Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

Moreover, David defeated Hadadezer son of Rehob, king of Zobah, when he went to restore his monument at the Euphrates River. David captured a thousand of his chariots, seven thousand charioteers and twenty thousand foot soldiers. He hamstrung all but a hundred of the chariot horses.

• 1 Chronicles 18:3-4

Note that I have not copied the entire chapter.  If the Lord is willing and my health continues, I will eventually get to this chapter again in a Bible study and look at the chapter as a whole.  But this nine week series is a challenge for me to find a teaching point in this chapter that I have skipped in roughly six years of writing posts.

To be honest, its parallel chapter is 2 Samuel 8, and I have quoted that chapter twice.

I am looking at the last sentence of the Scripture above.  King David hamstrung all but 100 of the horses.

It is obvious that King David hamstrung the horses so that the chariots could not be used in a reprisal for defeating Hadadezer.  King David could not take all the spoils of war with him, so he hobbled the horses to prevent any Aramean uprising from the north against King David.  It was a common practice of the time.

The practice is done today in many ways.  Armored vehicles do not get very far if sand is placed in the carburetor of gasoline powered engines.  The tires could be slashed.  The weapons could be broken.  The cute thing is to remove the firing pin, in that you might think it still works until you really need it.  But when you only take one part, you can replace the part.  Bending the rifle barrel makes that part useless.  But none of these things affect a living creature.

In my research, I found differing references to Hadadezer.  They ranged over several centuries.  Since Elijah is required to anoint Hazael of Aram (1 Kings 19:15).  Hazael would then go on to kill Ben-Hadad of Aram.  But who is this “Hadad”?  Genesis 25:13-15 speaks of the first Hadad being the eighth son of Ishmael, Abraham’s son from Hagar.  And it seems many kings were named Hadad, one an Edomite, maybe related through marriage.  Ben-Hadad is basically “son of Hadad.”  And the name Hadad in a few forms is in over 80 verses of the Old Testament from Genesis to Zechariah.  The people of Aram or the Arameans, not the Armenians of today, were people from Damascus and the surrounding area, basically the Syrians of today.

So, who was Hadadezer?  Probably one of a very long string of kings of what is now Syria, and usually listed as an enemy of Israel and Judah.

So, as I have mentioned before, war begets war.  There are winners and losers, and the losers want revenge.  Even when the losers were the aggressors that started the fighting, they feel they have been wronged by losing.

So, now we come to hamstringing a horse.  Some veterinary websites refused to discuss it, even as a biblical question.  Some claimed that the horse would become totally useless.  Other websites claimed that if a certain tendon were severed, the horse could even run a bit, just not fast enough to gallop.  The horses, in this case, could still help in farming.

So, while some may shout foul, David prevented an immediate counterattack in that the horses could not run, or at least run fast.  Thus the advantage of a chariot in warfare was mostly neutralized.  And I am thinking that the 100 remaining horses were taken by King David as part of the spoils.

It is funny that Tou of Hamath sent his son, Hadoram (2 Chronicles 18:9-10), and Hadoram presented David with gold, silver, and bronze.  King Tou was basically saying, “Here are the spoils of war, just do not bother going to war with us.”

This chapter also speaks of the Philistines.  They exist beyond this point, but David basically neutralized their effectiveness to control the southern border.  This chapter, for the most part lists King David’s miscellaneous victories.

We need to know from this that when we glorify God, God is capable of bringing us the victory.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory