Saul's Household and the Prophets Frustrate His Pursuit

Saul gives the order to his son first, perhaps assuming that the heir had the most to lose from David’s rise, the argument he will spell out in 20:31. “All his servants” makes it an order of the court. In 18:17 he did not want his own hand on David; now he wants every hand.

“Delighted much” is chafets, the verb Saul’s courtiers used falsely when they told David “the king hath delight in thee” (18:22). Jonathan’s delight is the real one. He warns David to hide “until the morning”, the hour when such orders were carried out, as verse 11 will show.

Jonathan arranges for David to be hidden near the field where the conversation will happen, so that the report can follow at once. “What I see, that I will tell thee” is a small rehearsal for the larger plan with the arrows in chapter 20.

“To thee-ward” means “toward thee”. Jonathan’s sentence is built as a mirror: let not the king sin against his servant, because his servant has not sinned against him. It is the reasoning of an advocate, and he calls his father “the king” as he argues.

To put one’s life in one’s hand was to risk it openly, as Jephthah said (Judges 12:3) and as the medium at Endor will say to Saul (28:21). “Without a cause” is chinnam, for nothing, the word Satan uses when he asks whether Job fears God for nothing (Job 1:9). Innocent blood carried guilt for a whole land (Deuteronomy 19:10).

Saul listens to a human voice again, as he admitted he did with the people at Gilgal (15:24). His oath by the living LORD echoes the one he swore at Michmash, when he vowed that the guilty man would die “though it be in Jonathan my son” (14:39). This time the oath protects life; it will not hold.

“As in times past” is literally “as yesterday and the day before”, a Hebrew idiom for the way things used to be. Jonathan does three things in the verse: calls David, tells him everything, and brings him in. The reconciliation is entirely his work.

“They fled from him” uses a singular: the Philistines flee from David himself. The phrase “great slaughter” once described Israel’s disaster at Aphek, when the ark was taken (4:10). War brings David more glory, and each victory feeds the fear it was supposed to end.

The spirit is again said to be “from the LORD”, as in 16:14. Saul is sitting at home with his spear in his hand, an odd thing to hold indoors, as though it had become his sceptre. The two hands of the verse, one on the spear and one on the lyre, are the same pairing as 18:10.

The spear finally strikes something, and it is the wall. The Greek places “that night” at the start of the next verse, so that the watch on the house begins the same night. Either way, David’s time at court ends here, in one sentence and three verbs of escape.

The title of Psalm 59 assigns that psalm to this night: “when Saul sent, and they watched the house to kill him.” These are Michal’s first recorded words, and they are a warning. She sees what her father intends before her husband does.

Rahab, whose house was built into Jericho’s wall, let the spies down through her window (Joshua 2:15), and Paul will leave Damascus in a basket through a window in the wall (2 Corinthians 11:33). Michal does the lowering herself. Three verbs follow: he went, he fled, he escaped.

“Image” is teraphim, household idols. Rachel once stole her father’s teraphim and deceived him about them (Genesis 31:19, 34); here Saul’s daughter uses teraphim to deceive hers. The word rendered “pillow” appears nowhere else, perhaps a net or quilt of goats’ hair made to look like a head of hair.

“He is sick” is two words in Hebrew. The messengers accept the word of the king’s daughter at her own door and do not look for themselves. Michal has gained a few hours, and David needs every one of them.

Saul now tells the messengers to “see” David, and to bring him bed and all. He would kill a sick man where he lay. The king whom David once soothed when he was troubled (16:23) shows no such mercy when David is said to be unwell.

“Behold” gives the scene through the messengers’ eyes: they pull back the cover and there is the household idol, with its goats’ hair at the pillow. The repetition of verse 13’s details makes it plain that nothing was rearranged; the decoy simply lay there the whole time.

“Deceived” is rimmah, the verb Jacob threw at Laban the morning he found Leah beside him: “wherefore then hast thou beguiled me?” (Genesis 29:25). A father demands of his daughter why she has lied to him, as Laban once pursued Rachel. Saul calls his son-in-law “mine enemy” to his wife’s face.

David goes to the one man in Israel who knows he has been anointed. Naioth may mean “dwellings” or “camps”, perhaps the prophets’ quarters at Ramah rather than a separate village. It is the first time David and Samuel appear together since the oil.

“It was told Saul” becomes a refrain of betrayal in these chapters: the Ziphites (23:19), the report about Keilah (23:7), and the word from Engedi (24:1). David can hardly stay anywhere without someone carrying the news to the king.

“Company” translates a rare word that seems to mean an assembly or band. Samuel “standing as appointed over them” pictures him presiding over a prophetic community, the only place in the book where he is shown in that role. The messengers see before they are seized.

Three delegations recall the three captains of fifty whom King Ahaziah sent to arrest Elijah (2 Kings 1:9–13). The repetition is almost comic in its bluntness: messengers, prophesying; more messengers, prophesying; a third set, the same. The verse spends no words describing what happened to them.

Sechu is otherwise unknown; the Greek reads something like “the well of the threshing floor on the bare height”. The king asks directions from a passer-by in the town of the man who anointed him. “Where are Samuel and David?” puts the two names together in Saul’s own mouth.

The Spirit comes on Saul before he even arrives, as it did on the road at his anointing (10:10). “He went on, and prophesied” is literally “he went, going and prophesying”, a man walking to an arrest and speaking as a prophet the whole way.

“Stripped off” is pashat, the verb used when Jonathan stripped off his robe for David (18:4). The son gave his clothing away; the father loses his before Samuel. “Naked” can mean stripped to an undergarment (Isaiah 20:2). The proverb gets a second origin here, beside the first in 10:11–12.