1:5 Now Adonijah, son of David and Haggith, 1 was promoting himself, 2 boasting, 3 “I will be king!” He managed to acquire 4 chariots and horsemen, as well as fifty men to serve as his royal guard. 5
1 tn Heb “son of Haggith,” but since this formula usually designates the father (who in this case was David), the translation specifies that David was Adonijah’s father.
sn Haggith was one of David’s wives (2 Sam 3:4; 2 Chr 3:2).
2 tn Heb “lifting himself up.”
3 tn Heb “saying.”
4 tn Or “he acquired for himself.”
5 tn Heb “to run ahead of him.”
6 tn Heb “because.” The words “his royal court was so large” are added to facilitate the logical connection with the preceding verse.
7 sn Tiphsah. This was located on the Euphrates River.
8 tn Heb “for he was ruling over all [the region] beyond the River, from Tiphsah to Gaza, over all the kingdoms beyond the River, and he had peace on every side all around.”
9 tn Heb “everyone who drew near to the table of King Solomon.”
10 sn As a unit of dry measure a cor was roughly equivalent to six bushels.
11 tn Heb “his house.”
12 tc The Hebrew text has “twenty cors,” but the ancient Greek version and the parallel text in 2 Chr 2:10 read “twenty thousand baths.”
sn A bath was a liquid measure equivalent to almost six gallons.
13 tn Or “pressed.”
14 tn Heb “and Solomon supplied Hiram with twenty thousand cors of wheat…pure olive oil. So Solomon would give to Hiram year by year.”
15 tn This Hebrew architectural term occurs only here. The meaning is uncertain; some have suggested “banisters” or “parapets”; cf. TEV, NLT “railings.” The parallel passage in 2 Chr 9:11 has a different word, meaning “tracks,” or perhaps “steps.”
16 tn Two types of stringed instruments are specifically mentioned, the כִּנּוֹר (kinnor, “zither” [?]), and נֶבֶל (nevel, “harp”).
17 tn Heb “there has not come thus, the fine timber, and there has not been seen to this day.”
18 tn Heb “and he burned the house of the king over him with fire and he died.”
19 tn The Hebrew verbal forms could be imperatives (“Disguise yourself and enter”), but this would make no sense in light of the immediately following context. The forms are better interpreted as infinitives absolute functioning as cohortatives. See IBHS 594 §35.5.2a. Some prefer to emend the forms to imperfects.