^1:2On the third day a man arrived from the camp of Saul with his clothes torn and dirt on his head.⁴ When he approached David, the man⁵ threw himself to the ground.⁶

^1:3David asked him, “Where are you coming from?” He replied, “I have escaped from the camp of Israel.” ^1:4David inquired, “How were things going?⁷ Tell me!” He replied, “The people fled from the battle and many of them⁸ fell dead.⁹ Even Saul and his son Jonathan are dead!” ^1:5David said to the young man¹⁰ who was telling him this, “How do you know that Saul and his son Jonathan are dead?”¹¹^1:6The young man who was telling him this¹² said, “I just happened to be on Mount Gilboa and came across Saul leaning on his spear for support. The chariots and leaders of the horsemen were in hot pursuit of him. ^1:7When he turned around and saw me, he called out to me. I answered, ‘Here I am!’ ^1:8He asked me, ‘Who are you?’ I told him, ‘I’m¹³ an Amalekite.’ ^1:9He said to me, ‘Stand over me and finish me off!¹⁴ I’m very dizzy,¹⁵ even though I’m still alive.’¹⁶^1:10So I stood over him and put him to death, since I knew that he couldn’t live in such a condition.¹⁷ Then I took the crown which was on his head and the¹⁸ bracelet which was on his arm. I have brought them here to my lord.”¹⁹

^1:11David then grabbed his own clothes²⁰ and tore them, as did all the men who were with him. ^1:12They lamented and wept and fasted until evening because Saul, his son Jonathan, the Lord’s people, and the house of Israel had fallen by the sword.

^1:13David said to the young man who told this to him, “Where are you from?” He replied, “I am an Amalekite, the son of a resident foreigner.”²¹^1:14David replied to him, “How is it that you were not afraid to reach out your hand to destroy the Lord’s anointed?” ^1:15Then David called one of the soldiers²² and said, “Come here and strike him down!” So he struck him down, and he died.

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Footnotes

4 Tearing one’s clothing and throwing dirt on one’s head were outward expressions of grief in the ancient Near East, where such demonstrable reactions were a common response to tragic news.
5 Heb “he”; the referent (the man mentioned at the beginning of v. 2) has been specified in the translation to avoid confusion as to who fell to the ground.
6 Heb “he fell to the ground and did obeisance.”
7 Heb “What was the word?”
8 Heb “from the people.”
9 Heb “fell and died.”
10 In v. 2 he is called simply a “man.” The word used here in v. 5 (so also in vv. 6, 13, 15), though usually referring to a young man or servant, may in this context designate a “fighting” man, i.e., a soldier.
11 Instead of the “who was recounting this to him, ‘How do you know that Saul and his son Jonathan are dead?’ ” the reads “declare to me how Saul and his son Jonathan died.”
12 The and one of the lack the words “who was telling him this” of the .
13 The present translation reads with the Qere and many medieval Hebrew “and I said,” rather than the Kethib which has “and he said.” See the , , and , all of which have the first person.
14 As P. K. McCarter (II Samuel [], ) points out, the Polel of the verb מוּת (mut, “to die”) “refers to dispatching or ‘finishing off’ someone already wounded and near death.” Cf. “put me out of my misery.”
15 Heb “the dizziness has seized me.” On the meaning of the Hebrew noun translated “dizziness,” see P. K. McCarter, II Samuel (), . The point seems to be that he is unable to kill himself because he is weak and disoriented.
16 The Hebrew text here is grammatically very awkward (Heb “because all still my life in me”). Whether the broken construct phrase is due to the fact that the alleged speaker is in a confused state of mind as he is on the verge of dying, or whether the has sustained corruption in the transmission process, is not entirely clear. The former seems likely, although P. K. McCarter understands the to be the result of conflation of two shorter forms of text (P. K. McCarter, II Samuel [], , n. 9). Early translators also struggled with the verse, apparently choosing to leave part of the Hebrew text untranslated. For example, the Lucianic recension of the lacks “all,” while other witnesses (namely, one medieval Hebrew , codices A and B of the , and the ) lack “still.”
17 Heb “after his falling”; “could not survive his wound”; “was too badly wounded to live much longer.”
18 The lacks the definite article, but this is likely due to textual corruption. It is preferable to read the alef (א) of אֶצְעָדָה (’ets’adah) as a ה (he) giving הַצְּעָדָה (hatsé’adah). There is no reason to think that the soldier confiscated from Saul’s dead body only one of two or more bracelets that he was wearing (cf. “one of his bracelets”).
19 The claims that the soldier is making here seem to contradict the story of Saul’s death as presented in 1 Sam 31:3–5. In that passage it appears that Saul took his own life, not that he was slain by a passerby who happened on the scene. Some scholars account for the discrepancy by supposing that conflicting accounts have been brought together in the . However, it is likely that the young man is here fabricating the account in a self-serving way so as to gain favor with David, or so he supposes. He probably had come across Saul’s corpse, stolen the crown and bracelet from the body, and now hopes to curry favor with David by handing over to him these emblems of Saul’s royalty. But in so doing the Amalekite greatly miscalculated David’s response to this alleged participation in Saul’s death. The consequence of his lies will instead be his own death.
20 The present translation follows the Qere and many medieval Hebrew in reading “his garments,” rather than “his garment,” the reading of the Kethib.
21 The Hebrew word used here refers to a foreigner whose social standing was something less than that of native residents of the land, but something more than that of a nonresident alien who was merely passing through.
22 Heb “young men.”