2 Samuel 18:31

O MY SON ABSALOM; MY SON; MY SON ABSALOM!

"And behold, the Cushite came; and the Cushite said, `Good tidings for my lord the king! For the Lord has delivered you this day from the power of all who rose up against you.' The king said to the Cushite, `Is it well with the young man Absalom?' And the Cushite answered, `May the enemies of my lord the king, and all who rise up against you for evil, be like that young man.' And the king was deeply moved, and went up to the chamber over the gate and wept; and as he went, he said, `O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would I had died instead of you, O Absalom, my son, my son.'"

There is no more pitiful a picture of David in the whole Bible than this one! Tatum called this passage, "One of the saddest in the Bible."[28] But the sadness pertains not so much to David's love for Absalom as it does to David's agonizing grief over his own sins which he surely recognized as having precipitated all of the evil that had come upon him in such a dreadful fulfillment of God's warning to him through Nathan (1 Samuel 12:10).

"Would I had died instead of you" (2 Samuel 18:33). Here David takes upon himself the blame (because of his sins) for the outrageous crimes of Absalom, and the simple truth is that David might have fully expected that God would execute upon him the death which his sins most certainly deserved. Therefore, bound up with his willingness to forgive Absalom was the hope that God would also forgive him. "David's lamentation is deeply pathetic, and the sincerity of it is beyond any doubt. To such a state had his own sins brought him."[29]

"It was David's conscience which smote him here, for his own sin `had found him out.' In Psalms 38 and Psalms 40 he made the confession that it was his own iniquity that was now surging over his head."[30]

"To understand this passionate utterance of David's anguish, we should bear in mind, not only David's excessive tenderness and weakness toward his son, but also his anger that Joab should have paid so little attention to his command to deal TENDERLY with the young man Absalom."[31]