The book opens where 1 Samuel 31 closed, but from the other side of the land: after the death of Saul, with David two days back in Ziklag from the Amalekite rescue (1 Samuel 30). On the third day a man arrives wearing the signs of grief — clothes rent, and earth upon his head — exactly as the messenger from Aphek came to Eli (1 Samuel 4:12). The reader is meant to hear that echo: once again a runner from a lost battle, once again the news that the leaders of Israel are dead.

He fell to the earth, and did obeisance. Before he has said a word he treats David as a king, and the narrator lets that stand as the first clue to what he wants. David asks the plain questions (vv. 3-4), and the answer comes in order of rising weight: the people fled, many fallen, and Saul and Jonathan his son are dead also. The one name David will hardly be able to bear is given last and almost in passing.

The difficulty must be named. In 1 Samuel 31:4-5 Saul, wounded by archers, asks his armourbearer to kill him, is refused, and falls on his own sword; no Amalekite is there. Here the young man says he found Saul leaned upon his spear (v. 6), still alive, and killed him at his request. The two accounts do not agree. Most readers take the Amalekite to be lying — he has the crown and bracelet, which he could have stripped from a dead king, and he has brought them to the man he expects to profit from Saul's death. Some take the two as variant tellings. The study follows the narrator's own account in chapter 31 and reports this one as the Amalekite's claim.

The crown... and the bracelet — the royal diadem and an arm-band, carried by an Amalekite to the man who has just spent the week killing Amalekites (1 Samuel 30:17) and whom Saul lost the kingdom for sparing (1 Samuel 15). The irony is the narrator's, and it is heavy. The symbols of Saul's kingship reach David by a hand that should not have touched them, and David will not accept them that way.

David's first act on hearing of Saul's death is not to reach for the crown but to tear his clothes (v. 11), and all the men that were with him do the same. They mourned, and wept, and fasted until even — the full rite of grief, given to the man who hunted David for years as much as to the friend who loved him. The order of the mourning is worth noticing: for Saul, first; for Jonathan; for the people of the LORD; for the house of Israel. The king is mourned as king.

The scene settles a question the Amalekite had already answered wrongly: what David felt about Saul's death. He had twice refused to take it (1 Samuel 24:6; 26:9-11), and now that God has done what David left to God, he grieves. The narrator shows the grief before the judgment of verses 13-16, so that the execution will not read as a king protecting his image but as a mourner answering a man who boasted of the deed.

The question is the one David has asked himself twice, in the cave and in the camp — who can stretch forth his hand against the LORD's anointed, and be guiltless? (1 Samuel 26:9; cf. 24:6) — now turned on another man. The Amalekite had answered the question Whence art thou? with the son of a stranger, an Amalekite (v. 13): a resident foreigner, who could be expected to know what the oil on Saul's head meant in Israel. Fear of the anointed is, for David, fear of God.

Whether the Amalekite actually killed Saul does not change David's verdict, and verse 16 says why: thy mouth hath testified against thee. He is judged on his own confession. Readers should see what this establishes at the start of David's reign — that the throne will not be reached by the murder of its occupant, and that anyone bringing a king's head to David for a reward will meet the same answer (4:9-12). The point is made again, with Rechab and Baanah, in almost the same words.

Thy blood be upon thy head — the ancient formula that places guilt for a death on the one who earned it (Joshua 2:19; 1 Kings 2:37). David has one of his young men strike the Amalekite down (v. 15). The study does not soften it: a man who came in mourning dress, carrying the crown, expecting reward, is killed on David's word within the hour. But it also notes the ground given — not that he brought bad news, not that he was an Amalekite, but I have slain the LORD's anointed, by his own account.

The story the Amalekite told was built to please the man he thought David was; it killed him because of the man David actually was. There is a warning in that about the stories people tell to win favour, and a lesson about David: he will not treat the removal of Saul as a service done to him. Chapter 4 will show the same judgment, and 1 Samuel 24:12 — the LORD judge between me and thee... but mine hand shall not be upon thee — stands behind both.

The lament is introduced with a note. He bade them teach the children of Judah the use of the bow — the KJV's italic the use of is supplied; the Hebrew says simply the bow, and many take it as the title of the song, named from Jonathan's bow in verse 22. Either way David wants Judah — the tribe about to anoint him (2:4) — to learn a song honouring Saul and Jonathan. The new king teaches his own people to mourn the old one.

The book of Jasher — a collection, now lost, cited also in Joshua 10:13 for the sun standing still at Gibeon. Its name is usually taken as the upright or the righteous; its contents beyond these two citations are unknown, and later works bearing the name are not it. The citation tells us that David's lament was known outside this book, and that the author of Samuel drew on written sources he expected readers to recognise.

The beauty of Israel — the word can mean glory, ornament, or (as some read) gazelle, which would match swifter than eagles in verse 23; the KJV's beauty is the common rendering. It is slain upon thy high places, the ridges of Gilboa. Then the refrain that frames the whole song, heard three times (vv. 19, 25, 27): how are the mighty fallen! It is a cry of grief, not a sermon. David does not say how the wicked are judged; he says the mighty have fallen, and he means it.

The lament is a public poem, meant to be sung, and it says nothing of Saul's sins, nothing of David's own sufferings, nothing of the anointing at Bethlehem (1 Samuel 16:13). That silence is its grace. Readers have long taken the song as a model of how to speak of the dead: truthfully, which here means generously, remembering what was good and leaving the rest with God. 3:33-34 will show David doing the same for Abner.

David curses the mountain, not the men: let there be no dew, neither let there be rain on Gilboa, where the shield of the king lay vilely cast away. The phrase fields of offerings is obscure in Hebrew — fields whose produce was offered as firstfruits, or, as some read with a small change, upwelling of the deep; the study leaves it. The image is clear enough: the ground that drank the king's blood should bear nothing.

As though he had not been anointed with oil — the only mention of anointing in the song, and it is said of Saul, not David. The shield lies in the dirt as if its bearer had never been the LORD's anointed. That is the sorrow at the centre of the poem: the oil of 1 Samuel 10:1 was real, and it ended here. David, anointed with the same oil in secret at Bethlehem, sings of what the oil did not prevent.

In their death they were not divided. Jonathan had every reason to leave his father — he knew David would be king (1 Samuel 23:17) and had been nearly killed by Saul for David's sake (1 Samuel 20:33) — and he stayed, and died beside him on Gilboa. David honours that. Lovely and pleasant in their lives is said of both, and David had known Saul's court as a young man before the spear (1 Samuel 16:21-23); he had a life's worth of memory to draw on, and he draws on the good.

Swifter than eagles... stronger than lions — the praise of warriors, true of Jonathan at Michmash (1 Samuel 14:13) and of Saul at Jabesh (1 Samuel 11:11). Verse 24 then turns to the daughters of Israel, who owe their scarlet and ornaments of gold to Saul's wars. The study notes that David reckons Saul's reign as a real reign, with real victories and real spoil; the book has been honest about Saul's failures, and David is honest about his strength.

The song narrows at the end to one man and one voice: I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan. The covenant of 1 Samuel 18:3, the robe and sword given, the warning in the field, the hand strengthened in the wood of Ziph (1 Samuel 23:16) — all of it lies behind very pleasant hast thou been unto me. Jonathan loved David as his own soul (1 Samuel 18:1), and gave up a throne to do it. David calls that love wonderful, passing the love of women.

The text means what it says: a covenant friendship, sealed before the LORD (1 Samuel 20:42), that David had found more wonderful than anything he had known from his wives. The study states it as the text states it and does not import later debates into a lament. What the phrase asks of the reader is to take friendship as seriously as Scripture does — there is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother (Proverbs 18:24). David's oath to Jonathan's house (1 Samuel 20:14-17) is still unpaid; chapter 9 will pay it.