1 Samuel 15:15

15. The people spared the best of the sheep He lays the fault upon the people, and thereby criminally insinuates that the thing was done against his will.

The Lord thy God These words, in this connexion, are full of significance. They seem to have flowed from a desire to compliment Samuel on the honour and sanctity of his personal intercourse with Jehovah, and also from a feeling that Jehovah was not his own God. “Every word,” says Hervey, “uttered by Saul seems to indicate the breaking down of his moral character. One feels that after the scene so forcibly described in this chapter Saul must have forfeited his own self-respect, and that his downward career was henceforth almost inevitable.”