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Context No. 220 of 4322 · 1 Samuel

Context · Reflection

1 Samuel 23:12-18: in context

12Then David said, “Will the men of Keilah deliver me and my men into the hand of Saul?” The LORD said, “They will deliver you up.” 13Then David and his men, who were about six hundred, arose and departed out of Keilah and went wherever they could go. Saul was told that David had escaped from Keilah; and he gave up going there. 14David stayed in the wilderness in the strongholds, and remained in the hill country in the wilderness of Ziph. Saul sought him every day, but God didn’t deliver him into his hand. 15David saw that Saul had come out to seek his life. David was in the wilderness of Ziph in the woods. 16Jonathan, Saul’s son, arose and went to David into the woods, and strengthened his hand in God. 17He said to him, “Don’t be afraid, for the hand of Saul my father won’t find you; and you will be king over Israel, and I will be next to you; and Saul my father knows that also.” 18They both made a covenant before the LORD. Then David stayed in the woods and Jonathan went to his house.

David is on the run with a band of about six hundred men, moving from one hideout to the next while Saul hunts him every single day. He has just had to abandon Keilah, a town he had rescued from the Philistines, because God warned him its own citizens would hand him over to save themselves. He is in the woods of Ziph, and Saul has come out to kill him.

Then Jonathan comes. By every ordinary calculation Jonathan is David's rival. He is Saul's son, the crown prince, the man who stands to inherit the throne David has been promised. Instead he goes out into the woods to find the fugitive, and the text says he strengthened David's hand in God. He tells David not to be afraid, that Saul will not find him, that David will be king over Israel and Jonathan will be second to him, and that his own father knows all of this. The heir talks the exile through his fear and hands him the throne in advance.

They make a covenant before the LORD, and then Jonathan goes back to his house. This is the last time the two of them will ever meet. One friend used his one visit not to secure his own future but to steady someone else's. When somebody near me is rising into a place I wanted for myself, can I go and strengthen their hand in God?

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