The Fallible · Synthetic · Study Bible

1 Samuel25:1

The Death of Samuel

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Generated by AI. It can be wrong, and it has no authority. Every note here is fallible commentary — never the Word itself. Public-domain sources are quoted and named; machine synthesis is marked and meant to be checked. Weigh all of it against Scripture. “They received the word with all readiness… and searched the Scriptures daily, whether those things were so.” — Acts 17:11
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1 Samuel 25:1 — The Death of Samuel. Each verse below carries the full apparatus: the Berean Standard Bible, the vocalized original (tap any word), and a parsed breakdown of every term transcribed from the interlinear. Synthesized commentary, canonical threads, and the reading of Christ gather at the end, over the whole unit.

1“When Samuel died, all Israel gathered to mourn for him; and they…”+

1When Samuel died, all Israel gathered to mourn for him; and they buried him at his home in Ramah. Then David set out and went down to the Wilderness of Paran.

Berean Standard Bible · CC0

Hebrew — tap a word ↓

šə·mū·’êl way·yā·māṯ ḵāl yiś·rā·’êl way·yiq·qā·ḇə·ṣū way·yis·pə·ḏū- lōw way·yiq·bə·ru·hū bə·ḇê·ṯōw bā·rā·māh dā·wiḏ way·yā·qām way·yê·reḏ ’el- miḏ·bar pā·rān

Literal — word-for-word from the original

And-died Samuel; and-were-gathered all-of Israel, and-they-wailed for-him, and-they-buried-him in-his-house in-the-Ramah. And-arose David, and-went-down unto wilderness-of Paran.

Where the English smooths the original

  • וַיִּקָּבְצ֤וּ וַיִּקָּבְצ֤וּ (way·yiq·qā·ḇə·ṣū, qâbats, H6908) is parsed Niphal, not Qal: “and they were gathered / gathered themselves.” The English active “gathered” loses the middle-passive force — Israel is not merely convening, it is being drawn together. Cambridge reads the assembly as a national act on the scale of the mourning for Moses; Ellicott presses the all: “not one portion or fragment only, as might have been expected in that time of division and confusion.”
  • וַיִּסְפְּדוּ־ וַיִּסְפְּדוּ־ (way·yis·pə·ḏū, çâphad, H5594) is not the English abstraction “to mourn.” Strong's records the concrete act: properly, to tear the hair and beat the breasts — audible, bodily, public wailing over a corpse. A relatively rare verb (29 verses). Josephus, cited by Ellicott, reports they wept “a very great number of days.”
  • בְּבֵית֖וֹ בְּבֵית֖וֹ (bə·ḇê·ṯōw, bayith, H1004) says flatly “in his house,” and the smooth English “at his home” softens a real difficulty. Numbers 19 would make literal interment indoors a source of perpetual defilement — so Cambridge, Ellicott, Gill, Barnes and the Pulpit all read court or garden. K&D dissents from the softening in a different direction: not a family tomb nor his birthplace, but “the house in which he lived, with the court belonging to it.”
  • וַיֵּ֖רֶד וַיֵּ֖רֶד (way·yê·reḏ, yârad, H3381) — “and he went down.” Strong's: to descend, literally to go downwards. The BSB keeps it, but the descent is easy to read as mere travel-idiom; it is both topographical (the Judean hills down to the southern waste) and, in the narrative shape, the anointed man moving away from the grave of the man who anointed him.
Word by word16 · parsed+
שְׁמוּאֵ֔לšə·mū·’êlWhen SamuelH8050
√ Shᵉmûwʼêl — Shemuel, the name of three IsraelitesNounpropermasculine singular
Shᵉmûwʼêl — H8050, “the name of three Israelites” The name stands first in the English rendering but second in the Hebrew clause, after the verb. Ellicott's estimate is the standard one: “Since Moses, none so great as Samuel had arisen” — prophet, last judge, kingmaker, founder of the prophetic schools.
וַיָּ֣מָתway·yā·māṯdiedH4191
√ mûwth — to die (literally or figuratively)Conjunctive wawVerbQalConsecutive imperfectthird person masculine singular
mûwth — to die (Qal, consecutive imperfect) The plainest verb in the lexicon, and the narrative gives it no ornament: no last words, no oracle, no successor named. Samuel had already told Saul the kingdom was torn away; his death removes the last living voice that had both anointed Saul and anointed David, leaving the two men alone in the wilderness with each other.
כָל־ḵālallH3605
√ kôl — properly, the wholeNounmasculine singular construct
kôl — properly, the whole (construct) Construct with Israel: “the whole of Israel.” The word carries the weight Ellicott and Cambridge both hang on it — a fractured nation acting, once, as one.
יִשְׂרָאֵל֙yiś·rā·’êlIsraelH3478
√ Yisrâʼêl — Jisrael, a symbolical name of JacobNounpropermasculine singular
Yisrâʼêl — H3478 Named as a single actor, not as tribes or as Saul's subjects. The state is at war with itself; the funeral is the one thing it does undivided.
וַיִּקָּבְצ֤וּway·yiq·qā·ḇə·ṣūgatheredH6908
√ qâbats — to grasp, iConjunctive wawVerbNifalConsecutive imperfectthird person masculine plural
qâbats — to gather (Niphal) The Niphal stem makes the assembly something that happens to Israel as much as something Israel does. The same root gathers the elders to Samuel at Ramah in 1 Samuel 8:4 to demand a king; the verb that opened the monarchy closes the prophet's life at the same place.
וַיִּסְפְּדוּ־way·yis·pə·ḏū-to mournH5594
√ çâphad — properly, to tear the hair and beat the breasts (as Orientals do in grief)Conjunctive wawVerbQalConsecutive imperfectthird person masculine plural
çâphad — to tear the hair and beat the breasts in grief A rare and physical verb (29 verses). Scripture's darkest judgment oracles are built by denying exactly this word together with burial (Jeremiah 16:4, 6; 25:33). Samuel receives both, in full, from the whole nation — the narrator's quiet verdict on the man.
ל֔וֹlōwfor him
Prepositionthird person masculine singular
Simple prepositional phrase, “for him”; no Strong's number is carried in the interlinear for the suffix form.
וַיִּקְבְּרֻ֥הוּway·yiq·bə·ru·hūand they buried himH6912
√ qâbar — to interConjunctive wawVerbQalConsecutive imperfectthird person masculine pluralthird person masculine singular
qâbar — to inter Burial and lament arrive as a pair (see note on index 5). Henry's point is pastoral rather than lexical, and it is the point the verb makes: a people are judged by how they bury those who prayed for them.
בְּבֵית֖וֹbə·ḇê·ṯōwat his homeH1004
√ bayith — a house (in the greatest variation of applications, especially family, etcPreposition-bNounmasculine singular constructthird person masculine singular
bayith — a house, in the greatest variation of applications, especially family The lexicon's own breadth is the whole exegetical problem here. Geneva takes it at the widest end — “among his own kindred”; JFB at the architectural end — “his own mausoleum”; K&D in the middle — the dwelling with its court. The Hebrew will bear all three, and the ceremonial law (Numbers 19) is what pushes most readers off the narrowest.
בָּרָמָ֑הbā·rā·māhin RamahH7414
√ Râmâh — Ramah, the name of four places in PalestinePreposition-b, ArticleNounproperfeminine singular
Râmâh — H7414, the name of four places in Palestine The parse records a definite article on the proper name (Preposition-b, Article) — Hebrew still hears the word as an appellative height, so it takes “the.” Ramah is where Samuel's mother vowed him, where he judged, where he kept his house; he is buried at the one address that held his whole life.
דָּוִ֔דdā·wiḏThen DavidH1732
√ Dâvid — David, the youngest son of JesseNounpropermasculine singular
Dâvid — H1732, the youngest son of Jesse The name enters the verse only after the grave is closed. Samuel anointed him in 1 Samuel 16 and the two scarcely meet again; the anointing outlives the anointer.
וַיָּ֣קָםway·yā·qāmset outH6965
√ qûwm — to rise (in various applications, literal, figurative, intensive and causative)Conjunctive wawVerbQalConsecutive imperfectthird person masculine singular
qûwm — to rise, in various applications “And David arose.” The same verb that elsewhere means to stand up, to be established, to take action; here it is pure motion, and the Pulpit Commentary insists it is not grief-flight but the logistics of six hundred men needing food.
וַיֵּ֖רֶדway·yê·reḏand went downH3381
√ yârad — to descend (literally, to go downwardsConjunctive wawVerbQalConsecutive imperfectthird person masculine singular
yârad — to descend, literally to go downwards The physical drop from the hill country toward the southern desert. Set against qûwm in the same breath — he rises and he goes down — the pair reads as motion without ascent: the king-elect moving further from the throne, not nearer.
אֶל־’el-toH413
√ ʼêl — near, with or amongPreposition
Directional preposition, “unto / toward” (ʼêl, H413).
מִדְבַּ֥רmiḏ·barthe WildernessH4057
√ midbâr — a pasture (iNounmasculine singular construct
midbâr — a pasture Not empty sand. Strong's root sense is grazing land, and JFB builds the whole scene on it: “Like other wildernesses, it presented large tracts of natural pasture” — which is why Nabal's three thousand sheep, and David's hungry men, are both there in verse 2.
פָּארָֽן׃סpā·rānof ParanH6290
√ Pâʼrân — Paran, a desert of ArabiaNounproperfeminine singular
Pâʼrân — H6290, a desert of Arabia A rare name (10 verses in the whole Hebrew Bible). It is Ishmael's dwelling (Genesis 21:21), the staging ground from which the spies were sent (Numbers 13:3, 26), and the mountain from which God shines in Deuteronomy 33:2 and Habakkuk 3:3. The LXX reads “Maon” here instead, and Barnes prefers it; Cambridge and the Pulpit keep Paran taken broadly.
The Voices✦ public domain+
✦Keil & DelitzschBiblical Commentary on the Old Testament1860s
Since the days of Moses and Joshua, no man had arisen to whom the covenant nation owed so much as to Samuel, who has been justly called the reformer and restorer of the theocracy.
✦Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges—1880s
A public mourning was held as after the death of Moses ( Deuteronomy 34:8 ), and the whole nation met to do honour to him, who for well nigh eighty years had gone in and out amongst them as Prophet, Judge, and Counsellor of the King.
✦Matthew HenryConcise Commentary on the Whole Bible1706
Those have hard hearts, who can bury faithful ministers without grief; who do not feel their loss of those who have prayed for them, and taught them the way of the Lord.
Benson quotes this same sentence of Henry's in a different wording (“with dry eyes”), evidence that Henry circulated in more than one edition; we quote the text as it stands in Henry's own entry.
✦The Pulpit CommentarySpence & Exell, eds.1880s
This is not to be connected with the death of Samuel, as though David had now lost a protector.
The commentators divide here. Pulpit and JFB both detach David's move from Samuel's death and explain it by supply; Gill allows either mourning or safety from Saul. The text itself only juxtaposes the two events and assigns no cause.
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The verse-by-verse work is done. What follows gathers the whole unit. All three layers below are machine-generated (⚙). Weigh them; they have no authority.

⚙Grand Commentary — the unit, read wholesynthesis · verify+

AI synthesis — woven from the public-domain voices above and the original text; generated and fallible.

i. The one thing a divided nation still did together — 25:1a

Four consecutive verbs carry the first half of the verse and not one of them is decorated: וַיָּ֣מָת he died, וַיִּקָּבְצ֤וּ they were gathered, וַיִּסְפְּדוּ־ they wailed, וַיִּקְבְּרֻ֥הוּ they buried him. Ellicott catches what the grammar is doing with all Israel — the assembly is “not one portion or fragment only, as might have been expected in that time of division and confusion.” Cambridge measures it against the only comparable funeral in the record, Moses' in Deuteronomy 34:8. K&D says why the scale is right: since Moses and Joshua the covenant nation had owed no man so much. Benson adds the political edge — Samuel's memory was the dearer because Saul's rule made the contrast; Gill agrees, noting that they had cause to lament him “since Saul their king proved so bad as he did.” ⚙ The observation the text leaves unspoken is that the last corporate act of Israel under Saul is a funeral.

ii. In his house at Ramah — a grave the law had to be argued around — 25:1b

The Hebrew says בְּבֵית֖וֹ, in his house, and the commentators spend more ink here than anywhere else in the verse, because Numbers 19 makes a corpse under a roof a standing source of defilement. Cambridge, Ellicott, Barnes, Gill and the Pulpit all move the grave outdoors — court or garden — and Ellicott, Barnes and Cambridge all reach for the same proof: Manasseh “buried in his own house” in 2 Chronicles 33:20 is glossed “in the garden of his own house” in 2 Kings 21:18. Gill, characteristically, records the contrast with pagan custom, that Greeks and Romans did bury within the dwelling, “hence sprung the idolatrous worship of the Lares.” Geneva takes the phrase socially instead of spatially: “among his own kindred.” JFB takes it architecturally: “his own mausoleum.” K&D refuses both edges and keeps the plain sense — the house he lived in, with its court. ⚙ Every one of these readings is an attempt to keep the sentence and the Torah in the same room; the sentence itself offers no help.

iii. And David went down — 25:1c

Two verbs turn the chapter: וַיָּ֣קָם he arose, וַיֵּ֖רֶד he went down. Devotional readings have long tied the descent to grief — Gill offers it as one option, “there to indulge his mourning for him” — but both JFB and the Pulpit reject the connection outright, JFB judging the removal “probably occasioned by the necessity of seeking provision for his numerous followers,” the Pulpit counting the six hundred men and the widening circuit needed to feed them. ⚙ The narrator supplies no causal particle at all; he simply sets a grave and a departure side by side. What the placement does accomplish is structural: the man who anointed both kings is buried, and the next thing that happens to David is a quarrel with a fool named Nabal over food — the first test he faces with no prophet left to consult.

Read under Sola Scriptura — this tool’s own fallible reading (⚙)

⚙ Offered as a fallible reading, to be tested against the text: this verse is the hinge on which 1 Samuel stops being about Samuel. Everything the book has built — the boy who heard a voice in the dark, the judge who gathered Israel at Mizpah, the prophet who anointed a king and then tore the kingdom out of his hands — is buried in a garden at Ramah in eleven Hebrew words, and the very next sentence is about a man moving south to find grass. Scripture does not eulogize him. It gives him the two things its judgment oracles most often withhold: he is wailed over (çâphad) and he is buried (qâbar), by everyone. Then it moves on. The line that follows is not a verse and carries no authority beyond this commentary: Israel could bury the man who anointed the king, but it could not bury the anointing. Samuel's office does not pass to a successor in this chapter — it passes, within a few verses, to a woman with no title at all, Abigail, who speaks to David about a sure house and the LORD's battles more prophetically than anyone else in the book will. ⚙ That is a reading, not a fact; the text does not call Abigail a prophet. But if it is right, the point of burying Samuel here is that the word of the LORD was never housed in Samuel, and the grave at Ramah proves it by failing to contain anything that mattered.

Israel could bury the man who anointed the king, but it could not bury the anointing.

⚙Canonical Threads — out to the whole of Scripturecross-refs · verify+

AI-generated connections. Each carries a verification badge with a recorded basis; contested links are flagged.

The wilderness that keeps receiving the excluded verbal / quotation — confirmed

פָּארָֽן (Pâʼrân, H6290) is a rare name — the Verifier finds it in ten verses of the Hebrew Bible. It is where Hagar's son settles when he is sent away (Genesis 21:21); it is where Israel camps and from which the twelve spies are sent, only to refuse the land (Numbers 10:12; 13:3, 26); it is the vantage from which Moses begins his last words (Deuteronomy 1:1). Cambridge gathers precisely this list. ⚙ David, already anointed and already unable to live in the country he is anointed over, goes down to the same desert — the standing address in Scripture for the one who belongs to the promise but cannot yet live inside it.

Genesis 21:21 · Numbers 10:12 · Numbers 13:26 · Deuteronomy 1:1

basis: Verifier: shared Hebrew lexeme H6290 Pâʼrân (in 10 vv — rare), with H4057 midbâr (in 257 vv) in Numbers 10:12, 13:26 and Deuteronomy 1:1. A genuine lexical link through a rare proper name; no verse here quotes another, and the motif reading above is synthesis.

Lamented and buried — the two things judgment takes away structural / thematic — confirmed

The pair וַיִּסְפְּדוּ־ (çâphad, H5594) and וַיִּקְבְּרֻ֥הוּ (qâbar, H6912) is the same pair the prophets negate to describe a curse: “they shall not be lamented, neither shall they be buried” (Jeremiah 16:4, 6; 25:33), and it is by receiving exactly one of them — mourning and a grave — that Jeroboam's one decent son is marked out from his house (1 Kings 14:13, 18). ⚙ Samuel receives both, from the whole nation. The narrator passes no verdict on him in words; he passes it in verbs.

Jeremiah 16:4 · Jeremiah 16:6 · Jeremiah 25:33 · 1 Kings 14:13

basis: Verifier: shared Hebrew lexemes H5594 çâphad (in 29 vv) and H6912 qâbar (in 122 vv) in all four verses. A real verbal overlap inside a shared formula, but no verse cites another — tiered structural rather than verbal for that reason.

Gathered to Samuel at Ramah, twice structural / thematic — confirmed

Israel's elders וַיִּתְקַבְּצוּ gathered themselves to Samuel at Ramah once before, in 1 Samuel 8:4, to demand a king like the nations; the Verifier confirms the shared root qâbats (H6908) with Shᵉmûwʼêl and Râmâh in both verses. ⚙ The monarchy therefore opens and Samuel's life closes with the same verb, the same man and the same address. What Israel gathered at Ramah to ask for, it gathers at Ramah to bury the asking-price of.

1 Samuel 8:4

basis: Verifier: shared Hebrew lexemes H6908 qâbats (in 121 vv), H8050 Shᵉmûwʼêl (in 120 vv), H7414 Râmâh (in 34 vv). Common lexemes individually; the link is the co-occurrence of all three, so it is tiered structural, not verbal.

The notice the narrator repeats before Endor verbal / quotation — confirmed

1 Samuel 28:3 restates this verse almost clause for clause — Samuel dead, all Israel having lamented (çâphad) him, buried in Ramah his city — immediately before Saul goes to a medium to call him back. The Verifier confirms the shared lexemes. ⚙ The repetition is deliberate narrative work: the reader is told a second time that this man is buried, so that what rises at Endor is met by a reader who already knows where the body is.

1 Samuel 28:3

basis: Verifier: shared Hebrew lexemes H8050 Shᵉmûwʼêl (in 120 vv), H5594 çâphad (in 29 vv — relatively rare), H7414 Râmâh (in 34 vv). Internal self-repetition by the same narrator, not a citation of another book.

God shone from Mount Paran typological

Two poems put the same rare name in God's mouth-place rather than man's: “the LORD came from Sinai... he shined forth from mount Paran” (Deuteronomy 33:2), and “the Holy One from mount Paran” (Habakkuk 3:3). ⚙ Read figurally, the desert David descends into on the day of Samuel's funeral is the desert Israel's poets name as the direction God comes from — the place of exile and the place of theophany given one name. This is our own reading and we do not find it in the commentators on this verse; the lexical link is real, the figure is ours.

Deuteronomy 33:2 · Habakkuk 3:3

basis: Verifier: shared Hebrew lexeme H6290 Pâʼrân (in 10 vv) only. The verbal tie is to a place-name; the reading that joins David's descent to the theophany poems is novel synthesis, offered to be tested.

⚙Christ in the Unittypology · verify+

AI-generated reading; weigh it against the text.

The prophet who dies, and the prophetic line that does not ancient/widely-held

The Pulpit Commentary reads Samuel as the head of a succession that runs, through the schools he founded, “until the last prophet, Jesus of Nazareth, with supreme and Divine power reenacted it as the religion of the whole world,” and cites Acts 3:24 — where Peter says all the prophets from Samuel onward spoke of these days. That is apostolic reading, not ours: Samuel is the first name in Peter's list of witnesses to Christ. ⚙ The point this verse adds is negative and structural. Samuel dies, and the office survives him; Hebrews 7:23 makes the same observation about the priests — they were many “because they were prevented by death from continuing.” Every office in Israel is held by men who get buried. The line only ends when it reaches one who does not stay buried.

Acts 3:24 · Deuteronomy 18:15 · Hebrews 7:23-25

A grave in a garden ancient/widely-held

Barnes, glossing בְּבֵית֖וֹ as “probably in the court or garden attached to his dwelling-house,” sends the reader to three places: 2 Chronicles 33:20, 2 Kings 21:18 — and John 19:41, the garden where a new tomb stood in which no man had yet been laid. ⚙ The comparison is Barnes's; the conclusion we draw from it is ours. Samuel's garden grave is still pointed out, contested, relocated, argued over by travellers — Gill and Benson both record the rival traditions. The garden grave in John is remembered for the opposite reason: not because the body stayed, but because it did not. Peter makes exactly that contrast at Pentecost about David's own tomb, which “is with us to this day” (Acts 2:29-31).

John 19:41 · Acts 2:29-31 · 2 Kings 21:18

The anointed man goes down into the wilderness novel

⚙ A figural reading, offered as novel and testable: the verse's last motion is an anointed man, with no prophet left alive to counsel him, going down (yârad, H3381) into the midbâr. In the Gospels the same sequence is compressed into three verses — the anointing at the Jordan, the prophet's voice falling silent, and the Spirit driving the Anointed into the wilderness to be tested (Mark 1:9-13), where the first temptation is about bread, as David's first trial in the desert immediately becomes a quarrel over food. We do not find this parallel in the commentators on this verse, and the Hebrew and Greek share no lexeme; it is a reading of shape, not of words.

Mark 1:9-13 · 1 Samuel 25:4-11

Apparatus & Provenance

The biblical text is the Berean Standard Bible (BSB), public domain (CC0). Hebrew/Greek text, transliteration, morphology and Strong’s are transcribed from the Berean interlinear (CC0) + Strong’s lexicons (PD); the literal renderings, divergence notes, word notes and all synthesis are this tool’s own work (⚙) — fallible; verify them.

Named voices, quoted verbatim from public-domain works:

Text. The Hebrew ends פָּארָֽן׃ס — the closing samekh is the Masoretic section marker, not a word. Our literal line restores Hebrew word order (verb before subject: way·yā·māṯ šə·mū·’êl); the interlinear in the brief lists the words in English-gloss order, so note index 0 is Samuel and index 1 is the verb.

Variant. The Septuagint reads Maon for Paran. Barnes calls it “the far more probable reading” because verse 2 places the scene next to Maon; Cambridge answers that “the change is unnecessary, if we suppose the term Paran to be used with some latitude,” and the Pulpit agrees, taking Paran as the whole southern waste. We keep the Masoretic Paran and record the dispute rather than settling it. Every thread built on H6290 above depends on that reading; if the LXX is right, those threads fall.

Chronology. How long Samuel outlived this point is unsettled in the sources themselves: Ellicott places the death near the En-gedi meeting, Josephus (via the Pulpit) gives eighteen years contemporaneous with Saul's kingdom, and Gill lays out four rabbinic estimates that disagree with each other by two years. None of this is in the text; it is inference, and we report it as such.

Later traditions. Benson's account of the bones removed to Constantinople by Arcadius in A.D. 401, Gill's citation of Benjamin of Tudela on the Crusaders finding the grave at Ramlah, Ellicott on the modern cave-tomb, and Cambridge on the Muslim tradition at Neby Samwil are all reported here as those commentators report them. They are late, mutually inconsistent, and carry no weight for the meaning of the verse.

Uncertain. The text gives no reason for David's departure and no time interval between the funeral and it; the commentators supply causes (grief, safety, supply) that the Hebrew does not. We have flagged that in the voices rather than choosing.

✦ = human, public-domain source, quoted and named. ⚙ = machine synthesis, to be verified. Flagged cross-references are left visible on purpose — the verifier working in the open. “Search the Scriptures daily, whether those things were so.” (Acts 17:11)