2 Samuel 18:33

David's mourning for Absalom

33. was much moved Better perhaps, was sore troubled. Sept. ἐταράχθη is a good rendering. This passionate outburst of grief was due not only to the tenderness of affection, which was so striking a trait in David's character, but to the bitterness of the thought that the rebel, the would-be parricide, was thus

"Cut off even in the blossoms of his sin,

No reckoning made, but sent to his account

With all his imperfections on his head;"

and that this terrible catastrophe was the fruit and the punishment of his own crimes. The heart-broken cry "Would God I had died for thee" was not only the utterance of self-sacrificing love, but the confession that he had himself deserved the punishment which fell upon another. Cp. ch. 2 Samuel 24:17.

would God, &c. So Moses (Exodus 32:32), and so St Paul (Romans 9:3), would have sacrificed themselves, had it been possible, to save others.