Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to 1 Samuel · About this commentary
Is Saul Also Among the Prophets?
1 Samuel 19:18-24
18 Now David fled and escaped, and came to Samuel at Ramah, and told him all that Saul had done to him. He and Samuel went and lived in Naioth. · WEB
Three squads of assassins are captured by prophecy, then the king himself — stripped and prostrate for a day and a night, and no better for it.
Now David fled and escaped, and came to Samuel at Ramah 1 Samuel 19:18.
The fugitive runs to the prophet who anointed him, and the scene that follows is one of the strangest in the book. Three sets of messengers are sent to arrest David; each set walks into a company of prophets with Samuel at their head, and each is overtaken — God's Spirit came on Saul's messengers, and they also prophesied 1 Samuel 19:20–21. An arrest party is disarmed by worship. God protects his anointed here without a sword being drawn, which is the pattern of David's whole exile: he is never once rescued by his own violence.
Then God's Spirit came on him also, and he went on, and prophesied... He also stripped off his clothes... and lay down naked all that day and all that night 1 Samuel 19:23–24.
Then the king comes himself, and the same power takes him. The picture is deliberately humiliating: royal robes off, Israel's monarch flat on the ground for twenty-four hours while the man he came to kill walks away. Read carefully, it is not a conversion. The Spirit's coming here is an overpowering, not an indwelling — the same sovereign force that once equipped him 1 Samuel 10:10 now simply immobilizing him, using a man who has rejected God's word to prevent the murder he came to commit.
Therefore they say, "Is Saul also among the prophets?" 1 Samuel 19:24.
The proverb from his first day returns as an epitaph. At the beginning it was asked in wonder, about a farmer suddenly caught up among prophets, at the start of everything 1 Samuel 10:11. Here the same words are said over a stripped and prostrate man who has spent the day being prevented from killing his son-in-law. Nothing is more sobering in Saul's story than that his career opens and closes on the same sentence, meaning opposite things.
The episode also settles a question the book keeps raising: an experience of God's power is not the same as a relationship with God. Saul prophesies twice in this book and obeys neither time. Ecstatic religion, spectacular and genuinely from God, has left the man exactly as it found him — which is why the standard the book keeps applying is never the intensity of an experience but the plain question of obedience 1 Samuel 15:22.
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