A man of valor

 1 Samuel 31

A man of valor and the only ink Jonathan got in the recording of verse two was; “And the Philistines overtook Saul and his sons, and the Philistines struck down Jonathan and Abinadab and Malchi-shua, the sons of Saul.”  Jonathan is one of my heroes in the Bible and I want to know more about what happened.  Did he kill hundreds or maybe even a thousand Philistines before they killed him?  But Jonathan is not the key person in this account, it is King Saul, his dad, and he died much like he lived, full of fear, and not willing to trust God.

I know you have read the account of the archers wounding Saul, and he asks his armor-bearer to run him through with his sword, but he could not do that.  We find that the King fell on his sword; maybe that is where the Japanese came up with doing so.  Anyway, after the armor-bearer saw that Saul had killed himself he also died in the same way.

Now when the men of Israel saw that King Saul and his sons were dead, they turned tail and ran home to get mom and the kids and leave town on an extended vacation.  It is clear that God’s favor was withdrawn from Saul and that He was now in the process of fulfilling the promise He had made and spoke through His prophet Samuel.  In 2 Samuel we will see David’s reaction to the death of Saul and also the death of his friend Jonathan, but we have not finished chapter 31.

It was common practice for the army who was the victor to strip the bodies of the fallen and to take the valuables.  When they came upon Saul and his sons, let us go to 1 Chronicles 10:8-10 for the account of what happened.  “The next day, when the Philistines came to strip the slain, they found Saul and his sons fallen on Mount Gilboa. And they stripped him and took his head and his armor, and sent messengers throughout the land of the Philistines to carry the good news to their idols and to the people. And they put his armor in the temple of their gods and fastened his head in the temple of Dagon.”

That also was not uncommon in that day, but do you recall that Saul rescued from Nahash, king of Ammon in the city of Jabesh-gilead?  Well, those people held Saul in great honor and on the day that they heard what the Philistines had done to his body and the bodies of his sons, we also have that account in 1 Chronicles 10:11-12.  “But when all Jabesh-gilead heard all that the Philistines had done to Saul, all the valiant men arose and took away the body of Saul and the bodies of his sons, and brought them to Jabesh. And they buried their bones under the oak in Jabesh and fasted seven days.”  How did they pull that off?  We are not given the details, it must have been in the darkness of the night, but we do know they had repaid Saul in his death by this act of honoring his memory.

From the Back Porch,

Bob Rice

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