1 Samuel 20:9

Far be it, the word rendered God forbid in 1 Samuel 20:2 . It indignantly rejects the idea of David having committed any crime. The rest of the verse is an incomplete sentence: "If I knew certainly that evil were determined by my father to come upon thee, and did not tell thee—" These broken sentences have great force in the original, as signs of intense feeling (comp. Luke 19:42 ). We must complete the sentence mentally in some such way as the Syriac: "then Jehovah do so to me, and more also."