Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to 1 Chronicles · About this commentary
The Death of Saul
1 Chronicles 10:1-14
1 Now the Philistines fought against Israel; and the men of Israel fled from before the Philistines, and fell down slain on Mount Gilboa. · WEB
The narrative opens on a defeat, and the verdict it passes on the first king is about where he went for a word.
After nine chapters of names the story begins, and it begins with a rout. Israel flees, Saul's sons fall on Gilboa , and the king, wounded by archers and refused by his armor bearer, falls on his own sword 1 Chronicles 10:1–5.
No coronation, no rise, no years of pursuit in the wilderness. The book's first scene is the end of the house it is replacing, told in five verses and without a word of pity or contempt for the manner of it.
What the Philistines do afterward is given more attention than the battle. The head and the armor are taken, and messengers carry the news through their territory to their idols and to the people 1 Chronicles 10:9. The armor is placed in the house of their gods and the head fastened in the house of Dagon 1 Chronicles 10:10. A military result is published as a religious one, and the trophies are dedicated. That framing matters, because the chapter is about to give its own account of who decided the battle.
One act of decency interrupts it. The valiant men of Jabesh Gilead travel through the night, recover the bodies, bury the bones under the oak, and fast seven days 1 Chronicles 10:11–12. Jabesh was the town Saul had rescued in the first week of his reign 1 Samuel 11:1–3. The only loyalty his corpse receives comes from the people he saved at the beginning.
Then the writer states his verdict in two verses, and it is the plainest theological summary in the book. Saul died for his trespass which he committed against Yahweh, on two counts: he did not keep the word given him, and he asked counsel of one who had a familiar spirit, to inquire, and didn't inquire of Yahweh 1 Chronicles 10:13–14.
The second count is where the emphasis falls, because the sentence says both what he did and what he failed to do. Heaven had gone silent — no answer by dreams, by Urim, or by prophets 1 Samuel 28:6 — and a silence from God is not a permission to consult somebody else. The practice is named among the abominations for which the previous inhabitants were driven out Deuteronomy 18:10–12.
The ground of that prohibition is that the dead are in no position to answer. The dead don't know anything Ecclesiastes 9:5; a man's breath departs, he returns to the earth, and in that very day, his thoughts perish Psalms 146:4. Whatever spoke at Endor, it was not Samuel resuming his ministry, because the dead have no ministry to resume.
So the first judgment the book pronounces is about worship rather than warfare, and the kingdom is turned over to David by the same verdict that removes Saul.
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