THE DEATH OF SAUL.
1Sa 31:1-13.
THE plain of Esdraelon, where the battle between Saul and the
Philistines was fought, has been celebrated for many a deadly
encounter, from the very earliest period of history. Monuments of
Egypt lately deciphered make it very plain that long before the
country was possessed by the Israelites the plain had experienced
the shock of contending armies. The records of the reign of Thotmes
III, who has sometimes been called the Alexander the Great of Egypt,
bear testimony to a decisive fight in his time near Megiddo, and
enumerate the names of many towns in the neighbourhood, most of
which occur in Bible history, of which the spoil was carried to
Egypt and placed in the temples of the Egyptian gods. Here, too, it
was afterwards that Barak encountered the Canaanites, and Gideon the
Midianites and Amalekites; here "Jehu smote all that remained of the
house of Ahab in Jezreel, and all his great men, and his familiar
friends, and his priests, until he left none remaining; "here Josiah
was slain in his great battle with the Egyptians; here was the great
lamentation after Josiah's death, celebrated by Zechariah, "the
mourning of Hadad-Rimmon in the valley of Megiddo; "in short, in the
words of Dr. Clarke, "Esdraelon has been the chosen place of
encampment in every great contest carried on in the country, until
the disastrous march of Napoleon Bonaparte from Egypt into Syria.
Jews, Gentiles, Saracens, Crusaders, Egyptians, Persians, Druses,
Turks, Arabs, and French, warriors out of every nation which is
under heaven, have pitched their tents upon the plains of Esdraelon,
and have beheld their banners wet with the dews of Tabor and Hermon."
So late as 1840, when the Pacha of Egypt had seized upon Syria, he
was compelled to abandon the country when the citadel of Acre, which
guards the entrance of the plain of Esdraelon by sea, was bombarded
and destroyed by the British fleet. It is no wonder that in the
symbolical visions of the Apocalypse, a town in this plain,
Armageddon, is selected as the battle-field for the great conflict
when the kings of the whole earth are to be gathered together unto
the battle of the great day of Almighty God. As in the plains of
Belgium, the plains of Lombardy, or the carse of Stirling, battle
after battle has been fought in the space between Jezreel and Gilboa,
to decide who should be master of the whole adjacent territory.
The Philistine host are said to have gathered themselves together
and pitched in Shunem (1Sa 28:4), and afterwards to have gathered
all their hosts to Aphek, and pitched by the fountain which is in
Jezreel (1Sa 29:1). That is to say, they advanced from a westward to
a northward position, which last they occupied before the battle.
Saul appears from the beginning to have arranged his troops on the
northern slopes of Mount Gilboa, and to have remained in that
position during the battle. It was an excellent position for
fighting, but very unfavourable for a retreat. Apparently the
Philistines began the battle by moving southwards across the plain
till they reached the foot of Gilboa, where the tug of war began.
Notwithstanding the favourable position of the Hebrews, they were
completely defeated. The archers appear to have done deadly
execution; as they advanced nearer to the host of Israel, the latter
would move backward to get out of range; while the Philistines,
gaining confidence, would press them more and more, till the orderly
retreat became a terrible rout. So utterly routed was the Israelite
army that they do not appear to have tried a single rally, which, as
they had to retreat over Mount Gilboa, it would have been so natural
for them to do. Panic and consternation seem to have seized them
very early in the battle; that they would be defeated was probably a
foregone conclusion, but the attitude of a retreating army seems to
have been assumed more quickly and suddenly than could have been
supposed. If the Philistine army, seeing the early confusion of the
Israelites, had the courage to pour themselves along the valleys on
each side of Gilboa, no way of retreat would be left to their enemy
except over the top of the hill. And when that was reached, and the
Israelites began to descend, the arrows of the pursuing Philistines
would fall on them with more deadly effect than ever, and the
slaughter would be tremendous.
Saul seems never to have been deficient in personal courage, and in
the course of the battle he and his shaft were evidently in the very
thickest of the fight. "The Philistines followed hard upon Saul and
upon his sons; and the Philistines slew Jonathan, and Abinadab, and
Melchishua, the sons of Saul." Saul himself was greatly distressed
in his flight by reason of the archers. Finding himself wounded, and
being provided with neither chariot nor other means of escape, a
horror seized him that if once the enemy got possession of him alive
they would subject him to some nameless mutilation or horrible
humiliation too terrible to be thought of. Hence his request to his
armour-bearer to fall on him. When the armour-bearer refused, he
took a sword from him and killed himself.
It may readily be allowed that to one not ruled habitually by regard
to the will of God this was the wisest course to follow. If the
Philistine treatment of captive kings resembled the Assyrian, death
was far rather to be chosen than life. When we find on Assyrian
monuments such frightful pictures as those of kings obliged to carry
the heads of their sons in processions, or themselves pinned to the
ground by stakes driven through their hands and feet, and undergoing
the horrible process of being flayed alive, we need not wonder at
Saul shrinking with horror from what he might have had to suffer if
he had been taken prisoner.
But what are we to think of the moral aspect of his act of suicide?
That in all ordinary cases suicide is a daring sin, who can deny?
God has not given to man the disposal of his life in such a sense.
It is a daring thing for man to close his day of grace sooner than
God would have closed it. It is a reckless thing to rush into the
presence of his Maker before His Maker has called him to appear. It
is a presumptuous thing to calculate on bettering his condition by
plunging into an untried eternity. No doubt one must be tender in
judging of men pressed hard by real or imaginary terrors, perhaps
their reason staggering, their instincts trembling, and a horror of
great darkness obscuring everything. Yet how often, in his last
written words, does the suicide bear testimony against himself when
he hopes that God will forgive him, and beseeches his friends to
forgive him. Does not this show that in his secret soul he is
conscious that he ought to have borne longer, ought to have quitted
himself more like a man, and suffered every extremity of fortune
before quenching the flame of life within him?
The truth is, that the suicide of Saul, as of many another, is an
act that cannot be judged by itself, but must be taken in connection
with the course of his previous life. We have said that to one not
habitually ruled by regard to the will of God, self-destruction at
such a moment was the wisest course. That is to say, if he merely
balanced what appeared to be involved in terminating his life
against what was involved in the Philistines taking him and
torturing him, the former alternative was by far the more tolerable.
But the question comes up, - if he had not habitually disregarded
the will of God, would he ever have been in that predicament? The
criminality of many an act must be thrown back on a previous act,
out of which it has arisen. A drunkard in a midnight debauch
quarrels with his father, and plunges a knife into his heart. When
he comes to himself he is absolutely unconscious of what he has
done. He tells you he had no wish nor desire to injure his father.
It was not his proper self that did it, but his proper self
over-mastered, overthrown, brutalized by the monster drink. Do you
excuse him on this account? Far from it. You excuse him of a
deliberate design against his father's life. But you say the
possibility of that deed was involved in his getting drunk. For a
man to get drunk, to deprive himself for the time of his senses, and
expose himself to an influence that may cause him to commit a most
horrible and unnatural crime, is a fearful sin. Thus you carry back
the criminality of the murder to the previous act of getting drunk.
So in regard to the suicide of Saul. The criminality of that act is
to be carried back to the sin of which he was guilty when he
determined to follow his own will instead of the will of God. It was
through that sin that he was brought into his present position. Had
he been dutiful to God he would never have been in such a dilemma.
On the one hand he never would have been so defeated and humiliated
in battle; and on the other hand he would have had a trust in the
Divine protection even when a bloody enemy like the Philistines was
about to seize him. It was the true source alike of his public
defeat and of his private despair that he indicated when he said to
Samuel; "God is departed from me;" and he might have been sure that
God would not have departed from him if he had not first departed
from God. It is a most important principle of life we thus get sight
of, when we see the bearing that one act of sin has upon another. It
is very seldom indeed that the consequences of any sin terminate
with itself. Sin has a marvelous power of begetting, of leading you
on to other acts that you did not think of at first, of involving
you in meshes that were then quite out of your view. And this
multiplying process of sin is a course that may begin very early.
Children are warned of it in the hymn - "He that does one fault at
first, and lies to hide it, makes it two." A sin needs to be
covered, and another sin is resorted to in order to provide the
covering. Nor is that all. You have a partner in your sin, and to
free yourself you perhaps betray your partner. That partner may be
not only the weaker vessel, but also by far the heavier sufferer,
and yet, in your wretched selfishness, you deny all share of the
sin, or you leave your partner to be ruined. Alas! alas! how
terrible are the ways of sin. How difficult it often is for the
sinner to retrace his steps! And how terrible is the state of mind
when one says, I must commit this sin or that - I have no
alternative! How terrible was Saul's position when he said, "I must
destroy myself." Truly sin is a hard, unfeeling master - "The way of
transgressors is hard." He only that walketh uprightly walketh
surely. "Blessed are the undefiled in the way, that walk in the law
of the Lord."
The terrible nature of the defeat which the Israelites suffered on
this day from the Philistines is apparent from what is said in the
seventh verse - "And when the men of Israel that were on the other
side of the valley, and they that were beyond Jordan, saw that the
men of Israel fled, and that Saul and his sons were dead, they
forsook their cities and fled; and the Philistines came and dwelt in
them." The plain of Esdraelon is interrupted, and in a sense divided
into two, by three hills - Tabor, Gilboa, and Little Hermon. On the
eastern side of these hills the plain is continued on to the Jordan
valley. The effect of the battle of Gilboa was that all the rich
settlements in that part of the plain had to be forsaken by the
Israelites and given up to the Philistines. More than that, the
Jordan valley ceased to afford the protection which up to this time
it had supplied against enemies from the west. For the most part,
the trans-Jordanic tribes were exposed to quite a different set of
enemies. It was the Syrians from the north, the Moabites and the
Ammonites from the east, and the Midianites and Amalekites from the
remoter deserts, that were usually the foes of Reuben, Gad, and
Manasseh. But on this occasion a new foe assailed them. The
Philistines actually crossed the Jordan, and the rich pastures of
Gilead and Bashan, with the flocks and herds that swarmed upon them,
became the prey of the uncircumcised. Thus the terror of the
Philistines, hitherto confined to the western portion of the
country, was spread, with all its attendant horrors, over the length
and breadth of Israel. We get a vivid view of the state of the
country when David was called to take charge of it. And we get a
vivid view of the worse than embarrassment, the fatal crime, into
which David would have been led if he had remained in the Philistine
camp and taken any part in this campaign.
How utterly crushed the Philistines considered the Israelites to be,
and how incapable of striking any blow in their own defense, is
apparent from the humiliating treatment of the bodies of Saul and
his sons, the details of which are given in this chapter and in the
parallel passage in 1 Chronicles (chap. 10). If there had been any
possibility of the Israelites being stung into a new effort by the
dishonour done to their king and princes, that dishonour would not
have been so terribly insulting. But there was no such possibility.
The treatment was doubly insulting. Saul's head, severed from his
body, was put in the temple of Dagon (1 Chron. 10.); his armour was
hung up in the house of Ashtaroth; and his body was fastened to the
wall of Beth-shan. The same treatment seems to have been bestowed on
his three sons. The other part of the insult arose from the
idolatrous spirit in which all this was done. The tidings of the
victory were ordered to be carried to the house of their idols as
well as to their people (l Sam. 21:9). The trophies were displayed
in the temples of these idols. The spirit of vaunting, which had so
roused David against Goliath because he defied the armies of the
living God, appeared far more offensively than ever. Not only was
Israel defeated, but in the view of the Philistines Israel's God as
well Dagon and Ashtaroth had triumphed over Jehovah. The humiliation
suffered in the days when the ark of God brought such calamities to
them and their gods was now amply avenged. The image of Dagon was
not found lying on its face, all shattered save the stump, after the
heads of Saul and his sons had been placed in his temple. Yes, and
the nobles at least of the Philistines would boast that the
slaughter of Goliath by David, and the placing of his head and his
armour near Jerusalem - probably in the holy place of Israel - were
amply avenged. Well was it for David, we may say again, that he had
no share in this terrible battle! Henceforth undoubtedly there would
be no more truce on his part towards the Philistines. Had they not
dishonoured the person of his king? had they not insulted the dead
body of Jonathan his noble friend? had they not hurled new defiance
against the God of Israel? had they not spread robbery and
devastation over the whole length and breadth of the country, and
turned every happy family into a group of cowering slaves? Were this
people to be any longer honoured with his friendship? "O my soul,
come not thou into their secret; unto their assembly, mine honour,
be not thou united!"
The only redeeming incident, in all this painful narrative, is the
spirited enterprise of the men of Jabesh-gilead, coming to Beth-shan
by night, removing the bodies of Saul and his sons from the wall,
and burning them with all honour at Jabesh, Beth-shan was a
considerable distance from Gilboa, where Saul and his sons appear to
have fallen; but probably it was the largest city in the
neighbourhood, and therefore the best adapted to put the remains of
the king and the princes to open shame. Jabesh-gilead was somewhere
on the other side of the Jordan, distant from Beth-shan several
miles. It was highly creditable to its people that, after a long
interval, the remembrance of Saul's first exploit, when he relieved
them from the cruel threats of the Ammonites, was still strong
enough to impel them to the gallant deed which secured honourable
burial for the bodies of Saul and his sons. We are conscious of a
reverential feeling rising in our hearts toward this people as we
think of their kindness to the dead, as if the whole human race were
one family, and a kindness done nearly three thousand years ago were
in some sense a kindness to ourselves.
That first exploit of Saul's, rescuing the men of Jabesh-gilead,
seems never to have been surpassed by any other enterprise of his
reign. As we now look back on the career of Saul, which occupies so
large a portion of this book, we do not find much to interest or
refresh us. He belonged to the order of military kings. He was not
one of those who were devoted to the intellectual, or the social, or
the religious elevation of his kingdom. His one idea of a king was
to rid his country of its enemies. "He fought," we are told,
"against all his enemies on every side, against Moab, and against
the children of Ammon, and against Edom, and against the king of
Zobah, and agairst the Philistines: and whithersoever he turned
himself he vexed them. And he did valiantly and smote Amalek, and
delivered Israel out of the hands of them that spoiled them." That
success gave him a good name as king, but it did not draw much
affection to him; and it had more of evil than in conferring on them
positive good. Royalty bred in Saul what it bred in most kings of
the East, an imperious temper, a despotic will. Even in his own
family he played the despot. And if he played the despot at home he
did so not less in public. All that we can say in his favour is,
that he did not carry his despotism so far as many. But his jealous
and in so far despotic temper could not but have had an evil effect
on his people. We cannot suppose that when jealousy was so deep in
his nature David was the only one of his officers who experienced
it. The secession of so many very able men to David, about the time
when he was with the Philistines, looked as if Saul could not but be
jealous of any man who rose to high military eminence. That Saul was
capable of friendly impulses is very different from saying that his
heart was warm and winning. The most vital want in him was the want
of godliness. He had little faith in the nation as God's nation,
God's heritage. He had little love for prophets, or for men of
faith, or for any who attached great importance to moral and
spiritual considerations. His persecution of David and his murder of
the priests are deep stains than can never be erased. And that
godless nature of his became worse as he went on. It is striking
that the last transaction in his reign was a decided failure in the
very department in which he had usually excelled. He who had gained
what eminence he had as a military king, utterly failed, and
involved his people in utter humiliation, in that very department.
His abilities failed him because God had forsaken him. The
Philistines whom he had so often defeated crushed him in the end. To
him the last act of life was very different from that of Samson -
Samson conquering in his death, Saul defeated and disgraced in his.
Need we again urge the lesson? "Them that honour Me I will honour;
but they that despise Me shall be lightly esteemed." You dare not
leave God out in your estimate of the forces that bear upon your
life. You dare not give to Him a secondary place. God must have the
first place in your regards. Are you really honouring Him above all,
prizing His favour, obeying His will, trusting in His word? Are you
even trying, amid many mortifying failures, to do so? It is not the
worst life that numbers many I failure, many a confession, many a
prayer for mercy and for grace to help in time of need, provided
always your heart is habitually directed to God as the great end of
existence, the Pole Star by which your steps are habitually to be
directed, the Sovereign whose holy will must be your great rule, the
Pattern whose likeness should be stamped on your hearts, the God and
Father of your Lord Jesus Christ, whose love, and favour, and
blessing are evermore the best and brightest inheritance for all the
children of men.
End of Vol. I
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