Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to 1 Samuel · About this commentary
A Covenant in the Field
1 Samuel 20:1-23
1 David fled from Naioth in Ramah, and came and said to Jonathan, “What have I done? What is my iniquity? What is my sin before your father, that he seeks my life?” · WEB
Two friends make a plan with arrows and a pact that reaches past their own lifetimes — the heir asking mercy for his children from the man taking his throne.
"What have I done? What is my iniquity? What is my sin before your father, that he seeks my life?" 1 Samuel 20:1.
Three questions and no answer available, because there is none: David's offense is that God is with him. Jonathan's denial — my father does nothing either great or small, but that he discloses it to me 1 Samuel 20:2 — is loyalty refusing evidence, and David corrects it with the shrewdest observation in the chapter: your father knows we are friends, so he has stopped telling you things 1 Samuel 20:3. Then the sentence that measures his life just now: there is but a step between me and death.
"Behold, tomorrow is the new moon, and I should not fail to dine with the king" 1 Samuel 20:5.
The test is well designed. An absence at the new moon feast is conspicuous but explicable; a family sacrifice at Bethlehem is an honorable excuse. What Saul does with a reasonable explanation will reveal whether he is angry at a man or committed to a murder. It is also, plainly, a cover story arranged in advance — Scripture reports the fugitive's tactics without pausing to grade them, and readers may notice that this particular arrangement will get a town of priests killed two chapters on.
"You shall also not cut off your kindness from my house forever, no, not when Yahweh has cut off every one of the enemies of David from the surface of the earth" 1 Samuel 20:15.
Here is the covenant's remarkable center. Jonathan speaks as a man who has fully accepted that David will reign — and rather than bargaining for a place in the new order, he asks for his children's lives. Dynastic changes in that world ended with the old house extinguished, and he knows it. The heir of Israel's first king negotiates the survival of his descendants with the man who is replacing him, and the negotiation is conducted in love: he loved him as he loved his own soul 1 Samuel 20:17. Years later David will comb the country for anyone left of Saul's line, and a crippled grandson of Jonathan will eat at the king's table for the rest of his life because of the covenant 2 Samuel 9:1 2 Samuel 9:7 — one of Scripture's clearest pictures of kindness reaching a man who could offer nothing.
"Behold, Yahweh is between you and me forever" 1 Samuel 20:23.
The mechanism is boyish — three arrows, a stone, a servant sent to fetch them, a coded phrase 1 Samuel 20:20–22 — and the oath around it is not. Two men make God the witness of a promise that will be kept after one of them is dead on a mountain.
settled What this mark means