The Woman of Tekoa
This chapter focuses on the woman of Tekoa (2 Sam. 14) and argues that her speech points out a pattern of David’s previous misconducts (profiled in ANE literature as the royal deviance principle) that endangered his family and YHWH’s people. Using the ominous phraseology in v. 14 (we are like water spilled on the ground), and reinforcing its tie to ancient maledictions, the woman parades before David a horrid demise of a nation due to its monarch’s failure to rectify inner-dynastic feuds. By placing her curse-related imagery into a lament-based petition, the woman protests its fulfilment in the ensuing chapters in the Absalom saga. Since the entirety of 2 Sam. 14 is supplemented with grief-related artifices, the woman’s speech functions as an act of mourning for the cumulative death toll of God’s people under David’s kingship.