Jonathan's faith is confident about God and modest about himself. It may be — he does not claim a promise he has not been given; there is no restraint to the LORD — he is sure of what God can do. That combination, humility about outcomes and certainty about the LORD, is the shape of true faith; presumption reverses it. These uncircumcised is not a slur on race but on covenant: the Philistines stand outside the people of the promise and are defying its God.

By many or by few — the prince has learned what the Judges taught and what his father is forgetting: Gideon's three hundred, Shamgar's ox goad, Samson's jawbone. Two men with one sword between them are few enough that no one will credit them. The armourbearer's reply (v. 7), I am with thee according to thy heart, is one of Scripture's finest pictures of loyal friendship.

Jonathan had asked for a sign (vv. 9-10) and received it: the invitation Come up to us — spoken in mockery — is taken as the LORD's word of release. Gideon had done something similar with the fleece and with the dream in the Midianite camp (Judges 7:13-15). The text neither commands this method nor condemns it; it records a man who sought God's leading and then acted on it without delay.

The LORD hath delivered them — spoken before a blow has been struck, by a man climbing a cliff upon his hands and upon his feet (v. 13). Faith speaks the victory in the past tense and then goes to work. The first slaughter is about twenty men in half an acre (v. 14); the rest is done by a very great trembling and an earthquake (v. 15) that the narrator leaves plainly to God.

Saul has just discovered that his son is missing (v. 17) and the enemy camp is in uproar. He reaches for a sacred object. The common Hebrew text reads the ark; the ancient Greek version reads the ephod, and many modern translations follow it, since Ahiah is wearing an ephod (v. 3), the ark was at Kirjathjearim (7:1-2), and withdraw thine hand (v. 19) fits a priest handling the ephod's lots. The KJV renders the Hebrew. The reader may hold the question open; the behaviour is the same on either reading.

What the behaviour shows is a king who begins to enquire of God and breaks off when the noise grows (v. 19) — withdraw thine hand. The enquiry was a formality that the battle interrupted. Contrast Jonathan, who waited on a sign before he moved. The chapter is built on this contrast: the son who seeks God and acts, the father who gestures toward God and reacts.

The LORD has just saved Israel that day (v. 23), and the next verse begins with Israel distressed — not by the Philistines but by their own king. Saul's oath has a revealing motive: that I may be avenged on mine enemies. The battle was the LORD's salvation; Saul calls it his vengeance. A fast imposed on a pursuing army is religion misapplied — a show of zeal that costs the people, not the king.

Oaths were taken with great seriousness in Israel (Numbers 30:2), which is why the people fear this one (v. 26). But Scripture also shows what rash vows do: Jephthah's cost him his daughter (Judges 11), and Saul's will nearly cost him his son. The Law never asked for this fast. Zeal that goes beyond the word of God usually lands on someone else's back.

Jonathan, who had not heard the oath (v. 27), tastes honey from the end of his rod and his eyes were enlightened — the plain physical brightening of a starving man fed. His judgment of the oath is blunt: my father hath troubled the land. The word recalls Achan, who troubled Israel (Joshua 7:25); Jonathan is saying that the king, not the son, is the one bringing trouble on the people today.

Verse 30 adds the military cost: a fed army would have made a much greater slaughter. Then verse 32 shows the moral cost: the famished people fall on the spoil and eat with the blood, breaking a law older than Sinai (Genesis 9:4; Leviticus 17:10-12). Saul's extra rule produced a real sin. He answers it with a great stone and an altar (vv. 33-35) — his first — which is right, but it was his own oath that drove the people to it.

God has refused to answer Saul's enquiry (v. 37), and Saul assumes the silence means a hidden sin — in someone else. The Hebrew of this verse is short; the ancient Greek version is considerably longer, spelling out a prayer that mentions Urim and Thummim, the sacred lots of the priest's breastplate. Many think the longer text preserves words that fell out of the Hebrew by a copyist's eye skipping; the KJV follows the Hebrew. Either way the scene is the casting of the priestly lot.

The people say Do what seemeth good unto thee (v. 40) — the same words they spoke before the night attack (v. 36) — and the lot falls on the king's own house. The man who swore to be avenged on his enemies has used God's oracle to hunt down the son whose faith won the day. The silence of God in verse 37 is never explained by the text; readers have taken it either as rebuke of the oath or as the lead-up to exposing it.

Saul swears a second oath — God do so and more also: for thou shalt surely die (v. 44) — and the people answer him with an oath of their own: as the LORD liveth. Oath meets oath, and the people's is the better one, because theirs honours what the LORD had done: he hath wrought with God this day. The army that had been too frightened to fight (13:6) finds its voice to save the man who fought for them.

Jonathan does not plead; he states the facts — I did but taste a little honey... and, lo, I must die (v. 43) — and submits. This is the same prince who will later give David his robe and his claim (18:4; 23:17); the readiness to lose everything for what is right is in him already. So the people rescued Jonathan — the text does not say whether Saul released the oath, and the king goes home with a vow he could neither keep nor honourably break.

The chapter closes with a summary of Saul's reign — wars on every side (v. 47), a victory over Amalek that anticipates chapter 15 (v. 48), and the names of his house: Jonathan, Ishui and Melchishua, Merab and Michal, Ahinoam, Abner (vv. 49-51). The list of sons here has three names; 1 Chronicles 8:33 gives four, including Eshbaal (Ishbosheth). Whether Ishui is another name for one of them, or the lists simply differ, is an open question; the text does not reconcile them for us.

He took him unto him — the verb of 8:11-17 again. The king takes the strong and the valiant for his own service, exactly as Samuel said he would. The next strong man Saul sees will be a shepherd from Bethlehem with a sling (16:21-22; 18:2), and the taking will become a holding-on that turns to hunting. Sore war... all the days of Saul — the Philistines were never finished in his lifetime; that work waits for the man after God's own heart.