And unto Abiathar the priest said the king, Get thee to Anathoth, unto thine own fields; for thou art worthy of death: but I will not at this time put thee to death, because thou barest the ark of the Lord GOD before David my father, and because thou hast been afflicted in all wherein my father was afflicted.
Unto Abiathar ... said the king. This functionary, as the counselor or accomplice of Adonijah, had deserved to share his fate. But partly from regard to his priestly dignity, and partly from his long association with the late king, Solomon pronounced on him the mitigated sentence of banishment to his country estate at Anathoth, about three miles distant from Jerusalem ('Anata), and thereby, as God's vicegerent in the theocratic kingdom, deprived him of his office and its emoluments, for opposing the declared will of God in the settlement of the succession (1 Chronicles 22:9-10; 1 Chronicles 28:4-5: cf. 2 Samuel 12:25). The sacred writer notices the remarkable fulfillment, in Abiathar's degradation from the high priesthood (see the notes at 1 Kings 4:4), of the doom denounced against the house of Eli and the ancestral house of Ithamar (1 Samuel 2:30).