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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadGreater Men and Women of the Bible by James Hastings: 276. Endor and Gilboa
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Endor and Gilboa
A point which may well be emphasized at this stage is this: The latter half of the First Book of Samuel has clearly been written with keen enthusiasm for the young captain who was in due course to be the founder of a new dynasty. Consequently, Saul appears only incidentally, and so we may be in some danger of failing to realize how great a work Saul had done. He must have knit together his kingdom during the years when David attracts all our attention. Though he fails to seize David, he is able to hunt him from place to place. In spite of the evident popularity which David enjoys, and in spite of his skill as a captain, there is no sign of any success gained by him against the forces of Saul.
We know not what may have been the feeling of the army at this juncture. But we are told that “when Saul saw the host of the Philistines, he was afraid, and his heart trembled greatly.” “The Spirit of the Lord,” which had roused him in his former years, had now departed from him. There was now no harp of the shepherd Psalmist to drive away the evil spirit; and “when Saul inquired of the Lord, the Lord answered him not”; no vision was vouchsafed to him in trance or dream, as before when he lay under the prophetic influence all night at Ramah; no intimation of the Divine will by the Urim and Thummim of the high priest's breastplate, for the house of Ithamar had been exterminated by the sword of Doeg, and its sole survivor, Abiathar, was following the fortunes of his fugitive rival; no consoling voice of the prophets of God, for Samuel, his ancient counsellor, had long since parted from him and had descended in mourning to his grave. Saul's courage is gone. He cannot hope, because he cannot pray. He feels that God has departed from him. Where clear eyes would have seen signs of promise, he discerns only signals of despair.
In this extremity the desperate man turned to a forbidden quarter. While he was still friendly with Samuel, we are told that, at Samuel's suggestion, he had forbidden all sorcery and witchcraft and all attempted foretelling of the future by magic spells and incantations and familiar spirits and invocations of the dead. Now Saul, in his desperation and his melancholy, turned in the hour of gloom and disaster to the very practices he had himself forbidden. At Endor lived a woman who claimed that she could raise the dead. To this woman Saul resolved to direct those prayers which he dared not address to God. He was torn with anxiety at the prospect of a battle on which everything hinged; he was in the blackness of gloom at the thought that God had hidden His face from him; he was faint from want of food: “he had eaten no bread all the day, nor all the night,” and in that weakened condition had had a long and probably dangerous journey over difficult ground. And so the wretched witch and the more wretched king stand face to face.
Even in this last act recorded of Saul on the night before his death there is a strange and mad confusion between a real desire to know the mind of God and a feeling that to him it could be declared only through some evil agent. He had a longing to see the friend of his youth, the true counsellor from whom he had severed himself, and when the witch produced some semblance of the departed prophet, his imagination quickly invested it with reality. He felt that the presence of the reprover and friend was there. “Why hast thou disquieted me, to bring me up?” The question may have been the ventriloquism of a charlatan bribed by the Philistines to practise upon Saul's superstition, and meant to check further inquiry. It may have been some sign from the unseen world. We do not know, and it does not matter. Saul believed that Samuel spoke, and the misery of it is, he believed that Samuel could love him when God had ceased to care for him; he believed there could be rain upon the grass when there was no water in the sea. Therefore his reply: “I am sore distressed; for the Philistines make war against me, and God is departed from me, and answereth me no more, neither by prophets, nor by dreams: therefore I have called thee, that thou mayest make known unto me what I shall do.”
But from the lips of the prophet came no words of comfort or hope. Saul was reminded of the past, reminded that only those things had come upon him which he had been assured would come if he went the way he had gone. He was reminded of Moses and the prophets, and warned to hear them, and told that he had but a night to listen. No gleam of hope from any outward change was given him. “To-morrow shalt thou and thy sons be with me.” “Then Saul fell straightway all along on the earth, and was sore afraid, because of the words of Samuel.”
After this single outburst of despair the monarch resumed the majesty of silence. He wrapped his curse about him and went forth into the night.
While in the Biblical account the woman remains anonymous, the rabbinical Midrash maintains that the witch of Endor was Zephaniah, the mother of Abner. That a supernatural appearance is here described is inferred from the repeated emphasis laid on the statement that Samuel had died and had been buried (1Sa_25:1; 1Sa_28:3), by which the assumption that Samuel was still living when summoned, is discredited. Still he was invoked during the first twelve months after his death, when, according to the Rabbis, the spirit still hovers near the body. In connexion with the incidents of the story, the Rabbis have developed the theory that the necromancer sees the spirit but is unable to hear his speech, while the person at whose instance the spirit is called hears the voice but fails to see; bystanders neither hear nor see. The outcry of the woman at the sight of Samuel was due to his rising in an unusual way-upright, not, as she expected, in a horizontal position.
The story throws light on the prevailing beliefs of primitive Israel concerning the possibility of summoning the dead and consulting them. Discussions concerning the historical veracity of this report, and attempts to reconcile its contents with natural laws by assuming that the woman palmed off some fraud on the excited king exhausted by previous fasting, miss the point of the Biblical account. The scene is really a satire on King Saul, and the summoning of the dead is introduced only incidentally. He, the destroyer of the necromancers, forsaken by Jahweh, himself repairs to a witch's house, but has only his pains for his trouble. Samuel refuses to help, and reiterates what Saul's fears had anticipated.1 [Note: E. G. Hirsch, in The Jewish Encyclopedia, v. 158.]
2. On the morrow there was some slight alteration in the disposition of the respective hosts. The Philistines moved towards Aphek, a little to the west of their camp; while the Israelites descended from the heights of Gilboa, and took up a position near the spring or fountain of Jezreel. Presently the battle was joined. Of the course of that battle we know no details. It ended in a complete and disastrous rout of the Israelites, on whom, destitute or nearly so of such aids, the cavalry and chariots must have inflicted terrible losses. Apparently, in spite of the Israelite advantage of ground, they were forced up the hill with great slaughter. Doubtless a body of devoted adherents fought desperately around Saul, as at Flodden, when the tide of battle was going sorely against Scotland,
Still the Scots around their king,
Unbroken, fought in desperate ring.
That Saul himself would fight as he never fought before we can well believe. Yet he has the pang of seeing his three sons, including his well-loved Jonathan, die at his side. Then the archers get his range, and he is sore wounded. Hope is gone even of inflicting more loss on the enemy before his own death. He can but die. The two accounts given of his death seem at first sight slightly contradictory. According to 1Sa_31:4, Saul, in the extremity of his despair, fell upon his sword and died; yet, according to 2Sa_1:10, he was slain at his own request by a wandering Amalekite. Probably Saul really died by his own hand, and the Amalekite, prowling on the field in search of plunder, found the dead body where it had fallen, and thought that his alleged slaughter of Saul would bring him a liberal reward from one who had been so long hunted down by the unfortunate king.
The Philistines had entered Esdraelon-doubtless by Megiddo. Had their aim been the invasion of the hill-country, they would have turned south-east to Jenin, and Saul would have met them there. That, instead, we find them striking north-east to Shunem, at the head of the Vale of Jezreel, proves that at least their first intention had to do with the Valley of the Jordan. Either they had come to subjugate all the low country, and so confine Israel, as the Canaanites did, to the hills, or else they sought to secure their caravan route to Damascus and the East, from Israel's descents upon it by the roads from Bezek to Bethshan and across Gilboa. In either case Saul must not be permitted to remain where he was, for from Gilboa he could descend with equal ease upon Esdraelon and the Valley of the Jordan. They attacked him, therefore, on his superior position. Both the narrative of the battle and the great Elegy in which the defeat was mourned imply that the fighting was upon the heights of Gilboa, and yet upon ground over which cavalry and chariots might operate. The Philistines could not carry Saul's position directly from Shunem, for that way the plain dips, and the deep bed of the stream intervenes and the rocks of Gilboa are steep and high. But they went round Jezreel, and attacked the promontory of the hill by the easier slopes and wadies to the south, which lead up to open ground about the village of Nuris, and directly above the 'Ain Jalûd. Somewhere on these slopes they must have encountered that desperate resistance which cost Israel the life of three of the king's sons; and somewhere higher up the gigantic king himself, wounded and pressed hard by the chariots and horsemen, yet imperious to the last, commanded his own death.1 [Note: G. A. Smith, Historical Geography of the Holy Land, 402.]
3. With the fall of Saul, Israel lost a hero who had begun his career with brilliance and great promise. He seemed to be called to do great things. A very talented nature, richly gifted, quick to decide, firm of hand, bold to venture, valiant in battle, animated with zeal for the greatness of Israel, and devoutly attached to Jehovah, he stopped suddenly short in his course, paralysed by a mysterious power. He suddenly showed himself unequal to the task that his nation and his crown imposed upon him, without our being able to say wherein exactly his weakness or his fault lay. But it is hardly to be doubted that the secret of his failure was, as in the case of Esau, his irreligion.
His character, indeed, is obscure, and we must be cautious while considering it; still, as Scripture is given us for our instruction, it is surely right to make the most of what we find there, and to form our judgment by such lights as we possess. It would appear, then, that Saul was never under the abiding influence of religion, or, in Scripture language, “the fear of God,” however he might be at times moved and softened. Some men are inconsistent in their conduct, as Samson, or as Eli, in a different way, and yet may have lived by faith, though a weak faith. Others have sudden falls, as David had. Others are corrupted by prosperity, as Solomon. But as to Saul, there is no proof that he had any deep-seated religious principle at all; rather, it is to be feared, his history is a lesson to us, that the “heart of unbelief” may exist in the very sight of God, may rule a man in spite of many natural advantages of character, in the midst of much that is virtuous, amiable, and commendable. For years the thought of God had meant less and less to Saul, and accordingly Saul had been more and more left to himself. And his end illustrates the stern words of Pro_1:25-27 :
“Ye have set at nought all my counsel,
And would none of my reproof:
I also will laugh at your calamity;
I will mock when your fear cometh;
When your fear cometh as desolation,
And your destruction cometh as a whirlwind.”
4. The affection which Saul in his better days had inspired came out touchingly even after he was dead. The great Benjamite's body and the bodies of his sons, which the Philistines dishonoured, were bravely rescued in a foray by their kinsmen from across the Jordan, the men of Jabesh-gilead. Their bones were reverently and sadly buried beneath a tree in Jabesh, from which King David ultimately brought them for burial in the ancestral sepulchre of Kish in the country of Benjamin in Zelah. Another tribute of affection to the Saul of earlier days was given in the beautiful lament of David, when the news reached him of Saul's and Jonathan's death. In that exquisite epitaph is no revenge or bitterness, no reprobation or dispraise. It calls up an earlier, brighter recollection of the conqueror beloved by his people, the delight of the daughters of Israel, of the heroism of father and of son, their lives, their undivided deaths. Let us think of him so; think of him as Handel must have felt when he penned for him the most moving funeral requiem the world has known. The auspicious and the hapless life alike put human judgment to the hush.
Ah! even yet I dream there lingers still
Through wildest storms, and wanderings of the will,
The man that God will own;
That loftiest hour thou canst not all forget,
That glory of the past is with thee yet,
That music from the Throne.
Yes, he shall own it in whose minstrel notes
A higher strain than priest's or prophet's floats,
The Spirit from on high;
His voice shall sing of father and of son,
Who still unsevered, soul and heart still one,
In death's dark chamber lie.
Lovely and pleasant yet our names shall be;
The guilt, the shame, the woe, the pain, shall flee;
And as the shadows fall,
Amid the surging storm, and battle's roar,
We with calm steps approach the eternal shore
Where peace reigns over all.1 [Note: E. H. Plumptre, Master and Scholar.]