1. but his father he did not tell. One assumes that his father would have forbidden him to go out on so dangerous a mission, but there is also an implicit contrast between Saul, sitting under the pomegranate tree, hesitant to act in the face of the superior forces of the enemy, and Jonathan, prepared to execute a daring commando raid.

3. Ahijah son of Ahitub brother of Ichabod. The genealogy here casts a certain suspect light on Saul: the priest who accompanies him to the battlefield, and on whose prognostication he relies, belongs to the blighted—and rejected—house of Eli.

bearer of the ephod. The title, noseʾ ephod, is formally parallel to “armor bearer,” noseʾ kelim, and so suggests a contrast between Saul, who relies on divination, and Jonathan, who relies on his weapons.

4. the pass through which Jonathan sought to cross over. The Philistines and the Israelites are encamped on the tops of two steep hills facing each other, with a deep gully, or wadi, running between them. Jonathan and his armor bearer are able to make their way down the slope unseen by taking cover among the crags and under overhangs. But Jonathan realizes that there will be a moment of truth in this tactic, for when they reach the floor of the gully, they will be “exposed” (verse 8) to the Philistine outpost.

5. loomed. The Hebrew mutsaq means literally “column.” It might conceivably be a scrambled scribal repetition of the next Hebrew word in the text, mitsafon, “from the north.”

6. these uncircumcised. This designation for the Philistines is of course contemptuous. Its spirit is precisely reflected, from the other side of the ethnic barrier, in Othello’s reference to a Turk he killed in battle as a “circumcised dog.”

7. Do whatever your heart inclines—here I am with you, my heart as yours. The translation follows the reading of the Septuagint. The Masoretic Text conveys the same general idea, though a bit less coherently: “Do whatever is in your heart, incline you—here I am with you as your heart.”

10. that will be the sign for us. Readers from the Talmud to our own times have construed this as a kind of divination. It is far more likely that a further contrast is implied between Saul, who depends on divination, and Jonathan, who is thinking in pragmatic military terms: if they invite us to come up to them, that will be our great opportunity; if they order us to await their descent, we may have no recourse (except, perhaps, flight at the last moment).

11. Look, Hebrews are coming out of the holes where they’ve been hiding. These words accord perfectly with the report in 13:6 of the Israelites hiding in every nook and cranny, and also vividly express the contempt of the Philistines for the Hebrews, whom they depict as so many vermin. The contempt is extended in the taunting challenge to Jonathan and his lad in the next verse.

13. Jonathan climbed up on his hands and knees. Although it is not easy to reconstruct the exact tactic of surprise, this notation makes clear that instead of walking up the slope directly to the Philistine outpost, Jonathan and his armor bearer manage to slip off to one side and make their way up the slope by a circuitous route, crouching and crawling in order to take shelter among the rocks, and thus come upon the outpost undetected.

14. the first toll of dead. The literal meaning of the Hebrew is “the first blow.”

with arrows and rocks of the field. The translation adopts the reading of the Septuagint. The Masoretic Text has here “within about half a furrow long, an acre [?] of field,” but that sequence of Hebrew words looks scrambled.

15. terror shook. The Hebrew ḥaradah means both terror and shaking.

dire terror. The Hebrew is literally “terror of God,” but the latter word, ’elohim, serves as an intensifier. In any case, the idiom functions as a kind of pun—dire terror is terror caused by God.

16. going off yonder. The translation presupposes halom (“yonder”), a repeated word in this episode, instead of the Masoretic wahalom, which could mean either, asyntactically, “and yonder” or “and hitting” (that is, the Philistines were going on, hitting each other).

18. Bring forth the ephod. The Masoretic Text, both in this clause and the next, has “Ark of God” instead of “ephod,” but the reading of the Septuagint, ephod, is compelling on several grounds. We have been informed earlier that the Ark of God was left, not to be moved for the foreseeable future, at Kiriath-Jearim. The Ark was not an instrument of divination, like the ephod, and what Saul wants Ahijah to do here is to divine. It is possible that Ahijah’s lineal connection with the keepers of the Ark at Shiloh led some early transmitter of the text to align this episode with the earlier story in which the Ark—quite misguidedly—was brought out from Shiloh to the battlefield. The Masoretic Text also reads, asyntactically, “for the Ark of God on that day was, and the Israelites,” whereas the Septuagint, far more coherently, has “for on that day he was bearing the ephod before the Israelites.”

19. Pull back your hand. That is, desist from the act of divination you have begun—it is no longer necessary, for the auditory evidence of the Philistine rout has reached our ears.

20. and, look, every man’s sword was against his fellow. This spectacle of total, self-mutilating panic (mehumah) in the camp of the enemy is a recurrent motif that goes back to Judges (compare the effect of Gideon’s surprise attack on the Midianite camp), and is a kind of narrative realization of God’s direct intervention in battle to grant victory to Israel. The foundational instance of this motif is the victory at the Sea of Reeds in Exodus.

21. Hebrews who were previously with the Philistines. Given the subject status of the Israelites, it is not surprising that some of them would have been conscripted by the Philistines, either as soldiers or to perform menial tasks for the troops. They are referred to here as “Hebrews” because that is how their Philistine masters would have referred to them.

24. And the men of Israel were hard-pressed. The explanation for being hard-pressed is not certain. The Hebrew term, nigas, most naturally refers to being at a military disadvantage, but here the Israelites appear to have the upper hand. The other possibility is that the men are weak from hunger, not having had the opportunity to eat in their hot pursuit of the Philistines. The oath Saul exacts would then compound this predicament. It should be said that the Septuagint reflects a different text for this entire clause: “And Saul committed a great blunder on that day.”

Cursed be the man who eats food. As we shall have occasion to see later in the David narrative, it was a fairly common practice (though by no means an automatic one) for fighting men to take on themselves a vow of abstinence from food, in order to enter the battle in what amounted to a state of dedicated ritual purity. But Saul in this instance makes a miscalculation, imposing a fast on hungry men, in an effort to force the hand of divinity. (Thus the Septuagint’s version of the first clause of this verse might be regarded as an interpretive gloss on the lapidary formulation of the received text.)

25. And the whole country came into the forest. This sounds as odd in the Hebrew as in translation because “country” (haʾarets) is not an idiomatic term for “people.” Extensive textual surgery yields this conjectural reconstruction of an original clause: “and there was honeycomb on the ground.” An additional difficulty in this passage is that the common Hebrew term yaʿar, “forest,” has a rare homonym that means honeycomb. (In verse 27, the term that occurs is yaʿarah, which is unambiguous both because with the feminine suffix it can refer only to honeycomb and because it is joined with devash, “honey.”) But the received text in our verse has the preposition “into” (b^e), which presumes that yaʿar means “forest” and not “honeycomb.”

27. his eyes lit up. The idiom used for the refreshing effect of a taste of food is a pointed one because, as Shimon Bar-Efrat has noted, the verb “to light up” (the Hebrew verb ʾor) plays antithetically on Saul’s “cursed (ʾarur) be the man.”

29. My father has stirred up trouble. The verb ʿakhar that is used here is doubly important. Etymologically, it means “to muddy,” as in stirring up muck in a pond. Thus, it is an antithesis to the lighting up of the eyes Jonathan has just experienced through partaking of food. It is also the verb Jephthah invokes when he sees it is his daughter who has come out to greet him: “and you have joined ranks with my troublers” (Judges 11:35). The echo sets up a network of intertextual links with the Jephthah story: here, too, a father who is a military leader seeks to influence the outcome of the battle by a rash vow that is an unwitting death sentence on his own child.

31. And they struck down the Philistines. Although the form of the two verbs does not indicate it, the narrative logic of the scene compels us to construe this sentence as a pluperfect summary of the day’s action, responding to Jonathan’s reference to the “toll” (literally, “blow”) exacted from the Philistines.

32. the troops pounced on the booty . . . ate them together with the blood. The first verb here has pejorative force, being generally used for birds of prey descending on their victims. Biblical law repeatedly prohibits the consumption of meat together with the blood because the blood is regarded as the sacred stuff of life. The slaughtering on the ground here would make it more difficult to allow the blood to drain off, as would have been done in slaughtering on a stone platform or altar. (Note Saul’s correction of the practice in verses 33–34.) Jonathan’s tasting a bit of honey thus leads to an orgy of gluttonous consumption of meat with blood. This consequence attaches an association of violation of sacred law to Jonathan’s act, but the ultimate fault lies with Saul, who by imposing a fast on already famished men has set them up to abandon all restraint the moment the taboo against eating is broken.

34. what he had in hand. This accords with the Septuagint, ʾasher beyado, against the Masoretic, “his bull in his hand,” shoro beyado.

37. And Saul inquired of God . . . And He did not answer him. Although it was extremely common for military leaders everywhere in the ancient Near East to consult an oracle before going into battle, Saul’s failed inquiry here participates in a larger pattern in his story: he is constantly seeking knowledge of what is about to happen (as in his quest for a seer to help him locate the asses at the very beginning), but this knowledge is repeatedly withheld from him.

38. wherein is this offense. Saul assumes that the oracle did not respond because someone among his troops committed some “offense.” The narrator does not necessarily endorse this assumption.

39. were it in Jonathan my son. “It” refers to the just mentioned “offense.” Is this a flourish of rhetorical emphasis, or, as J. P. Fokkelman has suggested, does it open the possibility that Saul has Jonathan in mind? In the immediately preceding episode, after all, Jonathan has gone out on a military operation without permission. Jonathan now is brought forth as the possible perpetrator of some further, not yet specified offense, which will prove to be the tasting of the honey. In any case, there seems to be some deep ambivalence between father and son well before the appearance of David at court.

41. LORD, God of Israel! Why did You not answer Your servant today? If there is guilt in me or in Jonathan my son . . . show Urim, and if it is in Your people Israel, show Thummim. This version comes from the Septuagint. The Masoretic Text here has the short and cryptic “Show Thammim [sic].” Saul’s frustrated reference to his failure to receive an answer from the oracle makes a great deal of narrative sense (see the comment on verse 37). The Septuagint version also makes intelligible the process of oracular lottery. The Urim and Thummim were two divinatory objects attached to the ephod, probably in a special compartment. They may have been in the form of stones or tokens with lettering on them. They provided indication of binary oppositions: thus the question addressed to the oracle had to take the form of yes or no, x or y. The opposition may have been underscored by the fact that Urim and Thummim begin, respectively, with the first and last letter of the Hebrew alphabet. More speculatively, Urim might be linked with ʾaror, “to curse,” and Thummim with the root t-m-m, whole or innocent.

the lot fell on Jonathan and Saul. The same idiom of being “caught” by the lot that was used for Saul’s election recurs here in the devolution of the curse on Jonathan.

42. Cast between me and Jonathan. Since the Urim and Thummim can provide only binary responses, it is necessary to divide again into two alternatives in order to get an answer.

43. indeed tasted . . . a bit of honey. Jonathan begins by clearly and emphatically admitting responsibility, using the infinitive absolute followed by the verb (literally, “taste I have tasted”). But he chooses, with precision, the minimal verb “taste” rather than “eat” and holds back its minimal object, “a bit of honey,” for the very end of the sentence.

45. And the troops said to Saul, “Will Jonathan die.” As several commentators have observed, this is a precise reversal of the incident after Saul’s victory over Nahash, in which the troops sought to kill dissidents and Saul saved their lives. Now he has become the severe autocrat, and his son’s well-earned popularity with the troops saves the prince.

47. Saul had taken hold of the kingship. The verb used, lakad, is the same one just invoked for the process of being caught, trapped, taken hold of, in the divine lottery. Saul himself was “caught” for kingship. Now, through conquest, he catches, or secures, the kingship. There is thus surely an undertone of ambiguity in this report of his success as monarch.

he would inflict punishment. The Hebrew yarshiʿa usually means to condemn someone as guilty in a court of justice. But a related idiom, “to do justice,” ʿasot shephatim, also means to carry out punitive acts against an enemy. The Masoretic version is to be preferred to the Septuagint’s yoshiʿa, “he would rescue,” because in this narrative, God, not Saul, is represented as the rescuer. Apparently, the implication is that he carried out punishing expeditions against Israel’s enemies to the east of the Jordan without actually conquering them, as David was to do.

49. And Saul’s sons. This entire notice of Saul’s family and of his conquests is placed as a formal marker of conclusion to the body of the Saul story. What follows is the episode that will definitively disqualify him for the throne in Samuel’s eyes, and then David will enter the scene. The episode in which Saul pronounces a death sentence on his son and heir heralds the climactic encounter with Samuel over Amalek in which the prophet will pronounce the end of Saul’s incipient dynasty. Eventually, Saul and Jonathan, the parties jointly indicated by the first cast of the Urim, will perish in battle on the same day.

50. Abiner. A variant vocalization of Abner.

52. And the fighting against the Philistines. Saul has greater success on the eastern front, but he is unable to subdue the Philistines. In the end, they will destroy him in their victory at Gilboa.

when Saul saw any warrior . . . he would gather him to himself. This report of constant military conscription indicates the institutionalization of the monarchy and also accords with Samuel’s warning about the burden of conscription that the king would impose.