The Soul of Jonathan, the Spear of Saul, and the Cave at En-gedi

• Anchor Bible Dictionary — “David,” “Jonathan,” “Michal,” “Saul,” “Doeg,” “Ahimelech,” “Abiathar,” “Nob,” “En-gedi,” “Keilah,” “Adullam,” “Teraphim,” “Ephod,” “Bread of the Presence,” “Covenant,” “Messiah.”
• Dictionary of the OT: Historical Books (IVP) — “David,” “Jonathan,” “Saul,” “Friendship,” “Priests and Levites,” “Prophets and Prophecy,” “Water and Water Systems” (for the En-gedi oasis), “Text and Textual Criticism” — the last one is where a reader should go before arguing about 1 Samuel 17–18.
• NIDOTTE / TDOT — אָהֵב (ʾāhēḇ, love), נֶפֶשׁ (nepeš, soul/life), בְּרִית (bərîṯ, covenant), קָשַׁר (qāšar, bind/knit — and also “conspire”), מְעִיל (məʿîl, robe), כָּנָף (kānāp, wing/corner), מָשִׁיחַ (māšîaḥ, anointed), תְּרָפִים (tərāpîm), חֲנִית (ḥănîṯ, spear).
• On the Greek — Bernard A. Taylor, “1 Reigns: To the Reader,” in NETS. It is where the description of Greek 1 Kingdoms in the codex note above comes from — Rahlfs as the base text, Thackeray’s sections and the non-kaige profile of 1 Reigns, and the exact list of verses the Greek does not contain.

• P. Kyle McCarter Jr., I Samuel (Anchor Bible) — the standard text-critical commentary on this book in English, and the place to see the Greek and Qumran evidence laid out verse by verse; Ralph W. Klein, 1 Samuel (WBC); David Toshio Tsumura, The First Book of Samuel (NICOT), which is markedly more conservative about the Masoretic Text and is worth reading against McCarter.
• Robert Alter, The David Story (translation and commentary on 1–2 Samuel), and The Art of Biblical Narrative for the tools used in the structure block; Robert D. Bergen, 1, 2 Samuel (NAC); Bill T. Arnold, 1 & 2 Samuel (NIVAC); V. Philips Long on the reign of Saul; Walter Brueggemann, First and Second Samuel (Interpretation). (Several of these read the narratives as literature and do not share the church’s confession; we take the tools, not the metaphysics.)
• Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, and Eugene Ulrich, The Qumran Text of Samuel and Josephus — for what the scrolls, the Greek and Josephus actually show, and for how careful one has to be with each.

“Love” in the ancient Near East is treaty vocabulary before it is anything else. In the suzerainty treaties a vassal is required to love his overlord: it means exclusive, undivided, demonstrable loyalty, and it is a term with legal teeth. William L. Moran established the point for Deuteronomy in a famous article (“The Ancient Near Eastern Background of the Love of God in Deuteronomy,” CBQ 25 [1963] 77–87), and J. A. Thompson applied it directly to these chapters (“The Significance of the Verb Love in the David-Jonathan Narratives in 1 Samuel,” Vetus Testamentum 24 [1974] 334–338). You can see the same grammar in the Hittite treaty printed in ANET: Mursilis to Duppi-Tessub, “With my friend you shall be friend, and with my enemy you shall be enemy… remain loyal toward the king of the Hatti land, my sons and my grandsons forever!” (ANET 203–205). Set that beside 20:14–17 and 20:42 — loyalty, descendants, forever — and you can hear what kind of speech Jonathan is making. This does not make the friendship cold. The narrator also says the two men wept until David could not stop (20:41), which no treaty ever required. It means the text is describing something at once personal and formally binding, and that both halves are in the words.

A fugitive from one king normally ran to another one, and the great powers wrote clauses about it. That is exactly what David does — to Samuel at Ramah (19:18), to Nob (21:1), to Achish king of Gath (21:10), to the king of Moab (22:3–4), and finally into the wilderness with four hundred men in debt and distress (22:2). The treaty between Hattusilis III and Ramses II devotes whole sections to Extradition of Fugitives: if a nobleman flees from one land to the other, “shall seize them and shall have them brought back” — with a mercy clause attached, that the returned fugitives not have their eyes torn out nor their families punished (ANET 201–203). Saul has no such treaty with Gath or Moab, which is precisely why those are the places David goes; and the anxiety of the men of Keilah and the Ziphites in chapter 23 is the anxiety of small towns who know a king can come and ask.

And a piece of a man’s garment was not a souvenir. Clothing in this world carried identity and legal weight — a hem could be pressed into clay as a seal in Mesopotamian practice, and in Israel a garment held in pledge had to be returned by sundown because “it is his only covering” (Exodus 22:26–27). That is why David can hold up a scrap of cloth in 24:11 as proof: it is the one thing that could only have been got by being close enough to kill. And it is why the robe torn in 15:27 and the robe given in 18:4 and the robe cut in 24:5 are all doing the same job in this book. (These pages cite ancient parallels only from a text we can actually check; the Mari and Amarna letters, which are often quoted here, fall outside the range of the ANET scan we verify against, so no page number is offered for them.)

• Treaty between Hattusilis III of Hatti and Ramses II of Egypt (ANET 199–203) and the treaty of Mursilis II with Duppi-Tessub of Amurru (ANET 203–205) — Late-Bronze suzerainty treaties (royal documents, witnesses, not Scripture): loyalty sworn “forever,” extended to sons and grandsons; the friend/enemy formula; and detailed extradition clauses for fugitives. The vocabulary of Jonathan’s covenant lives in this world.
• Josephus, Antiquities 6.242–270 (Second-Temple — a witness, not Scripture) — his retelling of Nob, and it is evidence in three directions at once. He calls Doeg “the Syrian” (6.254), which is the Greek reading and not the Hebrew one. He calls the priest Abimelech, again with the Greek. And he gives the number of the slain as three hundred and eighty-five (6.260) — a third figure, agreeing with neither the Hebrew’s eighty-five nor Rahlfs’s three hundred and five. Josephus is working from a Greek Bible, and his divergences are data about which Bible.
• Josephus, Antiquities 6.282–290 (Second-Temple — a witness, not Scripture) — the cave. He keeps the cut garment (6.284) and he keeps Saul’s confession, though he turns it into a Greek compliment: “thou hast demonstrated this day, that thou possessest the righteousness of the ancients… I am now persuaded that God reserves the kingdom for thee” (6.290). What the Bible says more simply is “you are more righteous than I.”
• Sirach 47:1–11 (Second-Temple — a witness, not Scripture, and not counted canonical by this church) — Ben Sira’s praise of David: he killed the giant, “so they glorified him with ten thousands” (47:6, ἐν μυριάσιν, the word from 1 Kingdoms 18:7). Note what he leaves out: no Jonathan, no spear, no Nob, no cave. A hymn of praise is not a history, and this one prunes.
• The psalm superscriptions (Scripture, and part of the Hebrew and Greek text alike) — five psalms attach themselves to these chapters by name. Psalm 52 (= LXX 51), “when Doeg, the Edomite, came and told Saul”; Psalm 54 (= LXX 53), the Ziphites; Psalm 57 (= LXX 56), “when he fled from Saul, in the cave”; Psalm 142 (= LXX 141), “when he was in the cave”; and Psalm 59 (= LXX 58), “when Saul sent men to watch his house in order to kill him” (19:11). Every one of these Greek numbers was looked up in the Greek Psalter, not calculated. In the Greek the title itself is verse 1 or 1–2, so English Psalm 52:1 is LXX Psalm 51:3.

• The ketiv and qere at 18:1. The consonants written are ויאהבו; the Masoretic reading tradition says וַיֶּאֱהָבֵהוּ, “and he loved him.” The sense is not in doubt and nothing turns on it, but it is worth seeing that even the most quoted sentence in these chapters has a note attached to it in the manuscripts. There are two more in this passage: 18:9 (עון written, עוֹיֵן read) and 24:4 · MT 24:5, where the written form is plural “your enemies” and the read form singular.
• “From beside the south” at 20:41. The Hebrew as it stands says David rose מֵאֵצֶל הַנֶּגֶב, “from beside the Negev,” which is not a thing you can stand beside. The ESV prints “the stone heap” and footnotes it (“Compare Septuagint; Hebrew from beside the south”) — and the Greek gives no help at all, because it does not translate the word either: ἀπὸ τοῦ εργαβ, spelled out in Greek letters. This is a place where the text has not come down to us clearly, and the honest thing is to say so rather than print a confident noun.
• Two words that occur nowhere else. כְּבִיר at 19:13 and 19:16 — the “pillow” or “quilt” of goats’ hair — occurs only in these two verses in the whole Bible, which is why the ancient Greek translator reached for liver and why modern translations differ. And אַבִּיר הָרֹעִים at 21:7 · MT 21:8, “mighty one of the shepherds,” is an unusual phrase which the Greek renders as a man pasturing mules. Where a word occurs once, everybody is reasoning from context, including us.

• 1 Samuel 15:27–28 — the hinge for everything in the structure block above. Samuel turns to go, Saul grabs the corner of his robe, it tears, and Samuel says: “The Lord has torn the kingdom of Israel from you this day and has given it to a neighbor of yours, who is better than you.” Every robe in this study is answering that sentence.
• 1 Samuel 2:27–36 and 1 Samuel 14:3 — the word against the house of Eli, and the genealogy that quietly connects it to Nob. Ahimelech son of Ahitub is of Eli’s line, and Abiathar is the one survivor. The explicit fulfilment notice comes much later, in 1 Kings 2:26–27, when Solomon removes Abiathar. Read the three together, and then read 22:22, where David takes the blame anyway.
• Leviticus 24:5–9 and Mark 2:23–28 — the law of the bread of the Presence, and the day Jesus used this chapter in an argument. “Have you never read what David did, when he was in need and was hungry, he and those who were with him: how he entered the house of God, in the time of Abiathar the high priest, and ate the bread of the Presence, which it is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and also gave it to those who were with him?” (Mark 2:25–26). See the note below on the Abiathar difficulty; we are not going to walk past it.
• Genesis 31:19–35 — the other bed with a household image in it. Rachel hides her father’s teraphim and sits on them; Michal lays one in a bed and covers it with a garment. In both stories a woman deceives an angry patriarch and the narrator declines to lecture anybody about it. That silence is a technique, not an endorsement.
• 1 Samuel 26 — the second cave, so to speak. David spares Saul again, this time over a sleeping man with a spear stuck in the ground by his head, and says the same sentence: “Who can put out his hand against the Lord’s anointed and be guiltless?” (26:9). Whether chapters 24 and 26 are two accounts of one event or two events is genuinely debated, and this page does not decide it; McCarter and Klein lean one way, Tsumura and Bergen the other, and the text itself gives us two.
• 2 Samuel 1:17–27 — the book’s last word on both men, and it is David’s. “Saul and Jonathan, beloved and lovely! In life and in death they were not divided… I am distressed for you, my brother Jonathan; very pleasant have you been to me; your love to me was extraordinary, surpassing the love of women.” The man who had the most reason to speak ill of Saul wrote a poem instead and commanded that it be taught. It is in the next book; it is the right place to stop when you are tempted to enjoy Saul’s fall.
• 2 Samuel 7:1–17 — where all of this is going. The fugitive who would not lay a hand on the anointed is given an anointed house “forever” — the same word Jonathan used in 20:42 about their two families.
• Psalms 52, 54, 57, 59, 142 (= LXX 51, 53, 56, 58, 141) — the superscriptions tie five psalms to these seven chapters: Doeg, the Ziphites, the cave twice, and the night the house was watched. Whatever one concludes about how the titles came to be attached, they are part of the received Hebrew and Greek text, and they are Israel’s own way of saying that this stretch of David’s life is where a great many people learn to pray. Psalm 34 (= LXX 33) is attached to the escape from Achish in 21:10–15, and its title calls the king Abimelech — in the Hebrew as well as the Greek.
• Exodus 22:26–27; Numbers 15:37–41 — for what a garment and its corner meant in Israel: a pledged cloak had to be returned by sundown, and the corners carried the tassels that were supposed to make a man remember the commandments. David cuts a corner off a king’s robe and it is his own heart that reacts first.

• P. Kyle McCarter Jr., I Samuel (Anchor Bible) — the fullest text-critical treatment, and the one most willing to prefer the Greek and Qumran against the Masoretic Text; David Toshio Tsumura, The First Book of Samuel (NICOT) — deliberately the other way, arguing that the Hebrew as received usually makes sense; Ralph W. Klein, 1 Samuel (WBC). Read at least one of the first two against the other; the difference between them is most of the field.
• Robert Alter, The David Story — for the literary reading and for the translation notes, which are unusually candid about where the Hebrew is broken; Robert D. Bergen, 1, 2 Samuel (NAC); Bill T. Arnold, 1 & 2 Samuel (NIVAC); Walter Brueggemann, First and Second Samuel (Interpretation); V. Philips Long on the reign of Saul.
• Dominique Barthélemy, David W. Gooding, Johan Lust and Emanuel Tov, The Story of David and Goliath: Textual and Literary Criticism (Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis 73, 1986) — four scholars, four positions, and their responses to one another printed together. This is the honest place to send anyone who wants to know whether the short Greek or the long Hebrew came first.
• Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible; Eugene Ulrich, The Qumran Text of Samuel and Josephus; Frank Moore Cross, Donald W. Parry, Richard J. Saley and Eugene Ulrich, Qumran Cave 4. XII: 1–2 Samuel (DJD XVII, 2005) — the actual transcriptions. And Benjamin J. M. Johnson in Vetus Testamentum 62 (2012), arguing that the surviving 4QSam^a fragments in 1 Samuel 17–18 fit the longer text rather than the shorter one.
• Bernard A. Taylor, “1 Reigns: To the Reader,” in A New English Translation of the Septuagint — the source for the edition, the translational profile, and the list of verses Rahlfs does not contain.

• “A harmful spirit from the Lord” (18:10; 19:9) is a genuine difficulty and we will not slogan our way past it. The Hebrew says רוּחַ אֱלֹהִים רָעָה at 18:10 and רוּחַ יְהוָה רָעָה at 19:9; the Greek at 19:9 reads πνεῦμα θεοῦ πονηρόν, “an evil spirit of God.” The adjective is the ordinary word for bad or harmful, and it can describe the effect as easily as the moral character. Readers have taken it three main ways: (1) a spirit sent by God as judgement, God remaining sovereign over what he does not approve (compare 1 Kings 22:19–23 and Job 1–2); (2) a natural or mental affliction attributed, as the Old Testament habitually attributes everything, directly to God; (3) the withdrawal of the Spirit that had come on Saul at his anointing (16:13–14), leaving something else in the vacancy. The house handles this the way it handles the hardening of Pharaoh in Exodus: the text says God did it and the text also holds Saul responsible for the spear, and we report both in the same breath rather than resolving one into the other. Where Scripture gives no further reason, we stop.
• Chapters 24 and 26 — one event told twice, or two events? Both have Saul pursuing with three thousand men, both have David in a position to kill and refusing with the same theological reason, both end with Saul confessing. Critical commentators frequently read them as variant accounts of a single tradition; others point to real differences of setting, agents and outcome and take them as two occasions, with the second deliberately echoing the first. We name the positions and do not adjudicate, and note that nothing in the doctrine of these chapters moves with the answer.
• The shorter Greek is not a small thing and it is not a threat. Roughly half of the Goliath material and the whole of 18:1–5 are missing from Rahlfs. That is a large, visible, ancient difference, and every serious study Bible footnotes it. It is worth saying plainly what it does not do: no article of the Christian faith rests on it. The church has had both witnesses for as long as it has existed, knew it, and confessed the same creed. A reader who loves one translation has a magnificent translation of a real text and loses nothing by learning where the other witnesses stand — which is the whole of our published policy on this.
• The narrator’s reticence about Michal’s household image, and about David’s lie at Nob. David tells Ahimelech that the king has sent him on business (21:2), which is not true, and eighty-five men die partly because of the visit; David himself says so in 22:22. The narrator records the lie, records the consequence, records David’s admission, and passes no sentence. The absence of a verdict is not a verdict. Commentators divide sharply over whether David is being quietly criticised in chapter 21, and the division is itself the evidence that the text does not say.
• How to preach Saul. He is the first king of Israel, he was anointed by Samuel, he was given another heart, he saved Jabesh-gilead, he fathered Jonathan, and he ends these chapters weeping in a cave doorway telling the truth about himself. He is a tragedy, not a villain to be enjoyed, and a congregation can tell the difference in about four sentences. The Talmud, at b. Yoma 22b, apologises to him by name. David wrote the elegy. If our treatment of Saul is harsher than David’s, we have gone wrong somewhere.

• The heir took off the robe himself. Nobody made Jonathan do it. He was the crown prince, he understood exactly what the women in the street were singing, and he gave away his robe and his armor and his sword to the man who was going to have his throne — and then kept giving, all the way to “you shall be king, and I shall be next to you.” That is what covenant love costs when it is real.
• The narrator counts the spear and never calls Saul a name. If you want to learn how to speak about someone who has gone badly wrong, read chapters 18 to 24 and notice what is not said. The facts are enough. The reader can do the rest.
• David’s heart struck him over a piece of cloth. He had the man who had hunted him for years, alone, in the dark, at his mercy — and what he actually did was cut a corner off a coat, and it kept him awake. A conscience that fine is not weakness; it is the reason the throne was safe with him.
• “The Lord forbid… he is the Lord’s anointed.” Notice the reason he gives. Not “Saul might repent,” not “it would look bad,” not “I am better than this.” It is that God did something to Saul once and it is not David’s to undo. He restrained himself on the basis of what God had done, not on the basis of what Saul deserved.
• Eighty-five men in linen ephods, and one who got away. Read 22:6–19 once, slowly, and do not preach it twice. It is what happens when a frightened man with power stops hearing anyone but himself — and the men who come out of it well are the guards who would not obey.
• And Saul said the true thing. “You are more righteous than I.” He said it out loud, in the open, weeping, with three thousand of his own men behind him, about the man who was taking his kingdom. It did not save him and it did not change what he did next. It was still true, and Scripture wrote it down in his voice.

A word about typology, clearly labelled: a Greek reader meets the words χριστὸς κυρίου in 24:6 and cannot help hearing what he hears everywhere else — the Lord’s Christ. Hold that carefully. The New Testament does not make Saul a type of anything, and it does not read 1 Samuel 24 as a picture of the cross. What it does do is call Jesus the Son of David and put David’s throne in Gabriel’s mouth (Luke 1:32–33), and it does send us back to this very stretch of the story in Mark 2:25–26 — where the hungry fugitive who was given the holy bread is the precedent Jesus claims for himself. As a devotional analogy, and labelled as one: a rejected anointed man, hunted by the authorities, who would not save himself by taking a life, is a shape a Christian will recognise. That is a devotional analogy and not an argument from the text, and this page does not pretend otherwise.

Step in response: two things this week. First, find the person you have every right to answer — the one who has wronged you and is still in reach — and do not. Cut the corner off the coat and let it be enough. Second, if you are Jonathan this week, and the thing you hoped for is going to someone else: he did not merely accept it, he went and strengthened the other man’s hand in God (23:16). That is a harder and better thing than resignation, and it can be done on a Tuesday.