1 Samuel 31 — So Saul Died, and His Three Sons
The Philistines fight against Israel on mount Gilboa; the men of Israel flee and fall slain. The pursuit closes on Saul and his sons: Jonathan, Abinadab and Melchishua are killed. The archers find Saul and wound him sore. He asks his armourbearer to thrust him through, lest the uncircumcised come and abuse him; the young man will not, for he is sore afraid, and Saul takes a sword and falls upon it. The armourbearer falls on his sword too. So Saul dies, and his three sons, and his armourbearer, and all his men, that same day together. The Israelites across the valley and across Jordan forsake their cities, and the Philistines dwell in them. On the morrow the Philistines strip the slain, cut off Saul's head, send his armour round the land to publish it in the house of their idols, lay it up in the house of Ashtaroth, and fasten his body to the wall of Bethshan. When the men of Jabeshgilead hear it, all the valiant men go all night, take down the bodies of Saul and his sons, burn them at Jabesh, bury the bones under a tree, and fast seven days.
“So Saul died, and his three sons, and his armourbearer, and all his men, that same day together.”
— 1 Samuel 31:6
- v.1-3 Gilboa — Israel flees; Jonathan, Abinadab and Melchishua slain; the archers find Saul
- v.4-6 Thrust me through — the armourbearer refuses; Saul falls on his sword; that same day together
- v.7-10 The cities forsaken; the head cut off; the armour in the house of Ashtaroth; the body on the wall of Bethshan
- v.11-13 The valiant men of Jabeshgilead go all night; burial under a tree; seven days' fast
The battle went sore against Saul, and the archers hit him — the Hebrew verb is more like found; the archers found him. Sore wounded is read by some as in great fear of the archers, since the Hebrew allows it; the KJV and most take it as wounded, which verse 4 assumes. The king who stood higher than any of the people (10:23) is now a target they cannot miss. It is the death David named as possible at Hachilah (26:10): he shall descend into battle, and perish.
Gilboa is the ridge above the Jezreel valley where Israel pitched by a fountain (29:1), with the Philistines at Shunem across the plain (28:4). Saul had gone up to the battle already knowing its end (28:19); the text does not say whether he told anyone. There is a kind of courage in going, and the narrator does not deny it, but it is the courage of a man with nowhere else to go. David's lament will say the shield of Saul, as though he had not been anointed with oil (2 Samuel 1:21) — the oil was the thing he had, and lost.
Saul's last request is to his armourbearer: thrust me through... lest these uncircumcised come and thrust me through, and abuse me. He fears torture and mockery more than death — rightly, as verses 9-10 show. The young man would not; for he was sore afraid — afraid of the deed, afraid to lay a hand on the king, as David had been. Then Saul took a sword, and fell upon it. The text reports the suicide plainly, without a verdict; the study reports it the same way and builds no doctrine of the next world on this verse.
The scene has been compared with Abimelech's (Judges 9:54), who also asked his armourbearer to kill him to avoid shame, and whose man obeyed. Saul's does not, and in the refusal is a last tribute: even now, the king is the LORD's anointed to his servant, who then dies with him (v. 5). Readers should hold the two threads together — the king who ends his own life and the servant who will not take it, in the same verse. The book that began with Hannah's he bringeth down to the grave (2:6) ends its first part at the grave's edge.
So Saul died, and his three sons, and his armourbearer, and all his men, that same day together. The sentence is a tombstone. All his men is generally taken as his bodyguard and immediate company, not the whole army, since 2 Samuel 2 finds Abner and an Israelite force alive. The narrator gives no obituary, no judgment, no word of Saul's soul. The verdict was given at Gilgal (15:23, 28) and repeated at Endor (28:17-19); the chapter merely records that it came. The silence is the respect Scripture pays to the dead.
1 Chronicles 10 retells this chapter nearly word for word and then adds the verdict the narrator here withholds: So Saul died for his transgression... and also for asking counsel of one that had a familiar spirit... therefore he slew him, and turned the kingdom unto David (10:13-14). Readers may hold both: 1 Samuel's silence, which lets the horror speak, and Chronicles' explanation, which names the cause. The study gives both and lets neither cancel the other.
The defeat is national. Israelites on the other side of the valley — the Jezreel plain — and... on the other side Jordan abandon their towns, and the Philistines came and dwelt in them. The enemy Saul was raised up to fight (9:16) now occupies the heartland and the Jordan crossings. Samuel's word that the LORD will also deliver Israel with thee (28:19) is fulfilled alongside the word about Saul. The people who asked for a king like the nations are ruled by the nations.
This is the low point of the kingdom's story, lower than Aphek and the lost ark (4:10-11), because now there is no judge and no king and the Philistines hold the land. The reader who knows what follows — David at Hebron, the recovery of all this ground — must still sit here for a verse. The book of 1 Samuel ends in occupation and a dishonoured king, and 2 Samuel begins with a messenger carrying a crown. Scripture does not skip the dark chapter to get to the bright one.
What Saul feared, the Philistines do. They cut off his head — as David cut off Goliath's (17:51), the reader cannot help remembering — strip his armour, and send the news round to publish it in the house of their idols and among the people. The victory is a religious event to the Philistines: their gods have beaten Israel's king. It is the mirror of 17:46, where David promised Goliath's head so that all the earth may know that there is a God in Israel. Now the Philistines publish the opposite.
1 Chronicles 10:10 adds that his head was fastened in the temple of Dagon — the god whose image fell headless before the ark (5:3-4). Readers have seen in the two scenes a deliberate echo: Dagon once lay broken before the LORD's ark; now Israel's king is headless in Dagon's house. The text does not spell out the comparison, and the study offers it as a reading. What is plain is the shame, and that the shame was what Saul's last words had tried to prevent.
They put his armour in the house of Ashtaroth — the goddess whose worship Israel had been told to put away (7:3-4; 12:10) — and they fastened his body to the wall of Bethshan, a city at the junction of the Jezreel and Jordan valleys, within reach of the Jordan fords. Goliath's sword had been laid up behind the ephod (21:9); Saul's armour is laid up before an idol. The trophy of the LORD's victory and the trophy of the Philistine gods are told in matching language, and the narrator does not need to say which God was real.
The exposure of a body was the deepest dishonour the ancient world knew, and the Law required that even an executed criminal be buried the same day (Deuteronomy 21:22-23). Saul hangs on a Philistine wall. This is the king who put away the mediums, who was head and shoulders above the people, who was anointed with the LORD's oil. The narrator spares the reader nothing; he intends the reader to feel that the fall of a man God chose is a real fall.
Then the one act of beauty in the chapter. The valiant men of Jabeshgilead — the town across Jordan that Saul rescued from Nahash in the first act of his reign (11:1-11), when the Spirit came on him and Saul himself said the LORD hath wrought salvation in Israel (11:13) — go all night, take the bodies from the wall, and carry them home. Saul's first deed as king is remembered by those who received it, after his last defeat. The book closes the circle: the Jabesh that made him king is the Jabesh that buries him.
And burnt them there — unusual in Israel, where burial was the rule; readers propose that the bodies were past preserving, or that the burning was to prevent further desecration, and 1 Chronicles 10:12 omits it, speaking only of the bones. The study notes the difference and does not resolve it. What matters is loyalty to a dead king who can reward no one. David will hear of it and bless them — blessed be ye of the LORD, that ye have shewed this kindness unto your lord (2 Samuel 2:5) — and later rebury the bones in Benjamin (2 Samuel 21:12-14).
They took their bones, and buried them under a tree at Jabesh, and fasted seven days. Saul was last seen at court under a tree in Gibeah, spear in hand (22:6); his bones rest under a tree in Gilead, in the one town that owed him everything. The seven days' fast is the full mourning of the ancient world (Genesis 50:10). The book of 1 Samuel ends here — not with David's coronation, which 2 Samuel will give, but with a burial and a fast, and a kingdom in the hands of its enemies.
One difficulty should be named. In 2 Samuel 1:6-10 an Amalekite tells David that he found Saul leaning on his spear and killed him at his request. That account does not agree with this chapter, where Saul falls on his own sword and no Amalekite is present. Most readers hold that the Amalekite lied to gain David's favour, and that David's execution of him (2 Samuel 1:15-16) answers a man who claimed the deed whether or not he did it; some take the two as variant traditions. The study presents the narrator's own account here as the one the book asserts.
Read Gilboa slowly and do not explain it away. A man God chose, filled with His Spirit, head and shoulders above his people, ends on an enemy's wall — and the most faithful man in the book dies beside him. Take from it, first, that a word spoken by God will be kept whether or not you believe it; Saul heard to morrow and went up the hill anyway. Take, second, that faithfulness does not purchase a different battlefield; Jonathan's reward was not survival. Then be a man of Jabeshgilead. Someone once did you a kindness who is now beyond rewarding anyone — a parent, a pastor, a friend who fell. Go all night if you must, take them down from the wall, and bury them with honour. The kingdom was in enemy hands that week, and a few valiant men still knew what loyalty was.
The church has read the end of 1 Samuel as the end of the kingdom men asked for — a king like the nations, head and shoulders above the rest, dying on a hill with his body nailed to a wall and his head carried to the house of an idol — and has set against it another King on another hill, whose body was taken down by night by a few faithful men and laid in a borrowed tomb before the sabbath. Saul's armour laid up before Ashtaroth is, for Christian readers, the shadow of the defeat that looked final on Friday; the valiant men of Jabesh are a shadow of Joseph and Nicodemus. And the book that ends with a burial and seven days' fasting points forward, in the church's reading, to a burial that lasted three days and a kingdom that was not left in the hands of its enemies.
The battle is told in three verses, and the pursuit followed hard upon Saul and upon his sons — the king and his heirs are the target, as in all ancient war. Jonathan is named first. The man who gave David his robe, who strengthened his hand in the wood, who said I shall be next unto thee (23:17), falls beside the father he would not leave. Scripture gives him no last words; the text that recorded his love so fully records his death in a name. 2 Samuel 1:26 will give him the elegy.
Abinadab and Melchishua die with him. 1 Chronicles 8:33 lists four sons of Saul, and Ishbosheth, who survives to be made king by Abner (2 Samuel 2:8), is not on Gilboa; 14:49 names Ishui where this chapter has Abinadab, which readers reconcile in various ways. Samuel's word of 28:19 — to morrow shalt thou and thy sons be with me — is kept to the letter. Readers should resist the thought that Jonathan's death was punishment; the text says nothing of the kind, and the one man in the book who never wavered dies in the same hour as the one who always did.