Judah replied: “What can we say to my lord? How can we plead or how try to prove our innocence? God has uncovered your servants’ guilt. Here we are, then, the slaves of my lord—the rest of us no less than the one in whose possession the goblet was found.”
So we said to my lord, ‘We have an aged father, and a younger brother, the child of his old age. This one’s full brother is dead, and since he is the only one by his mother who is left, his father is devoted to him.’
accompanied by a thousand men from Benjamin. Ziba, too, the servant of the house of Saul, accompanied by his fifteen sons and twenty servants, hastened to the Jordan before the king.
At that time Jeroboam left Jerusalem, and the prophet Ahijah the Shilonite met him on the road. The prophet was wearing a new cloak, and when the two were alone in the open country,
The children of your oppressors shall come, bowing before you; All those who despised you, shall bow low at your feet. They shall call you “City of the Lord,” “Zion of the Holy One of Israel.”
When the boy had gone, David rose from beside the mound and fell on his face to the ground three times in homage. They kissed each other and wept aloud together.