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The king replied to her, “What do you want?”[a] She answered, “I am a widow; my husband is dead. Your servant[b] has two sons. When the two of them got into a fight in the field, there was no one present who could intervene. One of them struck the other and killed him. Now the entire family has risen up against your servant, saying, ‘Turn over the one who struck down his brother, so that we can execute him and avenge the death[c] of his brother whom he killed. In so doing we will also destroy the heir.’ They want to extinguish my remaining coal,[d] leaving no one on the face of the earth to carry on the name of my husband.”

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Footnotes

  1. 2 Samuel 14:5 tn Heb “What to you?”
  2. 2 Samuel 14:6 tn Here and elsewhere (vv. 7, 12, 15a, 17, 19) the woman uses a term which suggests a lower level female servant. She uses the term to express her humility before the king. However, she uses a different term in vv. 15b-16. See the note at v. 15 for a discussion of the rhetorical purpose of this switch in terminology.
  3. 2 Samuel 14:7 tn Heb “in exchange for the life.” The Hebrew preposition ב (bet, “in”) here is the so-called bet pretii, or bet (ב) of price, defining the value attached to someone or something.
  4. 2 Samuel 14:7 sn My remaining coal is here metaphorical language, describing the one remaining son as her only source of lingering hope for continuing the family line.