1 Chronicles 10

Three of Saul's sons are named one by one (v. 2), and the first name is the one that stings. Jonathan was David's dearest friend - the heir to the throne who, knowing the kingdom had been promised to David, had freely embraced it: thou shalt be king over Israel, and I shall be next unto thee (1 Sam. 23:17). He dies here in the same breath as his father, one body among many on Mount Gilboa.

The Chronicler does not pause to mourn him; he saves that grief for David to pour out later, in the great lament of 2 Samuel 1, where David weeps over Jonathan… very pleasant… passing the love of women. Here Jonathan's death is simply folded into the catastrophe - a reminder that when a house falls, it takes the worthy down with the unworthy, the faithful son alongside the failing father.

The chapter opens in full retreat, and the verbs land like blows in sequence: Israel fled, they fell, they were slain (v. 1), and by verse 7 the survivors forsook their cities, and fled again, leaving the towns to the enemy. Gilboa is a ridge on the northern edge of Israel's heartland, commanding the rich Jezreel Valley below; to lose it was to lose the breadbasket and the road. The Chronicler does not narrate the fighting in detail or stop to assign blame in the moment.

He simply lets the collapse unfold, valley by valley, town by town. A kingdom is coming apart on the lower ground even as its king dies on the heights above. And the reader who knows the verdict still to come (vv. 13-14) understands that the rot did not begin on this battlefield. It had been spreading at the center for years.

One heavy line carries the weight of the whole section: a king, his three sons, and all his house died together (v. 6). The older account in 1 Samuel 31:6 reads almost identically but adds “and his armourbearer, and all his men, that same day together”; the Chronicler tightens the camera onto the house of Saul itself - the king and his sons, the dynasty, gone in a day. The wording is deliberate. This is the ending of a royal line, the closing of a chapter so that another can open.

There is something almost merciful in how briefly it is told: no lingering, no triumph, only the bare fact stated and the page turned. And the verse quietly sets up the chapter's final movement, because a throne now stands empty - and the Chronicler has spent nine chapters of genealogy telling us, name by name, whose family is waiting in the wings.

It begins as a grim, ordinary scene of ancient warfare - the victors back on the field the next morning to strip the dead (v. 8), armour and weapons and ornaments pulled from fallen bodies - until they recognize who one of the bodies is. The discovery of the king turns looting into a trophy. And here the irony the chapter never spells out lands hard: the king who fell on his sword to avoid being abused by the uncircumcised (v. 4) is found and handled by exactly those hands the next morning.

The death he chose to escape humiliation did not escape it. The body of the LORD's first anointed king lies on a hill, being stripped by Philistines - a picture of how completely the reign has come undone.

The Philistines know exactly what they have, and they make it a religious event. They took his head, and his armour, and sent into the land of the Philistines round about, to carry tidings unto their idols, and to the people (v. 9), and they put his armour in the house of their gods, and fastened his head in the temple of Dagon (v. 10). This is a victory tour with a theological message: their god Dagon has triumphed over the God of Israel and His king.

But the Chronicler's readers would catch the irony at once. This is the same Dagon whose idol, when the captured ark of the LORD was set beside it, was found fallen on its face - and the second morning fallen again, its head and hands broken off on the threshold (1 Sam. 5:3-4). A god who cannot keep his own head now displays the head of Saul. The boast is reported without comment, and the comment is the next chapter: the kingdom passes to David, Jerusalem is taken, and the Philistine threat is broken.

The temple of Dagon proclaims a victory that the very next page quietly overturns.

In the middle of a national catastrophe comes one act of small, costly faithfulness: And when all Jabesh-gilead heard all that the Philistines had done to Saul, they arose, all the valiant men, and took away the body of Saul, and the bodies of his sons… and buried their bones under the oak in Jabesh, and fasted seven days (vv. 11-12). Jabesh-gilead was a town across the Jordan whose one earlier appearance in the story was the night Saul, a brand-new king, gathered Israel and rescued them from Nahash the Ammonite (1 Sam. 11).

They have not forgotten. While a whole nation flees and the king's body hangs as a Philistine trophy, the men of Jabesh-gilead cross dangerous ground to bring the bodies home, give them honourable burial under the oak, and mourn with a seven-day fast. The detail is quietly moving: the first generation a king served well becomes the last generation to honour him. It is a flicker of loyal love in a dark hour, faithfulness that does not abandon a man even in death.

If someone once stood up for you and the whole world has since forgotten it, these are the people you want to be like - the ones who remember a kindness long after it would have been safe and convenient to forget.

Then the Chronicler does what no other telling of this story does: he stops and names the reason. The verdict comes in two halves, and the second is the heavier one. Saul died, first, for what he did - he committed a transgression against the LORD, kept not His word, and asked counsel of a medium. He died, even more, for what he did not do: and enquired not of the LORD (v. 14). The Hebrew behind “enquired” is darash - to seek, to search out, to inquire after; it is the very thing a king of Israel was meant to do before battle, bringing the question to God and waiting for His word.

Saul had stopped. The terrible irony, which the older account fills in (1 Sam. 28:6), is that he tried to enquire and heard only silence - and rather than wait, repent, and keep seeking the living God, he went looking for a voice among the dead. Here is the question that quietly indicts most of us. It is not only whether you have gone somewhere you should not have gone. It is whether you have simply stopped coming to the One you should.

Saul's tragedy is on both lists.