Women of the Bible: Rizpah, daughter of Aiah, Saul’s concubine.
2 Samuel 3: 6 While there was war between Saul’s house
and David’s house, Abner made himself strong in Saul’s house. 7 Now Saul
had a concubine, whose name was Rizpah, the daughter of Aiah; and Ishbosheth
said to Abner, “Why have you gone in to my father’s concubine?”
8 Then Abner was very angry about Ishbosheth’s words,
and said, “Am I a dog’s head that belongs to Judah? Today I show kindness to
the house of Saul your father, to his brothers, and to his friends, and have
not delivered you into the hand of David; and yet you charge me today with a
fault concerning this woman!
2 Samuel 21:1 There was a famine in the days of David for
three years, year after year; and David sought the face of Yahweh. Yahweh said,
“It is for Saul, and for his bloody house, because he put the Gibeonites to
death.”
2 The king called the Gibeonites, and said to them (now
the Gibeonites were not of the children of Israel, but of the remnant of the
Amorites, and the children of Israel had sworn to them; and Saul sought to kill
them in his zeal for the children of Israel and Judah); 3 and David said
to the Gibeonites, “What should I do for you? And with what should I make
atonement, that you may bless Yahweh’s inheritance?”
4 The Gibeonites said to him, “It is no matter of
silver or gold between us and Saul, or his house; neither is it for us to put
any man to death in Israel.”
He said, “I will do for you whatever you say.”
5 They said to the king, “The man who consumed us, and
who devised against us, that we should be destroyed from remaining in any of
the borders of Israel, 6 let seven men of his sons be delivered to us, and
we will hang them up to Yahweh in Gibeah of Saul, the chosen of Yahweh.”
The king said, “I will give them.”
7 But the king spared Mephibosheth, the son of Jonathan
the son of Saul, because of Yahweh’s oath that was between them, between David
and Jonathan the son of Saul. 8 But the king took the two sons of Rizpah
the daughter of Aiah, whom she bore to Saul, Armoni and Mephibosheth; and the
five sons of Michal the daughter of Saul, whom she bore to Adriel the son of
Barzillai the Meholathite. 9 He delivered them into the hands of the
Gibeonites, and they hanged them on the mountain before Yahweh, and all seven of
them fell together. They were put to death in the days of harvest, in the first
days, at the beginning of barley harvest. 10 Rizpah the daughter of Aiah
took sackcloth, and spread it for herself on the rock, from the beginning of
harvest until water poured on them from the sky. She allowed neither the birds
of the sky to rest on them by day, nor the animals of the field by night.
11 David was told what Rizpah the daughter of Aiah, the concubine of Saul,
had done. 12 So David went and took the bones of Saul and the bones of
Jonathan his son from the men of Jabesh Gilead, who had stolen them from the
street of Beth Shan, where the Philistines had hanged them, in the day that the
Philistines killed Saul in Gilboa; 13 and he brought up from there the bones
of Saul and the bones of Jonathan his son. They also gathered the bones of
those who were hanged. 14 They buried the bones of Saul and Jonathan his
son in the country of Benjamin in Zela, in the tomb of Kish his father: and
they performed all that the king commanded. After that, God answered prayer for
the land.
