Jonathan's plea is a model of intercession: he names the facts (he put his life in his hand, and slew the Philistine), gives God the credit (the LORD wrought a great salvation), reminds Saul of his own reaction (thou sawest it, and didst rejoice), and then names the sin by its right name — innocent blood. Deuteronomy 19:10 and 21:8-9 treat the shedding of innocent blood as a guilt that lies on the whole land. Jonathan is not pleading for a favour; he is warning a king.

Without a cause — the phrase David's own psalms will take up (Psalm 35:19; 69:4), and that John 15:25 applies to Jesus: they hated me without a cause. What has David done? Verse 4 answers: his works have been to thee-ward very good. The whole long persecution that follows is hatred with no ground in the one hated; the narrator wants that established before the hunt begins.

The appeal works — for a time. Saul hearkened — the verb that has governed the book (3:10; 15:22) — and he swears by the LORD's life that David shall not die. The oath is sincere in the moment; Saul is not a hypocrite here but a man whose better self can still be reached by his son. Verse 7 shows David back in his presence, as in times past. It is the last time the old relationship is restored.

But an oath cannot hold what the heart does not hold. Within three verses the javelin is in Saul's hand again (v. 9). Scripture shows the same thing in Pharaoh, who relented under each plague and hardened after it: a resolve made under persuasion is not repentance, and a king who swears as the LORD liveth while the Spirit of the LORD has departed from him (16:14) is using a name he has stopped obeying.

The scene of 18:10-11 is replayed almost word for word — the evil spirit, the house, the harp, even to the wall — except that this time the javelin is smote into the wall and David fled. What was once a fit that David could avoid has become a settled intention from which he must run. The narrator marks the turn: that night begins the years of flight that fill the rest of the book.

Notice that David was still playing (v. 9). After the oath of verse 6 he had gone back to his post and his harp, serving the man who had just sworn not to kill him and was about to try. The combination of loyalty and vigilance — he serves, and he slipped away — is the pattern of David's whole conduct toward Saul. He never stops honouring the office, and he never stands still for the spear.

An image renders the Hebrew teraphim — the household figures that Rachel stole from Laban (Genesis 31:19) and that Micah kept in Judges 17:5, later condemned alongside divination (Zechariah 10:2). That a teraphim was in David's house raises a question the text does not answer: whether it was Michal's, a thing tolerated in Saul's family, or simply what lay to hand. The narrator records it without comment, as he records Rachel's. How so small an object could pass for a sleeping man is also unexplained; some suppose the pillow of goats' hair was at the head to suggest hair, and the covering did the rest.

Michal's window stands in a line with Rahab's (Joshua 2:15) and with the basket at Damascus by which Paul escaped (Acts 9:25). The king's daughter who loved David (18:20) chooses her husband over her father, as Jonathan has chosen his friend. Both of Saul's children side with the man he hates; the text makes the king's isolation his own work.

Mine enemy — Saul's own word for his son-in-law, who has never lifted a hand against him. Michal's answer is a lie: she tells her father that David threatened her life, when in fact she had warned him and let him down the wall. The narrator neither excuses nor condemns it, exactly as with the midwives of Egypt and with Rahab; the reader is left to weigh a frightened woman protecting a husband against a father who has just sent men to kill him.

The deception has a cost that the chapter does not yet show. Michal will be given to another man (25:44), recovered by David years later (2 Samuel 3:13-16), and will end her story despising him from a window (2 Samuel 6:16) — the same vantage from which she once saved him. Scripture does not tidy the lives of its heroes; it tells them. Here she is simply the wife who kept David alive one more night.

David runs to the one man in Israel who had anointed him, and the old prophet takes him in. Naioth (vv. 18-19) is often taken to mean dwellings — perhaps the quarters where the prophets lived under Samuel's oversight — though this is inference, not something the text explains. The company of the prophets has not been seen since Saul met them with harp and tabret in 10:5-10. That meeting made him a new man; this one will undo him.

Three times (vv. 20-21) armed men sent to seize David are seized themselves by the Spirit of God and join the prophesying. The text does not describe what they said or did, only that the arrest did not happen. God protects His anointed here not with a sword but by overwhelming the men sent against him, as He once stopped Balaam's mouth and Laban's hand. Those who come to do Saul's will find themselves doing something else.

The proverb of 10:11-12 is given a second origin here, and the two could not be more different. The first time, the Spirit came on Saul to make him a king, and men marvelled that a farmer's son should prophesy; this time the Spirit overpowers a king who has come to kill, and the saying is repeated with something like pity. Naked may mean stripped to the undergarment, as the word often does; either way the king who tore the prophet's mantle (15:27) lies robeless at the prophet's feet. Samuel had come no more to see Saul (15:35); Saul has come to Samuel, and this is their last meeting in life.

Readers have asked whether this is judgment or mercy. Perhaps both: David gets a day and a night to escape, and Saul is shown, in his own body, that the Spirit he lost is not his to command. Prophesying here is not a sign of a right heart — Balaam prophesied, and Caiaphas (John 11:51). The gifts of God can rest for an hour on a man whose will is set against Him, and the chapter ends with that warning.