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Context No. 687 of 4322 · 1 Samuel

Context · Reflection

1 Samuel 22:6-10: in context

6Saul heard that David was discovered, with the men who were with him. Now Saul was sitting in Gibeah, under the tamarisk tree in Ramah, with his spear in his hand, and all his servants were standing around him. 7Saul said to his servants who stood around him, “Hear now, you Benjamites! Will the son of Jesse give everyone of you fields and vineyards? Will he make you all captains of thousands and captains of hundreds? 8Is that why all of you have conspired against me, and there is no one who discloses to me when my son makes a treaty with the son of Jesse, and there is none of you who is sorry for me, or discloses to me that my son has stirred up my servant against me, to lie in wait, as it is today?” 9Then Doeg the Edomite, who stood by the servants of Saul, answered and said, “I saw the son of Jesse coming to Nob, to Ahimelech the son of Ahitub. 10He inquired of the LORD for him, gave him food, and gave him the sword of Goliath the Philistine.”

Saul is coming apart. David has slipped through his hands again, and this scene finds the king sitting under a tamarisk tree at Gibeah with his spear in his hand, the spear he keeps reaching for, surrounded by his servants. What comes out of him is pure self-pity. He turns to his fellow Benjamites and asks whether the son of Jesse will really give them fields and commands, then accuses them all of conspiring against him. My own son has made a treaty with my enemy, he says, and none of you is sorry for me, none of you tells me anything. He is hunting an innocent man, and in his own telling he is the one being wronged.

Into that stew of grievance steps an outsider looking to be useful. Doeg the Edomite, Saul's herdsman, says he saw David come to the priest Ahimelech at Nob, who prayed for him, fed him, and handed him the sword of Goliath. It is the pretext Saul wanted. In the next scene Saul's own soldiers will refuse to raise a hand against the priests of the LORD, and it is Doeg, the foreigner who supplied the report, who carries out the slaughter. The king soaked in self-pity, and the informer who hands him a reason, are about to get eighty-five priests killed.

Saul, hunting an innocent man, could still cast himself as the one betrayed and unloved. When I am the one in the wrong, how easily do I rewrite myself as the wounded party?

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