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Context No. 546 of 4322 · 2 Samuel

Context · Reflection

2 Samuel 10:1-5: in context

1After this, the king of the children of Ammon died, and Hanun his son reigned in his place. 2David said, “I will show kindness to Hanun the son of Nahash, as his father showed kindness to me.” So David sent by his servants to comfort him concerning his father. David’s servants came into the land of the children of Ammon. 3But the princes of the children of Ammon said to Hanun their lord, “Do you think that David honors your father, in that he has sent comforters to you? Hasn’t David sent his servants to you to search the city, to spy it out, and to overthrow it?” 4So Hanun took David’s servants, shaved off one half of their beards, and cut off their garments in the middle, even to their buttocks, and sent them away. 5When they told David this, he sent to meet them, for the men were greatly ashamed. The king said, “Wait at Jericho until your beards have grown, and then return.”

When the king of Ammon dies, David remembers a past kindness the old king had shown him and decides to return it, sending envoys to comfort the dead king's son, Hanun, in his grief. It is a genuine act of sympathy, one ruler honoring a friendship across a border. But when David's envoys arrive, Hanun's advisors pour poison in his ear: do you really think David sent these men to honor your father? Surely he sent them to spy out the city and overthrow it. And Hanun believes them. He seizes David's envoys, shaves off half of each man's beard, cuts their garments off at the buttocks, and sends them home humiliated. A gesture of pure kindness has been read as a covert attack, and the misreading launches a disastrous war.

The engine of the whole catastrophe is cynicism, the reflex that assumes the worst about another person's motives. David's sympathy was real, but Hanun's counselors could not imagine a kindness that was simply a kindness; they were certain there had to be an angle, a hidden threat, a scheme underneath. And by acting on that suspicion, they turned a friend into an enemy and manufactured the very war they feared. The kindness was true; the cynicism was the lie, and the cynicism is what did the damage. Assuming the worst did not protect Hanun; it destroyed the good that was actually being offered to him.

That reflex is very much alive in me. When someone extends a kindness, an olive branch, an unexpected gesture of goodwill, part of me reaches immediately for the suspicion: what do they really want, what is the angle, what are they after? It feels like shrewdness, like protecting myself, but it can do exactly what it did to Hanun, poisoning a genuine gift and turning a possible friend into an adversary. Where am I reading someone's kindness as a hidden threat, assuming the worst about their motives, and what good might that cynicism be destroying before I have even let it near me?

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