40 Minutes In The Old Testament - 1 Samuel 13:1-23 (Episode 236)

Episode Date: October 5, 2020

There is a strange statement about Saul and one year. Saul's son Johnathan defeats some Philistines, but a larger battle is on the horizon. Saul assembles the people to seek the Lord, but Samuel is late in arriving resulting in Saul taking things into his own hands. Chad and Daniel discuss all of this. Have a listen! 1517 Podcast Network HWSS Livestream Signup Chad Bird's New Book 1517 YouTube Donate

Welcome to another episode of 40 Minutes in the Old Testament. 40 Minutes in the Old Testament is a 1517 Podcast Network podcast. You can go to 1517.org slash podcast. Check out all the other podcasts that are living over there. while you're over there guys it's not too late to sign up for the here we still stand live stream because there's no there's no ticket restriction we're not going to run out of tickets because it's all online but chad by the time this airs when we release this thing we're talking about less than two weeks away it's getting close it's getting close man it's getting close so i

mean if you've been waiting guys like i think i'm gonna let me figure it out let's go uh click on that banner on the website and uh get signed up so that you can join us for the conference chad uh book continues to to go on we're i mean i'm just going to plug this book until it releases i think i mean people i mean i'm assuming every single one of our listeners has pre-ordered it so of course yeah i mean faithful listeners which by the way if that were true it just would be a rabid bestseller so uh so i actually i'm pretty sure that all of you have not so what are you waiting for it's time to get over there and pre-order unveiling mercy get that 365 day devotional in the hebrew uh yeah by the way the uh the kindle is available now too so maybe that's

maybe that's the hang-up guys were you are you not really what it was not an ink and paper guy you like that screen well kindle available too so just go over to amazon or you can follow the link in the show notes and uh and you can order whatever it is that you paperback hardback whatever whatever your preferred uh vehicle for reading you can get it taken care of all right we are uh we are in first samuel chapter 13 yeah we start out with kind of a weird verse yeah we were just talking about it before the uh yeah we're just talking about this this is a this is a weird one uh apparently uh there's uh oh chad has enlightened me that there's no way good way to translate this because if you just read it for what it is you know first samuel 13 one

saul lived for one year and then became king so i don't know what that means uh if that means that He was a one-year-old when he became king, which would be crazy since he's like a six-foot-three rock-looking dude. He's a big baby. Let's just put it that way. He's a little baby out there rounding up donkeys, cutting up ox. I don't think that's what it means. I don't think that's what it's saying. What is going on here, Trent?

No, this is a case where nobody knows exactly how to translate this. So if you were to get a bunch of versions side-by-side, you would see all kinds of different ways that this has been translated. some of them quite creative i looking here for instance that the esv says saul lived for one year and then he became king and when he had reigned oh for two years over israel blah blah blah so they make it into like not even a whole sentence they they translate it so that it's like leading into verse two now new american standard says saul was 40 years old when he began to reign and he reigned 32 years over israel now they're just making stuff up when they do that that's not that's not there no there's well in i mean my translation does indicate that it will italicize

words if they're not like if they're added you know by way of explanation or interpretation so 40 and 30 are both italicized that's the new american standards way of saying hey we just put this in here we really don't know so this is a this is a case where evidently the the text was uh was messed up uh this is what we use we call a textual corruption where for whatever reason this was not preserved intact so we really uh don't know exactly how to translate this or what to make of it this is this is how i would read this now i might be totally off but if i was just If I'm just a guy reading the Bible and I come across this verse, I'll just tell you how I have interpreted this in the past

without, you know, going and investigating all the Hebrew. This is how I take this, and maybe this is how they mean for it to be taken. I don't know. Saul lived for one year and then became king, and when he had reigned for two years over Israel, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I take this as there was a year between when Samuel first told Saul, you're the guy, and him becoming king,

and then once he became king two years passed and then what we're going into next happens that's that's how i read it is that this is sort of one year past between the the proclamation of samuel that you will be king and him being sort of coronated as king in front of all the people yeah that's a that's a very valid interpretation and that's the way that some commentators that i've that i've read will take that uh one even suggested you know i've remarked a couple times that saul as it were is adopted by samuel and one of them has suggested that really what's being said here is that one year after that adoption so when saul was as it were one year old that is say one year after he was adopted as sort of a son by samuel then these events transpired yeah this

probably goes back to it saying that you know saul is hanging out with the gypsy prophets or whatever that was and uh and it said that he became a different man right so he has one year of being a different person under his belt exactly exactly so i mean this it could be a case where it actually wasn't a textual corruption but we're supposed to understand it that way anyway that's a couple different ways that you can take that i will say that it is it is the first of what we will see many, many times in the future, where you basically have something like so-and-so became king when he was such and such an age, and he reigned for this many years over Israel, right? You see that over and over in the books of 1 and 2 Kings. So this is going to be

the first of many of these announcements as to the age of a guy, and then how many years he reigned over over israel the book of acts chapter 13 verse 21 this is paul talking he says that saul reigned 40 years over israel that's the only other time referent that we have in the scriptures of course that's much later and that's uh that's uh in the in the new testament but that's the only other like reference to the length of saul's reign that we have that's similar to this verse which actually seems uh longer than you might have otherwise thought yeah he's no he's a when we were talking about him at first he kind of came across just in our conversation and in the chapters that we were looking at as you know pretty young guy you know

like maybe he's 20 ish you know something like that well he's he's not he was much older because we know from the chapter we're about to look at that he's married and that he has a son by the name of jonathan who is old enough to be in battle himself so assuming that we'll say assuming jonathan is 20 he could be a little bit younger we'll assume he's 20 well that probably means that yeah that saul was you know maybe uh mid 30s 40 something like that yeah yeah i mean you had kids young then but um yeah but if i mean even even saying they were young if you were if you say that saul was 20 when he had jonathan and jonathan's old enough to fight and he's 20 that makes all 40 yeah yeah so anyway uh all that about about the opening verse here uh he did

begin to reign you remember that when he was introduced to us that uh he was anointed as the prince right the nagid the the big guy the uh your highness kind of guy but he is referred to here as one who is kinging so he's he's reigning over israel yeah because initially he like sort gets uh he's sort of crowned king and then goes back to farming yeah i guess you know they were still trying to get used to the king thing well you know i mean they don't they don't have a lot of this stuff set up like where is the king supposed to live i don't know like where is he what's he supposed to does he it seems like they called out for a king got one before they had then you have to decide like well do we build a like a palace what are we doing here yeah what

we do with a king right we want one definitely want one but now we got to figure out exactly what to do with this now we got to have like probably a court and now we and then we're going to have like probably going to have a what samuel is saying is what's going to happen he's going to gather an army he's going to have i mean all the things that go along with having a king yeah and it's going to be well into david's reign before we have anything resembling what we usually think of when we think of of having a king because you know for a while even after david becomes king Israel is still divided because only a couple of tribes like the tribe of Judah there on the side of David but a lot of the northern tribes were not they were following

one of Saul's sons and then David after a few years was finally able to bring about some cohesion to all the tribes and then he needed like sort of a neutral place that really wasn't associated with the northern tribes or the southern tribes to be his capital city and so he captures captures jerusalem which before then had not been i mean it was supposed to belong to israel they just hadn't captured it yet it still belonged to the jebusites so david captures jerusalem he makes that his capital city and he consolidates uh his power religiously too because he that's where he takes the ark of the covenant and of course then his son solomon builds the uh the temple there yeah it's a long process yeah it kind of feels like until david does that that the king

is the king is sort of like a chief very much so yeah that probably actually would be a better way to translate this chief or yeah just kind of a is more of a military leader than anything else which you know that's what the people wanted give us a king so that he can go out and he can wage war against our our enemies so that's what they wanted and that's what uh that's what they got. Although, as we will see in the rest of chapter 13 and chapter 14, things are going to go downhill pretty precipitously for Saul. Starts out by saying that he, after that opening verse with the number challenges, he chose for himself 3,000 men of Israel, and 2,000 were with him in a place called Mikmash in the hill country of Bethel. And then a thousand were with Jonathan

at Gibeah. Remember that's their hometown, Gibeah of Benjamin, but he sent away the rest of the people each to his tent. So I'm assuming that these are like, you know, they had extras, but they don't want to have that many people, that many soldiers. A standing army is very, very difficult to maintain. I mean, that was one of the reasons, for instance, that when you know, when Alexander the Great began to conquer the world, he just started moving his soldiers all over the place. He would settle them in all these various cities because just, you know, just imagine how difficult it is to, you got to, you got to pay, you got to, you got to feed, you got to clothe, you got to take care of a standing army. Armies are, I mean, just look

at our military budget. You realize how expensive it is to maintain armed forces. So, you know, you might have 30 000 guys but you can't afford it it's a lot it's a lot of food man it's a lot of food yeah so you just send it right back to their to their home and you keep i guess the chosen white maybe these are the best warriors so he's got three thousand in all uh two thousand with him and a thousand with jonathan now it's kind of a weird narrative feature here because this is the first time we hear about jonathan and it doesn't really tell us who he is right yeah it's just some guy if you don't know yeah so it's as a as a narrative structure it's kind of strange we were told in verse 16 that his son is named jonathan but here it's just like

jonathan just kind of thrown into the story like oh yeah yeah everybody knows who's jonathan is when things like this happen in the scriptures uh as as this is being written that is written to an audience who of course know who jonathan is so this is this isn't some kind of huge error it's not written with the thought that you and i are going to be reading this later uh this is this is written for an audience that of course knows who jonathan is yeah yeah exactly exactly so uh jonathan emerges in this chapter as well as the next chapter really is the hero this is the beginning of the replacement of saul as a central character he was central in everything leading up to this point seemed like a pretty good guy but uh things are things are not going to go well with

him there's it's like a it's got a couple of different individuals who give Saul problems before David arrives one of these is Samuel we're going to have a Samuel confrontation here coming up pretty quick and the other one is Jonathan there's going to be the button heads between Saul and Samuel and between Saul and his son his son Jonathan so Jonathan we're told attacked the garrison of the Philistines that was in Geba, which was kind of close to Gibeah, and the Philistines heard it. So Jonathan is the first one mentioned here as kind of going on the offensive. He's going to be the hero of the story in chapter 14 as well. So he attacks this garrison of the Philistines, evidently defeats them. Saul takes advantage of this opportunity by

blowing the trumpet throughout the land. I assume that just means this was sort of the way of letting people know, hey, let the Hebrews hear. Everybody needs to know about the fact that my son has attacked the Philistines. He defeated them, and there's going to be problems. Verse 4 says, all Israel heard the news that Saul had attacked or had smitten the garrison of the Philistines. It was only his son, but it says Saul did this. And also that Israel had, well, it could be had become odious or you could translate it israel had begin had begun to stink in the nostrils to the philistines so uh we had this expression actually several different times in the scriptures i mean we still use that right i mean we still say you know something stinks or

whatever as as a pejorative way of referring to them hebrew does it as well so if you become odious or if you stink in the nostrils of somebody else that has well i don't have to translate that you get you get the metaphor right basically it's this the philistines smell what the rock is cooking and they don't like it there you go yeah in the in the daniel lemme press translation forthcoming right forthcoming yeah they they smell what this new king king the rock is cooking and they're not interested yeah exactly so uh the people were then summoned to saul at gilgal so this is kind of the this is the beginning of this confrontation that we're going to see carried over in the next couple chapters between the israelites and the philistines

now the philistines they uh they have some equipment here it says they assemble to fight with israel so this was of course an attack against one of their garrisons and so they're gonna they're going to retaliate it says here that they they have 30 000 chariots that could it the hebrew does have 30 000 it seems a little bit uh like way way over what we would expect Because that's like, that's higher than any other number of chariots we have in the entire Bible. So some have suggested this actually should read 3,000 instead of 30,000. Either way, a bunch of chariots and 6,000 horsemen and people like the sand, which is on the seashore in abundance. And they came up and they camp at Mi'kmaq east of Beth-Avon.

So this is not going to be good for the Israelites because they see this overwhelming force of the Philistines coming against them, and basically they go into full panic mode. The men of Israel saw that they were in a strait. They were in a bind because the people were hard-pressed. So what did they do? They started hiding everywhere they could. They are hiding in caves, They're hiding in thickets, cliffs, tombs or cellars. You could translate that a couple. It's an underground place and in pits or or in cisterns. In other words, wherever they can get out of the view of the Philistines, that's where they're hiding.

You have to be pretty freaked out to be like, man, I'm about to go get down in this. I'm about to get down in this well. Yeah. Yeah. You've got to be pretty scared to do that. uh and i mean it it it becomes uh uh it becomes something which is just i guess indicative of the fact that they they think they're about to be destroyed i mean like there's no other option because some of them are even running away the next verse says some of the hebrews crossed the jordan into the land of gad and gilead so they're like exiling themselves they're trying to get as

far away as possible saul he stays in gilgal and all the people following who followed him were trembling. So kind of put yourself in Saul's situation here. I go back and forth here. On one reading, I kind of feel sorry for Saul. I'm kind of sympathetic for him, the situation that he's in. And on the other hand, I'm not that way. So we'll see how it goes as we talk our way through this. But put yourself in Saul's situation. He's become king not that long ago. and they had an initial success. His son, Jonathan, attacked the garrison of the Philistines. He was successful. He's trying to get all Israel to be united against the Philistines. And then all of a sudden, this vast number show up. It's kind of an Exodus 14 all over again, right?

Here, the Israelites are trapped in Exodus 14. They're trapped between the Egyptian army and the Red Sea. Here, they're trapped between death and this overwhelming force of the Philistine army. So what's going to happen? What's going to save them? Verse 8 says, he waited seven days according to the appointed time set by Samuel. That was back in chapter 10 when we heard about this waiting for seven days at Gilgal. But Samuel did not come to Gilgal, and the people were scattering from him. So he's waiting, day one, day two, day three, day six rolls around, and people are just scattering left and right. They're hiding, they're crossing the border, he's losing troops, he's hemorrhaging troops, so he has to make a decision. What's he going to do, right?

So verse nine, Saul says, bring to me the burnt offering and the peace offering. and he offered the burnt offering so he doesn't get around the peace offering but he offers the burnt offering so he's stepped up to the altar he's taken upon himself the role of priest here to offer the burnt offering and it came about as soon as he finished offering the burnt offering that behold look samuel shows up and saul went out to meet him and greet him it's it's a little strange to me that i mean talk about timing it's like not even after the sacrifice it's like you almost get you almost get the feeling that like samuel is watching like he's over the hill and he showed up on day four he's gonna wait day five day six day seven

rolls around and then saul begins offering the burnt offering and he pops over the hill shows up just in time yeah see we're not we're not told here so it says that on one hand you can be sympathetic to saul he's waited seven days that's then samuel's supposed to be there right and he didn't show up now what's really important that we don't have in this text is did you wait till like the seventh day and samuel's been there and did you like as soon as that seventh day hit you're like let's do it or did you wait through the seventh day uh right right this is very important i feel like because like this is very important is this the eighth day or is or is this the seventh day right right

well the whole showing up between the offerings i mean that that's the part that that's what i mean they chat if you say like i'll be there on tuesday and i'm like cool and then at seven o'clock in the morning on tuesday when you have not shown up yet and all i have is that it will be some time on tuesday and i'm like well it's tuesday he's not here let's go that's that's a little hasty that's hasty now if it's wednesday morning and i'm like or even if it's midnight on tuesday and i'm like this dude said he'd be here he's not here we gotta go we gotta go that's a little more understandable not sure what it was but i wish we knew this i wish we knew this would help me whether or not i'm really sympathetic to saul

or i think he really blew it yeah i really blew it yeah well so here's what happened so he goes out to uh to meet saul goes out to meet and to uh to greet samuel a little meet and greet here literally it's he went out to meet him and to bless him so it's like Saul goes out there and he probably knows already he's messed up he's gonna try and like some nice smooth things over hey you know Samuel glad you glad you made it hope things are going well have a good trip Samuel is having none of this first words out of his mouth are reminiscent of of Genesis 3 and I think maybe this what this whole story is supposed to be read in light of to be honest because god says uh you know where are you to adam then he says you know what have you done to adam have you have you broken

the commandment right well here's what samuel says what have you done and saul saul pulls a complete adam here except he outdoes adam by adding a third party that he blames so you remember genesis 3 adam blames the woman that's the first party he blames whom you gave to be with me that's the second part of this blame she gave me the fruit well saul is going to blame three people saul says oh see see samuel here's what happened because i saw the people were scattering from me so he blames the people and that you did not come within the appointed days so he blamed samuel as well. And the Philistines were assembled at Michmash. So because of all that, I said, now the Philistines will come down against me at Gilgal. And I have not asked the favor of the

Lord. So I forced myself and offered the burnt offering. Now, this argument is not terrible. I think this argument is understandable. He's like, well, let me lay down three things that are really unfortunate here is the situation that i find myself in now but this language is interesting though so i forced myself didn't want to do it would have rather not done it in fact i so desperately didn't want i had to force myself to do it like so like i didn't want to do this so badly that i had to make myself do it there's a great war going on within me when i I had to literally force my own hand. Yeah.

I mean, it is a good argument. I will give it that. Or at least it's a practical, it's an understandable explanation. It's an understandable explanation, yeah. But in the ears of Samuel, anyway, I ain't going to cut it. No, no, no. It doesn't mean that it ends up that it wins the day. No.

But I do think this forced myself is a little. It's a little much. I mean, that's a little strong. Yeah, yeah. And that is a good translation. If anybody's wondering out there, that is a pretty good translation of the Hebrew, by the way. I mean, this is, I made myself do it. I compelled myself to do this, more or less.

It was, in other words, it wasn't my first choice. It wasn't my second choice. but it was like i ran out of options kind of situation yeah even like i'm not i'm not trying to usurp your position here i i felt as though i had no other options right right now here go do that peace offering thing now that you're here i'm not interested in being the priest yeah well as we're going to see he doesn't even do that he just kind of samba kind of just walks away but he has something to say first he said uh to saul verse 13 you have acted foolishly you have not kept the commandment the mitzvah you have not kept the commandment of the lord your god

which he commanded you for now the lord would would have established your kingdom over israel forever but now your kingdom shall not endure the lord has sought out for himself a man after his own heart and the lord will and the lord has appointed him as ruler over his people because you have not kept what the lord commanded you it's pretty rough shame it gets up and goes away it's pretty rough it's pretty rough that is pretty rough i mean it's one of these uh it's one of these moments in history that if things would have turned out differently than the rest of the scriptures would have been different right yeah i mean we would have had saul and presumably his sons and just a whole dynasty reigning over reigning over israel so because of what happens

in first samuel 13 all the rest of the scriptures are are different and that's why i think this is a pattern after genesis 3 this is one man making a decision blaming others for it breaking the commandment of the lord and suffering consequences which will endure throughout history as a result Yeah, and I think this sort of explains Saul's bitterness in his dealings with David later. Because, I mean, you have to think that he is just continually, as he looks at David, is like, I was staring down this crazy army.

This guy did not show up. I mean, if he's trying to justify what he did, this guy didn't show up. i got i got all these guys i'm about to like i got a bunch of people's lives in my hands here so i i tried to do the one thing and like that that's it that it's all over just because of that like i mean you you can see why he would look at david with contempt and then what they tell me is that oh i'm not a man after god's own heart this guy though this guy is a man after god's heart because i tried to spare a bunch of people's lives i mean you could just hear the you could

just hear him retelling the you know recounting this this um this situation and just every time he does it becoming more and more bitter about it yeah i and more and more bitter probably to the point where this was one of the reasons he had kind of the mental breakdown that he seems to have later on right i mean he just really loses his mind as as time goes on uh has some moments of of lucidity but a lot of times it just seemed like he's just kind of a like a mad king more or less yeah and you know that once he's heard that god has picked out another guy who is a man after his own heart that he's going to be on the lookout well who's this guy going to be so he becomes suspicious probably of everyone so if if god has picked out somebody else is it

him or is it him who's who's it going to be uh by the way that phrase we often hear that phrase David is a man after God's own heart. That could be taken a couple different ways. I think most people understand that to mean that David had a heart that God was pleased with, right? And I think they take that because of this verse, and then in chapter 16, verse 7, this is when Samuel goes to anoint one of the sons of jesse that he says that god tells tells samuel do not look at his appearance or at the height of the stature because i have rejected him that is david's brothers for god sees not as man sees for man looks at the outward appearance but god looks at the at the heart so between that verse and this one here about a man after his own heart i think

most people take that to mean that there uh there was something about david's heart which attracted which attracted god yeah we use that i mean we still use this this phrase i mean if uh you know chad if we go to a restaurant and then you order you know the burnt the burnt ends i might say ah a man after my own heart might say this and what this means is that i i have seen something in you that is very much like me yeah right and so i've always taken god say to man after my own heart as uh there's god sees uh in david something of himself which of course theologically is exactly uh is exactly right i mean so when god i mean this is how we understand god changing uh a heart of stone to a heart of flesh you're becoming a new creation all of this

sort of stuff right and so uh david that david when god looks at you and says oh i see something of myself in there it's because he put it there yeah exactly yeah i think that's kind of what is being communicated by by the hebrew as i say that you can you can take it that way you can also take it to to mean that the lord has sought out a man that is that is the kind of man that his heart is looking for if you know what I mean so this is my because of course the heart is in the scriptures the heart is the epicenter of a person you can think of it also as the epicenter of God so God's looking for someone his his heart is looking for someone and he finds it in finds it in David but basically the idea here judging from other occurrences of this particular phrase is that

it's sort of a one of these where it's a mirror image right so after my heart means someone who is imaging back to me or mirroring back to me that which i see in myself yeah my own heart would be someone who resembles what i'm looking for yeah i mean you get to go to you know as the author of hebrews will say that without faith it is impossible to please god so god finds nothing pleasing in a person uh or or their heart separated from faith and of course we know that faith is a gift and so so what what happens i mean if you just look at david you say like well David doesn't seem like an infinitely better guy than Saul. If you just audit their lives, you're like, I don't know.

These guys both seem like scoundrels at the end of it all. But what David is, obviously, is a man of faith. So David knows what repentance is. Saul seems to not know what repentance is nearly as much. Yeah, that's a good way to put it. And, of course, repentance is an act of faith. Right, right. So this is the first mention, by the way, of, not mention of, but allusion to David.

Nothing before this point is ever suggested that there might be somebody else. So this is the first time that we have a hint of someone who is on the horizon. Well, everything kind of just ends as far as this scene goes. Samuel gets up and he leaves. And that's the end of it. We don't know, you know, did they ever have the peace offering? You know, what transpired? We don't know.

We're never told. But we are told in this beginning of a new section that Saul, a number of the people were with him, and it was down to 600 men. So remember, we started out, he had 2,000 with him, and now we're down to 600 because people were just leaving. They were scared. They're hiding. They're running across the border.

Saul and his son Jonathan now we're told that Jonathan is his son explicitly and the people who were with them they were staying in in Geba or Geba of Benjamin and the Philistines were in Michmash and I believe those are very close together like a couple miles apart if I remember correctly so this is a a very very heated kind of situation because you've got the enemy just literally almost uh uh within just a couple of miles two or three miles of where you're at then the philistines start to send out these raiding parties probably to just make sure that the roads coming into their camp are going to be safe because they send some they send out three companies uh some of them go toward ofra so they some of them go northwest the next verse says some

of them go southwest and then some of them also go to the east and we have the the place names that that are laid out for us there. This is more or less the Philistines making sure that they're not just camped in one spot, but they have various parties, northwest, southwest, and east, to protect the roads leading to where they're camped. Then we have a pretty fascinating detail that's given to us. This is kind of thrown in here. It says, now no blacksmith could be found in all the land of israel for the philistines said lest the hebrews make swords or spears so all israel used to go down to where the philistines were to get their their plowshare or their their matic which is like a pickaxe or their their axe or their hoe that gals we translated sickle how they went to

the philistine to get all these things sharpened right and they were they were charged two-thirds of a shekel for the plowshares and the mattocks and the forks the axes and to to fix the hose or to fix the sickles so that's just those three verses are kind of thrown in there well makes it makes you think they're significant yeah it makes you think that the philistines had some sort of uh power over over the over israel obviously where they're like we're not going to allow you to have blacksmiths i mean so pretty tyrannical yeah it is yeah this is a i mean this is this is economic oppression what we call it today because they're charging on what evidently would have been exorbitant prices that's the reason the money amounts are mentioned the money

amounts are not thrown in there just as far as like you know some kind of historical detail in case you're interested the money amounts are thrown in there to make sure you know that even to get their their farm equipment fixed and sharpened they were charged just these uh inordinate amounts as a way of also economically oppressing the Israelites. But it also shows you, you know, we usually think of the Philistines and the Israelites as like always at war, right? Well, they were under the Philistines for the longest time. They were able to interact with the Philistines when they weren't at war. They had to go down to get their weapons sharpened. They had to go to the Philistine blacksmiths to get them worked on. And then they were overcharged

because of that so if you're the this also explains maybe why the the israelite soldiers were running away what kind of weapons do they have well they probably had bows and spears and slings so all these were didn't require them to have uh any kind of metal right yeah if you see a bunch of chariots and a bunch of swords um that slingshot yeah i mean yeah unless you got unless you got you know a thousand davids with you this is this is gonna be seem like pretty bad odds yeah they're i mean they're they're extremely outgunned they're so they're kept at an economic advantage they're kept at a uh at a weaponry disadvantage so things are not looking good look good for israel so it continues on with verse 22 saying that on the day of battle neither

sword nor spear was found in the hands of any of the people who were with saul and jonathan but somehow we're not told how but somehow saul and his son jonathan did have these weapons not no idea how they got them i suppose if there's one sword in all of israel the king has it i suppose so i guess i guess that's the way there's two his son has the other one right right so uh they've got they've got the weaponry nobody else in israel has the weaponry and then the chapter ends by saying that the garrison of the philistines went out to the pass at mcmosh so basically the the situation that we're in is that israel is they're outgunned they're outmanned it sounds to me like they're being outmaneuvered as well by the philistines uh their their troops

are dispersing because they're all going awol because they're overwhelmed by the power of the philistines and you got to think you know saul had recently kind of in the in the beginning of his reign had this great military victory but now it seems as if he's destined for defeat and i guarantee you that word of what happened between him and samuel was beginning to spread among the people as well so if you're an israelite if you're especially if you're an israelite soldier you're kind of looking at this situation and you're beginning to wonder uh maybe it wasn't such a great idea for us to have a king. Maybe this is not going to work out so well after all. And as I've mentioned, this whole story is sort of a Genesis 3 type story. This is the fall

of King Saul. The kingdom is going to be taken away from him. But it's also, in the bigger picture, it's the way that God is writing the story in such a way as to prepare us for what is to come. This first and second Samuel could have been called first and second David because he's really the central character. And that's what the whole story is leading toward. Everything is preparing us for the introduction of the guy that's going to be the main character. And that way, I mean, the Genesis 3 nature of it is a perfect counterpoint to what's happening here because the way is being prepared for David, just like Genesis 3 prepared us for that promised seed which we're going to hear later in samuel is actually going to be the the seed of david as well

so you know in a chapter that has a lot of a lot of negative things happening in it it's really the step in the direction that god has taken the the whole story which will lead to david and then to finally to david's son yeah and next week we'll find out um you know what exactly happens with this battle i mean is this it is this the end i mean they're going to take take everyone out or there might be a little surprise yeah we got some crazy stuff coming up in this next chapter so join us then yeah all right guys well that's it for this week uh go over to uh 1517.org and uh make sure you register for the here we still stand live stream so that you can uh join us uh you know on your phone on your laptop you got a smart tv whatever you gotta do uh hang out with

us on the 16th and 17th of october chad i'll see you next week all right we'll see you then We'll see you next time.