1. after the death of Saul . . . David had returned from striking down Amalek. As the story unfolds, an odd symmetry emerges: David has just struck down Amalek; an Amalekite says he has struck down Saul; David has this Amalekite put to death.

2. look, a man was coming . . . his garments torn and earth on his head. The “look” signals the visual perspective of David and his entourage: what they see is a man who has adopted the most visible signs of conventional mourning. The Amalekite wants to make it clear that he regards Saul’s death, and the defeat, as a catastrophe, though, as we shall see, he really has another purpose in mind.

4. What has happened? The words he uses, meh hayah hadavar, are identical with those spoken to the messenger who brings the news of the disastrous defeat to Eli in 1 Samuel 4:16. There are several other echoes here of that earlier scene.

5. the lad who was telling him. The repetition of this phrase (see next verse), as J. P. Fokkelman has noted, calls attention to the act of telling and by underlining that act may make us wonder whether this is an authentic report or a fabrication.

6. I just chanced to be on Mount Gilboa. Does one accidentally stumble onto a battlefield while the killing is still going on? A more likely scenario is that the Amalekite came onto the battlefield immediately after the fighting as a scavenger, found Saul’s corpse before the Philistines did, and removed the regalia.

Saul was leaning on his spear. From Saul’s words in verse 9, what this means is not that he was resting but that he was entirely spent, barely able to stand.

8. I am an Amalekite. Only now, in the middle of the story, is the national identity of the messenger revealed. The fact that he was an Amalekite means he would have felt no recoil of taboo about doing violence to the king of Israel—something Saul appears to grasp at once. (Compare Doeg the Edomite’s slaughter of the priests of Nob in 1 Samuel 22.) But there is also dramatic irony here: Saul lost his hold on the kingship when he failed to kill the Amalekite king; now he begs an Amalekite to kill him, the king of Israel.

9. Pray, stand over me and finish me off. “Stand over” suggests that Saul himself is barely standing, that he is collapsed against the support of his spear—the very spear that has been associated with his kingship and with his outbursts of rage. “Finish me off” is somewhat inelegant as English diction, but the nuance of the Hebrew (the polel conjugation of the verbal stem that means “to die”) is essential to the story: Saul feels he is dying, and he asks the Amalekite lad not to kill him but to finish him off before the Philistines can get to him. The Amalekite and David concur in this indication of what the Amalekite does to Saul.

the fainting spell. The Hebrew noun appears only here. It may be related to a root that suggests “confusion,” or, alternately, “weakness.”

for while life is still within me. This clause, which has vexed some critics and has led to emendations, is most simply construed as a broken-off sentence that the failing Saul does not have the strength to complete.

10. I stood over him and finished him off. This whole story obviously contradicts the account of Saul’s death by his own hand in 1 Samuel 31. Predictably, this has led many critics to imagine two conflicting “sources.” It is reassuring that more recent scholarly consensus has come to the sensible conclusion that the Amalekite lad is lying. Having come upon Saul’s body, he sees a great opportunity for himself: he will bring Saul’s regalia to David, claim personally to have finished off the man known to be David’s archenemy and rival, and thereby overcome his marginality as resident alien (“sojourner,” ger) by receiving a benefaction from the new king—perhaps a portion of land at David’s disposal. Fokkelman shrewdly notes that the Amalekite, instead of removing the diadem and armband from Saul’s body, might better have buried the body or dragged it off and so saved it from desecration by the Philistines.

for I knew that he could not live after having fallen. The Amalekite sees Saul’s condition “leaning” on his spear to be equivalent to having fallen (“for the fainting spell has seized me”) and assumes, as does Saul himself in this account, that in any case the king will not survive.

14. How were you not afraid . . . to do violence to the LORD’S anointed? Although the Israelite piety of David’s statement is noteworthy, his words, as in the previous episodes in which he warned against harming Saul, are also politically self-interested because he, too, is the LORD’S anointed. In fact, now with Saul’s death, he alone is the LORD’s anointed.

16. your mouth bore witness against you. There is no way of knowing whether David actually believes the Amalekite’s story, but it is certainly convenient for him to be able to point an accusing finger at someone with whom he has had nothing to do as the person responsible for Saul’s death, and then to order immediate punishment.

the LORD’S anointed. At the end of the episode, David makes a point of using the epithet of divinely grounded royal status instead of simply calling his predecessor “Saul,” as the Amalekite (who never even refers to him as “king”) had done.

17. And David sang this lament. We have been aware since 1 Samuel 16 of David’s gift as a lyre player and (presumably) as a singer. Only now do we hear him in action as a singer-poet. This grandly resonant lament, cast in archaic epic diction, marks a great moment of transition in the larger narrative, as the David–Saul story becomes the David story. It is also another public utterance of David’s that beautifully serves his political purposes, celebrating his dead rival as it mourns his loss and thus testifying that David could never have desired Saul’s death.

18. to teach hard things. The Masoretic Text has “to teach the bow”—a problematic reading because the lament scarcely provides instruction in the arts of war. Some critics delete “bow” (qeshet), following the Septuagint. The present translation revocalizes qeshet as qashot, with Fokkelman.

look, it is written down in the Book of Jashar. This lost work, mentioned elsewhere in the Bible, was obviously familiar to the ancient audience. The title probably means “Book of the Upright,” though another reading of yashar, as a verb rather than as a noun, yields “Book of Songs.” (This, however, requires revocalizing the word.) It might have been an anthology of archaic Hebrew poems.

20. Tell it not in Gath. There is an ironic echo here of the account of David’s activities as vassal to the king of Gath, activities that he did not want told in Gath (see 1 Samuel 27:11).

Lest the Philistine daughters rejoice. In this martial culture, the young women had the role of celebrating the victors (“Saul has struck down his thousands. . . .”), gloating over the defeated enemy, and enjoying the spoils the men brought back from their conquest (compare verse 24).

21. O hills of Gilboa. As Shimon Bar-Efrat has observed, apostrophe is the dominant form of address throughout the elegy. David first turns, in a plural verb, to Israel at large (“Tell it not in Gath”), then to the hills of Gilboa, then to Saul and Jonathan, then to the daughters of Israel, then to Jonathan alone. The apostrophe is a form of address that underscores the actual absence of the person or object addressed and so is especially apt for an elegy.

lofty fields. The Hebrew usedeh terumot is a little obscure. The simplest solution is to treat the initial particle u as an excrescence and to read the phrase as a poetic inversion of the similar meromey sadeh in Judges 5:18. In the parallelism here, “lofty fields” would be an epithet for “hills of Gilboa.”

unburnished with oil. The shields were made of leather, often studded with metal plates. Rubbing them with oil before battle would have made their outer surface slippery and thus would have enhanced their effectiveness in deflecting weapons. But the Hebrew for “unburnished,” beli mashiaḥ, is a pun—it means “unanointed” or “messiah-less,” a haunting intimation that the LORD’S anointed is no more. Clearly, the image of the royal shield lying befouled in the dust is a powerful metonymy for Saul himself.

22. Jonathan’s bow . . . the sword of Saul. After the image of the implement of defense, the shield, lying cast aside, we get a retrospective picture of these two offensive weapons destroying the enemy. The idea of the sword or the bow consuming flesh and blood is conventional in ancient Near Eastern martial poetry.

23. in their life and their death they were not parted. This is, of course, an extravagant idealization on the part of the elegist since father and son were almost estranged and twice Saul was on the point of killing Jonathan.

24. O daughters of Israel, weep. The invocation of the daughters of Israel to weep over the king who brought them precious booty is a symmetrical antithesis to the initial warning to keep the news away from the daughters of the Philistines, who would rejoice.

26. I grieve for you, my brother, Jonathan. Jonathan several times proclaimed his love for David. It is only in Jonathan’s death, and at the distance of apostrophe, that David calls him “my brother” and says that Jonathan was dear to him.

More wondrous . . . than the love of women. Repeated, unconvincing attempts have been made to read a homoerotic implication into these words. The reported details of the David story suggest that his various attachments to women are motivated by pragmatic rather than emotional concerns—and in one instance, by lust. This disposition, however, tells us little about David’s sexual orientation. The bond between men in this warrior culture could easily be stronger than the bond between men and women.

27. How have the warriors fallen, / and the gear of battle is lost. The first clause here echoes the second verset of the opening line of the poem and so closes the elegy in a ringing envelope structure. The second clause beautifully picks up the image of the cast-off shield lying in the dust, and of the relentless bow and sword that will never more be borne into battle. It is misguided to render the verb at the end as “perished” (King James Version, New Jewish Publication Society) because that presupposes that “gear of battle” is actually an epithet for Saul and Jonathan. Far more effectively, the lament concludes with a concrete image of shield and sword and bow abandoned, and by a simple process of metonymy we vividly understand the fate of the two men who once wielded them.