CRITICAL AND EXPOSITORY NOTES—
1 Samuel 31:1. “In Mount Gilboa.” Most likely the actual battle took place on the plain, and the Israelites sought refuge on the mountain.
1 Samuel 31:3. “Sore wounded.” Hebrew scholars generally translate here sore afraid, or he was alarmed or trembled greatly.
1 Samuel 31:3. “He was sore afraid.” The armourbearer was responsible for the king’s life. Jewish traditions say that this man was Doeg.
1 Samuel 31:6. “All his men.” In 1 Chronicles 10:6 it is “all his house.” “Certainly Abner, who was no doubt in the battle, had not fallen, but that is not inconsistent with the statement, since he, as Saul’s general, belonged strictly speaking neither to the house nor to the men, by which term we must understand the soldiers who were near the king’s person, his body-guard, as it were.” (Erdmann.)
1 Samuel 31:7. “The men of Israel on the other side,” etc. “The plain is the lowland between Mount Gilboa and Little Hermon, the continuation of the plain of Jezreel, into which the battle passed.… The Jordan with its west bank terrain formed the border. Those who from the station of the narrator (which we must take with Kiel to be the battlefield) dwelt beyond, that is, opposite him on the mountain terrain beside the plain and in the Jordan flats” (Erdmann) were those who fled. “Came and dwelt.” Not immediately; but this district eventually fell into their hands.
MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.— 1 Samuel 31:1-7
THE DEFEAT AT GILBOA
I. The culminating calamity of many resulting from the answering of a self-willed prayer. The unanswered request of a child by his parent is often the greatest act of kindness that parent can bestow; unhappy, indeed, would that child be who had all he asked for, and no parent who has any regard for only the bodily life of his offspring ever thinks of granting all their requests. And with parents whose concern for their children extends to their intellectual and moral well-being it is often needful to deny more petitions than they grant. It is exactly so with men and God; if men had at all times received from Him all that their ignorance and wickedness desired the human race would before now have become extinct through its own sin and consequent misery. But as the father of the prodigal did not refuse the request of his wayward son, but let him taste the fruit of having what he demanded, so God sometimes answers the self-willed prayers both of individuals and of nations, that they may know from experience whether they or God know best. As the swine-herding in the far country was the outcome of the answer to “Give me the portion of goods that falleth to me,” so was this fatal day on Gilboa the outcome of the answer to “Nay, but we will have a king.” “I gave thee a king in mine anger, and took him away in my wrath.” (Hosea 13:11.) So must it always be with those who will have what God would rather not give.
II. A calamity involving both the innocent and the guilty. One man, at least, who fell at Gilboa was innocent of both the national and individual sin which brought the judgment. The king of Israel had forsaken God, and therefore the once brave man trembled and fled before those whom—with the consciousness of God on his side—he would have faced and defied, and so the heathen foe triumphed over God’s anointed. And whatever may have been the character of the others who fell, Jonathan’s fate was not the result of his personal transgression but of his father’s sin, and says to us in plain language that no sinner harms only himself, and that the good often in this world suffer because of the bad. All relationships of life have some influence upon our earthly destiny, but none is so potent for good or ill as that which the parent holds to his child. But if Jonathan is a sad illustration of this truth, he is also a cheering proof that if a son must suffer for his father’s character he need not walk in that father’s footsteps.
III. A calamity which failed to change the heart of the greatest sufferer in it. The last act of Saul is in keeping with the one in which he first openly departed from God. His disobedience in the early part of his reign proclaimed a man who would choose his own method of life rather than the Divine purpose concerning him, and even this last and crushing judgment failed to break his self-will, and he who would not leave the ordering of his life to God would neither let Him ordain the manner of his death. So also as the prominent thought in the matter of the Amalekites was not the sin against God but the disgrace before men, now it is not the retribution which awaited his spirit, but the dishonour which might come to his body. It is the same man who fears now nothing so much as the sword of the uncircumcised, as formerly dreaded most the loss of position among his subjects (1 Samuel 15:30).
OUTLINES AND SUGGESTIVE COMMENTS
1. God would hereby complete the vexation of Saul in his dying moments and the judgment that was to be executed upon his house. If the family must fall, Jonathan must fall with it.
2. He would hereby make David’s way to the crown more clear and open. For though Jonathan himself would have cheerfully resigned all his title and interest to him, yet it is very probable that many of the people would have made use of his name for the support of the house of Saul …
3. God would hereby show us that the difference between good and bad is to be made in the other world, not in this.—Henry.
1 Samuel 31:4. In this way did Saul shrink from adversity; he went forth glorying in his majesty, the anointed of the Lord, king over the chosen people of God; the battle turns against him, he is sore-wounded of the archers and … seeks in death a cure for the anguish of wounds and the shame of defeat.… What would the world now have been if it had always been said, “because the archers smite me sore, and the battle goes against me, I will die?” Alas! man has gained all his joy by his pains; misery, hunger, and nakedness have been his teachers, and goaded him on to the glories of civilised life; take from him his unyielding spirit, and if he had lived at all, he would have lived the most suffering creature of the forest.—Sydney Smith.
The evil spirit had said, the evening before, “To morrow thou shalt be with me;” and now Saul hasteth to make the devil no liar; rather than fail, he gives himself his own mittimus. O the woful extremities of a despairing soul, plunging him ever into a greater mischief, to avoid the less! He might have been a patient in another’s violence, and faultless; now, while he will needs act the Philistine’s part upon himself, he lived and died a murderer: the case is deadly, when the prisoner breaks the jail, and will not stay for his delivery; and though we may not pass sentence upon such a soul, yet upon the fact we may: the soul may possibly repent in the parting; the act is heinous, and such as, without repentance, kills the soul.—Bp. Hall.