When Ahithophel saw, &c.— Ahithophel had too much penetration and experience not to see what must be the consequence of Absalom's imprudence in preferring Hushai's advice to his own. Piqued therefore with furious jealousy, and not doubting that David would soon be victorious, and punish his perfidy, he determined to prevent that punishment, and therefore gat him to his home, and hanged himself. Some of the rabbis give the original ויחנק vaiiechanek another signification, translating it with the LXX, he was suffocated; imagining that Ahithophel, through the violence of his agitation and distress, was suffocated with extreme passion; but the more general opinion is, that he hanged himself with his own hands, as Judas did afterwards when he had betrayed his Divine Master. See Matthew 27:5. Lightfoot thinks, that David composed the 55th Psalm upon the occasion of Ahithophel's perfidy. Thus Ahithophel, when he had contrived, inspired, diffused, and propagated evil through an innumerable multitude, and loaded his soul with all the horrors of complicated guilt, treachery, rebellion, incest, parricide! hurried that soul to all the vengeance due to it from eternal justice: to prevent all possibility of reparation and repentance, he died in the act of self-murder. So perished the great Machiavel of that age, the very wisest of the very wise men of this world; whose God is their belly, whose glory is their shame, but whose end is destruction! See C.G. Schwartz, in Thesauro Novo, Theol. Philol. tom. 1: p. 676.
Related Commentaries of 2 Samuel 17:23
2 Samuel 17:23
23 And when Ahithophel saw that his counsel was not followed,f he saddled his ass, and arose, and gat him home to his house, to his city, and put his household in order, and hanged himself, and died, and was buried in the sepulchre of his father.