catapults against walls. Defensively (to protect the attackers), trenches might be built with earthwork battlements. By moving these trenches forward toward the city gates, a large army could approach almost any city immune to almost any counter-attack.
3. David remained behind. In 2 Samuel, ten chapters fill in the gap between verse 3 of our chapter and verse 4 that follows. Those chapters include King David’s sin with Bathsheba, the murder of Uriah the Hittites, David’s repentance and marriage to Bathsheba, and the entire account of Absalom’s retribution against his brother Amnon for the rape of Absalom’s sister and the rebellion that followed. None of those things are recorded in Chronicles. But the very next account (that is, verses 4-8 of this chapter) record four battles against various giant Philistines that are grouped because of their subject matter, but not as a chronological sequence. In 2 Samuel 21:15-22, these follow another battle (not recorded in Chronicles) in which David was fighting against the Philistines “and became exhausted.” After Joab’s brother Abishai rescued David from a giant named Ishbi-Benob, “David’s men swore to him, saying, ‘Never again will you go out to war with us in battle, so that the lamp of Israel will not be extinguished’” (2 Samuel 21:17). If that battle took place before the siege of Rabbah, it would explain why David did not go along with the armies of Israel and stayed behind. This was when David, from his rooftop, saw the beautiful Bathsheba bathing nearby, and his weak flesh was not up to the temptation.
However, after the siege ended and the Ammonites were defeated, David traveled across the Jordan to Rabbah to make a statement by removing the crown from the young defeated king, and by placing the crown on his own head. After the shame, the humiliation, and the grief over what had happened back in the palace because of his sin, David’s trip and ceremonial performance in the victory were nothing but an empty show. A leader who does not look to his own place under God will bring nothing at all to his people but emptiness at best and ruin at worst. This is what Shakespeare’s king meant when he said: “within the hollow crown / that rounds the mortal temples of a king / keeps Death his court” (Richard II, III:2).
4. The weight of a talent of gold. How heavy was the crown? Various Bible translations give different modern weights for a talent. Usually these weights are based on the Roman talent, and they are accurate for New Testament references such as Matthew 25:15-18. The Hebrew word is kikkar, meaning “a round weight.” It may have been a reference to the amount of metal weight one servant could carry a long distance, a circular disk or mass of gold or silver weighing between 80 and 125 pounds. In 2 Kings 5:22-23, two servants are each given a talent of silver to carry along with a set of clothes. Those talents were put into bags and probably carried over the shoulders. In the Jewish Talmud, the weight of a talent in Moses’ day (c. 1400 BC) was estimated to be about twice the weight of a talent in Roman times (1 AD). This was only a guess, however. I offer the following rough estimate of the talent’s weight depending somewhat on the century and also by the dominating world power. The “Moses talent” is also called the heavy or common talent.
| Year | Region / Power | Equivalent Pounds |
|---|---|---|
| 1500 BC | Moses | 129 pounds |
| 600 BC | Babylon | 67 pounds |
| 500 BC | Late Egyptian | 60 pounds |
| 1 AD | Roman | 75 or 80 pounds |
Living just four hundred years after Moses, it would seem that the golden crown David set on his head was, as hats go, pretty heavy.
5. Forced labor of the defeated. Since our study of this incident has been telescoped out over a few weeks, we should remember what brought about this war in the first place. When the old king of Ammon died, David had sent envoys, royal representatives, to offer their condolences to his son, the new king. Those men had been shamed, and then the Ammonites took up a belligerent posture on Israel’s border, even inviting mercenaries down from Aram to help them. The mercenaries were defeated, the walls of the capital city were now breached, and David had removed the crown from their king. The defeat was driven even further home by the enslavement of the people, who were forced to take up “saws, iron picks, and axes” in the service of Israel. At first, it may sound like they were being sent into a forest to cut down trees, but that doesn’t account for the iron picks. The only thing that the people of Rabbah could be doing, in their high desert plateau with few trees and where lumber was more valuable than stone, was tearing down their own homes, forced into the work by David’s victorious soldiers.
Many years ago in my hometown, there was a young artist who was asked to paint a mural on the cinder block walls of a partly-finished basement. The mural wrapped around the entire main space of the basement, with archways depicted, windows and plants and many other things besides. However, the family that commissioned the mural was only renting, and when they moved out, the landlady was furious. She hired a local painting company to come and repaint the whole house, including the basement walls. And of course, the very artist who had created that mural (it had taken months of work) had to pick up a brush and a roller and destroy what he himself had made. His protests to his boss were met with nothing but a shrug. And with all the irony that a small town can muster, he himself was the very next person to rent that house. His emotions of grief and resentment destroying what was really just an amateur piece of artwork was surely nothing that could compare with the defeated people of Rabbah, ripping up their own doorways and living rooms, tearing down their own rooftops and smashing their own ovens. Then they would have had to haul away all that rock, stone, and wood, and dump it outside in a pile of ruin and rubble—and more than a few tears.
The King of the Ammonites had rejected what was nothing but an offer of sympathy. Professor Wendland puts his finger on the precise meaning of the text: “He could have received friendship from the Lord’s anointed, and all his people would have been blessed. But since he had opposed David, he lost his right to rule, and his people lost their freedom” (People’s Bible: 1 Chronicles p. 217). His downfall is an illustration of unbelief and the consequences of unbelief: death, judgment, hell, punishment, the wrath of God, separation from all of God’s blessings and love, from the protection of the good angels, from the blessing that comes from living among the saints on earth and saints in heaven, from human compassion of any kind, and from all the rest of God’s goodness: light, joy, rest, and happiness. There is only grief, pain, agony, torment, weeping, rage, the gnashing of teeth, and an eternity surrounded by enemies, for there are no allies or alliances in hell. There is only the flame and the worm and being a horror to all that Isaiah prophesies (Isaiah 66:24).
Our Father in heaven, deliver us from evil!
In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith
Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in New Ulm, Minnesota. To receive God’s Word for You via e-mail, please visit the St. Paul’s Lutheran Church website.