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Solomon’s Birth
2 Samuel 12:24–25 — Solomon’s Birth. Each verse below carries the full apparatus: the Berean Standard Bible, the vocalized original (tap any word), and a parsed breakdown of every term transcribed from the interlinear. Synthesized commentary, canonical threads, and the reading of Christ gather at the end, over the whole unit.
24Then David comforted his wife Bathsheba, and he went to her and lay with her. So she gave birth to a son, and they named him Solomon. Now the LORD loved the child
Berean Standard Bible · CC0
Hebrew — tap a word ↓
dā·wiḏ ’êṯ baṯ- way·na·ḥêm ’iš·tōw še·ḇa‘ way·yā·ḇō ’ê·le·hā way·yiš·kaḇ ‘im·māh wat·tê·leḏ bên way·yiq·rå̄ ’eṯ- šə·mōw šə·lō·mōh Yah·weh ’ă·hê·ḇōw
Literal — word-for-word from the original
“And-he-comforted David [namely] Bath-Sheba his-wife, and-he-came unto-her and-he-lay with-her; and-she-bore a-son, and-he-called his-name Solomon — and-YHWH, He-loved-him.”
Where the English smooths the original
David comforted Bathsheba; who was now much dejected, both for her former sin, which she truly repented of, as may be gathered from Proverbs 31:1-3 , &c., and for the loss of that child which was very dear to her, and which might seem to be the only tie of David’s affection to her;Poole supplies the human situation the Hebrew leaves silent: a woman who has buried a child and may reasonably expect to be discarded. His appeal to Proverbs 31 as evidence of her repentance rests on the old identification of Lemuel with Solomon, which is traditional rather than stated by the text.
David patiently submitted to the will of God in the death of one child, and God made up the loss to his advantage, in the birth of another.
and the birth of this son was a confirmation of the peace and reconciliation between God and them, and which his name carried in it;
David gave the child this name, because he regarded his birth as a pledge that he should now become a partaker again of peace with God,K&D's reading is a deliberate rejection of the more common one (Cambridge, Pulpit) that the name marks the end of the Ammonite war; he holds the peace named is peace with God, and that Solomon was in fact born after Rabbah fell.
25and sent word through Nathan the prophet to name him Jedidiah because the LORD loved him.
Berean Standard Bible · CC0
Hebrew — tap a word ↓
way·yiš·laḥ bə·yaḏ nā·ṯān han·nā·ḇî way·yiq·rā ’eṯ- šə·mōw yə·ḏî·ḏə·yāh ba·‘ă·ḇūr Yah·weh
Literal — word-for-word from the original
“And-he-sent by-the-hand-of Nathan the-prophet, and-he-called his-name Jedidiah, for-the-sake-of YHWH.”
Where the English smooths the original
It does not appear that this name ( beloved of the Lord ) was intended to do more than express the Divine acceptance of Solomon; and it never came into use as a personal title.
The name Jedidiah (which contains the same root as the name David, namely, "to love") indicated, prophetically, what God's Providence brought about actually, namely, the succession and glorious reign of Solomon over Israel.Barnes reads the name as predictive of the succession. That is inference from later history, not a claim the verse itself makes; the text says only that the LORD loved him.
The name was given “because of the Lord,” i.e. because Jehovah loved the child; and it served as a pledge to David that he was again fully received into God’s favour.
As we have already pointed out, this was no slight matter, but the virtual selection of Solomon to be David's successor, and probably, therefore, was delayed until he had given indica of his great intellectual gifts.Quoted exactly as the source text stands; “indica” is a defect in the public-domain transcription for “indications.” Pulpit's dating — that the second naming waited until Solomon was ten or twelve — is his reconstruction, not a datum of the text.
The verse-by-verse work is done. What follows gathers the whole unit. All three layers below are machine-generated (⚙). Weigh them; they have no authority.
AI synthesis — woven from the public-domain voices above and the original text; generated and fallible.
The unit opens with a Piel: וַיְנַחֵ֣ם, David works comfort into Bathsheba. Strong's root sense of nâcham is “properly, to sigh,” and the intensive stem turns that breath outward. Poole fills in the silence the Hebrew keeps, describing a woman dejected for her sin and for the dead child, who “might think that David would utterly cast her off.” Benson notices the same silence from the other side and presses it further: in the whole account “there is not one word said to her … either concerning her guilt or her punishment.” Gill adds a specific content to the comforting — that David told her God had pardoned them and would give them a son to succeed him — which is Gill's reconstruction, not the narrator's report; the text says only the verb. ⚙ What the grammar does say is that the man who a chapter earlier acted on her is now the man who acts for her, and that the first word the restored marriage receives is אִשְׁתּ֔וֹ, “his wife” — Gill: the first time she is so called.
Three wayyiqtols run without pause — he came, he lay, she bore — and then a name: שְׁלֹמֹ֔ה, from shālôm. Cambridge: the name “signifies peaceable,” given “in anticipation of the peace and quietness promised to Israel in his reign in contrast to his father’s wars,” citing 1 Chronicles 22:9. Pulpit agrees it was “a name of hope,” given at birth, and then turns the knife: the same father had already named another son Absalom, “his father's peace,” and that peace was broken by rebellion. K&D dissents on the referent — for him the peace named is David's own restored peace with God, a pledge rather than a political forecast. ⚙ Both readings agree in this: the name is spoken over a child who has done nothing, in a house still under an announced sword. It is a confession, not a description. Then the narrative drops its verb chain and fronts the subject — וַיהוָ֖ה אֲהֵבֽוֹ — so that the clause stands apart from the sequence like a verdict: and YHWH, He loved him. JFB registers the scandal: this love, “considering the criminality of the marriage from which he sprang, is a remarkable instance of divine goodness and grace.”
Verse 25 begins with a verb that has no stated subject, וַיִּשְׁלַ֗ח, and the commentators split along that gap. K&D argues from syntax that the sender “cannot be David … but must be Jehovah, the subject of the clause immediately preceding,” and that Nathan, not Jehovah, is the one who then speaks the name. Pulpit reaches the same conclusion by idiom: “in the hand” is the ordinary Hebrew preposition meaning “by,” so “the sense plainly is that God sent a message by Nathan.” Geneva's marginal note answers the same question with one word — “Meaning, David.” Cambridge reports a third possibility from the Vulgate, that David committed the boy to Nathan's hand for his education, and concedes “the explanation is doubtful, and there is no further trace of the fact.” ⚙ The Hebrew will not settle it; what it settles is the name. יְדִ֣ידְיָ֑הּ is built, as Barnes and Cambridge both note, on the same root as David, with the divine name attached. Ellicott keeps it modest — the name expressed “the Divine acceptance of Solomon” and never became a personal title. Cambridge says what that acceptance was for: it “served as a pledge to David that he was again fully received into God’s favour.” And the Hebrew has no verb of loving in this verse at all; it ends baʻăbûr YHWH, “for the sake of the LORD,” and leaves the loving to be carried forward from v. 24.
⚙ Offered to be tested, not believed on our word. The whole unit is two verses long and contains no promise, no command, and no explanation — only four verbs of ordinary human life (comforted, came, lay, bore) and two names. That is the reading I want to press: grace here is entirely onomastic. Nothing is said to Bathsheba; nothing is said about the child's character; no covenant is restated. God's response to a house He has just sentenced is to give a name, and then to send a prophet a second time to give another one. The first name, Solomon, is spoken by a human mouth into a situation where peace is not yet true — Pulpit is right that it is hope, and right that it was broken. The second name, Jedidiah, comes from outside, carries the root of the father's own name, and announces a love that the verse does not even bother to supply a verb for; it must be borrowed from the line above. ⚙ I take this to mean that the restoration of a forgiven sinner is not announced as a reversal of consequences — the sword stays in the house, and every commentator here knows it — but as a renaming. The same man is told his son is beloved by the God whose commandment he despised. If that is right, then the honest way to read v. 24's fronted clause is not “God overlooked it” but “God loved him anyway, and said so in the one medium that cannot be argued with: what the child would be called.” Where I am least sure: whether the naming in v. 25 is God's act through Nathan (K&D, Pulpit) or David's grateful act (Geneva), and whether Barnes is right to hear the succession prophesied in it. I lean with K&D on the first and against Barnes on the second, and I hold both loosely.
The line that follows is the tool's own interpretive summary and is not a verse of Scripture: “Forgiveness, in this house, arrives first as a name — and the name is the father's, given back from heaven with God's own attached.”
AI-generated connections. Each carries a verification badge with a recorded basis; contested links are flagged.
The three names introduced together here reappear as a set only in one other place in the canon: the succession crisis of 1 Kings 1, where Nathan the prophet goes to Bath-Sheba and tells her to secure the throne for Solomon. The Verifier confirms the shared lexemes. ⚙ The link is one of persons and plot, not of wording: the narrator has quietly assembled in two verses the cast that will decide who sits on David's seat, and the naming here — which Barnes takes as already prophetic of the succession — is what 1 Kings 1 will cash out. I record it as structural rather than verbal deliberately: the rare shared word is a proper name, and shared names are continuity of character, not quotation.
1 Kings 1:11 · 1 Kings 1:28 · 1 Kings 2:19
basis: Verifier: shared Hebrew lexemes H1339 Bath-Shebaʻ (in 11 vv — rare), H5416 Nâthân (in 39 vv), H8010 Shᵉlômôh (in 263 vv). The rare lexeme is a proper name, so the shared vocabulary evidences recurrence of the same persons, not verbal dependence — hence structural, not verbal.
The Masoretic superscription of Psalm 51 names the same two persons the Verifier finds shared with this unit — Nathan the prophet, and the going in to Bath-Sheba — making it the one place in the Psalter that points back at this story by name. Henry, commenting on this very passage, states the connection as fact: “David now penned the 51st Psalm.” ⚙ The superscription is part of the Hebrew text (vv. 1–2 in MT numbering) and functions as an explicit internal citation of the narrative; that, plus the rare lexeme, is what earns the verbal tier here. What it does not establish is Henry's chronology — that the psalm was composed at this point rather than earlier in ch. 12 — which is inference.
Psalm 51:1
basis: Verifier: shared Hebrew lexemes H1339 Bath-Shebaʻ (in 11 vv — rare), H5416 Nâthân (in 39 vv), H5030 nâbîyʼ (in 288 vv), occurring in the MT superscription, which names this narrative explicitly; Henry (1706) independently ties the psalm to this passage.
The Verifier pairs this unit with 2 Samuel 10:3 (and its parallel in 1 Chronicles 19:3) on two shared words: nâcham, to comfort, and ʻâbûwr, for the sake of. At 10:3 the Ammonite princes sneer at David's comforters and persuade Hanun to humiliate them, and out of that refused comfort comes the war whose siege of Rabbah frames chs. 11–12. ⚙ Here, at the war's end, the same root returns with David as its subject and his wife as its object, and the second shared word carries the cause: for the sake of the LORD. I claim a real verbal recurrence within a shared motif, not a quotation — neither passage cites the other, and both lexemes are common.
2 Samuel 10:3 · 1 Chronicles 19:3
basis: Verifier: shared Hebrew lexemes H5162 nâcham (in 100 vv) and H5668 ʻâbûwr (in 47 vv). Both are common, so the shared vocabulary supports a motif-level link (comfort offered and refused / comfort given), not verbal dependence.
Matthew's genealogy records exactly the marriage this unit legitimizes, and records it with the scandal intact: David the father of Solomon “by the wife of Uriah.” Ellicott, on v. 24, makes the same connection from this end — the birth of the son “through whom should pass the line to the Messiah, was too important to be overlooked,” which he gives as the reason the notice stands here out of strict chronological order. ⚙ This is a cross-Testament link and therefore cannot rest on shared Strong's numbers: the Greek of Matthew 1:6 and the Hebrew of 2 Samuel 12:24 share no lexeme by definition. The basis is referential — the same two persons and the same child, named in a genealogy that exists to trace this line — so it is recorded as structural, never verbal.
Matthew 1:6
basis: Cross-Testament (Greek↔Hebrew): no shared Strong's lexeme is possible, so no verbal tier. Basis is referential identity — Matthew 1:6 names David, Solomon and the wife of Uriah, the three parties of this verse — supported by Ellicott (1878) on 2 Samuel 12:24.
Cambridge, glossing Jedidiah, sends the reader to Deuteronomy 33:12 (Benjamin, “the beloved of the LORD”) and Psalm 127:2 — the latter a Song of Ascents ascribed to Solomon, whose closing phrase has been read since antiquity as “so he gives to his beloved sleep.” ⚙ I record this on Cambridge's authority and flag it, because the Verifier's candidate list for this unit does not include either verse, so the shared-lexeme basis has not been machine-confirmed here; and the reading of Psalm 127:2 is itself disputed in translation. A genuinely attractive link that I have not verified is still an unverified link.
Deuteronomy 33:12 · Psalm 127:2
basis: Basis is Cambridge Bible (1880s) citing Deut 33:12 and Psalm 127:2 for the root behind H3041 Yᵉdîydᵉyâh. Not present in this unit's Verifier candidate list, so the shared-lexeme link is unconfirmed by computation; the sense of Psalm 127:2b is additionally contested among translators.
AI-generated reading; weigh it against the text.
Gill takes the name שְׁלֹמֹ֔ה straight through to its antitype: the name signifies “peaceable,” the birth was “a confirmation of the peace and reconciliation between God and them,” and in this Solomon “was a type of Christ, the Prince; of peace; who is the author of peace between God and men by the blood of his cross.” K&D, without the typology, reaches the same theological point about the name — David gave it “because he regarded his birth as a pledge that he should now become a partaker again of peace with God.” ⚙ The structure the two share is worth naming: in both readings a child is the pledge that hostility is over, and in both the peace precedes any evidence for it. That is the shape of Isaiah's Prince of Peace and of Colossians' peace made through the blood of the cross. The reading that Solomon typifies Christ in his peace and his temple-building is ancient and widely held; the specific claim that David knew this when he named him is Gill's, and goes beyond the text.
1 Chronicles 22:9 · Isaiah 9:6 · Colossians 1:20 · 2 Samuel 7:14
The second name is not chosen by a parent but sent: a prophet arrives and declares over a child that he is loved of YHWH, for the LORD's own sake. Gill draws the line explicitly — Jedidiah is “a name and character which well agrees with the Messiah, Solomon's antitype,” and cites the voice at the Jordan (Matthew 3:17). ⚙ The formal parallel is exact and, so far as I can see, unforced: in both cases the beloved-status is announced from outside the scene, before any public work, and is grounded not in the child's record but in the speaker's love. The Hebrew even withholds the verb — v. 25 says only for the sake of YHWH, and the loving must be carried down from v. 24. Barnes and Cambridge supply the further detail that Yedidyah is built on the root of David: the beloved son bears the father's name with God's added to it.
Matthew 3:17 · Matthew 17:5 · Ephesians 1:6
Ellicott explains the placement of these two verses on redemptive-historical grounds: the notice stands here, out of chronological order, because “the birth of that son who should succeed to the kingdom, and through whom should pass the line to the Messiah, was too important to be overlooked.” Matthew 1:6 confirms the route and refuses to sanitize it, naming the mother only as the wife of Uriah. ⚙ What I take from the pairing is narrower than a type: not that Solomon prefigures Christ at this point, but that the genealogy of the Christ is routed deliberately through the household of David's worst sin and God's declared forgiveness. JFB, commenting on the divine love for this child, calls it exactly that — “a remarkable instance of divine goodness and grace,” given “the criminality of the marriage from which he sprang.”
Matthew 1:6 · 2 Samuel 7:12-16
The biblical text is the Berean Standard Bible (BSB), public domain (CC0). Hebrew/Greek text, transliteration, morphology and Strong’s are transcribed from the Berean interlinear (CC0) + Strong’s lexicons (PD); the literal renderings, divergence notes, word notes and all synthesis are this tool’s own work (⚙) — fallible; verify them.
Named voices, quoted verbatim from public-domain works:
Text. Two verses, Hebrew, BSB base text with the Berean interlinear. Three items in the supplied interlinear need flagging rather than hiding. (1) At 12:24 word 2 the surface בַּת־ is tagged “Preposition” with an empty gloss while carrying Strong's H1339 (Bath-Sheba); this is a tagging artifact of splitting the compound name across two tokens (words 2 and 5), not a real parse. (2) At 12:24 word 12 the consonantal form וַיִּקְרָא is masculine (“and he called”) but is parsed in the brief as third person feminine singular — which matches the marginal reading Gill reports (“the Keri or marginal reading is, ‘and she called’ … that is, Bathsheba”). The transliteration given for that word alone (way·yiq·rå̄) departs from the scheme used everywhere else in the unit, which is consistent with a Ketiv/Qere marker in the source data. Who names the child is therefore genuinely open in the manuscript tradition: Gill allows David, Bathsheba, or the LORD; Geneva says the LORD; Barnes and Cambridge say it was given at circumcision. (3) At 12:25 word 9 the gloss “the LORD [loved him]” is bracketed because there is no verb in the Hebrew of v. 25; the sense is supplied from אֲהֵבֽוֹ in v. 24.
Sources. All eleven commentators available for this unit are public-domain: Ellicott (1878), Benson (1810s), Henry (1706), Barnes (1834), JFB (1871), Poole (1685), Gill (1746–63), Geneva (1599), Cambridge (1880s), Pulpit (1880s), K&D (1860s). Eight are quoted. Pulpit's excerpt contains “indica” where the transcription has lost “indications”; it is reproduced as the source stands rather than silently corrected.
What is uncertain. The date of Solomon's birth relative to the fall of Rabbah (Ellicott, Cambridge, Pulpit and K&D all place it later than the narrative order, by differing margins, and all are reconstructing). The subject of וַיִּשְׁלַ֗ח in v. 25 (K&D and Pulpit: YHWH; Geneva: David; Vulgate tradition reported by Cambridge: David committing the boy to Nathan's custody). Whether Nathan tutored Solomon — Cambridge says the supposition is general but “there is no further trace of the fact.” Whether Jedidiah was predictive of the succession (Barnes) or only expressive of acceptance (Ellicott). Poole's use of Proverbs 31 as evidence of Bathsheba's repentance depends on identifying Lemuel with Solomon, a traditional identification the text does not make. Thread 5 (Deut 33:12 / Psalm 127:2) is flagged: the link is Cambridge's, not machine-verified for this unit.
✦ = human, public-domain source, quoted and named. ⚙ = machine synthesis, to be verified. Flagged cross-references are left visible on purpose — the verifier working in the open. “Search the Scriptures daily, whether those things were so.” (Acts 17:11)