2 Samuel 20:15 - Coke's Commentary on the Holy Bible

They cast up a bank against the city— The LXX render it, they levelled the bank, or glacis, of the city; which receives some countenance from the words immediately following, and it stood in the trench. The Vulgate reads, and they surrounded the city with fortifications. But some learned persons have imagined, that the word סללה solelah, rendered a bank, signifies an engine of war, used in casting stones, or other heavy bodies, against the walls of a city. Parkhurst is of this opinion, who says, that it signifies a balista, a battering engine, anciently made use of to shoot stones against the wall of a besieged city, in order to beat them down. That this is the true meaning of the word, rather than a bank heaped up of stones or earth, seems evident from the present passage, and Jeremiah 6:6; Jeremiah 32:24; Jeremiah 33:4. One of the Greek versions in the Hexapla renders it, Ezekiel 26:8 by βελοστασεις balistas. But should any one in some places prefer the other meaning, which the ancient versions generally favour, it will be best to render it battery, which will preserve the idea of the word. Dr. Delaney observes, that from the accounts we have of Joab's digging a trench round this city, and battering the walls, critics have fairly concluded, that the science of besieging cities with lines of circumvallation and contravallation, as they call them, and battering engines, was much older than any account left us of this practice in the history of the heathen world: though Herodotus, in his first book, gives Harpagus, Cyrus's general, the credit of having invented the lines now mentioned, and taken the city of Phocoea (the first city, according to him, so taken) by that invention; whereas the sacred writer speaks of one of those lines on occasion of the siege of Abel, as of a thing familiar and well known to his readers. See Scheuchzer on the place.