Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to 1 Samuel · About this commentary
By Many or by Few
1 Samuel 14:1-23
1 Now it happened on a day that Jonathan the son of Saul said to the young man who bore his armor, “Come! Let’s go over to the Philistines’ garrison that is on the other side.” But he didn’t tell his father. · WEB
Two men climb a cliff on a maybe — and God's whole army panics — while the king sits under a tree calling for the ark.
"Come! Let's go over to the garrison of these uncircumcised. It may be that Yahweh will work for us, for there is no restraint on Yahweh to save by many or by few" 1 Samuel 14:6.
Jonathan's sentence is the book's theology in a soldier's mouth, and its most striking word is may. He does not claim a revelation; he reasons from God's character to a risk, and goes. Faith here is not certainty about the outcome but confidence about who is unrestrained — and the armor bearer's answer is one of Scripture's great replies from the ranks: Do all that is in your heart... I am with you according to your heart 1 Samuel 14:7.
"But if they say this, 'Come up to us!' then we will go up, for Yahweh has delivered them into our hand" 1 Samuel 14:10.
The sign they set is not a fleece testing whether God will act; it is a reading of the tactical moment, and it is deliberately the harder option. A summons upward means climbing a crag on hands and knees into a garrison's teeth 1 Samuel 14:13 — Jonathan asks for the sign that costs more. The Philistines oblige with a taunt about Hebrews coming out of the holes where they had hidden themselves, and twenty men fall in the space of half a furrow.
There was a trembling in the camp... and the earth quaked, so there was an exceedingly great trembling 1 Samuel 14:15.
Then God enlarges a skirmish into a rout. The Hebrew for the panic is the word for a divinely sent terror, and the earthquake makes the author of it plain: two men with one sword between them, and a whole army turning on itself 1 Samuel 14:20 — while deserters and men hiding in the hills come streaming back to the winning side.
Saul stayed in the uttermost part of Gibeah under the pomegranate tree 1 Samuel 14:2.
Set the father beside the son. Jonathan tells nobody and climbs; Saul sits at the rear with six hundred men, a priest, and — the narrator's pointed footnote — a great-grandson of Eli in the ephod 1 Samuel 14:3, the condemned house still ministering at the king's elbow. When the tumult starts he calls a roll to see who is missing, sends for the ark, and then, as the noise grows, cuts the consultation off mid-inquiry: Withdraw your hand! 1 Samuel 14:19.
The scene is Saul in miniature. He seeks God when there is time to spare and abandons the seeking the moment events look promising — the exact inverse of chapter thirteen, where he could not wait long enough. A man who consults God as a formality will always be either too early or too late. So Yahweh saved Israel that day 1 Samuel 14:23 — through the son who was not there when the roll was called.
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