1. Saul was [] years old . . . and [-] two years he reigned. The Masoretic Text, notoriously defective at this point, says “Saul was a year old . . . and two years he reigned.” This whole sentence is absent from the Septuagint, leading one to suspect that the redactor here stitched into the narrative a textual fragment in which there were lacunae in the numbers that he did not presume to fill in.

3. Jonathan struck down the Philistine prefect. Though the Hebrew uses the standard idiom for killing someone in battle, the context of Israel’s subservience to the Philistines suggests that this was an act of assassination, intended to trigger general rebellion. Jonathan enters the narrative without introduction. The neophyte king had himself seemed a rather young man, but with the casualness about chronology characteristic of the biblical storyteller, Saul now has a grown son.

in Gibeah. The text reads “Geba,” but the two names, which continue to alternate, appear to be variants of the same name.

Saul blew the ram’s horn . . . saying, “Let the Hebrews hear!” The ram’s horn, which produces shrill, piercing sounds, was often used for a call to arms. The “hearing” of the Israelites is counterpointed to the just reported “hearing” of the Philistines. “Hebrews” is usually the term used by foreigners for the Israelites. As J. P. Fokkelman has observed, Saul invokes “a name used in contempt by enemies such as Pharaoh and the Philistines . . . in order to arouse his people’s pride and fortify their will to resist.”

4. Saul has struck down. Though Jonathan was the assassin, Saul, as political leader of the rebel forces, is credited with responsibility for the act.

Israel has become repugnant. The literal meaning of the Hebrew idiom is very much like “to be in bad odor with,” but that antiquated English idiom has a certain Victorian fussiness not suitable to this narrator.

5. thirty thousand chariots. This inflated figure is reduced to three thousand in the Septuagint.

6. in dugouts. The Hebrew term tsariaḥ appears only here and in Judges 9:46. Although the context in Judges has led some interpreters to construe it as a tower, extrabiblical evidence from Late Antiquity argues for a chamber, or sepulcher, hewn out of rock.

7. And Hebrews had crossed. Here the narrator’s use of “Hebrews” may have been encouraged by the attraction of a folk-etymological pun: ʿivrim (Hebrews) ʿavru (had crossed).

Saul was still at Gilgal. This cultic site is, according to a common identification, near Jericho in the Jordan Valley. The “Hebrews”—perhaps the general population and not the army—who cross the Jordan appear to be fleeing the Philistines to the relative safety of the territory of Gad and Gilead to the northeast.

8. the fixed time Samuel had set. The words “had set” (one word in the Hebrew) are lacking in the Masoretic Text but are supplied by two of the ancient versions. The fact that the Hebrew word in question, sam, has the same consonants as the first two consonants of Samuel’s name may have led to the scribal error. The entire story of Samuel’s fixing a period of seven days for Saul to await him at Gilgal before the offering of sacrifices goes back to 10:8. The fulfillment of that initial instruction to the new king has been interrupted by the election of Saul by lottery, his campaign against the Ammonites, and the renewal of the kingship at Gilgal. One must assume either that the order to await Samuel at Gilgal was for an eventual meeting at an unspecified future time or that one literary strand of the Saul story has been interrupted by the splicing in of other strands (chapters 11–12).

the troops began to slip away from him. Battle could not be engaged without first entreating the favorable disposition of the deity through sacrifice (compare Saul’s words of explanation in verse 12). Saul’s men are beginning to give up hope and to desert; so he feels, with good reason, that he can afford to wait no longer.

10. as he finished offering the burnt offering that, look, Samuel was coming. The timing gives the distinct appearance of a cat-and-mouse game played by Samuel. He is not absolutely late, but he has waited until the last possible moment—sometime well into the seventh day (or it might even be the eighth day), by which time Saul has been obliged to take matters into his own hands.

12. I took hold of myself. The Hebrew verb hitʾapeq means to force yourself to do, or to refrain from doing, something. The same verb is used when the tearful Joseph “could no longer hold himself in check” in the presence of his brothers (Genesis 45:1).

13. Had you but kept the command of the LORD. The Masoretic Text has a declarative, “you have not kept,” but the structure of the whole sentence argues strongly for emending lo’ (“not”) to lu (“if” introducing a clause contrary to fact). Samuel flatly assumes that his own commands and the commandments of the LORD are entirely equivalent. In fact, it is he, not God, who has given Saul the elaborate instructions about waiting seven days at Gilgal. In a kind of prophet’s tantrum, Samuel insists again and again in this speech on the words “commanded” and “command.” (In verse 14, “appointed him prince” is literally “commanded him prince.”)

made your kingdom . . . unshaken forever. The Hebrew verb hekhin means both to establish and to keep on a firm foundation (makhon), and so it is misleading to translate it only as the initiating “to establish.”

14. your kingdom shall not stand. Samuel’s rage over the fact that Saul has offered the sacrifice derives from his construing that act as a usurpation of his own prerogatives as master of the cult (though there are other biblical instances of kings who offer sacrifices). One suspects that Samuel has set up Saul for this “failure,” and that he would have been content only with a puppet king.

The LORD has already sought out for Himself a man after His own heart. Although this would have to be a veiled prediction of the advent of David, in naturalistic terms, the incensed Samuel is in a way bluffing: fed up with Saul, he announces to the king that God has already chosen a successor—about whom Samuel himself as yet knows nothing whatever, nor has he even had time for a communication from God that there will be a successor.

appointed him prince to His people. As Polzin shrewdly notes, David will later use these very words (2 Samuel 6:21) when he angrily tells Saul’s daughter Michal that it is he who has been divinely elected to replace her father.

15. to Gibeath-Benjamin. It looks improbable that Samuel would now go off after this confrontation to Gibeah, which is Saul’s hometown. The text at this point in the Septuagint has him going “on the way,” leaving the more likely outcome that he abandons Saul and his small handful of men at Gibeah to tackle the Philistines.

about six hundred men. By this point, 1400 have “slipped away.”

17. the Shual region. The name literally means “Foxland.”

18. Zeboim Valley. Or, Jackal Valley.

19. no smith could be found in all the land of Israel. This bit of background notation vividly reflects the abject status of the Israelites under Philistine domination. Ironsmiths are banned among them to prevent their developing the weaponry needed for rebellion.

20. his sickle. The reading used here is, as in the Septuagint, ḥermesho, instead of the Masoretic maḥareshato, “his plowshare,” which repeats the first term in the list.

21. the price of the sharpening was a pim. The italicized term occurs only here in the Bible, but the archaeologists have found stone weights marked pim, which is two-thirds of a shekel (here, evidently, a silver shekel). The Philistines, then, not only deprive the Israelites of the technology for making weapons but also reap a profit from their smithless vassals for the maintenance of the agricultural tools they need for their livelihood.

the three-pronged forks. A commonly proposed emendation yields “a third of a shekel for the forks and the axes and for the setting of the goads.” This change would make sense if in fact the sharpening of these implements were half the work of sharpening plowshares and mattocks, but that is not entirely clear.