The command is anchored in a memory. Amalek attacked Israel at Rephidim just out of Egypt (Exodus 17:8-16), and Deuteronomy 25:17-19 adds the detail that they cut off the feeble and faint and weary at the rear of the column, and he feared not God. The LORD then swore a war from generation to generation and told Israel to blot out the remembrance of Amalek when they had rest in the land. Saul is being handed a sentence pronounced long before his birth. The chapter asks the reader to hold the justice of that sentence and the horror of its execution together, as the text itself does.

It is not a war of conquest or of profit; verse 3 forbids profit entirely. Amalek was not a people in Israel's path to the promised land but a raider that had chosen to prey on refugees and had continued to harry Israel through the judges' period (Judges 3:13; 6:3). The text presents the judgment as the LORD's, delayed across centuries, and delivered through a king who will himself be judged for how he carries it out.

This is a hard verse, and an honest study should not soften it. Utterly destroy renders the Hebrew term for the ban (herem) — devoting a thing wholly to God so that none of it may be taken as spoil, applied in Deuteronomy 20:16-18 and Joshua 6 to peoples under judgment. Here it reaches infant and suckling. Christian readers have responded in several ways: some hold that God, who gives and takes all life, may judge a whole people in time as He judges each in eternity; some read the language of total destruction as the conventional idiom of ancient warfare, noting that Amalekites reappear in 27:8, 30:1 and 2 Samuel 1:8. None of these removes the difficulty, and the text does not try to.

What the text does is bind the command to two things: the LORD's own stated memory and justice (v. 2), and a ban on gain — spare them not of the animals too, so that no one could say Israel went to Amalek for sheep. The sin Saul commits is precisely at that point. He finds the people easy to destroy and the livestock hard to give up (v. 9). Whatever one makes of the command, the chapter's verdict on Saul is not that he was too merciful but that he kept what was good for himself and called it worship.

The narrator's own summary, before Saul gets to tell his version. Spared — the thing the command forbade in so many words (spare them not). What is spared is the king and all that was good; what is destroyed is the vile and refuse. The rule of the ban was that the best belonged to God; Saul inverted it and gave God the rubbish. Many take the sparing of Agag as the trophy a king like all the nations would want to parade; the text does not say why, only that it was done.

Saul and the people — the narrator shares the responsibility, but Saul will try to shift all of it (the people spared the best, v. 15; the people took of the spoil, v. 21). A commander who has just mustered two hundred thousand men (v. 4) does not lack authority over the flock. The warning given before Israel had a king — that a king will take — has here its strange mirror image: a king who takes what God had reserved.

It repenteth me — the LORD speaks in the language of human regret, as He did before the Flood (Genesis 6:6). Eighteen verses later Samuel will say that the Strength of Israel will not lie nor repent: for he is not a man, that he should repent (v. 29); and the chapter closes, the LORD repented that he had made Saul king (v. 35). The tension is the text's own and should not be smoothed away. The common Christian reading is that God does not change His purpose or His word, and that His repenting is the way Scripture describes His real response, in time, to a change in man — He genuinely sorrows and acts, without ever having been mistaken.

He is turned back from following me — the charge is not a single lapse but a direction. The old prophet's response is not satisfaction at being proved right about kings but grief: he cried unto the LORD all night. Samuel had warned Israel against this king and anointed him with his own hands; now he spends a night pleading for him. Intercession that ceases not (12:23) is at its hardest when the one prayed for is the one who failed.

Saul's excuse was sacrifice: the sheep were kept to sacrifice unto the LORD thy God (vv. 15, 21 — note thy God, not my). Samuel's reply is one of the great sentences of the Old Testament, taken up by the prophets (Isaiah 1:11-17; Hosea 6:6; Micah 6:6-8) and by Jesus (Matthew 9:13). Sacrifice was commanded by God; it is not despised here. What is denied is that offerings can substitute for the obedience they were meant to express. A ram burnt in disobedience is not worship but a bribe.

To hearken — the verb that has governed the book since 3:10, Speak; for thy servant heareth. Samuel heard; Saul did not. The chapter has been full of religious words from the king — blessed be thou of the LORD, I have performed, to sacrifice — and none of them is listening. Verse 23 names the thing beneath: rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry — to set one's own will against God's word is, in effect, to consult another god.

The sentence that was pronounced at Gilgal in 13:14 is here made final and given its ground: because thou hast rejected the word of the LORD. The verb is the one used of Israel in 8:7 — they have rejected me. The people rejected the LORD for a king; the king has rejected the LORD's word; the LORD now rejects the king. Saul will keep the throne for years, but from this chapter the narrative treats him as a man whose reign is over, and chapter 16 opens with the oil going to another.

Witchcraft... idolatry — Saul will end his life consulting a witch at Endor (28:7), which many readers see as the sad outworking of this very verse. Stubbornness, left to itself, goes looking for another oracle. The Law had placed divination and idolatry among the gravest offences; Samuel says that the self-will which overrides God's plain word belongs in the same family.

The Strength of Israel — a title found only here in the KJV; the Hebrew word is variously rendered Glory, Eminence or Enduring One of Israel. Samuel uses it to say that the sentence just passed will not be reversed by tears or by clutching at a mantle. Balaam had said the same: God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent (Numbers 23:19). The decree of verse 28 — the kingdom given to a neighbour better than thou — stands.

Set this beside verses 11 and 35, where the LORD repented that He made Saul king. The same chapter says both, and the reader should let both stand. The usual resolution is that verse 29 concerns God's word and purpose, which do not shift, while verses 11 and 35 describe His grief and His change of dealing toward a man who changed. God is not fickle, and He is not stone. That He can be sorry over Saul and still unmovable about the verdict is the picture Scripture gives, and it is a truer picture than either half alone.

Agag comes delicately — cheerfully, or in chains, depending on how the rare word is read — and says the bitterness of death is past (v. 32); he supposes that a king who has spared him for days means to keep him. Samuel's sentence treats him as a judged man, not a prisoner of war: as thy sword hath made women childless. The text presents Agag as a killer receiving what he dealt, under a sentence that long predated Saul's war.

That the old prophet does the deed himself, before the LORD in Gilgal, is deliberately shocking. Gilgal was where the kingdom was renewed with rejoicing (11:15) and where it was first forfeited (13:13); now it is where the ban Saul would not complete is completed by Samuel's own hand. The narrator does not tell us Samuel's feelings here; verse 35 tells us he mourned for Saul. A reader may be troubled by the scene; the text does not ask us to enjoy it, only to see that what God had commanded was not left undone.

The parting of prophet and king. Samuel came no more to see Saul — the official relationship is over; Saul will see Samuel once more, when he comes to Naioth (19:24), and once beyond the grave (28:15). Nevertheless Samuel mourned — the private love outlives the public break. The man who prayed all night (v. 11) goes on grieving, and in 16:1 the LORD will have to ask him how long wilt thou mourn for Saul?

The chapter ends on the note it began with: the LORD repented. The book is honest that God's first king was a sorrow to God. But the sentence that follows is fill thine horn with oil — the sorrow is not the end of the story. Saul had said, pleading for his honour, turn again with me, that I may worship the LORD thy God (v. 30) — thy God, to the last; the man never quite says my. That, more than Agag or the sheep, is what the chapter mourns.