1 Samuel 31:13

13. Took their bones From which it appears that they were not burned to ashes.

Buried them… at Jabesh Where they remained until David had them removed and placed in the sepulchre of Kish at Zelah. 2 Samuel 21:14.

Fasted seven days Because of their deep humiliation and grief.

Here ends the history of Saul, and at its close we may well pause to record a few additional reflections on his life and reign. We are impressed from the beginning to the end of his career with the conviction, which deepens all the way along, that he was unequal to his times. He was the center of events and persons greater than himself, and was sadly deficient in those mental and religious qualities which mark the highest style of man. He possessed, indeed, some touching and tender traits of character. In his earlier years he was meek and little in his own eyes, (1 Samuel 15:17,) though in the eyes of all who knew him he was a choice and noble youth. 1 Samuel 9:2. His emotional soul quickly caught the ecstasy of the prophetic schools, and he prophesied among them; and even in the later days of his insane persecution of David there would come moments of deep humiliation and contrition of soul, when he would melt into tearful tenderness. 1 Samuel 24:16; 1 Samuel 26:21. But he was unequal to the weight of empire. Elevation to power spoiled and finally ruined him, for there was in him a sad mental and religious incapacity for meeting the exigencies of that most trying period of Israelitish history.

“If Samuel is the great example of an ancient saint growing up from childhood to old age without a sudden conversion, Saul is the first direct example of the mixed character often produced by such a conversion, a call coming in the midday of life to rouse the man to higher thoughts than the lost asses of his father’s household or than the tumults of war and victory. He became ‘another man,’ yet not entirely. He was, as is so often the case, half-converted, half-roused. His mind moved unequally and disproportionately in its new sphere. Backwards and forwards, in the names of his children, we see alternately the signs of the old heathenish superstition and of the new purified religion of Jehovah. He caught the prophetic inspiration not continuously, but only in fitful gusts. Then he would be again the slave of his common pursuits. His religion was never blended with his moral nature. It broke out in wild, ungovernable acts of zeal and superstition, and then left him more a prey than ever to his own savage disposition. With the prospects and the position of a David, he remained to the end a Jephthah or a Samson, with this difference, that, having outlived the age of Jephthah and of Samson, he could not be as they; and the struggle, therefore, between what he was and what he might have been, grew fiercer as years went on; and the knowledge of Samuel, and the companionship of David, became to him a curse instead of a blessing.” Stanley.

The true theocratic view of Saul’s reign is appropriately given in Jehovah’s own words. Hosea 13:11: “I gave thee a king in mine anger, and took him away in my wrath.” We must not understand, then, that Saul was chosen because God saw in him the proper qualifications for a king, but quite the contrary. God wished to punish his people for their loss of the true theocratic spirit, and their blind adherence to the false principles and aims with which they thought to revolutionize their government, and the punishment came by the administration of an incompetent king. The leaders of Israel were in an almost passionate haste for change. The occasion and manner of their asking for a king was like throwing the blame of all their national misfortunes on Jehovah, and was accompanied by a suggestion that a king like one of the heathen monarchs would be better than any other kind of leader; so he gave them a king much after their fancy in order to punish them a man of lofty stature, of splendid personal appearance, of strong heroic impulses, but sadly defective in those nobler virtues which make a man after God’s own heart.

We need not suppose that Saul was so exclusively chosen of God as that the people had no hand and voice in his election. Already, when he first appeared to Samuel, he was designated as the one above all others, “on whom was all the desire of Israel.” 1 Samuel 9:20. His noble presence and lofty stature, and the wealth and political influence of his family, had already led many in Israel, as they were talking up a king, to turn their eyes to Saul, the son of Kish. The sacred historian may have purposely passed over the merely human measures that were used to secure Saul’s election, and have given us, as is the design of sacred history, the working of God’s hand in the matter.

In the introduction to chapter 13, where the history of Saul’s reign properly begins, we have called attention to the fact that the first three chapters of that history (13, 14, and 15) are devoted to a detailed account of the three great errors of Saul’s life. From these three errors sprang all his after woes. They were the religious crises of his history, and at each point he failed.

But though Saul’s reign was a failure, his whole career is sketched with a plaintive tenderness. Not only did Samuel greatly mourn for Saul, ( 1Sa 15:11 ; 1 Samuel 15:35; 1 Samuel 16:1,) but the sacred historian, caught the sad, tender spirit of that saintly judge, and breathed it into his narrative. In the same spirit David pours forth his touching elegy over the fallen beauty and might of Israel. 2 Samuel 1:19-27. In the same spirit let us remember that “pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.”