1. David . . . said before Jonathan. The seeming awkwardness of the preposition is actually strategically calculated. The normal usage would be “said to” (ʾel). “Before” (lifney) is a preposition that commonly designates approach to the presence of regal or seigniorial authority. (Compare its occurrence in David’s words, “what my offense before your father.”) This speech is a remarkable instance of the pattern of occluding the personal side of David that we have been following. Quite strikingly, these are David’s first reported words to Jonathan, though Jonathan’s devotion to David and one speech to David (19:2–3) have been duly recorded. It is noteworthy that this is not a personal communication to Jonathan but a kind of political statement—a protestation of innocence cast in patently rhetorical language (“What have I done? What is my crime . . .?”). David speaks to Jonathan less as an intimate friend than as a courtier, later in the dialogue even invoking the deferential self-reference of “your servant.”

2. why should my father hide this thing from me? If one considers Saul’s previous behavior and his relationship with Jonathan, this faith in his father’s openness with him seems singularly misplaced. Throughout, Jonathan remains well meaning and naïve, against the wary, calculating David.

3. David swore again. It is ill advised to emend the verb here, as some scholars have proposed. In fact, David’s first speech (“before” Jonathan) was a kind of oath of innocence, and now he continues to swear, rather than simply speaking.

there is but a step between me and death. This vivid image surely is meant to recall the quick dodging step that twice enabled David to elude Saul’s hurled spear.

5. the new moon. In early biblical times, this was an important festival. Sacrifices were offered, ceremonial feasts were held, and ordinary business was not transacted.

the day after tomorrow. The Masoretic Text has “the third evening,” treating hashelishit as an adjective modifying “evening,” although it has the wrong gender suffix. It is more likely a noun meaning the day after tomorrow (the day on which one speaks being day one in the sequence of three). One should then read ʿerev hashelishit instead of the Masoretic ha ʿerev hashelishit. In any case, the number three will play an important role as the episode develops.

7. If thus he says, “Good!,” it is well with your servant. After Saul’s attempts on David’s life by the “hand of the Philistines,” by the spear in his own hand, and by a team of assassins, can David really believe that any statement by the king of favorable disposition means it will be well with him? Polzin has shrewdly suggested that David’s real intention is “to provoke Saul to an angry outburst that would remove Jonathan’s misconceptions, not his own.”

8. faith. The two parties to a pact, contract, or other binding agreement owe each other ḥesed, faithful performance of their covenantal obligations.

into a pact of the LORD you have brought your servant with you. David’s formulation of the arrangement is pointed and quite accurate: it was Jonathan who initiated the pledge of mutual fealty out of his love for David, and who drew David into the commitment.

9. Heaven forbid you say it. The Hebrew has, elliptically, “Heaven forbid you.”

10. Who will tell me. David is not questioning Jonathan’s good faith but registering a practical difficulty: if Saul is in fact determined to kill him, how will Jonathan be able to get word to him?

12. Witness the LORD. The word “witness” (ʿed) is absent in the Masoretic Text but is reflected in Josephus and the Peshitta.

tomorrow, [or] the day after. Again, the time reference in the Hebrew is somewhat confusing. The text reads literally “tomorrow the third day” or even “the morrow of the third day.”

13. if it seems good to my father [to bring] the evil. The ironic antithesis of good and evil is patent. All ancient versions lack “to bring,” which seems required by the context. The word may have been inadvertently deleted by a scribe because it closely resembles the preceding word in the text—ʾavi (my father), lehavi’ (to bring).

the LORD shall be with you as He was with my father. Here Jonathan explicitly recognizes that the persecuted David is to displace Saul, his father.

14. Would that. This translation treats the Hebrew consonants as welu instead of the Masoretic welo’ (“and not”).

16. Jonathan has sealed a pact. The Hebrew idiom is literally “cut” (with “pact” implied) and so picks up the play of the two different occurrences of “cut off” in the previous sentence (the same verb in a different conjugation). Jonathan’s insistence that David not cut off Jonathan’s descendants once he gains power will have prominent ramifications later in the story.

requite it from the hand of David. The Masoretic Text has “from the hand of the enemies of David,” but the substitution of a person’s “enemies” for the person himself is a common Hebrew scribal euphemism (here, so as not to say something negative about David), as both Rashi and David Kimchi recognized in the Middle Ages.

19. The day after tomorrow. The Masoretic vocalization weshilashta treats this as a verb (to do something a third time or in a third instance), but it is more plausible to vocalize it as a noun, ushelishit, “and on the third day.” (See the second comment on verse 5.)

you will go all the way down. The Hebrew, literally “you will go down very much” (or, “you will wander very much”), is problematic.

the place where you hid on the day of the deed. The meaning has been disputed, but the most likely reference is to David’s hiding, and Jonathan’s speaking in his defense, in 19:1–7.

23. the LORD is witness. Again, “witness” is absent from the Masoretic Text but supplied by the Septuagint.

24. to table. The Hebrew is literally “to the bread.”

25. Jonathan preceded him. This translation reads weyiqdam instead of the Masoretic wayaqom (“and he rose”). The seating arrangement remains a little obscure, but the verb qadam cannot mean “to sit opposite,” as some scholars have claimed.

26. He is unclean. Since on the new moon celebrants partook of a sacrificial feast, they would have to be in a state of ritual purity. (A seminal emission, for example, which might be hinted at in the Hebrew term for “mischance,” would render a person impure until the evening of the day on which he cleansed himself by ablution.)

27. the son of Jesse. At the end of the Goliath episode, Saul wanted to know whose son David was. Now he refers to him repeatedly only by patronymic, which is dismissive, rather like our using a person’s last name only. David’s status in Saul’s eyes is a constant reflex of Saul’s acute ambivalence: the king wants him at court as a royal intimate, or, alternately, as someone under surveillance; yet he makes him flee the court as persona non grata.

29. my brother has summoned me. Jonathan, in playing out the scenario David has dictated to him, improvises one element—that David has gone off to his hometown at the express urging of his brother, and in order to be with his brothers. His evident intention is to provide a palliative to David’s absence: he had to go to Bethlehem because of family pressure. But Saul’s outraged response suggests that Jonathan’s invention has the opposite effect. Saul concludes that David’s loyalty to his clan takes precedence over his loyalty to his king, and he may even suspect that David means to use his clan as a power base to challenge the throne.

let me . . . get away. Jonathan inadvertently substitutes for “run” in David’s instructions the very verb of escape repeatedly used when David fled Saul’s assassins.

30. O, son of a perverse wayward woman. All English translations have treated the last Hebrew term here, mardut, as “rebellion,” deriving it from the root m-r-d, “to rebel.” But this form (with the ut suffix of abstraction) would be anomalous in the Hebrew, whereas the vocalization in the received text yields a Hebrew word well known in rabbinic Hebrew and meaning “discipline.” (The verbal root is r-d-h, “to rule sternly.”) She is “perverse against discipline”—hence “wayward” in this translation.

the shame of your mother’s nakedness. This is quite violent. “Nakedness” refers to the sexual part (as in the idiom for taboo intercourse, “uncovering the nakedness of”), and so, it has virtually the force of “your mother’s cunt,” though the language is not obscene.

31. he is a dead man. The Hebrew is literally “son of death,” thus playing back on “son of Jesse.”

32. Why should he be put to death? What has he done? These two questions are four compact words in the Hebrew.

33. Saul cast the spear at him to strike him down. Saul’s madness is vividly reflected in his attempt to kill his own son in the same way that he tried to kill David—just after he has been urging Jonathan to protect the security of his own future kingship. The act thus expresses his blind destructive impulse toward his own dynasty.

34. because he was pained for David and because his father had humiliated him. The Hebrew text does not have “and” but it is clearly implied.

35. And it happened in the morning. On the third day there are three figures in the field and three arrows will be shot. The triangle of two knowing persons and one ignorant one is an ironic replication of the David–Jonathan–Saul triangle. The lad’s running after the arrows may also pick up David’s (fictitious) “running” to Bethlehem.

36. the arrow. Some scholars, bothered by the switch from three arrows to one, have emended the text to reduce all plurals of arrow to a singular. The maneuver is misconceived because, as we have seen before, Hebrew narrative readily switches from multiple instances to a particular case.

37. Jonathan called after the lad. Again, the use of the preposition is quite precise because the lad has run on ahead of Jonathan.

38. gathered up the arrows. The Masoretic Text has “arrow” in the singular at this point, but the verb “to gather up” (laqet) accords much better with collecting several objects, and Jonathan’s having shot all three of the arrows earlier mentioned would require more time on the part of the lad and hence would give Jonathan and David more of an opportunity to talk in confidence.

40. Jonathan gave his gear to his lad. Fokkelman reminds us that Jonathan earlier gave his armor and weapons to David, and now “the successor to the throne indicated by Saul . . . devotes himself defenselessly to the intimate contact with the man who, according to his father, is his rival.”

41. arose from by the mound. This follows the Septuagint. The Masoretic Text has “arose from the south.”

42. The LORD is witness. As in the previous occurrences in Samuel of this formula of vow taking, the Masoretic Text lacks “witness,” but that word is reflected in the Septuagint. It may well be an idiomatic ellipsis in the original Hebrew version, but the problem with leaving it that way in the English is that it could sound as though Jonathan were saying that the LORD will intervene between him and David (“the LORD will be between me and you”). Polzin contends that the double meaning is intended, but that reading seems a little strained.