An Offering Made Before the Waiting Is Over

The same formula frames the reigns of Ishbosheth and David (2 Samuel 2:10; 5:4), which is why readers expect an age and a length here. Other sources filled the gap in their own ways: Paul’s sermon at Pisidian Antioch gives Saul forty years (Acts 13:21), and Josephus offers figures of his own.

Jonathan enters the book without introduction; only in verse 16 is he called Saul’s son. This is Israel’s first standing army, three thousand picked men split between father and son, with everyone else sent “to his tent”, the old phrase for going home. Michmash and Bethel lie in the hills north of Gibeah.

Geba sat on the south lip of the gorge facing Michmash, and its name is easily confused with Gibeah. “Hebrews” is normally what foreigners call Israel (4:6, 9), so it sounds odd in Saul’s mouth. The Greek reads a near-identical Hebrew word differently: “The slaves have revolted”, which would be the Philistines’ line.

“Had in abomination” translates a verb meaning to stink. Jacob used it when his sons made him “to stink” among the Canaanites (Genesis 34:30), and it returns at 27:12, when Achish thinks David has made himself odious to Israel. Credit for Jonathan’s blow goes to Saul, and so does the smell.

Thirty thousand chariots would outnumber any force recorded in the ancient Near East; some Greek manuscripts and the Syriac read three thousand. “As the sand which is on the sea shore” is the stock picture of a vast enemy (Joshua 11:4; Judges 7:12). Beth-aven, “house of wickedness”, lay near Ai (Joshua 7:2).

“A strait” is the 1611 word for a tight place, a narrow pass with no way through. Five hiding places are listed, from caves down to pits, the dry cisterns cut in the rock. The Philistines will jeer about exactly this in 14:11: “the Hebrews come forth out of the holes where they had hid themselves.”

The Hebrew plays on the name: ivrim avru, “Hebrews crossed over”, from the same root. Gad and Gilead lie east of the Jordan, the region Saul had just rescued at Jabesh. “Trembling” is the word used of Eli’s heart trembling for the ark (4:13).

The appointment goes back to 10:8, where Samuel told Saul to go down to Gilgal and wait seven days. “Tarried” translates a verb that often carries the sense of waiting in hope. The verse gives both of Saul’s clocks at once: the days are used up, and the men are leaving.

Saul calls for exactly the pair of offerings Samuel named in 10:8, burnt offerings and peace offerings, the ones Samuel had said he would come down to make. “To me” marks who is now presiding. Only the burnt offering is said to be made; the peace offerings are overtaken by Samuel’s arrival.

“Salute him” is literally “bless him”; the ordinary greeting was a blessing. Saul goes out to bless the prophet who has come to rebuke him, and he will do the same again at 15:13 with “Blessed be thou of the LORD”, just before another confrontation.

“What hast thou done?” is the question God puts to the woman in Eden (Genesis 3:13). Saul’s reply is built on the verb “I saw” and three clauses of observation, and the middle one places the fault partly on Samuel: thou camest not.

“I forced myself” is the verb used of Joseph restraining his tears before his brothers (Genesis 43:31). Saul turns it inside out, forcing himself into action rather than holding back. “Made supplication” is literally to soften or stroke the face of the LORD, an idiom for seeking favour.

“Thou hast done foolishly” uses the verb David will apply to himself after the census: “I have done very foolishly” (2 Samuel 24:10). The dynasty on offer was permanent, “for ever”, which makes the loss in the next verse larger than a single reign.

“Captain” is nagid, the title Samuel gave Saul when he anointed him (10:1). The verbs are already past tense, “hath sought” and “hath commanded”, as if the successor has been chosen before anyone on the field knows his name. Paul quotes the phrase of David in Acts 13:22.

Samuel goes to Gibeah, Saul’s own town, without him. Three thousand (verse 2) have become about six hundred. That figure echoes the six hundred Benjaminites who survived the civil war by hiding at the rock Rimmon (Judges 20:47), a thin remnant of the same tribe.

The standard Hebrew text has Geba here, not Gibeah, and Geba fits the geography: Israel on the south rim of the gorge, the Philistines on the north at Michmash, a steep ravine between them. The verse is a map of the stand-off that chapter 14 will break.

“Spoilers” is the Hebrew mashchit, the word for the destroyer that passed through Egypt (Exodus 12:23). Three companies mirror Saul’s own three at Jabesh (11:11), now used against him. Ophrah and the land of Shual, “fox country”, lay to the north.

Beth-horon guarded the road west down to the coastal plain; the valley of Zeboim, “valley of hyenas”, ran east toward the Jordan wilderness. With the first company going north, the raiders fan out in every direction except south, where Saul’s six hundred sit.

A smith was a charash, a worker in metal. The book lets the Philistines explain their own policy in a quoted sentence, and they call their subjects “the Hebrews” again. A disarmed people cannot even make a spearhead, never mind a rebellion.

The list is of farm tools, not weapons: the share was the ploughshare, the coulter a ploughing blade, then axe and mattock. Israel “went down” to the Philistines, from the hills to the plain, and every sharpening was a reminder of who held the forge.

The King James guessed “file” for the Hebrew pim, a word no one understood until small stone weights inscribed pym turned up in excavations, about two thirds of a shekel. The verse is a price list: a pim for ploughshares and mattocks, a third of a shekel for axes and goads.

“The day of battle” points forward to chapter 14. Sword and spear are exactly the pair David will name to Goliath when he says the LORD “saveth not with sword and spear” (17:47). The one armed father and son stand in a crowd with farm tools.

“Passage” is ma’abar, a crossing place, from the same root as the Hebrews who crossed over in verse 7. The pass of Michmash was a known military route; Isaiah pictures the Assyrian army marching “over the passage” at the same spot (Isaiah 10:28–29).