Jonathan has just said it is not so (v. 2): his father tells him everything, and has told him nothing of this. Jonathan is loyal to both men and slow to believe the worst of his father; David must swear to convince him. His explanation is shrewd — Saul hides it precisely because he knows the friendship. Love can be the last to see what everyone else sees, and the chapter is in part the story of Jonathan being made to see it.

There is but a step between me and death — the most quoted line of the chapter, and literally true: David has just been spared by a window and a day of prophesying. Yet the man who says it will live to be an old king. The step is real and the LORD stands in it. The psalms David will write in these years are full of this double sense — mortal danger, and a God who holdeth our soul in life (Psalm 66:9).

Jonathan swears with the fullest formula Israel had — the LORD do so and much more — and binds himself to tell David the truth even when it is against his own father. Then comes a sentence that shows what he has understood: the LORD be with thee, as he hath been with my father. He speaks of God's presence with Saul in the past tense. The crown prince is blessing another man with the thing that made his father king.

The verses that follow (14-16) are Jonathan asking for mercy from the man who will one day have power over his family: the kindness of the LORD... not cut off thy kindness from my house for ever. He assumes David's victory and his own house's danger, and asks only for covenant kindness. 2 Samuel 9 records David keeping this word to Mephibosheth, for Jonathan thy father's sake. Few requests in Scripture are made so far ahead and kept so faithfully.

Kindness is the great covenant word of the Old Testament, the loyal love that keeps faith with a bond; Jonathan calls it the kindness of the LORD (v. 14) because its measure is God's own. The request is remarkable for its realism. Jonathan expects a day when the LORD hath cut off the enemies of David every one, and he knows that the house of Saul could be reckoned among them. He asks that his own family be the exception, by covenant and not by chance.

Verse 16 is terse in the Hebrew and the KJV renders it closely: Let the LORD even require it at the hand of David's enemies — a curse called down on whoever would break the bond. Verse 17 adds the reason the narrator wants remembered: he loved him as he loved his own soul. Covenant and affection are not opposed here; the oath gives the love a form that will outlive both men, and David's treatment of Saul's house in 2 Samuel is measured against it.

The sign of the arrows (vv. 19-22) is a device to pass a message at a distance without a word spoken — the lad will hear only the arrows are beyond thee, and only the two friends will know what it means (v. 39). The stone Ezel and the exact arrangement are not explained further; readers should not build much on details the text leaves plain. What matters is that the friends part under an oath, not a plan.

The LORD be between thee and me — the language of Laban and Jacob at Mizpah: the LORD watch between me and thee, when we are absent one from another (Genesis 31:49). There it was two suspicious men calling God to referee; here it is two friends who may never meet again calling Him to witness and keep a love neither can enforce. The phrase returns in the chapter's last verse, enlarged to their children. God is invoked not to divide them but to be the bond.

Honesty requires saying what this verse is: a father's obscene abuse of his son. The KJV renders it with restraint. Thou son of the perverse rebellious woman is an insult aimed at Jonathan through his mother — in effect calling him the child of a worthless woman — and the confusion of thy mother's nakedness means the shame of the woman who bore him. Many modern versions render it more bluntly. Saul does not name his wife (Ahinoam, 14:50) as the target; he is reaching for the foulest thing he can say to the son who has chosen the son of Jesse.

Verse 31 states Saul's whole policy in a sentence: as long as the son of Jesse liveth... thou shalt not be established, nor thy kingdom. He knows exactly what is at stake, and it is Jonathan's succession. The tragedy is that Jonathan has already given that succession away (18:4; 23:17). The father fights for a throne the son does not want, and curses the son for loving the man God has chosen. Rebellious echoes the charge of rebellion Samuel laid against Saul himself (15:23).

The javelin that was thrown at David (18:11; 19:10) is now thrown at Saul's own son and heir. The man who could not bear to lose the kingdom to David tries to kill the one person for whom he was keeping it. The text gives no evil spirit here as it did before; this is Saul's own rage, at a sacred feast, in front of Abner and the court. Whereby Jonathan knew — the test David proposed (v. 7) has yielded its answer in the hardest possible form.

Jonathan rises in fierce anger and fasts (v. 34), for he was grieved for David, because his father had done him shame. Note whose shame he feels: not his own, though he was the one insulted and nearly killed, but David's. The chapter is the portrait of a man whose love has fully displaced his self-interest — and of a father who cannot understand such a man at all.

The arrows have said what they were to say (vv. 36-38), but the friends cannot leave it at a signal. David comes out of hiding and bowed himself three times — the anointed king bowing to the prince, the future to the present, in the humility that marks all his dealings with Saul's house. Then the formality breaks: they kissed one another, and wept. Men wept openly in the ancient world, and Scripture records it without embarrassment: Joseph with his brothers, Jacob with Esau.

Until David exceeded — David wept the longer; the sense of the Hebrew is debated (some read until David recovered himself), and the KJV gives the simplest. He has lost his place at court, his wife, his home, his teacher Samuel's protection, and now the friend who gave him his robe. The years ahead will be caves and deserts. The man after God's own heart is a man who weeps; the psalms of this period are soaked in it.

The parting word is a covenant, not a comfort. Go in peace — Jonathan sends his friend into exile with the oath restated and extended: between my seed and thy seed for ever. The two will meet once more, in the wood of Ziph (23:16-18), and then Jonathan will die on Gilboa beside the father he could not change. The seed clause is what survives: Mephibosheth at David's table (2 Samuel 9:13), and Jonathan's line spared when Saul's house was not (2 Samuel 21:7).

He arose and departed: and Jonathan went into the city. Two directions. One man goes to the wilderness and the throne; the other returns to his father's house and a loyalty he will keep to the end. Jonathan does not follow David, and the text does not fault him for it; he honours both his father and his friend until honouring both is no longer possible. The friendship held by letting each man walk his own road under one oath.