Chapter I: Origin of the Monarchy. Reign of Saul

=1. One of= the most evident =results= of the intimate =associations= of the Israelites with the Canaanitish tribes was the desire to have a king.

In the transition from the era of the Judges to that of the Kings =there arose a man= whose earliest days had been passed in the precincts of the Tabernacle at Shiloh under the care of Eli, the priest and judge of Israel. He seems to have been one whose evident piety and clear and manly judgment had impressed the people with a reverence for him from his earliest days. No other person in the times of the Judges seems to have been known so universally as uniting in one man divine authority and wisdom, and of no other had it been said that “all Israel, from Dan to Beersheba, knew that =Samuel= was established to be a prophet of the Lord,” 1 Sam. 3:20.

=2. With Samuel=, as we have said, the line of the Judges closes. By divine direction he gratified the demands of the people by appointing Saul king over Israel, but not without a solemn warning as to the despotism with which the kings, in the future, would rule over them.

The whole land now becomes united under one ruler as a king, but at the same time strongly influenced by the prophetic authority of Samuel, who seems never to have lost power, either over the people or the king.

=3. Dan= and =Beersheba= were towns which in common speech limited the whole land, the former on the north, the later on the south. Dan was the name of only the tribe on the Mediterranean west of Jerusalem until the time that a colony from this tribe migrated to the extreme north of Canaan, beyond all the tribes, and drove out a company of Sidonians who had settled by themselves near the southern parts of Mt. Hermon, in a place before called Laish. This town the Danites conquered, and, taking possession of the place, named it Dan, after their ancestor.

Scarcely anything remains of this ancient city, but its location, called Tel el-Kady is beautiful, at the head of the plain of Huleh, nearly twenty-five miles north of the Sea of Galilee. There are two fine springs at the ancient site and the elevation is 505 feet above the Mediterranean, which is twenty-five miles distant, on the west, to a point near the city of Tyre, which then existed. Dan was in the region assigned to the tribe of Naphtali.

=4. Beersheba= was exactly 148 miles south-southwest of Dan. Here the only remains consist of two very ancient large wells. The site still bears the ancient name and is twenty-seven miles southwest from Hebron. The wells contain excellent water and show the rope-grooves of many centuries in the massive stones with which they are lined and curbed.

=5. The introduction of Saul= to the full possession of the kingly office and authority was after his first battle, near a place east of the Jordan, called Jabesh-gilead.

The Ammonites had come up against this city from the south and demanded its unconditional surrender. In their distress they sent to their brethren, at Gibeah, where Saul resided. Saul seems to have had, at this time, but little to do as king, and it was not until he returned from the field, where he had been attending to his cattle, that on inquiry he learned the condition of the inhabitants of Jabesh-gilead and their appeal for help to their brethren, who were publicly lamenting their inability to give them any aid.

=6. Saul immediately hewed a yoke of oxen= into pieces, and sending messengers with pieces of the oxen throughout the entire land of Israel, made wise use of the name of Samuel in union with his own, in the threat, “Whosoever cometh not forth after Saul and after Samuel, so shall it be done unto his oxen,” 1 Sam. 11:7.

No such universal call to united effort had before sounded over the land for ages. It was the sword of the king and the authority of Samuel the prophet of the Lord, and the call was honored from Dan to Beersheba. The messengers from the besieged city were hurried back with the cheering reply from the gathering army, “To-morrow by that time the sun be hot ye shall have help,” 1 Sam. 11:9.

JABESH-GILEAD.

=7. Jabesh-gilead= is not certainly identified, but it was not far off from a valley known as Wady Jabes, or Yabes, about twenty miles southeast of the Sea of Galilee, in the land of Gilead.

Bezek, where the hosts gathered before they started to cross the Jordan, was some plain near the Jordan not yet identified.

=8. Three hundred and thirty thousand= of Israel gathered themselves together in three bands and hastily crossed the Jordan in the night, and before the heat of day they had slain and routed the Ammonites in the greatest battle that had been known in Canaan for several centuries.

So great was the reaction from the long-continued indifference to united effort, and especially to the publicly expressed lack of confidence in Saul, that, in keeping with their rude manners, they demanded the immediate execution of those who had spoken against the king.

=9. But Samuel turned this feeling= into another channel. He summoned a great gathering similar to the one called by Joshua 300 years before at Shechem, but at this time the assembly was at Gilgal. Here they renewed their promises to God and to the king. This was the Gilgal which was upon the plains of Jericho, and of which we have already spoken.

=10. Saul now became king= in its fullest sense. His first act was to appoint a standing army of 3,000. By an ill-timed attack upon an outpost of the Philistines the anger of that entire nation was aroused at a time when the Israelites were unprepared to meet them. Samuel was called upon for advice and service, but Saul’s impatience and disobedience to the directions of the prophet discouraged Samuel so greatly that he withdrew from Saul. Jonathan by a stratagem executed in the night, 1 Sam. 14, created a panic in the Philistine army, and the Israelites, gathering together from various hiding-places to which they had fled in their fear, joined in pursuit, until the Philistines were driven back to their own country, which was upon the southwest coast of Palestine about forty miles distant.

But the repeated instances of disobedience, coupled with deception, on the part of Saul led Samuel to withdraw from the king entirely and for ever, and by divine appointment he anointed David, in private, to be successor to Saul. David’s appointment was suspected, and it aroused the bitter jealousy of the king, which was shown by his continued pursuit and persecution of David, until the great and final battle of Saul’s reign, which took place on the plain of Jezreel, against the Philistines, about B. C. 1056.

SAUL’S LAST BATTLE.

=11. This battle=, with its associated geography and incidental history, requires some knowledge of the localities of SHUNEM, GILBOA, and EN-DOR.

The Philistines, with whom Saul was soon to contend, had approached the great plain of Esdraelon from their coast on the southwest. They had passed up the plain of Sharon northward along the shore of the Great Sea and entered through the pass of Mt. Carmel, which range limits this plain on the southwest, and thus they had entered the plain which we have already described, page 101.

Saul had gathered his army, and passing northward along the central elevated ridge, had reached the same plain at the town of En-gannim, which is on the edge of the southern border and overlooks the plain. Shunem was ten miles north. Here the Philistines were now gathering in their forces from the west, since the pass is sixteen miles west of Shunem.

It is an interesting fact that Gen. Kleber, under Napoleon I. in his battle with the Turks, 1799, drew up his smaller army of fifteen hundred in a square occupying exactly the same ground which a part of the Philistine army covered at this time, while the Turks with their twenty-five thousand covered more of the same battle-ground on the north.[84]

=12. Shunem=, now called Solam, is on the west and southern end of the short hill range running east, and supposed to be the hill of Moreh, but the Philistines occupied the plain on the south of this ridge-end, for Saul’s army was across the valley on the west end of Mt. Gilboa and immediately opposite the Philistines. Between the two armies was the valley of Jezreel running down eastward to Beth-shean in the valley of Jordan. The town of Jezreel, which gave name to the valley, was south of Shunem――Shunem on the Philistines’ side, Jezreel on that of Saul.

Just one mile and a half southeast of the valley of Jezreel is the “Fountain of Jezreel,” now a large body of water fed by a spring called Ain Jalud. This is probably both the Fountain of Jezreel of 1 Sam. 29:1, and the “water” referred to in Judg. 7:4. It is also the “well of Harod” of the first verse.

It was just two centuries before this battle that Gideon at this place obtained his great victory over the Midianites, and it was, perhaps, chosen by Saul because of the fountain.

=13. As Saul had= more than 300,000 warriors in his battle with the Ammonites and was as fully aware of the seriousness of a conflict with the Philistines as he was there with the Ammonites, it is probable that he brought into the field as many as he then had. The Philistines had a much larger number than Saul, and the total number therefore in conflict could not have been less than 700,000.

The evening before the morning of the battle Saul came fully to the conclusion that the Philistines were too strong for the forces under his command. In his forlorn belief in the spirit world and in the existence of Samuel, although three years dead, he determined upon an interview with the prophet if it were possible by a witch’s power of incantation to obtain it. As soon as it was dark, Saul, disguised, and with two trusty servants, crossed the valley from Gilboa northward to the village of En-dor, where in the caves near at hand there dwelt such a woman as he sought. The distance from the Fountain of Jezreel is about seven miles north. The interview with Samuel, which seems to have been as unlooked for and as terrible to the witch as it was dreadful and disheartening to Saul, is recorded in 1 Sam. 28:3‒25.

=14. Early the next day= the battle began. The place called Aphek, where the main centre or headquarters of the Philistines was located, is not known, but was probably a mile southwest of Shunem, where the left wing of the army extended upon the line of its approach. The Philistines had the army of Saul at terrible disadvantage from the fact that his troops were drawn up southeast of them against the foot of Gilboa and slightly covering its sides, and thus elevated to the shafts of the archers. It was at about this age that the bow in war was used with terrible fatality by some of the African nations, and the Philistines had added this weapon to their javelins and short arms.[85]

=15. It was a battle of arrows= against swords and slings, and the archers won the victory, and after a long day’s fearful contest Saul and his three sons lay dead among the defeated thousands that covered the flanks of Gilboa.

Beth-shean was in sight eastward down the valley of Jezreel. It probably was never a Jewish but always a Canaanitish city, and here the Philistines the next day carried the headless trunk of Saul’s body and nailed it upon the outside walls with the bodies of his sons, while the salted head of the king was sent to the land of the victors to be carried around through the cities of the Philistines on exhibition.

Large numbers of the Philistines now took possession of the vacated cities, and many of the Israelites crossed the Jordan to find other homes until better times should come.

ZIKLAG AND THE SOUTH COUNTRY.

=16. Among the vast numbers of the Philistine army=, as they came upon the plain from Mt. Carmel, David’s royal friend, King Achish, occupied the rear, and David and his small band would be distinguished from the lack of the conventional army uniform, which could be seen at a great distance. The appearance of the Philistines in war was specially distinguishable from that of all other warriors by a peculiar head-dress and tightly-fitting tunic, leaving the arms bare.

But David’s presence formed ground for suspicion, and he was dismissed to return with his men to =Ziklag=. The situation of this place is not known, but from various circumstances it could not have been far off from the hill country of Judæa and in the general vicinity and south of Gath, since Achish, who gave him the place, was king of that city.[86]

=17.= On his return to Ziklag, finding that the Amalekites of the far south had burned his city and carried off all the families, David and his men pursued after them, recovered all, and returned to Ziklag. “=The south=” was a special term for that country beginning somewhere about Beersheba and reaching fifty or sixty miles south, and perhaps farther.

=18. The duration of Saul’s reign= was about forty years, or as the commonly received chronology presents it, from 1095 B. C. to 1056 B. C., and at the latter date Saul and his eldest son Jonathan died upon the battlefield.

In this great battle the Philistines, as we have said, used bows and arrows, and in this respect had a great advantage over the Israelites, who were not taught the use of this instrument in war until after this battle, 2 Sam. 1:18, and in the reign of David.