Let me freely speak. — Better, it is lawful for me to speak with freedom. Those to whom the Apostle spoke could not for a moment dream of asserting that the words quoted had been literally and completely fulfilled in him, and it was therefore natural to look for their fulfilment elsewhere.
Of the patriarch David. — The word is used in its primary sense, as meaning the founder of a family or dynasty. In the New Testament it is applied also to Abraham (Hebrews 7:4) and the twelve sons of Jacob (Acts 7:8). In the Greek version of the Old Testament it is used only of the comparatively subordinate “chief of the fathers” in 1 Chronicles 9:9; 1 Chronicles 24:31, et al.
His sepulchre is with us unto this day. — The king was buried in the city which bore his name (1 Kings 2:10). Josephus relates that vast treasures were buried with him (Ant. vii. 15, § 4), and that John Hyrcanus opened one of the chambers of the tomb, and took out three thousand talents to pay the tribute demanded by Antiochus the Pious (Ant. xiii. 8, § 4). Herod the Great also opened it and found no money, but gold and silver vessels in abundance. The tradition was that he sought to penetrate into the inner vault, in which the bodies of David and Solomon were resting, and was deterred by a flame that issued from the recess (Ant. xvi. 7, § 1). It is difficult to understand how such a treasure could have escaped the plunderer in all the sieges and sacks to which Jerusalem had been exposed; but it is possible that its fame as a holy place may have made it, like the temples at Delphi and Ephesus, a kind of bank of deposit, in which large treasures in coin or plate were left for safety, and many of these, in the common course of things, were never claimed, and gradually accumulated. The monuments now known as the “tombs of the kings” on the north side of the city, though identified by De Sauley with the sepulchres of the house of David, are of the Roman period, and are outside the walls. David and his successors were probably buried in a vault on the eastern hill, in the city of David (1 Kings 2:10), within the range of the enclosure now known as the Haram Area.