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Day 111: Saul Tries to Kill David
Agape Bible Study
1 Samuel 18 - 19
Chapter 18: David joins Saul's Army
1 Samuel 18:1-5 ~ David and Jonathan
Jonathan is moved by David's courage and his love for God. This is the beginning of an enduring friendship. Since David cannot afford to purchase arms and perhaps because Jonathan's father has failed to keep the promise he made concerning the reward for killing Goliath, Jonathan takes it upon himself to adequately dress David for battle (Goliath's equipment would have been too large for David). He not only gives David his weapons but even gives David his princely cloak. Unknowingly Jonathan performs a significant act that points to David who is now God's anointed nagid, the prince elect/crown prince (see nagid in reference to David in 1 Sam 25:30; 2 Sam 5:2; 6:21; 7:8). That Saul will not allow David to leave and conscripts him into the army is evidence that David is now twenty years old, the age a young Israelite can become a warrior. His success as a warrior soon earns David his own command.
1 Samuel 18:6-16 ~ Saul's Jealousy of David
Saul's fondness for David is now transforming into jealousy over David's popularity with the soldiers and with the people. Saul is also beginning to suspect that David is the man God has chosen to replace him as Israel's king.
Saul's jealousy escalates into hatred, and the day after David's great victory Saul attempts to kill him (verses 10-11). After the attempt to kill David, Saul removes David from court. Saul promotes David, giving him the command of a thousand soldiers, and again David is successful in all his missions. The people love David, but Saul hates and fears him because while God's Spirit has left him it is obvious that God's Spirit is with David.
1 Samuel 18:17-25 ~ Saul Offers David his Daughter as a Wife
Question: What plan does Saul devise to kill David?
Answer: He offers his eldest daughter as a wife on the condition that David continuously engages the Philistine enemy.
Question: What is David's reply?
Answer: He humbly protests that he is not worthy to be the king's son-in-law because of his humble birth and declines the offer.
David is also probably hesitant because a royal bride was supposed to be David's reward for killing Goliath (17:25) and Saul did not fulfill that promise.
Question: What is the result of this new offer of a royal bride?
Answer: Saul continues to make the offer but then he gives Merab in marriage to another man.
1 Samuel 18:26-30 ~ David's Marriage
David agrees to the bride price and before the appointed time elapsed to submit the payment, David and his men more than provided the necessary price in Philistine foreskins by doubling the count and bringing back two hundred foreskins. Saul was caught in his own trap and had to approve of David's marriage to princess Michal.
Now David is an even greater threat to Saul because he is a part of the royal family. David's popularity with the people continues to grow along with David's successes and Saul's jealousy and hatred for David.
Saul and David (Rembrandt)
Chapter 19
1 Samuel 19:1-7 ~ Jonathan Intercedes for David
Saul goes from being afraid of David (18:12-14) to hating him. Saul has probably come to the conclusion that David is the man Samuel spoke of as the one God has chosen instead of Saul to be king of Israel (15:28). Saul has already attempted to kill David with a spear (18:11) and then attempted to arrange for David to be killed on the battlefield (18:17-25), and now Saul admits to his courtiers that he has every intention of killing David. Saul's public announcement in 19:1 is not only a significant split between Saul and David but now Jonathan is placed in the middle between his father and his friend.
It is interesting that Jonathan refers to Saul as "my father" three times in verses 2-3. However, when he speaks to Saul he does not speak as son to father but as subject to king in verse 4.
Question: What is the result of Jonathan's intervention?
Answer: Saul listens to Jonathan and swears by Yahweh's name that he will not kill David.
1 Samuel 19:8-10 ~ Saul's Second Attempt on David's Life
After his talk with Saul, Jonathan feels the issue is settled because his father has listened to reason and has taken a solemn oath in God's divine name not to harm David. However, Jonathan has failed to take into consideration that a mentally ill person is not ultimately moved by reason but by emotion. Saul is temporarily moved by the emotion of Jonathan's argument, but his expressed emotional resolve not to harm David will not last. For a second time, Saul attempts to kill David and again David evades the attack and escapes.
David will have two occasions where he could kill Saul but he will resist and will continue to place his life and his destiny in God's hands. David will not place himself on the throne of Israel; he will leave the when and where of that event in God's hands.
Michal helps David Escape (Gustave Doré)
1 Samuel 19:11-17 ~ David's Escape from Saul's Fortress at Gibeah
Saul's daughter Michal is the second member of the royal family to protect David. Michal, like her brother Jonathan, is also confronted with the choice between loyalty to her father and loyalty to her husband David. She risks her life to help David escape by letting him climb down from the upper window of their house to avoid the king's agents who were watching to prevent David from leaving and with instruction to capture and kill him.
Question: This is one of three times when God's agents are helped to escape from an enemy by climbing down from a height. Can you name all three occasions?
Answer:
- The Israelite spies were saved by Rahab of Jericho who let them climb down from the window of her house in the city wall (Josh 2:15).
- Michal saved David from Saul in allowing him to escape from the upper window of their house.
- Saul/Paul will escape from his enemies in Damascus by being lowered down from the city wall in a basket (Acts 9:23-25).
In order to give David more time to escape, Michal took a household idol and a patch of goat's hair to make it appear that David was sleeping in bed. It seems that Saul's household did not strictly observe the first of the Ten Commandments that prohibited the possession and worship of idols. The Hebrew term teraphim in verse 13 usually refers to small household idols that were symbols of good luck, but this idol was obviously large enough to make someone believe a person was in the bed.(1)
Question: When confronted by her father, what excuse did Michal give for helping David escape? What was her real reason?
Answer: When confronted by Saul, Michal says that self-preservation prompted her to help her husband escape, but the real reason was that she, like Jonathan, acted out of love for David.
1 Samuel 19:18-24 ~ Events at Ramah
David went north to find Samuel at Ramah instead of south to his family in Bethlehem. Ramah was only about an hour walk from Gibeah while Bethlehem was ten miles away. Samuel is living at Ramah with a community of prophets (like Elijah, Elisha and possibly Isaiah in 2 Kng 2:7; 4:38-44; 9:1; Is 8:16). Notice the threefold repetition in the story of the three groups of agents who went to Ramah to arrest David (verses 20 and 21), and the repetition of the forms of the word "to prophesy" that appears six times in verses 20 twice, 21 twice, 23 and 24 in the Hebrew text.
Saul sent his agents after David but when they arrived at Ramah, God intervened and sent them into a frenzy of prophesizing. The same thing happens to a second and third group of agents sent to capture David and finally to Saul himself. When Saul arrives, he stops at the storage well outside the city. It is probably a communal cistern for collecting rain water and it may have been where the young women were going who Saul met coming out of the gate at Ramah when he first went looking for Samuel (9:11). As Saul makes his way into Ramah to find David and Samuel, God intervenes and God's Spirit sends Saul into a frenzy of prophesizing like his three groups of agents.
In verse 24 the saying "Is Saul one of the prophets too?" recalls the events in 10:10-12 when Saul was given this same experience as a "sign" that God had chosen him to be king and the same saying 10:12. In the earlier event the experience is positive, but here the reference that comes after Saul's rejection is negative which is evident from Saul's disgraceful behavior as he tears off his clothes and lies naked on the ground and out of control before the community for the rest of the day and all night.
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A Daily Defense
Day 111 The Eucharistic Sacrifice
CHALLENGE: “Catholicism is wrong to say the Eucharist involves a sacrifice. Jesus was sacrificed ‘once for all’ (Rom. 6:10; Heb. 7:27, 9:12, 26, 10:10; 1 Pet. 3:18).”
DEFENSE: Jesus died only once, but this does not exhaust his sacrificial ministry.
Hebrews acknowledges Christ’s once-for-all death on earth as well as his ongoing sacrificial ministry in heaven, saying the heavenly things must be purified “with better sacrifices” (plural) than those offered in the earthly temple.
Protestant historian J.N.D. Kelly writes that in the early Church the Eucharist was regarded as a sacrifice: Malachi’s prediction (1:10–11) that the Lord would reject Jewish sacrifices and instead would have “a pure offering” made to him by the Gentiles in every place was seized upon by Christians as a prophecy of the Eucharist.
The Didache indeed actually applies the term thusia, or sacrifice, to the Eucharist. . . . It was natural for early Christians to think of the Eucharist as a sacrifice. The fulfillment of prophecy demanded a solemn Christian offering, and the rite itself was wrapped in the sacrificial atmosphere with which our Lord invested the Last Supper.
The words of institution, “Do this” (touto poieite), must have been charged with sacrificial overtones for second-century ears; Justin at any rate understood them to mean, “Offer this.” . . . The bread and wine, moreover, are offered “for a memorial (eis anamnēsin) of the passion,” a phrase which in view of his identification of them with the Lord’s body and blood implies much more than an act of purely spiritual recollection (Early Christian Doctrines, 196–197).
The sacrifice of the cross was unique because it was offered “in a bloody manner” (i.e., by Christ dying), but it is perpetuated in the Eucharist, in which he does not die. The eucharistic sacrifice is the same as the sacrifice of the cross in that the offering (Christ’s body and blood) and the primary sacrificing priest (Christ) are the same (CCC 1367).
Today, the Eucharist is “the body and blood of Christ enthroned gloriously in heaven” (Paul VI, Credo of the People of God), where Jesus offers himself to the Father as “a living sacrifice”—as Christians are called to do (Rom. 12:1).
Jimmy Akin, A Daily Defense: 365 Days (Plus One) to Becoming a Better Apologist
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