The LORD interrupts a grief. Samuel's mourning was right (15:35), but there is a point where mourning over what God has set aside becomes a refusal to move with what God is doing: how long? The remedy is a task — fill thine horn with oil, and go. Saul was anointed from a vial (10:1); David will be anointed from a horn, a detail some have taken to hint at a more lasting anointing, though the text draws no such moral.

I have provided me a king — literally, I have seen for myself — the verb of Genesis 22:8, God will provide himself a lamb. The next king is not sought by Israel or proposed by Samuel; he is already seen by God, in a house in Bethlehem, among a farmer's sons. Ruth 4 had ended with Jesse's name in a genealogy; here the genealogy becomes a throne. Bethlehem enters the story of kingship quietly, as it will enter the story of the gospel.

Even Samuel is taken in by a tall man. Eliab is the firstborn and the height of his stature recalls Saul, higher than any of the people (9:2) — Israel's eyes had chosen one king that way, and the prophet is about to repeat the error. The verse corrects not the people this time but the prophet. God's choices are not readable from the outside, which is why the man after God's own heart (13:14) will be the one no one thought to fetch.

The LORD looketh on the heart does not mean that David was sinless — the rest of his story forbids that — but that God chooses on grounds that are His, not ours, and that He sees the inner man we cannot. I have refused him — the same verb used of Saul in 15:23 and 16:1. The rejecting and the choosing are both God's, and the chapter means us to feel that He does both with His eyes open.

Seven sons have passed (v. 10), and the one God has seen is the one his own father did not bring — not out of malice, but because the youngest was out with the sheep and no one thought a king would be found there. 17:12 says Jesse had eight sons; 1 Chronicles 2:13-15 names seven, with David as the seventh. Readers have taken this either as one son dying young or as the lists counting differently; the text does not say. What it stresses is the youngest — Hannah's song again, the LORD raising the low (2:8).

He keepeth the sheep — the first thing Scripture says about David, and the thing it never lets him forget: he chose David also his servant, and took him from the sheepfolds... to feed Jacob his people (Psalm 78:70-71). We will not sit down till he come — the feast waits for the shepherd. Samuel, who was taken in by Eliab's face, has now learned to wait for the LORD's man.

The name David appears here for the first time in the book — the narrator withholds it until the oil is poured. He is anointed in the midst of his brethren: the brothers who will despise him in the valley of Elah (17:28) are witnesses, though whether they understood what the anointing meant is left open; the text does not record that Samuel explained it. Saul's anointing was secret (9:27); David's is a household affair, and still no one in Israel knows.

From that day forward — set against the next verse, where the Spirit departed from Saul. The two movements are told in one breath: the Spirit who comes for office and task passes from the rejected king to the chosen one. David will not reign for years; the Spirit is the earnest of a kingdom he does not yet have. Samuel goes home to Ramah and, apart from a brief scene in chapter 19, leaves the stage.

A difficult verse that should be read as it stands. The text says plainly that the troubling spirit was from the LORD — three more times in the chapter it is from God (vv. 15, 16, 23). Readers have understood this in several ways: that God permits a hostile spirit to afflict a man who has rejected Him, as with Ahab (1 Kings 22:22) and as Satan was permitted against Job; or that the Hebrew word rendered evil can mean harmful or distressing and describes a God-sent torment of mind rather than a demon; or some combination. The narrator does not distinguish, and the honest course is not to pretend the verse says less than it does.

What is clear is the moral shape: the Spirit who equipped Saul for office (10:6, 10) has gone, and what fills the vacancy is dread, suspicion and rage — the Saul of the javelin (18:10-11) and of Nob (22:18). The judgment is not arbitrary; it is the inside of a man who has turned back from following the LORD (15:11). Nothing in the verse suggests Saul was beyond pity; the next verses show his own servants trying to help him, and the LORD's chosen harper being the help.

An unnamed servant gives David his first character reference: a musician, a mighty valiant man, and a man of war, wise in speech, good to look at, and the LORD is with him. The last clause is the one that matters and the one the narrator will repeat (18:12, 14, 28). Cunning in the KJV means skilful, not sly. Here is the lad from the sheepfold already known at court by reputation — the heart God looked on had begun to show.

Readers notice that this verse calls David a man of war and that in chapter 17 he is but a youth (17:33) whom Saul and Abner do not seem to know (17:55-58). The tension is real and old. Some suggest the servant speaks in praise beyond the facts, or that the lion-and-bear exploits (17:34-36) are what he means; some take chapters 16-17 as drawn from more than one account of how David came to Saul, placed side by side; some note that the oldest Greek manuscripts lack 17:55-58. The study of chapter 17 returns to this. Here the point is that God brings His anointed into the king's house by the ordinary door of a servant's word.

The man anointed to replace Saul is first brought into Saul's house to soothe him. The rejected king loved him greatly (v. 21) and made him armourbearer; the man after God's own heart ministers with a harp to the man God has refused. There is a mercy in the arrangement that the narrator does not label but plainly intends: God sends relief to Saul through the very one he will come to hate.

Refreshed... well... departed — the relief is real and repeated (as at other times, 18:10), and it is temporary; music is not the Spirit, and a harp in the right hands does not reverse the sentence of chapter 15. The sweet psalmist of Israel (2 Samuel 23:1) is seen here at the beginning of his craft. The chapter ends with the two kings in one room, one on the throne and one with a harp — and the reader knows which is which.