1 Samuel24:1–15

i. Three thousand chosen men, and a spring called the Kid — 24:1–3

The unit opens on a hinge verb: Saul שָׁב (šāḇ, H7725) — he turns back from the Philistines, and turns immediately onto David. Ellicott hears the speed as character: “no sooner was the Philistine raid repulsed than with sleepless animosity he at once set forth.” The force he raises is described with the language of election — three thousand בָּחוּר (bāḥûr, passive participle of bāḥar, H977, “to try, to choose”) — which is the narrator's quiet joke: a rejected king marches his chosen men against the man God chose. JFB is blunter about the futility: “Nothing but the blind infatuation of fiendish rage could have led the king to pursue his outlawed son-in-law among those craggy and perpendicular precipices… But the overruling providence of God frustrated all his vigilance.”

The terrain is named for creatures, not men. הַיְּעֵלִים (yāʻêl, H3277, “an ibex, as climbing”) occurs in only three verses of the Hebrew Bible; Pulpit reads it as a proper name of cliffs near En-gedi, K&D disagrees — “probably not a proper name for some particular rocks, but a general term applied to the rocks of that locality.” The brief does not settle it and neither do we. Poole, quoting an eyewitness, records what the commentators agree on: “These very rocks are exceeding steep, and full of precipices, and dangerous to travellers.”

Then verse 3 puts the king inside the mountain. The Hebrew says only that Saul went in לְהָסֵךְ אֶת־רַגְלָיו — “to cover his feet” — and the ancient versions split. Cambridge and K&D take it as the standard euphemism for the necessities of nature; Poole preserves the dissent, that “the Syriac and Arabic, interpret this place and phrase quite otherwise, that Saul went in to sleep there.” ⚙ Both readings land on one fact, and the narrator seems to want only that fact: the man with three thousand soldiers made himself, for a few minutes, a body without a guard. Opposite him, in the יַרְכְּתֵי (the “thighs,” the far recesses) of the cave, David and his men were יֹשְׁבִים — not “hiding,” as the English has it, but sitting, yāšaḇ (H3427), the verb Strong's glosses “properly, to sit down (specifically as judge).”

ii. Providence with a religious varnish — 24:4–5

David's men speak the most dangerous sentence in the unit: “Behold the day of which YHWH said unto thee.” No such saying exists in 1 Samuel, and the named voices are unanimous. JFB: “God had never made any promise of delivering Saul into David's hand.” K&D: “what follows clearly shows that David had received no such oracle,” and so the men “regarded the leadings of providence… as a divine intimation, and called this intimation a word of Jehovah.” Barnes traces the raw material — the succession oracles of 1 Samuel 15:28 and 16:1, 12, known publicly through Jonathan's words. Maclaren names the technique without mercy: “They put a religious varnish on their advice. It would be almost impious not to kill Saul, for here was the hand of God evidently fulfilling a prophecy!” Geneva makes it a mirror for the reader: “Here we see how ready we are to hasten God's promise, if the occasion serve never so little.”

⚙ Notice the grammar the men chose. נֹתֵן (nōṯên, H5414) is a participle — I am giving, right now — so the alleged oracle is not a remembered promise but a running commentary on the present moment. That is the exact form the temptation takes: not “God once said,” but “God is saying, look.”

What David actually does is smaller and stranger than what they urged. בַּלָּט (ballāṭ, H3909, “in the secrecy”), he cuts (kārat, H3772 — the covenant verb) the כָּנָף (kānāp̄, H3671, a wing) of the royal mᵉʻîl. And then the blow he withheld lands on him: וַיַּךְ (nākāh, H5221, the battlefield verb “to strike”) with the heart of David as its subject. K&D: “his conscience reproached him, because he regarded this as an injury done to the king himself.” Ellicott presses further, that the smiting was “not for what he had done to Saul, but… for the momentary thought that had stained his soul of slaying the Lord's Anointed” — a reconstruction, we should say plainly, of an interior the verse does not open. Geneva supplies the decisive reason in one clause: “For seeing it was his own private cause, he repented that he had touched his enemy.” Poole adds the honest possibility that David “had some secret thought of doing more to him, though he suppressed and overcame it.”

iii. “A profanation to me” — the ethic of the anointing — 24:6–7

David's refusal is not mercy and is not policy. He says חָלִילָה (ḥālîlāh, H2486), a word Strong's traces to a profaned thing — Pulpit renders the idiom “Far be it from me from Jehovah,” for Jehovah's sake — and he follows it with אִם, which K&D identifies as “a particle denoting an oath.” Four times in this unit the title מְשִׁיחַ יְהוָה (mᵉšîaḥ YHWH, H4899) is spoken, twice here and twice to Saul's face in v. 10. Poole draws the whole constitutional argument out of it: the unction made Saul's person “sacred and inviolable, and is so to be accounted by me, and you, and all his subjects… as God only exalted him, and God only could pronounce a sentence of deprivation… so it belongs to God only to execute his own sentence.” Pulpit: “He was Jehovah's Messiah, and as such his person was sacred.”

⚙ The force of the argument is that David is himself already anointed. He is not deferring to an office he does not hold; he is refusing to establish a precedent that would one day be used on him. A throne taken by cutting down an anointed man could be kept only by cutting down the next claimant — and the man saying this will later have to answer for Uriah. He is right here, and the rightness is costly, and it does not make him safe.

The cost is visible in one verb. David וַיְשַׁסַּע (šāsaʻ, H8156, “to split or tear,” Piel) his men with words. Cambridge: “Lit. tore, or lashed: a strong expression”; K&D glosses it verbis dilacere; Pulpit says the verb “means to crush down” and “shows that David had to use all his authority.” Henry's summary is right and quiet: “He not only would not do this bad thing himself, but he would not suffer those about him to do it.” Benson goes further and makes the reading typological on the spot — David rendered good for evil, “and was herein both a type of Christ, who saved his persecutors, and an example to all Christians, not to be overcome of evil, but to overcome evil with good.”

iv. Nostrils in the dust, and a hem held up as evidence — 24:8–11

David comes out and calls after Saul — אַחֲרֵי, the preposition of the whole pursuit, now reversed by a voice. Ellicott catches the intent of the posture: he called “with an address of the deepest reverence, accompanied too… with an act of the profoundest homage which an inferior could pay to a superior. He would show Saul at least he was no rival king.” The Hebrew for that homage is bodily: אַפַּיִם אַרְצָה, nostrils earthward — the organ that in Hebrew also names wrath, laid in the dirt — followed by wayyištāḥû (šāḥāh, H7812), the verb of worship. Pulpit reads the whole gesture politically: “so far from being a rebel, he still acknowledged Saul's lawful authority.”

Then the indictment, aimed past the king at his court. Poole: “He prudently and modestly translates the fault from Saul to his followers and evil counsellors.” Ellicott names them — Doeg, Cush the Benjamite, the Ziphites; Cambridge ties the situation to Psalm 7, a link that rests on that psalm's superscription and on likeness of language, not on anything in 1 Samuel. ⚙ The Hebrew sharpens the charge past what the English shows: the informers say David is מְבַקֵּשׁ (mᵉḇaqqêš, H1245, Piel) Saul's harm, and that is the exact verb the narrator used in v. 2 for what Saul came to do to David. The accusation is a confession.

Verse 10 contains the unit's hardest clause and its deepest one. וְאָמַר לַהֲרָגֲךָ has no expressed subject: “and he/it said to kill thee.” Ellicott lays out the options honestly — the literal rendering makes Jehovah the speaker, which he rejects as “contrary to the spirit of the whole narrative”; the Syriac and Chaldee supply “one said”; the Vulgate repoints to “I thought.” What follows is unambiguous in every reading: וַתָּחָס (ḥûs, H2347, root sense to cover) — the eye spared. Pulpit states the principle the whole chapter exists to teach: “But what seem to us to be the leadings of Providence are not to be blindly followed.”

And the evidence is produced: “see, yea see the wing of thy robe in my hand.” Gill: “look on it again and again; view it with the eyes of thy body intently… and consider that I could as easily have had thine head in my hand as the skirt of thy robe.” K&D hears the address my father as “childlike reverence and affection… towards the anointed of the Lord,” though Ellicott and Barnes read it instead as the deference of a junior. The counter-charge is technical: Saul is צֹדֶה (ṣōḏeh, H6658), and that rare participle is the word Exodus 21:13 uses for the lying-in-wait that makes a killing murder.

v. The court of last appeal — 24:12–15

The speech ends in a courtroom. Šāp̄aṭ (H8199) sounds three times in four verses, rîḇ twice in one clause as verb and noun together — “may He contend my contention” — and God is asked to become דַּיָּן (dayyān, H1781), an agent-noun that stands in only one other verse of the Hebrew Bible. Henry states David's resolution exactly: “He declares his fixed resolution never to be his own avenger. If men wrong us, God will right us, at farthest, in the judgment of the great day.” K&D distils v. 12 to a sentence: “Only a wicked man could wish to avenge himself; I do not.” Benson, weighing the tense of ū·nᵉqāmanî, insists David “does not, in these words, pray God to punish Saul… but to justify, clear, and protect himself.” Poole agrees: “I will not execute vengeance on thee, but will leave it wholly to God.”

The proverb of v. 13 is an argument from character: mê·rᵉšāʻîm yêṣêʼ rešaʻ, wickedness comes out of the wicked. Cambridge: “A man's character is known by his actions. If I were wicked at heart, I should have shewn it by killing you.” Gill reaches for Gospel language to say the same — “a corrupt tree brings forth evil fruits” — and Ellicott collects the parallels, Grotius on how “actions usually correspond to the quality of the mind,” and Erdmann's Greek proverb about the bad egg from the bad raven. Cambridge is careful where we should be careful too: it is not clear whether the closing refrain, “but my hand shall not be upon thee,” belongs to the proverb or to David.

Then the self-description that the whole army makes ridiculous: a dead dog, one flea. Ellicott presses the numeral BSB omits — “the original is even stronger, after ‘one flea’… if it is caught, is poor game for a royal hunter.” K&D: “a perfectly harmless and insignificant man, of whom Saul had no occasion to be afraid.” Barnes puts it as a question about the crown: “was it consistent with the dignity of the king of Israel to lead armies in pursuit of a weak and helpless individual like David?” The last line asks not for rescue but for verdict — Cambridge, literally, “judge me out of thy hand: give me my right, and set me free.” Ellicott's entry here hands the microphone to Bishop Sanderson, in David's voice: “God can and will in His own due time make good His own promise without my sin.”