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1 Samuel 19: What the Passage Says

81 claims across 24 verses, in the order the chapter makes them.

Not a sermon outline. What 1 Samuel 19 says, and what its hard words meant. The reading of it is yours.

The Chapter in a Sentence

Saul orders his son Jonathan and his servants to kill David. Jonathan talks his father out of it and David returns to court, but after another victory over the Philistines Saul throws a spear at David, and David runs. Michal, David's wife, lowers him out a window and puts an idol in his bed to delay Saul's messengers. David reaches Samuel at Ramah, and the messengers Saul sends there begin to prophesy, as does Saul himself when he finally comes.

Claim by Claim

  1. 19:1
    • Saul spoke to Jonathan his son and to all his servants about putting David to death.
  2. 19:2
    • Jonathan, Saul's son, delighted greatly in David.
    • Jonathan told David that Saul his father was seeking to kill him.
    • Jonathan told David to be on his guard in the morning.
    • Jonathan told David to stay in a hiding place and conceal himself.
  3. 19:3
    • Jonathan said he would go out and stand beside his father in the field where David was.
    • Jonathan said he would speak to his father about David.
    • Jonathan said that whatever he saw, he would tell David.
  4. 19:4
    • Jonathan spoke well of David to Saul his father.
    • Jonathan told Saul not to let the king sin against his servant David.
    • Jonathan said David had not sinned against Saul.
    • Jonathan said David's deeds had been very good toward Saul.
  5. 19:5
    • Jonathan said David put his life in his own hand.
    • Jonathan said David struck down the Philistine.
    • Jonathan said the LORD brought about a great deliverance for all Israel.
    • Jonathan said Saul saw it and rejoiced.
    • Jonathan asked why Saul would sin against innocent blood by killing David without cause.
  6. 19:6
    • Saul listened to Jonathan's voice.
    • Saul swore an oath by the life of the LORD that David would not be put to death.
  7. 19:7
    • Jonathan called David.
    • Jonathan told David all these things.
    • Jonathan brought David to Saul.
    • David was in Saul's presence as before.
  8. 19:8
    • War broke out again.
    • David went out and fought the Philistines.
    • David struck the Philistines with a great blow.
    • The Philistines fled from before David.
  9. 19:9
    • An evil spirit from the LORD came upon Saul.
    • Saul was sitting in his house.
    • Saul's spear was in his hand.
    • David was playing music with his hand.
  10. 19:10
    • Saul sought to strike David with the spear and pin him to the wall.
    • David slipped away from Saul's presence.
    • The spear struck into the wall.
    • David fled and escaped that night.
  11. 19:11
    • Saul sent messengers to David's house to watch him.
    • Saul intended to have David killed in the morning.
    • Michal, David's wife, warned David.
    • Michal said that if David did not save his life that night, he would be killed the next day.
  12. 19:12
    • Michal let David down through a window.
    • David went and fled and escaped.
  13. 19:13
    • Michal took a household idol and laid it in the bed.
    • Michal put a woven cover of goats' hair at its head.
    • Michal covered it with a garment.
  14. 19:14
    • Saul sent messengers to take David.
    • Michal said David was sick.
  15. 19:15
    • Saul sent the messengers back to see David.
    • Saul told the messengers to bring David up to him in the bed so that he could kill him.
  16. 19:16
    • The messengers came in.
    • The household idol was in the bed.
    • The woven cover of goats' hair was at its head.
  17. 19:17
    • Saul asked Michal why she had deceived him in this way.
    • Saul said she had sent his enemy away so that he escaped.
    • Michal said to Saul that David had told her to let him go.
    • Michal reported that David said, why should I kill you.
  18. 19:18
    • David fled and escaped.
    • David came to Samuel at Ramah.
    • David told Samuel all that Saul had done to him.
    • David and Samuel went and stayed at Naioth.
  19. 19:19
    • Saul was told that David was at Naioth in Ramah.
  20. 19:20
    • Saul sent messengers to take David.
    • The messengers saw the band of prophets prophesying.
    • Samuel was standing, stationed over them.
    • The Spirit of God came upon Saul's messengers.
    • The messengers also prophesied.
  21. 19:21
    • Saul was told about this.
    • Saul sent other messengers.
    • Those messengers also prophesied.
    • Saul sent messengers a third time.
    • Those messengers also prophesied.
  22. 19:22
    • Saul himself went to Ramah.
    • Saul came to the great cistern that is in Sechu.
    • Saul asked where Samuel and David were.
    • Someone said they were at Naioth in Ramah.
  23. 19:23
    • Saul went there, to Naioth in Ramah.
    • The Spirit of God came upon Saul also.
    • Saul went along prophesying until he came to Naioth in Ramah.
  24. 19:24
    • Saul stripped off his clothes.
    • Saul prophesied before Samuel.
    • Saul fell down naked all that day and all that night.
    • For this reason people say, Is Saul also among the prophets?

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

19:1
"Servants" here means the king's officials and courtiers, the men of his household staff and armed retinue, not slaves. David was one of them: an officer in Saul's service and, by this point in the story, married to Saul's daughter.
19:2
Jonathan was Saul's oldest son. A king's son usually became king next, so David was the rival Jonathan might have feared most.
19:4
Jonathan speaks in the formal third person, "the king," rather than "you," which is how a member of the court addressed a ruler even when that ruler was his father. Calling David Saul's "servant" is not an insult either; it was the standard term for a man in the king's service.
19:5
The Philistine is Goliath (chapter 17). The Philistines were a people settled on the coastal plain south-west of Israel, organized around five cities, and Israel's main military rival throughout this period. "Put his life in his hand" is a Hebrew idiom for deliberately risking death.
19:6
"As the LORD lives" was the standard formula for a binding oath. By swearing it, a speaker staked himself on the words: to break the oath was to invite the punishment of the God he had sworn by.
19:9
"Evil" here translates a Hebrew word meaning harmful or injurious rather than morally wicked; the spirit is one that torments Saul. Hebrew writers routinely traced such things to the LORD, since they did not picture any power operating outside his control. The weapon (KJV "javelin") is a light spear that could be thrown or thrust, and Saul appears to hold it as a mark of office as much as a weapon. David's instrument was a lyre, a small hand-held harp with strings stretched across a frame.
19:10
The King James word "javelin" means a spear. Saul kept one beside him the way a king keeps a staff.
19:11
Michal is Saul's own daughter, given to David in marriage in the previous chapter, so the warning sets her against her father. "Messengers" translates a word for royal agents sent on the king's business; here they are effectively a police detail posted to watch the house until daylight.
19:12
Houses were often built against the town wall, with an upper room whose window opened outward; letting someone down by rope through such a window bypassed the guarded gate and the watchers at the door.
19:13
The Hebrew word is *teraphim*, household images or figurines kept in the home; here one is large enough to pass for a sleeping man. The KJV's "pillow of goats' hair for his bolster" is a guess at an obscure phrase: the Hebrew says only that she put something of goats' hair at its head, which may have been a woven net or quilt, or hair arranged to look like David's own.
19:15
Beds were light frames or mats that could be carried, so ordering a sick man brought "in the bed" was a practical instruction, not a taunt.
19:17
Michal reports David as having threatened her ("let me go, or why should I have to kill you?") which gives her the excuse that she acted under duress. The Hebrew leaves open whether she is repeating something David said or inventing it on the spot.
19:18
Ramah was Samuel's home town. Naioth appears only in this episode; the name may not be a town at all but a word meaning "dwellings" or "camps", that is, the quarters where the group of prophets around Samuel lived.
19:19
Naioth was a place at Ramah where a group of prophets lived and stayed together.
19:20
A "company of the prophets" was an organized band living together under a recognized leader. "Prophesying" in these passages does not mean predicting the future; it describes ecstatic behavior (chanting, music, loss of ordinary self-control) that marked a person as seized by the spirit of God. Saul's arrest party is caught up in it and stops being able to carry out its errand.
19:22
The "great well" may equally be a large cistern, a rock-cut tank for storing water, which would serve as a landmark and a natural place to meet people and ask directions. Sechu (Secu) is otherwise unknown.
19:23
This same thing had happened to Saul once before, at the beginning of his reign, when the Spirit came on him and he prophesied among a band of prophets. Chapter 16 says that Spirit had since left him. The story is deliberately reminding the reader of Saul's beginning as it describes his ruin.
19:24
Stripping off his clothes means shedding his royal robes, the visible marks of kingship; the Hebrew word for "naked" can mean either entirely unclothed or stripped to an undergarment. The saying quoted at the end is already recorded earlier in the book (chapter 10) and was used of anyone turning up somewhere he plainly did not belong.

Read 1 Samuel 19