21 During David’s reign, there was a three-year famine. David inquired from Yahweh who said, “Sha’ul and his family have blood on their hands, because he killed the Gibeonites.” 2 (The Gibeonites were not native Israelis, but were a remnant of the Amorites. The Israelis had promised to protect them, but Sha’ul had attempted to eliminate them in his zeal for the people of Israel and Yehudah.) So the king summoned the Gibeonites and asked them,[ref] 3 “What can I do for all of you? How can I remedy what was done in the past so that you all would bless Yahweh’s people?”

4 “We have no claim to gold or silver from Sha’ul or his household,” the Gibeonites replied, “And we don’t wish to have anyone in Israel put to death.”

“Then what are you saying that I can do for you all?” he asked.

5 “That man who crushed us,” they replied, “and who intended that we be annihilated from within Israel’s borders, 6 give us seven of his descendants and we’ll hang them before Yahweh in Gibeah where Yahweh’s chosen king Sha’ul lived.

“Okay, I’ll give them to you,” the king responded.

7 However, the king spared Yonatan’s son (and Sha’ul’s grandson) Mefiboshet because of the promises that he and Yonatan had made to each other before Yahweh.[ref] 8 Instead he took two of the sons (Armoni and Mefiboshet) of Ritsfah (Ayyah’s daughter and one of Sha’ul’s slave-wives), as well as five sons of Sha’ul’s daughter Michal, that she’d bore to Adriel (the son of Barzillai, the Meholatite).[ref] 9 He handed them over to the Gibeonites, and they hung them on a hill before Yahweh, and the seven of them died together. This happened at the beginning of the barley harvest.

10 Then Ayyah’s daughter Ritsfah took sackcloth and she spread it on the rock where the corpses were. She kept the birds away during the day and the animals at night—staying there from the beginning of the harvest until the beginning of the rainy season.

11 David was told what Ritsfah had done, 12 and he went and got the bones of Sha’ul and his son Yonatan from the leaders of Yabesh-Gilead, who had stolen them from the square of Beyt-Shan where the Philistines had hung them there on the day the Philistines had defeated Sha’ul at Gilboa.[ref] 13 David took Sha’ul and Yonatan’s bones along with the bones of the seven men who’d been hung, 14 and his men buried them in the tomb of Sha’ul’s father Kish in Zela (in the Benyamite region), doing everything that the king had commanded. After that, God answered their prayers for the country.