This is from yesterday’s McCheyne reading, 2 Samuel 19. I’m doing it today. I’m a day late. That’s what usually happens, because I have to think about these things for a while. If we go back to 2 Samuel 16:1–4, we read this account: When David had gone a short distance beyond the summit, there was Ziba, the steward of Mephibosheth, waiting to meet him. He had a string of donkeys saddled and loaded with two hundred loaves of bread, a hundred cakes of raisins, a hundred cakes of figs and a skin of wine. The king asked Ziba, “Why have you brought these?” Ziba answered, “The donkeys are for the king’s household to ride on, and the bread and fruit are for the men to eat, and the wine is to refresh those who become exhausted in the wilderness.” The king then asked, “Where is your master’s grandson?” Ziba said, “He is staying in Jerusalem, because he thinks, ‘Today the Israelites will restore to me my grandfather’s kingdom.’” Then the king said to Ziba, “All that belonged to Mephibosheth is now yours.” “I humbly bow,” Ziba said. “May I find favor in your eyes, my lord the king.” I’m calling this meditation “Ziba, the Inheritance Hustler,” because that’s exactly what this is. Now think about what had to happen here. If you go back to 1 Samuel 18:3–4, Jonathan makes a covenant with David and gives him his robe and weapons. Then in 1 Samuel 20:14–17, Jonathan asks David never to cut off his steadfast love from Jonathan’s house. Jonathan makes a covenant with David’s house and has David swear again. Then in 1 Samuel 20:42, at their parting, Jonathan says that their oath before the LORD extends to their descendants forever. And when you get to 1 Samuel 23:16–18, Jonathan visits David in the wilderness, and they make a covenant before the LORD again. We have all these covenants. There is a covenant between the house of David and the house of Jonathan. Then when you get to 2 Samuel 9:1, 7–10, David seeks someone from Saul’s house to whom he can show kindness for Jonathan’s sake. He restores all Saul’s land to Mephibosheth and orders Ziba and his household to work it for him. Ziba is the servant. Mephibosheth is the holder of the estate. He is the one who has title. Now, one of the problems we have when we read passages like this is that we don’t understand how land inheritance worked in Old Testament Israel. The land really was inalienable. It could not easily be transferred from one family to another. We get to the book of Ruth and we do see land changing hands, but there is somebody raised up in place of the person who has died. The landholding was almost like your church membership. You had a piece of real estate in Canaan. It had tremendous religious significance because it was a foreshadowing and typology of our heavenly inheritance. So when you had land, it belonged to the offspring of the father. Furthermore, when that inheritance was handed down to the next generation, the firstborn received a double portion. But a double portion of what? It wasn’t simply that the land was continually chopped up—the firstborn gets this much, the second-born gets this much, and so on. If that happened generation after generation, the farm would eventually be divided into tiny parcels that wouldn’t be very productive. The family holding remained intact. We might think of the firstborn as having something like the role of the acting trustee of the family estate. He was the heir, but the inheritance was not merely for himself. It was the family holding, where multiple generations could live and work together. So when Mephibosheth received all of Saul’s land, Mephibosheth was the heir. Ziba was the steward. He was there to work and manage the estate for Mephibosheth. That’s the context. But when we come to 2 Samuel 16:1–4, Ziba slanders Mephibosheth and alienates David against him. If Mephibosheth had actually done what Ziba claimed, yes, that would have been serious treason. But it wasn’t true. One of the most damaging things—and this shows up in family disputes today—is alienation. Sometimes we call it parental alienation, although I think that can be too restrictive. It can happen throughout an entire family. A well-placed lie can have catastrophic intergenerational consequences. Whole families can be torn apart because of lies. Sometimes a divorce goes badly, and one person slanders the other in order to turn the children against one parent. That happens. There are also blended families where someone can engineer the situation so that his or her own children inherit the property while the natural-born heirs of the spouse are excluded. You even see something like this in the Cinderella story. The stepmother favors her own children over her spouse’s child, to the point that she badly mistreats Cinderella. She lives in the house, uses its resources, and makes Cinderella do all the work. I don’t really recommend movies, but the 2015 adaptation of Cinderella was actually fantastic. It stayed quite close to the story and was very good storytelling. In some ways, it tells us what can happen when someone is alienated. Cinderella is terribly mistreated, and she bears it. Yet at the end she forgives her stepmother for what she has done. I think it’s a great morality tale for thinking about this. Back to Ziba, though. I wish I could say his story ended the way Cinderella’s did. It did not. On Ziba’s accusation, David declares that everything belonging to Mephibosheth now belongs to Ziba. Stop. Right there is a fundamental problem with what David does. Even for bad behavior, you did not simply lose your ancestral property. Even if Mephibosheth had been treasonous, that does not mean David had the right to take his inheritance and give it to Ziba. Think about the parable of the prodigal son. The son leaves the land, but the land is still the family inheritance. When he demands his inheritance, what does he want? He wants the movable wealth—the money. The father doesn’t simply sell the family property and parcel the ancestral land out. That’s not how it works. So David never had the right simply to take this land and give it to Ziba in the first place. And this takes us straight back to 1 Samuel 8. Israel wants a king, and Samuel warns them what a king will do: “This is what the king who will reign over you will claim as his rights…” He will take their sons. He will take their daughters. And then: “He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his attendants.” That is exactly what David does. He takes somebody’s ancestral inheritance and gives it to his attendant. He is using inalienable land for political ends. That’s the first strike. Then we come back to 2 Samuel 19. Mephibosheth finally gets to give his account, and David orders Mephibosheth and Ziba to divide the land. Divide the land? You weren’t supposed to divide the land in the first place. Now, some have argued that David may mean dividing the produce or profits from the land. But even then, why on earth would Mephibosheth want to continue in an economic relationship with Ziba after Ziba had slandered him? What was David thinking? Why didn’t David take the time to adjudicate this case properly? It wouldn’t have been that difficult. And Ziba’s original accusation—that Mephibosheth somehow thought Israel was going to restore Saul’s kingdom to him—made very little sense. David should have taken the time to judge the case properly. And at no point should Ziba ever have owned that land. What Ziba did was a tremendous sin. And it caused David, at least in this respect, not to fulfill completely the promise he had made to Jonathan. David did not destroy Jonathan’s house. But if you take Jonathan’s descendant’s inheritance and give it to Ziba, you have harmed the house of Jonathan. This is a tremendously sad event in David’s life. And then look at how Mephibosheth responds. In a sense, he responds almost like Cinderella: Keep it. I don’t want it. I think Mephibosheth is the hero here. He is the one who acted faithfully. David did not. And Ziba certainly did not. Ziba was an inheritance hustler. He was a political operative. And I think David’s decisions here were driven by political expediency. When David was fleeing Jerusalem, perhaps the thought was: I don’t have time to figure this out. But what do you mean you don’t have time? This is the descendant of a man with whom you made a covenant oath before the LORD. And then when David returns, he still gives Ziba half. Was David uncertain whether Mephibosheth was telling the truth? In one sense, it doesn’t even matter. Leave the ancestral land with Mephibosheth. He is no threat to David. Ziba has no legitimate claim to Jonathan’s inheritance. And then something later in the narrative makes the whole thing even more striking. In 2 Samuel 21:7, the narrator expressly tells us that David spares Mephibosheth because of the oath between David and Jonathan. The covenant remains operative in the story. In other words, David did not kill Mephibosheth. Well, good. But taking a man’s inheritance and giving part of it to Ziba—the liar, the alienator, the inheritance hustler—was still a terrible injustice. I looked through a number of commentaries to see who really picked up on this. Keil and Delitzsch were among the few I found who spoke forcefully against Ziba. A lot of commentators get caught up in the question, Was Mephibosheth telling the truth? But I think that can obscure the larger problem. The land was Mephibosheth’s inheritance. Ziba was supposed to be its steward. And the steward maneuvered to become the heir. That should never have happened. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit william296.substack.com
