(After writing my previous post on 2 Samuel 21, my thoughts kept returning to Rizpah. The passage tells us what was done to her sons, but it never lets her speak for herself. So I have tried, in a small way, to give her that voice back. What follows is Rizpah’s story, in her own words, as I imagine she might have told it.)
Rizpah Speaks
My name is Rizpah. I want to tell you my story in my own words.
I was a woman in the house of Saul, the first king of Israel. I was not his wife. I was his concubine. That meant I lived in his house, but I had no real power and no real name of my own. I gave birth to two sons. I named them Armoni and Mephibosheth. I loved them more than I can say. They were my whole world.
David became king. Saul died in battle. Years passed. I thought my sons were safe. I was wrong.
A terrible famine came over the land. For three years there was no rain and no harvest. People were starving. David asked God why this was happening. God told him it was because Saul had once broken a promise. Long before, Israel had made peace with a people called the Gibeonites. Saul had broken that peace and killed many of them. Now God said the land was suffering because of what Saul had done.
David went to the Gibeonites and asked what they wanted. They did not ask for silver or gold. They asked for seven men from Saul’s family. They wanted them killed, in public, on the hill at Gibeah, Saul’s own home.
David agreed.
He looked through Saul’s family for the seven men. He spared Mephibosheth, the son of Jonathan, because Jonathan and David had once made a promise to each other. But no one had made any promise to protect my sons. David chose my two sons, Armoni and Mephibosheth, and five sons that belonged to Saul’s daughter Merab. Seven men in total.
I remember the day they were taken. I could not stop it. I had no army, no husband, no king to speak for me. I was only a mother. I begged. It did not matter. They took my sons up the hill, and they killed them there, in front of everyone, at the very start of the harvest season.
I will never forget watching that. A part of me died on that hill with them.
After it was done, the bodies were left there, hanging in the open air. No one came to take them down. No one came to bury them. I understood what was happening. Without anyone to stop it, the birds would come and tear at their flesh. The wild animals would come at night and drag away what was left. My sons would not even have the dignity of a grave.
I could not let that happen.
So I took sackcloth, the rough cloth people wear in mourning, and I carried it up that hill myself. I spread it on a flat rock, and I sat down. I decided I would not leave. I would stay there and guard their bodies myself, since no one else would.
I want to be honest about what this was. It was not only grief. It was a protest. I had no voice in the king’s court and no power to undo what had been done. Sitting on that hill, refusing to move, was the only way left for me to say that what had happened was wrong, and that my sons still deserved dignity even in death.
I do not think anyone expected me to stay long. Grief usually passes in days. But I stayed for months. I stayed from the beginning of the harvest all the way until the rains finally came again in the autumn.
I want you to understand what those months were like.
In the daytime, I watched the sky. Vultures and crows circle when they smell death, and they came often. I would stand and wave my arms and shout until they flew away. Some days they came again and again, and I had to do it over and over, until my arms ached and my voice was hoarse.
At night was worse. That is when the jackals and wild dogs came. I would hear them before I saw them, moving in the dark, getting closer. I was one woman alone on a hill with no weapon except a stick and my own voice. I was afraid every single night. I did not know if I had the strength to actually fight off an animal if it came close enough. But I stayed anyway, because the fear of leaving my sons unprotected was worse than my fear of the dark.
I barely slept. I could not really rest, not with seven bodies around me and the constant fear of what might come. I sat among the dead, not only my own two sons but the five sons of Merab as well. I did not know all of them well, but I could not separate my grief from theirs. We had all been brought to that hill by the same decision, so I watched over all of them together, as if they were all mine.
As the weeks passed, I watched something terrible happen. The bodies began to change in the heat. I will not describe all of it, but I will say that I stayed even as it became harder and harder to stay. The smell never left me. My clothes carried it. My hands carried it. I do not think I have ever fully washed it away, even now, even in memory. By the end, there was no flesh left to protect anymore. Only bones remained, sun-bleached and bare. I had been there long enough to watch that whole change happen, day by day, until that was all that was left of my sons.
Still, I did not leave the bones unguarded. I do not know how to explain why except to say that they were still my sons to me. A mother does not stop loving a body just because it has changed. I would have stayed forever if I had to.
I did not know it then, but word of what I was doing reached the king. Someone told David that Rizpah, daughter of Aiah, had been on that hill for months, refusing to let any animal touch the bodies of the dead.
When David heard this, something in him finally moved. He sent men to gather the bones, not only of my sons, but also of Saul and his son Jonathan, whose bones had been buried somewhere else after the battle that killed them. David had all of them brought together and properly buried in the family tomb, in the land of Benjamin, in the grave of Saul’s father, Kish.
Only after that did the rain finally come and end the famine.
I think about that often. It was not the killing of my sons that ended the suffering of the land, even though that was supposed to be the reason for it. It was only after the dead were treated with respect, after someone finally gave them a proper burial, that things were made right.
I do not know if anyone will remember my name after all these years. I was a concubine, not a wife. I had no power, no army, no voice that kings usually listen to. All I had was a piece of cloth, a rock, and the refusal to let my sons be treated as nothing.
If you remember anything about me, remember this. I sat with my dead because no one else would. And in the end, that was enough to be seen.
I believe it was God who saw my protest for what it truly was, a search for justice, and it was God who moved the king’s heart to finally act.
Rizpah
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