Saul ha.d done much ; but in his last years he brought all to ruin, and at his death he left his country in abject thraldom, e.nd with all its national liberties tra.mplcd underfoot. In his foll Saul involved in equal ruin his son Jonathan, one of the most generous and beautiful chu,raoters that ever the world saw. And his death nt Gilboa wo.s but the ending of a path wrapped in deepening shadow and leading inevitably to misery and diso.eter. In I Sam. xiv. we see Saul in almost o.e bad a light as when he murdered Ahimelech and his brethren. The youthful Jonathan and his armour-bearer had wronght one of those feafa of desperate valour which are not uncommon in t!ie history of the Israelites. And their bravery had stricken the raw levies of the Philistines with panic, increased by the action of a. body of Hebrews drawn from the districts conquered by the Philistines, and forced to serve in their army. They were posted in the rear to guard the camp, and their defection placed revengeful enemies in the very pathway of flight. Saul meanwhile concludes from the absence of Jone.than and his armour-bearer that it was some brave exploit of theirs which was causing this confusion in the Philistine host; but when the priest asks counsel of God, with just the same absence of self-control as had made him .refuse to wait for Samuel at Gilgal, Saul bids him withdraw his hand from the ephod and desist. He needs no counsel from above. He will act for himself, and with extraordinary rashness and absence of good sense he commands the people under a solemn curse to abstain from food until all is over. They must fight the battle and pursue fasting. Had he given himself time for reflection, he would have felt that the slight loss of time spent in taking refreshment would be more than compensated by increased vigour of body and power of endurance. The pursuit, too, had come suddenly, and his men were not prepared; and to have partaken of the provisions cn.st aside by the runaways wonld have kept up their strength. They must at last stop from sheer exhaustion, and then the whole army would be in a state of ravenous hunger. Worst of all, he was laying a trap for those who had gained the victory. Saul's body-guard would hear his orders, and obey with grumbling. Jonathan and all who joined in the pursuit from a distance, rushing from caves and from the hills of Ephraim, would be in danger unwittingly of bringing upon them- selves a. curse. The results were most disastrous. When they reached Aijalon the people were so faint with hun!?'Pr that they began slaying sheep and o:xen, and eating them without observing the command of the Law, that they must carefully free the flesh from the blood. And Saul, aghast at this violation of a solemn ceremonial ordinance, bids his body-guard disperse themselves among the people, and compel them to bring their oxen to a large stone, and there slay them in the manner prescribed. There was thus long delay 1:iefore the wants of the troops could be supplied, and when at last they had taken a hurried meal, and Saul was eager to resume the pursuit, they gave him so sulky an answer as to be virtually a refusal. And now the priest, iv INTRODUCTION TO
mediating between king and people, purposes to e.sk counsel of God, and Se,ul consents. But no answer comes. Saul had refused God's counsel in the morning, &nd now the 01'8,0le is silent. But. Sanl sees no fault in himeelf. Fault he assumee there is, and he will find it out by dre,"1i.ng lots. He bids the people ete.nd on one eide, and himself e.nd Jonatbe,n on the other; e,nd again, with a sulky a.newer, the people aseent. Age.in and a.gain the lot fa.lie, till Jonathan ie left, and Saul, nothing doubting that he is guilty, asks for confession; wherenpon Jonathan tells him how, unwitting of his command, he had tasted almost-by cbe.nce a little honey. Never was man more innocent than Jonathan, and God by him that de,y bad wrought a great deliverance for Ierael. Yet his guilty father, with dark fanaticism, condemns him to death. The people indeed rescue him, but all his lege.l rights were gone. In the eye of the Law he was a dead man, and henceforward Jonathan ever acts as if there was a ba.r between him and the kingdom. He never once speaks as if it were possible for him to inherit Saul's throne, or as if he were ceding to Davia anything to which he had a cle.im. His father's curse, his father's con- demnation, still rested upon him. The people had saved him by force, but the legal act remained, and the fa.ther bad destroyed the son. From first to last Saul was the destroyer of himself, his family, and his kingdom. Samuel foretold his fall, but the warning was given personally to the king to move him to repentance. Repentance would have saved Lim, and Samuel a.llowed him ample time ; for, during four or five years, he did absolutely nothing to help on his words to their accomplishme11.t. Only s:fter this long delay, spent by Samuel in mourning (1 Sam. xv. 35), at God's express command he arose and anointed David; but neither of them, either openly or by secret conspiracy, took any steps to compass Saul's min. .All that David did he was driven to do. To the last he was loyal to his king. And when in an evil hour he deserted his country, and entered the service of the Philistine king of Gath, it was almost a renuncia- tion of his anointing. He seems himself to have given up all idea of ever becoming king, and, in a fit of desperation, to have thought only of saving his life. To his counb-ymen this open alliance with their enemies put him entirely in the wrong, and sorely he was punished for it by a seven years' delay. Yet slowly both predictions were moving on to their fulfilment, and if the purpose was Divine, the human agency was that of the self-willed Saul. There is thus a tragic interest in the First Book of Samuel. Unre- pentant, stubborn, wilful even in his deepest depression, the king struggles against his fate, but each effort only entangles him in fresh difficulties, and burdens his conscience with darker crimes. The one pathway of safety which David tried, and not in vain, in his season of terrible sin, Saul will not try. He sees his doom; is driven by it to melancholy, is unhinged in mind; but the prophet's words, "rebellion," "stubbornness," indicate the unyie1diog elements of his nature, and stubbornly he died in the lost battle- THE SECOND BOOK OF SAMUEL. V