2 Samuel 9:11

‘ Then said Ziba to the king, “According to all that my lord the king commands his servant, so shall your servant do.” As for Mephibosheth the king had said, “he shall eat at my table, as one of the king’s sons.”

Ziba accepted the king’s command (he actually had little option) and assured the king that he would carry out his will as a true ‘servant’. The king meanwhile confirmed that Mephibosheth would eat at the royal table, and would indeed be treated as one of the king’s sons. (‘The king had said’ is lacking in the Hebrew, but is clearly required. Compare verse 10a. The whole sentence is an added participial clause confirming the privilege that was to be Mephibosheth’s with ‘he shall eat at my table, as one of the king’s sons’ being a kind of comment put into the first person). It was an exceedingly magnanimous gesture.

It should be noted that David nowhere refers to Mephibosheth’s lameness. It is Ziba and the writer who draw attention to his condition, the one to try to protect him from the king’s vengeance, the other so as to emphasise that he was no threat to the throne, and David’s magnanimity. There may also be the thought that his condition was a true picture of the house of Saul, as a house that could only stumble before God. David himself, however, appears to have treated him on a level of total normality. He was simply moved by loyalty to Jonathan, and ultimately by generosity, not by pity.