1 Chronicles 19:1-5 meaning
1 Chronicles 19:1-5 opens with a death and a king's intention to do good: Now it came about after this, that Nahash the king of the sons of Ammon died, and his son became king in his place (v 1). Nahash had been king of Ammon since the beginning of Saul's reign, when he besieged Jabesh-gilead and demanded the right eye of every man in the city (1 Samuel 11:1-2). The sons of Ammon descended from Lot (Genesis 19:38) and lived east of the Jordan around their capital Rabbah, the site of modern Amman. The specification of "After this" places the story in the sequence of David's wars that began in the previous chapter, where Ammon has already been listed among the nations whose spoil David dedicated (1 Chronicles 18:11).
David's response to the news is generous: Then David said, "I will show kindness to Hanun the son of Nahash, because his father showed kindness to me." So David sent messengers to console him concerning his father. And David's servants came into the land of the sons of Ammon to Hanun to console him (v 2). The word translated kindness, "chesed" in Hebrew, speaks to the type of covenant loyalty God had just promised to David's son, "I will not take My lovingkindness away from him" (1 Chronicles 17:13). In this verse, David extends to Hanun a human form of what he had received from God.
Scripture does not say what kindness Nahash showed David. Nahash was Saul's enemy, and a plausible guess is that he aided David during the years Saul hunted him, since Nahash's other son Shobi later brought supplies to David at Mahanaim during Absalom's revolt (2 Samuel 17:27-29). Whatever the favor was, David remembered it after the man who did it had died, and he sent messengers to console the son (v 2).
The embassy is received by suspicious men: But the princes of the sons of Ammon said to Hanun, "Do you think that David is honoring your father, in that he has sent comforters to you? Have not his servants come to you to search and to overthrow and to spy out the land?" (v 3). The princes were the court officials who surrounded the new king, and their counsel is built from fear. David had just broken the Philistines, Moab, Zobah, Damascus, and Edom (1 Chronicles 18:1-13), and a delegation from such a king looked to them like reconnaissance. Their three verbs, to search and to overthrow and to spy out (v 3), mistake those who would have been comforters into enemies. Hanun chose to believe the worst.
The young king's answer to kindness is calculated shame: So Hanun took David's servants and shaved them and cut off their garments in the middle as far as their hips, and sent them away (v 4). A full beard marked a man's dignity in Israel and the surrounding nations, and the law forbade an Israelite to disfigure his own (Leviticus 19:27). To be shaved by an enemy was to be treated as a slave or a captive; Isaiah would later describe Assyria as a razor God hired to shave Judah's "head and the hair of the legs" and "the beard" (Isaiah 7:20). Cutting the garments in the middle as far as their hips (v 4) exposed the men as prisoners of war were exposed (Isaiah 20:4).
2 Samuel 10:4 adds that Hanun shaved off half of each beard, so that the men were made ridiculous as well as naked. Hanun treated ambassadors of peace as enemies taken in battle, and in the ancient world an insult to a king's envoy was an insult to the king.
David's first concern is his men: Then certain persons went and told David about the men. And he sent to meet them, for the men were greatly humiliated. And the king said, "Stay at Jericho until your beards grow, and then return" (v 5). The men were greatly humiliated (v 5); the Hebrew verb "kalam" is the root behind the "humiliation" the Servant endured in Isaiah 50:6. David sent to meet them before they could reach the capital, sparing them the walk through Jerusalem in that condition.
Jericho lay near the Jordan crossing on the road from Ammon, under Joshua's curse and without walls until Hiel rebuilt them in Ahab's day (Joshua 6:26; 1 Kings 16:34), a place where the men could recover unseen. The instruction, until your beards grow, and then return (v 5), restored them to dignity before duty. David had sent them in his name; he received their shame as his own and cared for them first.
The section carries a pattern that runs through Scripture. God sends messengers of kindness, and the world often answers them with contempt. Jesus described a king whose servants carried a wedding invitation and were "mistreated" and "killed" by those they went to (Matthew 22:3-6), and He told His own messengers, "The one who rejects you rejects Me" (Luke 10:16). Paul called himself one of Christ's "ambassadors" sent with an appeal to be reconciled to God (2 Corinthians 5:20), and he bore the shame that came with the post. The Servant of Isaiah went furthest, giving His "cheeks to those who pluck out the beard" (Isaiah 50:6), and God vindicated Him.
Hanun's princes stand for a response that has recurred: treating God's kindness as a threat. Paul asks those who do so whether they "think lightly of the riches of His kindness," not knowing "that the kindness of God leads you to repentance" (Romans 2:4). David's treatment of his men shows the other side of the pattern. The King who sends His servants out knows their humiliation, meets them in it, and restores them (1 Peter 4:14; Hebrews 11:26).