David Laments Abner and Names His Own Weakness

David makes Abner's funeral a public judgment on the killing

David says to Joab and to all the people with him, Rend your clothes, gird you with sackcloth, and mourn before Abner. King David himself follows the bier. They bury Abner in Hebron. The king lifts up his voice and weeps at the grave, and all the people weep. He laments: Died Abner as a fool dies? Your hands were not bound, nor your feet put into fetters; as a man falls before wicked men, so you fell. All the people weep again.

The people come to make David eat meat while it is still day. He swears that God do so to him if he tastes bread or anything else till the sun is down. The people take notice and it pleases them, as whatever the king did pleased all the people. All the people and all Israel understand that day that it was not of the king to slay Abner. The fast and the lament are meant to be read. They honor a fallen prince. They also teach a political lesson about who shed the blood.

A prince has fallen, and the anointed king calls himself weak

The king says to his servants, Know you not that there is a prince and a great man fallen this day in Israel? I am this day weak, though anointed king, and these men the sons of Zeruiah are too hard for me. The LORD shall reward the doer of evil according to his wickedness.

David names Joab's hardness and his own limits. The confession can be grief, political theater, real inability, or all three; the lament itself does not prove which. What the unit will not let a reader do is treat Abner as a mere obstacle on David's road. A great man has been murdered in Hebron, the king weeps in public, and the men too hard for him remain in command.