שמואל ב, פרק י״ב, פסוק כ״א

A father's reaction to the loss of a child usually follows a predictable path of deepening grief. Yet, David’s response to his infant son's death baffles his royal court. His servants are shocked by the sharp shift in his behavior, moving instantly from intense mourning and sadness while the child is dying to a normal routine the moment the child passes away [ביאור שטיינזלץ]. As long as the boy was still living, David engaged in these severe practices, but everything changed upon his death [מצודת דוד, רד״ק].

The servants' confusion stems from several different assumptions. The primary approach among commentators is that they believed the king’s fasting was driven by profound sadness over the illness, rather than just being an act of prayer, since prayer alone does not require a person to afflict their body. Therefore, they could not understand why his visible sadness vanished and he began to eat precisely when the tragedy occurred. A sharper perspective suggests the servants harbored a darker suspicion: they wondered if David had been fasting not out of sorrow, but because the child was still alive. They questioned whether he actually wished for the child's death, which would explain why he promptly got up to eat once the boy died [מלבי״ם]. Another angle involves the laws of fasting. The servants reasoned that since David was an individual who took upon himself a fast during a time of distress, he was required to complete it until the end of the day, even after the child died. They wondered why he broke his fast immediately [חומת אנך].

David’s actions are rooted in a practical approach to faith. Human effort, prayer, and fasting are only fitting when an outcome is still possible. As long as the boy drew breath, David hoped God might show mercy. Once death arrived, such efforts were no longer useful. But this raises a deeper question: why did David pray at all, knowing the illness was a firm divine decree punishing him for his past actions? He either hoped that sincere repentance would move God to cancel the decree, or his outward displays of fasting and crying were meant to hide the truth from his wife and men, masking the fact that the illness was a direct punishment for his personal failure. Ultimately, when the child died, David fully accepted the divine judgment, bowed in the house of God, and resumed his life [אברבנאל]. From a legal standpoint, his immediate decision to stop fasting was justified because his original intent was to fast only on the condition that the child lived. With the child's passing, that condition was broken, and the obligation to finish the fast was lifted [חומת אנך].