1–2. Jonathan his son . . . Jonathan the son of Saul. In keeping with the biblical practice of using relational epithets to underscore a thematic point, Jonathan is identified as Saul’s son at the very moment when he takes David’s part against his father.

4. Let not the king offend. Saul’s royal power is palpable in the dialogue, for his own son is careful to address him by title in the deferential third person.

6. Saul heeded Jonathan’s voice, and . . . swore. Saul’s paranoia and uncontrolled outbursts manifest themselves in an intermittent cycle. He is amenable to the voice of reason and conscience, and vows in presumably good faith not to harm David, but further evidence of David’s military brilliance will unleash another round of violent impulses. In consequence, through this sequence of the narrative David oscillates between being a proscribed person and someone Saul expects to be a faithful member of his court.

9. his spear in his hand and David playing. As in the previous incident of the spear cast at David, the Hebrew exhibits the pointed antithesis of “his spear in his hand [beyado]” and David “playing by hand [beyad].” Conventional biblical scholarship explains the repetition of incident, and the other doublets in this narrative, as an inclusion of two versions of the same event from different sources. It is at least as plausible to assume that the author of the Saul and David narrative had a fondness for paired incidents that could be used to good literary effect. Saul’s mental disturbance involves compulsive repetition. He does his best to be reconciled with David, his soothing lyre player and indispensable military leader, but the recurrent flashes of jealousy drive him again to the same lethal action. After the second occurrence of spear throwing, David realizes he must flee the court, but he does not imagine that Saul will send assassins to surround his house.

10. Saul struck . . . David fled. As several interpreters have noted, these are the very two verbs used in verse 8 to report David’s military triumph over the Philistines: as David battles Israel’s enemies, the distraught king battles David.

11. Michal his wife. This is another pointed familial identification. Previously, she was referred to as Saul’s daughter.

If you do not get yourself away tonight, tomorrow you’ll be dead. It is striking that we are given Michal’s urgent dialogue here but not a word of response from David, only the chain of his rapid actions after she lets him down (by an improvised rope?) from the window—“he went off and fled and got away.” Perhaps this asymmetrical presentation of the two characters is meant to suggest David’s breathless flight, with no time for conversation. In any case, it continues the pattern of occluding David’s inner responses that we observed in chapter 18. Michal is risking a great deal in order to save David. We have no idea about his feelings toward her as she does this.

13. Michal took the household gods . . . and the twist of goat’s hair . . . and covered them with a cloth. She adopts the familiar trick used by prisoners round the world of concocting a dummy to mask an escape. But the means she chooses introduce another elaborate allusion to the Jacob story. The household gods (teraphim) are what Rachel stole and hid from her father when Jacob fled from him. Like Rachel, who pleads her period and does not get up from the cushions under which the teraphim are hidden, Michal also invokes illness (verse 14) to put off the searchers. Both stories feature a daughter loyal to her husband and rebelling against a hostile father. Michal puts goat’s hair at the head of the bed because, being black or dark brown, it would look like a man’s hair, but goats (and the color of their hair) are also prominent in the Jacob story. Finally, the cloth or garment (beged) used to cover the dummy recalls the repeated association of garments with deception in the Jacob story. Laban, of course, never finds his teraphim, whereas Saul’s emissaries, to their chagrin, find the teraphim instead of the man they are looking for.

15. Bring him up to me in the bed. If Michal claims David is ill, Saul will have him brought up bed and all.

17. Why have you thus deceived me. These words are close to the ones spoken by the outraged Laban to Jacob (Genesis 31:26).

Why should I kill you? This purported death threat by David is of course pure invention by Michal in order to make it seem that she was forced to help David flee.

18. David had fled and gotten away and had come to Samuel. The twice-repeated verbs of safe flight are reiterated once more. David takes refuge with the man who anointed him, although it is not entirely clear whether the prophet’s authority will really protect him, or the prophet.

Naioth. Some have claimed this is not a place-name but a common noun, nawot, “oases” (according to one suggestion, a collection of huts where the prophets resided). But then one would expect a definite article, which does not occur. Naioth is most plausibly construed as a little village or place of temporary residence in the vicinity of the town of Ramah.

20. Samuel standing poised over them. The image is implicitly military: the term for “poised” (nitsav) is cognate with the terms for garrison and prefect. Samuel, like the pope, commands no divisions, but the band of ecstatics are his troops, and the infectious spirit of God that inhabits them and devastates Saul’s emissaries acts as a defensive perimeter.

22. And he himself went. Again, we have the folktale symmetry of three identical repetitions, then a fourth repetition with a crucial change.

Where are Samuel and David? Once more, Saul (Shaʾul) has to ask (shaʾal). This particular question recalls his initial question in chapter 9 about where the seer was.

24. he . . . stripped off his clothes . . . and lay naked. In the clash between Saul and Samuel that marked their final estrangement, Samuel had explicitly associated garment with kingship. Now the frenzy that seizes Saul drives him to strip off his garments—implicitly, to divest himself of the kingship, just as the first episode of Saul among the prophets was an investment with kingship. Robert Polzin brilliantly links this moment with Michal’s use of a garment and the contrasting narrative presentations of David and Saul: “Whereas Michal covers David’s bed with his clothes (verse 13) Saul strips off his clothes and lies naked all day and night (verse 24)—a graphic picture of how the narrator hides David and bares Saul throughout the last two chapters.”

Therefore do they say, “Is Saul, too, among the prophets?” This is the same etiological tag as at the end of the first story of Saul among the prophets in chapter 10. The doublet, far from being a stammer of transmission or inept or automatically inclusive redaction, is vividly purposeful, providing a strong frame for Saul’s painful story. Fokkelman states the effect nicely: “The same faculty for the numinous and the same sensitivity for suddenly being lifted into a higher state of consciousness which occurred there [in chapter 10] under the positive sign of election, appear here under the negative sign of being rejected, and now bring Saul into a lower state of consciousness, a kind of delirium.” The conventions of verisimilitude of a later literary tradition would lead one to conclude that this encounter would have to have occurred either at the beginning of Saul’s career or at the end, but not twice. To the ancient audience, however, the recurrence would not have seemed a contradiction, and the conflicting valences given to the explanation of the proverbial saying add to the richness of the portrait of Saul, formally framing it at beginning and end.