Charles Ellicott Commentary 1 Samuel 31:4

"Then said Saul to his armorbearer, Draw thy sword, and thrust me through therewith, lest these uncircumcised come and thrust me through, and abuse me. But his armorbearer would not; for he was sore afraid. Therefore Saul took his sword, and fell upon it." — 1 Samuel 31:4 (ASV)

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.