The woman: this refers to the wife of the man who owned the well where the two men were hiding. Some may say “the woman of that house” or something similar.

The object of both verbs (took and spread) is the covering over the top of the well. In many languages it will be more natural to supply the object with the first verb rather than the second, as Revised Standard Version does. Most English versions, including New Revised Standard Version, do this.

Covering: the text uses a very general word here for anything that covers an object. But in this context, what probably happened was that, after the men had gone down into the well, the normal protective covering was placed back over the hole, and that in turn was covered by something like a mat, “a piece of canvas” (New Jerusalem Bible), or a “cloth” (Moffatt, Knox, and New Jewish Publication Society’s Tanakh). This concealed the fact that there was a well at that place.

The well’s mouth: the “opening” of a well may be described in different ways in different languages. Some may say “mouth” as in Hebrew. But others will refer to it as the “top” or the “door,” or some other term may be used. Translators should not picture a well with a high protective barrier around it, that is, where the walls of the well extend above the earth’s surface. It was rather a deep hole in the earth with a protective covering level with the surface of the earth, so that the whole opening could be covered by a mat or something else on which grain could be spread out to dry in the sun. The drying of grain in this manner was not unusual in that part of the world at that time and provided a perfect way to hide the opening of the well.

Nothing was known of it: literally “and the matter [or, word] was not known.” That is, the fact that the two men were hiding in the well was not something that people knew about. In the English rendering of Revised Standard Version, the pronoun it may be understood as referring to the well itself or to the fact that the two men were hiding in it. But since the subject of the verb in Hebrew is clearly “the matter,” this cannot refer to the well, but only to the whole situation. The passive construction may be reworded to say something like “no one could tell that the two men were there” or “people could not know about the hiding place.”

Quoted with permission from Omanson, Roger L. and Ellington, John E. A Handbook on the First and Second Books of Samuel, Volume 2. (UBS Helps for Translators). New York: UBS, 2001. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .