² tn Heb “he”; the referent (Ish Bosheth) has been specified in the translation for clarity.

¹ tn Heb “he”; the referent (Ish Bosheth) has been specified in the translation for clarity.

¹ tn Heb “to Ish Bosheth son of Saul saying.” To avoid excessive sibilance (especially when read aloud) the translation renders “saying” as “with this demand.”

¹ tn The MT does not specify the subject of the verb here, but the reference is to Ish Bosheth, so the name has been supplied in the translation for clarity. 4QSam^a and the LXX mistakenly read “Mephibosheth.”

¹ tc The Hebrew of the MT reads simply “and he said,” with no expressed subject for the verb. It is not likely that the text originally had no expressed subject for this verb, since the antecedent is not immediately clear from the context. We should probably restore to the Hebrew text the name “Ish Bosheth.” See a few medieval Hebrew mss, Aquila, Symmachus, Theodotion, and Vulgate. Perhaps the name was accidentally omitted by homoioarcton. Note that both the name Ish Bosheth and the following preposition אֶל (ʾel) begin with the letter alef.

¹ sn The name Ish Bosheth means in Hebrew “man of shame.” It presupposes an earlier form such as Ish Baal (“man of the Lord”), with the word “baal” being used of Israel’s God. But because the Canaanite storm god was named “Baal,” that part of the name was later replaced with the word “shame.”

¹ tc The MT here reads “the Ashurite,” but this is problematic if it is taken to mean “the Assyrian.” Ish Bosheth’s kingdom obviously was not of such proportions as to extend to Assyria. The Syriac Peshitta and the Vulgate render the word as “the Geshurite,” while the Targum has “of the house of Ashur.” We should probably emend the Hebrew text to read “the Geshurite.” The Geshurites lived in the northeastern part of the land of Palestine.