3. three thousand picked men. David, it should be recalled, commands a guerilla band of about six hundred men; so he is outnumbered five to one and is facing elite troops.

4. Saul went in to relieve himself . . . David and his men . . . in the far end of the cave. The topography is quite realistic, for the cliffs overlooking the Dead Sea in the region of Ein-Gedi are honeycombed with caves. Power and powerlessness are precariously balanced in this episode. David and his men are in all likelihood hiding in the far end of the cave from Saul’s search party. Had a contingent of soldiers entered the cave, they would have been trapped. Instead, Saul comes in alone, and he is in a double sense exposed to David and his men.

5. Here is the day that the LORD said to you. David’s eager men exhibit a certain theological presumptuousness. They surely know that their leader has been secretly anointed to be king, but nothing in the preceding narrative indicates a divine promise that God would deliver Saul into David’s hands.

do to him whatever seems good in your eyes. They carefully avoid the plain word “kill.”

6. David was smitten with remorse. The Hebrew is literally “David’s heart smote him.”

he had cut off the skirt of the cloak that was Saul’s. Clearly, what David feels is that he has perpetrated a kind of symbolic mutilation of the king by cutting off the corner of his garment—not with anything like a scissors, of course, but surely with his sword, his instrument for killing his enemies. The cloak (meʿil) has already been linked emblematically with kingship in the final estrangement between Samuel and Saul, and so David is in symbolic effect “cutting away” Saul’s kingship. For all the remorse he feels, he will continue to make double use of the corner of the cloak, as we shall see.

7. that I should have done this thing to my master, the LORD’s anointed. Some interpreters have read this whole episode as an apology for David’s innocence and piety in relation to Saul. But the very gesture of piety is also self-interested—David, after all, is conscious that he, too, is the LORD’s anointed, and it is surely in his long-term interest that the reigning king’s person should be held sacred by all his subjects.

8. David held back his men. The meaning of the verb shisaʿ is disputed, but it is most plausibly linked with the noun shesaʿ, a split or cleft. The sense here would then be: he “split off” his men from Saul, using his words to interpose a kind of barrier between them and the king. In any case, the first clause of this verse appears to respond to the men’s initial inclination to kill Saul (verse 5) rather than following from David’s remorse over the cutting of the garment—a chronological displacement noted as early as Rashi.

9. David . . . came out of the cave and called after Saul. David is taking a calculated risk. Saul could, after all, order his troops to attack David and the men behind him in the cave. David first throws Saul off his guard by paying obeisance to him as king and prostrating himself—hardly what one would expect of a fugitive or rebel. He then counts on the persuasive power of his own rhetoric, and on the telltale scrap of the king’s cloak that he clutches, to deflect Saul from his lethal intentions. David is cannily self-protective but he is also a gambler.

10–11. Why should you listen to people’s words . . . this day your eyes have seen. Instead of rumor heard about David’s harmful intentions, here is ocular evidence of his innocence—and of God’s having devised to give David the upper hand over Saul.

11. and they meant to kill you. The Masoretic Text has “he meant,” which may be either corrected to a plural, as some of the ancient versions do, or construed as “someone said.”

12. my father see, yes, see the skirt of your cloak in my hand. It is, appropriately, ambiguous whether “my father” is a form of respectful address to an authority or an attempt to reach back to the moment of affectionate intimacy in their relationship. We may note that David, for all the remorse he felt over having cut off the skirt of Saul’s garment, makes great display of it now as evidence of having had Saul entirely at his mercy. The proof of his innocence is thus inseparable from the reminder of the power he had over his rival.

13. Let the LORD judge between me and you . . . the LORD will avenge me of you. David’s great protestation of innocence and his purported gesture of reconciliation move toward a barely veiled threat: you are the one who has wronged me, and vengeance will be exacted, but by God, not by me.

14. the proverb of the ancients. The Masoretic Text has “ancient,” in the singular, but the Qumran Samuel scroll, more plausibly, shows the plural form.

From wicked men does wickedness come forth. The gnomic saying—only three words in the Hebrew!—that David chooses to cite is archly double-edged: Wicked acts are perpetrated only by the wicked, so I won’t be the one to touch you. But there is also the distinct hint that the wicked person in question could be Saul himself. Though David cannot know this, Saul will die by his own hand.

but my hand will not be against you. The words that the writer attributes to David ironically echo the words of Saul’s first murderous plot against David, conveyed in interior monologue, when Saul said, “Let not my hand be against him but let the hand of the Philistines be against him” (18:17).

15. has the king of Israel come forth. The very verb attached to the wicked in the proverb!

After a dead dog, after a single flea? In his peroration, David outdoes himself in professing his humble station. A dead dog was proverbial in ancient Israel as a contemptible, worthless thing, but David goes the idiom one better by saying he is scarcely more important than a single flea on the dead dog’s carcass, a brilliant adaptation to prose of the logic of intensification of biblical poetry, in which a term introduced in the first part of the line is raised to the second power semantically in the parallel second half.

16. judge me against you. The Hebrew is literally “judge me from your hand,” that is, judge me favorably and rescue me from your hand. The term thus picks up the insistence on “hand” throughout David’s speech.

17. Is this your voice, my son, David? These first words of Saul’s response to David are one of the most breathtaking instances of the biblical technique of contrastive dialogue. David’s speech had been, by biblical standards, quite lengthy, and very much a speech—a beautifully crafted piece of rhetoric, with complex political aims in mind. Saul responds with four choked Hebrew words, haqolkha zeh beni Dawid? His designation of David as “my son” is free of the ambiguity attached to David’s calling him “my father.” This is one of those extraordinary reversals that make biblical narrative such a probing representation of the oscillations and the unpredictability of human nature: David’s words have cut to the quick of the king’s conscience, and suddenly the obsessive pursuer feels an access of paternal affection, intertwined with remorse, for his imagined enemy. Saul asks his question because he has to shake himself to believe his enemy is his friend, because he stands at a certain distance from David (who has called out “after” Saul), and also because his eyes are blinded with tears. He is thus reminiscent of the blind father Isaac, who was able to make out the voice, but not the identity, of his son Jacob, and from whom a blessing was wrested.

18. You are more in the right than I. These words echo the ones pronounced by Judah, referring to his vindicated daughter-in-law Tamar, who will become the progenitrix of David’s line.

you who requited me good . . . I requited you evil. The antithesis of good and evil is played on through the next three verses and should not be sacrificed in the English for the sake of imagined idiomatic fluency.

21. I know that you will surely be king. This marks Saul’s first open admission that David is the “fellow man who is better than you” of whom Samuel spoke (15:28). He has been doubly convinced—by God’s having put him at David’s mercy and by David’s refusal to harm him, a kingly act and not the act of a rebel and usurper.