Sixth Sunday After Pentecost 2 Samuel 1:1,17-27 July 1, 2018 “Two Stories of Death”

This chapter of the second book of Samuel has been chopped up by the lectionary collectors so as to avoid the tale of the death of Saul as recounted by the wandering Amalekite who claims not only to be an eyewitness to the death but also tells David that he, the Amalekite, performed the killing himself. The lectionary draws our attention to the fine poem that David composed to celebrate/mourn Saul’s demise along with the death of Saul’s son, Jonathan. That poem is an excellent composition, serving both to claim that David and Saul were never truly enemies (a bold lie!), and that Jonathan was a truly special friend of David’s, whose love “passed the love of women.” The careful reader should note however that David in the poem is quite clear that he is mourning Jonathan’s “love for me” (2 Sam.1:26), not any supposed love he had for Jonathan. It is striking that nowhere in the long story is it ever said that David loved Jonathan. I would suggest that David used Jonathan just as he uses everyone who crosses his path on his way to absolute power. In addition, David’s poem also urges no one to help the hated Philistines to find any joy in their victory, thus separating David from Israel’s enemy, an enemy with whom he had lived for the preceding 18 months! The poem thus serves several purposes all at the same time.

But my created story this week involves the so-called two accounts of Saul’s death. It was common in the time of traditional biblical criticism to assume that 1 Sam.31 and 2 Sam.1 contained two different accounts of Saul’s murder by the Philistines. After all, it was reasoned, the Bible is filled with double accounts of events from different sources, beginning with the two creation stories of Gen.1-2. However, that is plainly not the case in the Samuel stories. The tale of 1 Sam.31 is the one we should trust; those are the facts of Saul’s death. The story of 2 Sam.1 is a first-person tale out of the mouth of a man who thinks he has much to gain from the new king of the land. Horribly, he is quite wrong, as that king has him butchered right in front of the king’s eyes. In today’s parlance, 1 Sam.31 represents the facts of the matter, while 2 Sam.1 is fake news, or as Colbert has it, a twisted piece of “truthiness.”

Saul fought hard and long and well, but he soon was surrounded by the Philistine scum on Mt. Gilboa, that place where the cruel Samuel had humiliated and rejected him some time before. Saul stood in his full height, threatened by Philistine warriors, shouting and screaming for his blood, brandishing their iron spears and short swords, looking for a weakness in Saul’s defense. Out of the corner of his eye, Saul watched as his sons were brutally dispatched, Jonathan and Abinadab and Malchishua, his three eldest, excellent soldiers each one. As he turned his full attention to his deadly peril, several arrows, shot from distance, flew passed his shield and buried themselves deep into his left shoulder and right thigh. With a roar of pain, he collapsed onto his knees, and the savages moved in for the kill. In desperation, the deeply religious Saul shouted out to his armor bearer, hovering nearby, “Kill me now; I do not want these foul heathen to have the pleasure of my death!” But the man was terrified to kill his monarch, knowing that the murder of a king was anathema to Israel, leading to the certain execution of the one who dared such a thing. Saul was left with no choice. Planting his massive sword into the soil in front of him, he threw himself on its point, cutting his great heart in two just before the Philistine swords pierced his body from every side. Saul died by his own hand, depriving the Philistines of a final victory.

After the battle ended finally, the victors combed the site for any worthwhile objects as tokens of triumph or perhaps to sell at a future market in Gath or Ashkelon. When two drunken soldiers happened on Saul’s huge corpse, they with a furious irony, cut off his head, shouting, “Not the tallest in Israel now, are you?” With repulsive savagery they also cut off his hands and feet and dragged his mutilated body to a small Philistine desert outpost, Beth-Shan, as a proclamation of Philistine power and as a warning to any would-be opponents of the all-powerful Philistines.

Many suns before this horrifying defeat, Saul had rescued a tiny Transjordanian hamlet called Jabesh-Gilead. Those villagers never forgot Saul’s victory on their behalf, so when they heard about the Israelite debacle, and the monstrous acts performed on Saul’s dead body, they travelled all night long and secretly stole the body from Beth- Shan, and carrying it back to their village, buried it with full military honors under a famous tree and fasted and mourned for seven days. Thus did Saul’s life end with no Israelite celebration or mourning. Saul died alone, at his own hand, and was buried in a foreign land.

Meanwhile, a wandering Amalekite, a battle scavenger, passed quietly and unobtrusively among the Philistine warriors on Gilboa, and happened on Saul’s crown and armlet, buried in the muddy soil of the mountain. Immediately, this clever man saw these objects as tickets to his own possible high position in the entourage of the new king, David. All knew that this David, a rival of Saul’s, was destined to succeed the first king of the land, even though his stay at the Philistine city of Ziklag during Saul’s tremendous defeat at the hands of those same Philistines was a troubling fact. Well, all knew that Saul wished to kill David, so one could hardly blame him for seeking a safe refuge from the maddened king. And it soon became quite clear that David had had no part in the battle against Saul, refusing to join the ranks of the Philistines. “Refuse” may not be quite the right word to describe what in fact happened; David offered to join the fight but was rejected by certain Philistine captains who did not trust the Israelite warrior enough to fight alongside him against his own people. One could imagine that David heaved a great sigh of relief at his rejection, though outwardly he expressed deep grief that he was not allowed to prove his loyalty to his Philistine master, Achish. Just one more sign, the Amalekite thought, of that man’s unmatched cleverness. Who else could be the next king but David?

So he brought the royal jewelry into David’s tent and concocted a highly colorful tale about the death of Saul just to please this David, who was known to love a good story. He claimed that he “happened” to be on Gilboa just at the time to witness the final acts of the battle. He saw Saul, who asked the Amalekite to kill him, because he knew his life was at an end. So, out of deep mercy, the man had dispatched the king and had brought his crown and armlet to David as a small token of his merciful act of murder and as a present to the mighty David.

David’s eyes narrowed, and his strangely red head shook with fury as he shouted at the man, “How did you, you foreigner, think you had the right to lay your filthy hands on YHWH’s anointed?” And with a small wink, one of David’s massive bodyguards unsheathed his sword and thrust it deep into the Amalekite’s belly; he died almost immediately. “Your blood be on your own head, you foul man, in that you did not refrain from murdering YHWH’s anointed one,” David shouted for all to hear. After all, he thought, it will hardly do to create a precedent where YHWH’s anointed ones may be murdered so easily. David, too, is YHWH’s anointed; let no one forget that.

These two stories are nothing less than brilliant uses of literary irony, and have much to teach in our day. Facts must be separated from pseudo “facts” if we are to maintain our stance in reality. We can never allow half-truths to rule in our lives, lest we find no lasting fixed norms by which we continue to live together in hopeful peace and harmony.