1 Samuel23chapter 23

1 Samuel 23:14-15

but God delivered him not into his hand: The two conditional answers of the ephod prove true here without David ever testing them: Saul seeks him every day, and God delivered him not into his hand, exactly as the oracle implied he need not stay to find out. The wilderness of Ziph, a mountain district between Hebron and En-gedi, becomes the next hiding ground, and verse 15 has David watching his own pursuer come out to take his life. John Gill compares the daily persistence of the search to Goliath's forty daily defiances in chapter 17, one persecution measured out in days like the other.

Older translations render Horesh in the Wilderness of Ziph as a wood, and Barnes reports Conder's view that it is a place name, found today at Khoreisa. Henry reads David's hiding from Saul as waiting on God's time. He compares Galatians 4:29, where the son born by the flesh persecutes the son born by the Spirit.

1 Samuel 23:16-18

strengthened his hand in God: This is the last recorded meeting between David and Jonathan, and the covenant the two make before the Lord in verse 18 renews what they had already sworn at 18:3 and again at 20:16-17, its third renewal in the book. Jonathan's word that David shall be king and he himself next to him is the clearest statement in the narrative that the king's own son understood and accepted where the throne was going. Matthew Henry reads it as what Jonathan wished rather than what he had ground to expect, since the two never meet again in the story that follows.

Wesley thinks Jonathan drew his hope of second place from David's friendship or from a promise David had made him. Saul knows it, Jonathan says, and Henry calls it folly to fight what God had fixed. Saul says so himself at 24:20.

made a covenant before the Lord: Gill takes before the LORD to mean that God was called as witness to the oath. David stays at Horesh. Jonathan goes home to his father's house, and he dies with Saul and his brothers in the battle of 31:2.

1 Samuel 23:19-21

Doth not David hide himself with us: The Ziphites are David's own tribesmen of Judah, and they volunteer his location to Saul unasked, before any threat or reward is offered; Matthew Henry contrasts them with Judas, who at least named a price. Psalm 54 carries a title naming this very report, though this database stores the Psalms without their Hebrew titles, so the link cannot be shown from the floor by query even though the title is canonical text in the Hebrew Bible. Saul's answer, blessed be ye of the Lord, puts the covenant name of God in the mouth of a king thanking men for betraying his own anointed, two verses after Jonathan strengthened that same anointed's hand in the same God.

Jamieson, Fausset and Brown think the Ziphites had seen David's men moving on the hill of Hachilah. Their promise of delivering him into Saul's hand repeats the chapter's phrase from verses 7 and 12. Verse 14 has already given God's answer.

Saul thanks the Ziphites for compassion, the concern he complained at 22:8 that none of his own servants had shown him, as Gill notes. Henry says his envy made him an object of pity.

1 Samuel 23:22-25

he dealeth very subtilly: Saul's caution here, wanting certainty of the place before he commits his men, costs him time, and David withdraws further south into the wilderness of Maon while the search continues. Nineteenth-century surveyors described this tableland as broken sharply into ravines, terrain that explains both David's ability to disappear into a rock at verse 25 and the difficulty Saul's larger force has closing on him. Saul's whole company now moves to surround the smaller band, narrowing the ground between them verse by verse.

Saul will search for David among all the clans of Judah, David's own tribe, and the Ziphites of verse 19 belong to it. Henry sees a hunter who thought himself sure of his prey. David has already moved on to Maon.

The Ziphites go home ahead of Saul to guide his search. Barnes explains the Arabah as the desert valley running along the Jordan and south of the Dead Sea, and Clarke places Maon in the far south of Judah.

Wesley takes the rock to mean a cave in it, where David first thought to hide. He moved on when Saul came near. The chase that follows runs along the two sides of one mountain in verse 26.

compassed David and his men round about: This is the nearest Saul ever comes to taking David alive: the two parties stand on opposite sides of a single mountain, and Saul's men close around David's smaller company to take them. Nothing in the verse is David's own doing, no stratagem and no word from the ephod, and the older commentators read the bare fact of the encirclement as the chapter's real turning point for exactly that reason.

1 Samuel 23:27-29

the Philistines have invaded the land: The rescue comes from outside the story entirely, a Philistine raid elsewhere in the land arriving at the one moment it could matter, and Adam Clarke calls it plainly the workings of providence: deliverance without a battle, a sign, or an answer from the ephod. The place keeps the memory of it in its name, the rock of divisions, because there Saul's pursuit was split off from David by circumstance rather than by choice or defeat. David goes up from there to the strongholds of En-gedi, where the seventeenth-century scholar John Lightfoot placed the writing of Psalm 63, a tradition both Gill and Henry record.

Clarke reports the Targum's reading of the name, that the king's heart was divided over which way to go. Barnes gives Conder's identification of the place with a narrow gorge called Malaky, between El Kolah and Maon. The Philistines David fought at Keilah now draw Saul away.

David went up from Maon to the strongholds of En-gedi, above the Dead Sea. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown explain the name as the spring of the wild goats, and Barnes identifies the place with Hazazon-tamar of Genesis 14:7. Its caves are where Saul comes looking for David in chapter 24.