1 Samuel31chapter 31

1 Samuel 31:1-2

fought against Israel: The rout at Gilboa is where the king Israel asked for goes down in full view, on the same hillside where he had gone the night before to consult the dead because the LORD would no longer answer him at Endor. Jonathan dies with his brothers Abinadab and Malchi-shua, ending at the sword the covenant he had made with David at the throne's own door; the dirge David sings over him waits for the next chapter and is not drawn forward here. Wesley reads a mercy folded into the loss: of Saul's sons Jonathan alone stood fairest for the crown, and his death clears the road David's anointing had already marked.

1 Samuel 31:3-5

Saul's request that his armourbearer run him through, and the refusal born of fear, plays out the sentence Samuel had spoken to him from beyond the grave at Endor, that he and his sons would be with Samuel by the morrow, the word chapter 15 had already fixed when Saul spared Agag against the ban on Amalek. The armourbearer's fear answers Saul's own fear of Philistine abuse, and in the end neither man dies by an enemy's hand; both fall on their own swords. The text narrates the act without comment and passes no verdict beyond the one Samuel had already spoken.

1 Samuel 31:6

The verse counts the dead together, king, sons, armourbearer and army entangled in one sentence, on the day Samuel's word from Endor had already named. Chronicles supplies the verdict this history leaves the reader to draw for himself: Saul died for his transgression which he committed against the LORD, and also for asking counsel of one that had a familiar spirit, and enquired not of the LORD. The king raised up because the people would not have the LORD reign over them goes down having refused, at the last, to ask the LORD anything at all.

1 Samuel 31:7

The defeat at Gilboa reaches past the battlefield: towns across the valley and beyond the Jordan empty rather than face a Philistine army with no king and no standing force left to answer it, and the Philistines settle into cities Joshua's conquest had won. Barnes locates the abandoned country in the north, the ground of Naphtali, Zebulun and Issachar, held by the tribes since the conquest itself. One lost battle undoes what generations had kept, the practical cost of the manner of a king Samuel had catalogued back at chapter eight.

1 Samuel 31:8-10

The Philistines strip Saul as David once stripped Goliath, and cut off his head as David cut off the head of Gath's own champion; the roles have reversed since chapter seventeen, and the head that once stood higher than any man in Israel is carried through Philistine territory as a trophy. Samuel's own text says only the house of their idols; Chronicles names it plainly, that they fastened his head in the temple of Dagon, the same god who had fallen on his face before the ark at Ashdod and now receives Israel's anointed in triumph. The armour goes to the house of Ashtaroth and the body to the wall of Beth-shan, and the cry raised at Shiloh, the glory is departed, reaches its full picture here in a king hung up for a god that could not stand on its own threshold.

1 Samuel 31:11-13

Jabesh-gilead is the one city in the book with a debt to Saul, delivered from Nahash the Ammonite and the threat of a gouged right eye in the first act of his reign, and it becomes the one place that pays a kindness back in full. Its valiant men march all night to take Saul and his sons down from the wall of Beth-shan, an open defiance of the army now settled in the land, then burn the bodies already corrupted by the heat and the days on the wall, bury the bones under a tamarisk, and fast seven days, the length Israel had once kept for Jacob. Samuel's history opens with Saul's finest hour, delivering a besieged city; it closes with that city delivering him, the one unbroken act of gratitude the book records.