Marriage - 1st Samuel 18:10-21

Saul knows that he’s lost God’s favor and that God has promised to replace him as king with someone else who is righteous. Saul probably didn’t really believe that God would do that or he didn’t believe that God could do that or he just didn’t care and was determined to not go down without a fight. David is not only clearly being favored by God militarily with all his victories, but he’s very popular among the people, even his own son Jonathan. At this point Saul is very wary of David as a rival and a threat to his own power and starts to plot his downfall. He’s having this mood swings and David is able to soothe him with music like was his role before but now Saul is carrying a “javelin” in his hand while at court. TB notes that always carrying a weapon “this was not usual for a king; normally a king held a royal scepter as the symbol of his power. But for Saul his spear had become his scepter. This weapon of death was Saul’s emblem.” Twice Saul used that spear that he was carrying and threw it at David who as able to dodge it both times but man that’s wild to consider. Imagine you’re David, trying your best, kidnapped from your family’s house, being blessed by God, carrying out the missions that your king gave you to do and then he tries to kill you because he’s threatened by you, like that’s wild, talk about traumatic.

On some level, Saul recognizes that God has left him and is now giving David favor and victory and having won battles because of the favor of God, he must know that God can remove Saul out of his position and give it to David if he wants. I think it’s that helplessness, that desire for a certain outcome but watching all the signs that your worst nightmare is going to come true. There’s denial, there’s anger, there’s jealousy, all of those things just can make you increasingly unstable. Saul put him in charge of a large military force and David had lots of victories and people throughout Israel and Judah loved him and Saul hated it. The scriptures keep referring it to Saul being afraid of David and being scared is when people are most unpredictable because when you’re scared you can justify almost any action

Now there is still the matter of David’s rewards for defeating Goliath, and one of those is marrying the king’s daughter, so Saul promises David marriage to his oldest daughter Merab but instead of just giving him that promise, he adds on a requirement, “be thou valiant for me, and fight the Lord’s battles.” Is Saul just admitting that David is blessed by God militarily and wants that blessing to work for him? No, he wants David to be killed by the Philistines. David feigns humility “Who am I, and what is my life, or my father’s family in Israel, that I should be son in law to the king?” David’s father’s family were significant rulers in Israel so politically David would be a great candidate for marriage into the king’s family. When it came time to marry Merab, Saul gives her to another man to marry. But Saul has a second daughter and that second daughter is in love with David, and Saul likes this a lot because he sees it as an opportunity to set David up to be killed. In reality, TB says that Saul probably knew that his second daughter was in love with David, saw this as an opportunity to make an alliance through marrying off the first daughter to someone else and then making his second daughter happy by marrying her to David and this also fulfills his obligation to marry David into his family while also setting him up to be killed in some way. So it’s really win win for Saul this with this arrangement.