2nd Samuel Chapter 1 verse 12 Holy Bible

Pulpit Commentary

Pulpit CommentaryVerse 12. - They mourned, and wept, and fasted. The sight of Saul's royal insignia was clear proof of Israel's disaster; and this sorrow of David and his men shows how true their hearts were to their country, and how unbearable would have been their position had not the prudence of the Philistine lords extricated them from the difficulty in which they had been placed by David's want of faith. But David had other reasons besides patriotism for sorrow. Personally he had lost the truest of friends, and even Saul had a place in his heart for he would contrast with his terrible death the early glories of his reign, when all Israel honoured him as its deliverer from the crushing yoke of foreign bondage, and when David was himself one of the most trusty of his captains. Otto von Gerlach compares David thus weeping over the fall of his implacable enemy with David's Son weeping over Jerusalem, the city whose inhabitants were his bitter foes, and who not only sought his death, but delivered him up to the Romans, to be scourged and spitefully intreated, and slain upon the cross.

Ellicott's Commentary

Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers(12) They mourned.--On hearing the tidings of the Amalekite, David and all his people showed the usual Oriental signs of sorrow by rending their clothes, weeping, and fasting. Although David thus heard of the death of his persistent and mortal enemy, and of his own consequent accession to the throne, yet there is not the slightest reason to doubt the reality and earnestness of his mourning. The whole narrative shows that David not only, as a patriotic Israelite, lamented the death of the king, but also felt a personal attachment to Saul, notwithstanding his long and unreasonable hostility. But Saul did not die alone; Jonathan, David's most cherished friend, fell with him. At the same time, the whole nation over which David was hereafter to reign received a crushing defeat from their foes, and large numbers of his countrymen were slain. It has been well remarked that the only deep mourning for Saul, with the exception of the men of Jabesh-gilead, came from the man whom he had hated and persecuted as long as he lived.The people of the Lord.--Besides his personal grief, David had both a religious and a patriotic ground for sorrow. The men who had fallen were parts of that Church of God which he so earnestly loved and served, and were also members of the commonwealth of Israel, on whose behalf he ever laboured with patriotic devotion. The LXX., overlooking this distinction, has very unnecessarily changed "people of the Lord" into "people of Judah."