1. as he finished speaking with Saul. The speech referred to is the exchange between David and Saul after the vanquishing of Goliath. This is a clear instance in which the (late medieval) chapter division actually interrupts a narrative unit.

Jonathan loved him as himself. No reason is given, so one may infer that Jonathan was smitten by David’s personal charm and perhaps by the sheer glamour of his victory, which exceeded even Jonathan’s own military exploits. It is noteworthy that throughout this narrative David is repeatedly the object but never the subject of the verb “to love”—in this chapter, Jonathan, the people, and Michal are all said to love David.

3. And Jonathan, and David with him, sealed a pact. This is one of the most significant instances of the expressive grammatical pattern in which there is a plural subject with a singular verb, making the first member of the plural subject the principal agent: the initiative for the pact of friendship is Jonathan’s, and David goes along with it.

4. Jonathan took off the cloak. This gesture strongly invites comparison with Saul’s failed effort to dress David in his battle gear in the previous episode. This time David accepts the proffered garments and weapons: practically, they are presumably his own size, but he also is now ready to assume a regular role in the army. The first item Jonathan offers is his cloak, me‘il, the very piece of clothing Samuel associated symbolically with kingship. Bearing that in mind, J. P. Fokkelman has proposed that “with his cloak Jonathan is conveying to David the crown prince’s rights and claims to the throne.” Perhaps one should say that he is conveying these subliminally or proleptically rather than as a fully conscious act.

5. Saul set him over the men of war. The designation for fighting men is also the one Saul uses for Goliath. Moshe Garsiel has suggested that this may be a term for elite troops, and that later, when Saul appoints David captain of a thousand (verse 13), he is in effect transferring him to the position of an ordinary officer.

6. lutes. As is often the case with ancient musical instruments, the precise identification of the term is in doubt. The Hebrew shalishim derives from sheloshah, “three,” but it could refer either to a three-stringed lute, which was fairly common in the ancient Near East, or perhaps to a triangle.

8. To David . . . tens of thousands and to me . . . the thousands. It is a fixed rule in biblical poetry that when a number occurs in the first verset, it must be increased in the parallel verset, often, as here, by going up one decimal place. Saul shows himself a good reader of biblical poetry: he understands perfectly well that the convention is a vehicle of meaning, and that the intensification or magnification characteristic of the second verset is used to set David’s triumphs above his own. Saul, who earlier had made the mistake of listening to the voice of the people, now is enraged by the people’s words.

10. went into a frenzy. The verb here is the same one that refers to “speaking in ecstasy” or “prophesying” in the episode of Saul among the prophets, but in the present context only the connotation of raving and not that of revelation is relevant.

when David was playing as he was wont to. The present version of the story at this point seeks to integrate the account of David as victor over Goliath with the preceding report of David as Saul’s personal lyre player. Evidently, when he is not playing the lyre, he is sent out intermittently at the head of the elite troops. After this incident, Saul removes him entirely from the court by making him a regular commander. The one thing Saul cannot afford to do is to dispense with David’s brilliant services as a military leader. In the Hebrew, “was playing” is literally “was playing with his hand,” which sets up a neat antithesis to the spear in Saul’s hand (“with” and “in” are represented by the same particle, b^e in Hebrew).

11. Let me strike through David. Saul picks up the verb of striking from the song of the celebrant women that so galled him.

12. for the LORD was with him. This emphatic refrainlike phrase recalls the Joseph story (see especially Genesis 39), another tale of a handsome shepherd boy who ascends to regal grandeur. Like Joseph, David is repeatedly said to “succeed” (though different verbs are used in the two stories.) Allusions to the Joseph story will turn from this initial consonance to ironic dissonance.

15. Saul saw . . . and he dreaded him. Throughout this pivotal episode, Saul’s feelings and motives remain perfectly transparent—here, through the narrator’s report of his emotions, and in the next scene, through interior monologue. At the same time, David is pointedly left opaque. No word of his is reported when Jonathan gives him his cloak and battle gear. We know that Saul is afraid of David but not whether David is afraid of Saul, who, after all, has tried to kill him. And when David speaks in the next scene, it will be manifestly a speech framed for a public occasion, which leaves his real motives uncertain.

16. led them into the fray. The Hebrew says literally, “was going out and coming in before them,” an idiom that means to lead in battle.

17. Here is my eldest daughter, Merab. Only now is the promise of the hand of the king’s daughter for the vanquisher of Goliath implemented. But the fulfillment of that promise, as it turns out, is part of a plan to destroy David.

Let not my hand be against him. The interior monologue leaves no doubt about Saul’s intentions. Could it be that his very transparency as a political schemer, manifested in the means of narrative presentation, is a reflection of his incapacity in the harsh realm of politics? David, by contrast, knows how to veil his motives and intentions—a veiling replicated in the narrative strategies used to present him.

18. Who am I and who are my kin. The translation adopts a scholarly proposal of considerable currency to revocalize the Masoretic ḥayai, “my life” as ḥayi, “my kin,” a conjectured term based on the Arabic. David’s protestation of unworthiness recalls Saul’s when Samuel hinted he was going to confer the kingship on him. Perhaps these words are dictated by court etiquette, the commoner obliged to profess unworthiness when offered the honor of a royal connection. Perhaps the young David may actually feel unworthy of the honor. But it is also clearly in his interest to conceal from the jealous king any desire he may harbor to marry the king’s daughter, for such an alliance could be converted into an implicit claim to be successor to the throne.

20. And Michal the daughter of Saul loved David. Not only is she the third party in this chapter said to love David, but she is also the only woman in the entire Hebrew Bible explicitly reported to love a man. Nothing is said, by contrast, about what David feels toward Michal, and as the story of their relationship sinuously unfolds, his feelings toward her will continue to be left in question.

21. Through the second one. The Hebrew is quite cryptic, and the text might be defective here. Literally, it says, “through two” (bishtayim). This has variously been interpreted to mean: through two daughters (if not one, then the other); through two conditions (vanquishing the Philistines and bringing back their foreskins?); for two reasons (perhaps, “the king desires you” and “all his servants love you”).

22. discreetly. The root of the Hebrew adverb refers to covering up, but the usual translation of “secretly” is misleading. This is not a clandestine communication but one in which the servants—that is, Saul’s court attendants—must be careful to cover up their master’s real intentions.

24. Words of this sort David has spoken. Saul may well have counted on the fact that David would initially demur, perhaps because he was the youngest son of eight and thus lacked a suitable bride-price for a princess. This refusal would then set the stage for Saul’s extravagant proposal, which he assumed would be a fatal one, of a hundred dead Philistines.

25. The king has no desire for any bride-price except a hundred Philistine foreskins. The language Saul directs to David through his attendants—note that he now has begun to communicate with David only through intermediaries—makes it sound as though this were a small thing instead of an enormous thing. Beyond this story, there is no indication that the Israelites had a custom of collecting the foreskins of the uncircumcised Philistines like scalps. Fokkelman shrewdly notes that the foreskins are associated with (impure) sexuality and conjectures that “by this condition Saul really wants to contaminate David”—just as Saul is using his own daughter’s sexuality as a lure to destroy David. “He thinks,” Fokkelman goes on to observe, “that this rival has outdone him amongst the women and now uses woman as a trap.”

Saul had devised to make David fall. The narrator continues his systematic effort to make Saul’s intentions transparent.

26. And the time was not done. Literally, “the days were not filled.” The presumable reference is to a period fixed by Saul during which David was to go out and bring back the grisly trophies. Garsiel has interestingly proposed that the idiom here deliberately echoes a phrase used in the Jacob story (Genesis 29:21) and signals a whole network of allusions to the Jacob narrative: in both stories the young man is a candidate to marry two sisters and gets the one not at first intended; in both stories he must provide a bride-price he cannot pay for from material resources; in both stories he must “count out” (literally “fill”) payment to a devious father-in-law; eventually each man flees his father-in-law, aided and abetted by his wife; and in each instance, as we shall see, household idols (teraphim) are involved. Later in the David story, other kinds of parallels with Jacob will be invoked.

28–30. These verses constitute a formal concluding frame to the whole episode, much like the concluding verses in Genesis 39, which mirror the opening ones. Once again, in a pointed repetition of phrases, the following is brought to our attention: David’s success, the fact that the LORD is with him, Saul’s fear of David, Michal’s love of David, and David’s great reputation. The concluding words of the chapter, “his name became greatly esteemed,” are a pointed antithesis to his protestation of unworthiness, “I am a poor man, and lightly esteemed.”