Charles Ellicott Commentary 1 Samuel 31

Now the Philistines fought against Israel. —The narrator here is very abrupt. No doubt a devoted patriot, it was very bitter for him to write the story of the fatal day of Gilboa.

Yet there were certain things belonging to that fated day that were necessary for every child of Israel to know. It was right that the punishment of the rejected king should be known; right too that the people should be assured that the remains of the great first king lay in no unknown and unhonoured sepulchre. It was also fitting that coming generations should honour the devoted loyalty of the grateful men of Jabesh-Gilead.

But the narrator hurries over his unwelcome task; very curtly he picks up the dropped threads of 1 Samuel 28:1–5; 1 Samuel 29:2.

The march of the Philistines northward into the valley of Jezreel has been told, and their gallant array—as under the many banners of their lords they passed on by hundreds and by thousands—has been glanced at. The assembling of the armies of Israel at Shunem, overlooking the Jezreel valley, has been narrated; and there the historian dwelt on the terror of King Saul, which led to the visit to the witch of En-dor. David’s fortunes at this juncture then occupied the writer or compiler of the Book; but now he returns, with evident reluctance, to the battle that rapidly followed the En-dor visit of Saul.

He simply relates that the hosts joined battle. The locality of the fight is not mentioned, but it was most likely somewhere in that long valley that was spread out at the foot of the hills occupied by the hostile camps; Israel was defeated and fled upwards, towards their old position on the slope of Gilboa.

And the Philistines pursued Saul and his sons closely. —“The details of the battle are only seen in broken snatches, as in the short scene of a battle acted upon the stage, or witnessed at remote glimpses by an accidental spectator. But amidst the showers of arrows from the Philistine archers, or pressed hard even on the mountain side by their charioteers, the figure of the king emerges from the darkness. His three sons have fallen before him; his armor-bearer lies dead beside him.”—Stanley: Jewish Church, Lect. 21

And the Philistines killed Jonathan, and Abinadab, and Melchi-shua, Saul’s sons. —But while, in his own record of the national disaster, the compiler or historian, in his stern sorrow, removes every detail and represses every expression of feeling, he gives us in the next chapter (2 Samuel 1:1–27) the stately elegy, in the beautiful moving words which the successor to the throne wrote on the death of the first king and his heroic son.

Without comment, he copies into his record the hymn of David on Saul and Jonathan, just as he found it in the Book of Jashar (the collection of national odes celebrating the heroes of the Theocracy). “There David speaks of the Saul of earlier times—the mighty conqueror, the delight of his people, the father of his beloved and faithful friend—like him in life, united with him in death” (Stanley).

“Saul and Jonathan were lovely and pleasant in their lives
And in their death they were not divided.
Than eagles they were swifter, than lions more strong.”

(2 Samuel 1:23) From the lost Book of Jashar.

Nothing is known of the two younger princes who fell fighting here by their father’s side, sword in hand against the enemies of their country.

The hero Jonathan and his two brave brothers, as far as we can gather from the scanty details of the battle after the army was routed in the valley of Jezreel, retreated (fighting all the while) to the hill of Gilboa. There, it seems, they made the last stand with the fideles of the royal house of Saul (1 Samuel 31:6), and there, no doubt defending the king to the last, they fell.

And the battle went sore against Saul. —That is, after the death of Jonathan and his brothers. The great warrior king no doubt fought like a lion, but one by one his brave defenders fell in battle by his side; and the enemy seems to have directed their principal attention, at this period of the fight, to killing or capturing the famous Saul.

And the archers hit him. —It would seem as though, in that deadly combat, no one could strike down that giant kingly form, so the archers—literally, as in the marginal note of our Bible version, shooters, men with bows, skilful shots—were designated, and these, aiming at the warrior towering above the other combatants, with the crown on his head (2 Samuel 1:10), hit him.

And he was sore wounded by the archers. —This is the usual rendering of the word, but the more accurate translation is, He was sore afraid (or was greatly alarmed at them), according to Gesenius, Keil, Lange, and others.

All seemed against him. His army was routed, his sons were dead, his faithful captains and companions were gone, and these bowmen were shooting at him from a distance where his strong arm could not reach them.

Gradually weakened through loss of blood—perhaps with the words he had heard only a few hours before at En-dor from the dead prophet ringing in his ears, To-morrow shalt thou and thy sons be with me—the great undaunted courage at last failed him, and he turned to his armorbearer, who was still by his side.

His armourbearer. —Jewish tradition tells us that this faithful armourbearer was Doeg, the Edomite, and that the sword which Saul took apparently from the hand of the armourbearer was the sword with which Doeg had massacred the priests at Gibeon and at Nob.

Lest these uncircumcised come and thrust me. —“Even in Saul’s dying speech there is something of that religious formalism which marked his character after his fall from God, and which is a striking sign of spiritual blindness. He censures the Philistines as ‘uncircumcised.’”— Wordsworth.

Saul had a strong consciousness of the sacredness of his person as the Lord’s anointed; as it has been well said of him, no descendant of a long line of so-styled Christian or Catholic sovereigns has held a loftier claim of personal inviolability.

And abuse me. —He remembered how these same Philistines in former years had treated the hero Samson when he fell into their hands.

His armourbearer would not. —Love and devotion to his master we can well imagine stayed his hand from carrying out his fallen master’s last terrible command. If the armourbearer—as the Jewish tradition above referred to asserts—was indeed Doeg the Edomite, the two, the king and his confidential officer, had been fast friends for years.

Some dread of the after consequences, too, may have weighed with the royal armour-bearer, as he was to a certain extent responsible for the king’s life. What he possibly dreaded actually came to pass in the case of the Amalekite who told David that he was the one who inflicted the fatal stroke when the king was dying; as a reward for his act, David had him at once put to death for having put forth his hand to destroy the Lord’s anointed.

A sword. —It was a heavy weapon, a war sword, answering to the great epée d’armes of the Middle Ages. This he took from the reluctant hands of his faithful follower, and placing the hilt firmly on the ground, he threw the weight of his body on the point.

In 2 Samuel 1:6–10, we have another account of the death. In this account, an Amalekite, bearing the royal insignia of the late king—the crown royal and the well-known bracelet of Saul—comes to David at Ziklag after the fatal fight. He recounts that he found the king leaning on his spear—possibly, as Bunsen supposes, “lying on the ground propping his weary head with the nervously-clutched spear.” The king was exhausted and seized with “cramp” (this is the Rabbinical translation of the word rendered “anguish”), and at his urgent request, the Amalekite killed him.

Most commentators—for instance, Kiel, Lange, Bishop Hervey, etc.—regard the Amalekite’s story as an invention framed to extract a rich gift from David, who, the savage Arab thought, would be rejoiced to hear of his great enemy’s fall. If this is so, then we must suppose that the Amalekite, wandering over the field of battle strewn with the slain on the night that followed the battle, came upon the body of Saul. Attracted by the glitter of the golden ornaments, he stripped off the precious insignia and hastened with his lying story to David. Ewald, however, sees no reason to doubt the trustworthiness of the Amalekite’s story; in fact, the two accounts may well be harmonised.

Stanley graphically paints the scene after Saul had fallen on his sword, and his faithful armourbearer had in despairing sorrow killed himself also. “His armourbearer lies dead beside him; on his head the royal crown, on his arm the royal bracelet; ... the huge spear is still in his hand; he is leaning peacefully on it. He has received his death-blow either from the enemy (1 Samuel 31:3), or from his own sword (1 Samuel 31:4). The dizziness and darkness of death is upon him. At that moment a wild Amalekite, lured probably to the field by the hope of spoil, came up and finished the work which the arrows of the Philistines and the sword of Saul himself had all but accomplished.”— Jewish Church, Lect. 21.

The words of the next verse (1 Samuel 31:5) do not contradict this possible explanation. The armourbearer, seeing the king pierced with the arrows and then falling on his own sword, may well have imagined his master dead, and so put an end to his own life. But Saul, though mortally wounded, may have rallied again for a short while; in that short while the Amalekite may have come up and finished the bloody work. Then, after the king was dead, he probably stripped the royal insignia from the lifeless corpse.

So Saul died. —This is one of the very rare instances of self-destruction among the chosen people. It seems to have been almost unknown among the Israelites.

Prior to Saul, the only recorded example is that of Samson. His was a noble act of self-devotion—the hero sacrificed his life in order to achieve the destruction of a great crowd of men, powerful and influential foes of his dear country. His death in the great Dagon Temple at Gaza ranks, as it has been well said, with the heroism of one dying in battle rather than with cases of despairing suicide.

There is another instance after the days of Saul: that of King David’s wise counselor, Ahithophel, who, we read, in a paroxysm of bitter mortification, went and hanged himself. There is another in the Gospel story familiar to us all.

Theologians are divided in their judgment on King Saul. S. Bernard, for instance, thinks that Saul was lost for ever. Cornelius à Lapide, followed by Bishop Wordsworth, has no kindly thought for the great first king. The Jewish historian Josephus, on the contrary, writes in warm and glowing terms of the patriotic devotion with which Saul went to meet his end. Many of the Rabbis sympathise with Josephus in his estimate of the unhappy monarch.

Without in any way justifying the fatal act that closed the dark tragedy of his reign, we may well plead in extenuation the awful position in which the king found himself that evening after Gilboa had been fought and lost. We may also remember the similar conduct of Brutus, Cassius, and the younger Cato. Furthermore, we can recall what posterity has said of these noble heathens and how far they have judged them guilty of causeless self-murder.

It would be well for men, when they sit in judgment on Saul and on other great ones who have failed, as they think, in the discharge of their duties to God as well as to man. It would be well for them to imitate for once what has been rightly called “the fearless human sympathy of the Biblical writers.” They should remember how the “man after God’s own heart,” in strains never to be forgotten, wrote his touching lament over King Saul. In this lament, David dwelt only on Saul: the mighty conqueror, the delight of his people, the father of his beloved and faithful friend Jonathan, who was like Saul in life and united with him in death. And they should remember how, with these words—gentle as they are lovely, inspired by the Holy Spirit—the Bible closes the record of that life, and leaves the first great king, the first anointed of the Lord, in the hands of his God.

And all his men. —We must not interpret this statement quite literally; 1 Chronicles 10:6 explains it by “all his house.” Ishbosheth, his son, for instance, and Abner, the captain of the host, we know were not among the slain on that fatal day. The meaning is that all his “fideles,” his personal staff, as we should say, with his three sons fell fighting around him. The lines of the chivalrous Scottish ballad writer who with rare skill describes the devoted followers of King James V. falling around him at Flodden, well paint what took place on the stricken field of Gilboa around the hero king Saul:

“No one failed him! He is keeping
Royal state and semblance still,
Knight and noble lie around him,
Cold, on Flodden’s fatal hill.

“Of the brave and gallant-hearted
Whom you sent with prayers away,
Not a single man departed
From his monarch yesterday.” AYTOUN.