The Gospel According to 2 Samuel 1

some thoughts on Jesus's presence within the Scriptures

In one of my graduate school classes, we separated into groups and practiced exegeting a difficult text from the Hebrew Scriptures. Specifically, our professor gave us a passage that is violent and often causes some lively debate about the “God of the Old Testament.”

The purpose of this exercise is to rescue this passage from the clutches of literalism, moralism, and spiritualization while offering a literal, moral, and spiritual (or gospel) reading of this passage. This specific approach comes from the early church fathers, especially Origen, but we know about it from others who employed this approach in the years following his death. You can read more about this method of approaching difficult texts, or any text, by consulting Dr. Bradley Jersak’s work A More Christlike Word.

Some people worked through the flood story while others did Samson and Delilah. My group was tasked with picking a passage where David was involved in some kind of violence. There are plenty of options of course, like with Goliath or Uriah, but we wanted to dig a little deeper than these classic examples, so we chose the scene in 2 Samuel 1 where David orders one of his men to kill an Amalekite for mercy killing an almost-dead Saul.

In this article, I’ll take you through our approach.

It might be good for you to reread this passage now. You may even start in the last chapter of 1 Samuel because there are some pretty interesting differences between the two narratives.

The Literal Reading

One of the first things to notice is that this man who was killed was an Amalekite, not an Israelite. What makes his story even more interesting is that Saul was supposed to kill all the Amalekites according to 1 Samuel 15, including the women and children. This brutal passage has given me a lot of trouble over the years, but obviously Saul spared far more than the livestock and the king, so maybe we shouldn’t even read 1 Samuel 15 literally because here this Amalekite stands.

So this man, whose people were apparently killed by Saul, is the one Saul asks to go ahead and end his life before his enemies arrive, so he does.

Maybe this man took joy in doing that? Maybe he did this to gain favor with presumably the new administration? It’s hard to say his motives, but he does call David “my lord” as he presents the crown to the new king.

In response to this, David has the man killed.

The Moral Reading

The moral reading asks, “How does this make me a better disciple?”

One of the things we noticed is that David had gone out of his way to not kill Saul, but here, after Saul is dead, David’s first act as king is to have another man killed. Despite being handed the kingdom, he doesn’t take the opportunity to end the cycle of violence.

Beginning his new reign with an act of violence is what eventually leads to his inability to construct a temple to God.

But the word of the LORD came to me, saying, ‘You have shed much blood and have waged great wars; you shall not build a house to my name because you have shed so much blood in my sight on the earth. 1 Chronicles 22:8

Since God doesn’t want David to build a temple because of his violence and wars, we might pause to consider whether God desires violence at all. Was it God who wanted the Amalekites slain or was it God’s children projecting their violence on to God, which is something we all might do.

He shouldn’t have a place at the table because he is breaking clear commands of God.

Their worship can’t be acceptable because God despises novelties in worship.

Maybe these sorts of statements seem like they come from the Bible because of our plethora of quotations to support them, but even then they may be misinterpretations that say more about us than God.

So when we are faced with a story like this, we have to ask, “What Would Jesus Do?”

When Jesus was confronted with situations that would cause the average priest or king to become enraged, such as coming face to face with an unclean person or witnessing the cruelty of the empire, he chose neither fight nor flight; instead, he engaged in radical nonviolence that included art (drawing in the dirt), action (publicly healing on the Sabbath), and self-sacrifice (willingly and humbly dying on the Cross).

When we are given an opportunity to break a cycle of violence or alcoholism or abuse or bad parenting or whatever, what do we do? And can we have grace for those, like David, who fall back on unhealthy ways of facing these things? Can we have this grace for others and ourselves while still seeking a better way, perhaps Walter Wink’s Third Way?

The Spiritual (or Gospel) Reading

In our group’s presentation of our findings, I was asked to offer the spiritual reading. Before I continue, I need to distinguish between a spiritual reading and spiritualizing. If I were to open the Scriptures, pick a passage, and make it say anything I wanted, then that would be a disservice to the text; instead, a spiritual reading is one that attempts to faithfully honor the literal and moral levels while following Paul’s steps in seeing deeper meaning in the story of Hagar and Sarah or finding Jesus in the Rock in the wilderness. It means walking with Jesus on the road to Emmaus, realizing that all of Scripture points to the Christ.

Instead of adding our own understanding to the text, eisegesis, it is an attempt to extract from the text a gospel reading that was put there by the Spirit, exegesis.

In a short eBook I wrote for my congregation on how to study the Bible, I expanded upon a four layer method I heard Richard Rohr explain several years ago: literal, deeper, comprehensive, and mystery. So if this seems familiar to you and you have been following my work for sometime, then that’s where it came from.

So the first thing that stood out to me about this text was that the slaying happened on the third day after Saul’s death. Once you begin to notice how often certain numbers are used, such as seven or ten or forty, it’s worth it to pause at the mention of one of these common numbers to see if there is something going on. Sometimes there isn’t, but this was the first clue that there may be more to this story than meets the eye.

Which is actually true about every passage because of what Jesus said on the road to Emmaus.

Now, the thing that helped confirm this suspicion is what David called Saul in verse 14:

David said to him, “Were you not afraid to lift your hand to destroy the LORD’s anointed?” 2 Samuel 1:14

The word annointed is where we get the word Messiah or Christ, so the connection here jumped off the page at me. This is when I really started getting excited.

While the end of 1 Samuel says that Saul fell on his sword, here the passages says that Saul was pierced with a spear:

The young man reporting to him said, “I happened to be on Mount Gilboa, and there was Saul leaning on his spear, while the chariots and the horsemen drew close to him…” 2 Samuel 1:6

So here is Saul, the Lord’s Christ, pierced with a spear, and who kills him? A gentile.

In the New Testament, one of the most graphic scenes is when the Lord’s Christ is pierced through with a spear by a gentile (for Lord’s Christ: Luke 2:26; for Jesus being pierced: John 19:34).

At this point, I had enough to make me excited about our group work, but then I had an idea: I need to check the Bible the first Christians used, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures called the Septuagint (abbreviated LXX).

In most of our versions, the gentile messenger reports Saul as saying, “Come, stand over me and kill me, for convulsions have seized me, and yet my life still lingers” (2 Samuel 1:9). In the LXX though, the passage reads, “And he said to to me, ‘Stand, now, over me and kill me because a dreadful darkness has seized me because all my life is before me’” (2 Kingdoms 1:9, LES).

On the day Saul died, he was seized by a great darkness; on the day Jesus died, darkness was over the face of the earth for three hours (Matthew 27:45).

So here is David on the third day after Saul’s death, which tells you and me as Christians that there is a possibility of resurrection, but what does David do? Instead of being a man after God’s own heart, instead of being the kind of man that could build the house of God, he continues the cycle of violence.

When confronted with this choice in his own life, Jesus took the violence into himself, which brought the cycle of violence to a screeching halt. Now, you and I have the opportunity to follow in his footsteps by taking up our crosses, staring down the evil in the world, and saying, “Enough.”

As the gentile man lay dead at David’s feet, David said, “Your blood be on your head” (2 Samuel 1:16). At the trial of Jesus, the “people as a whole” cried out, “His blood be on us and on our children.”

What David didn’t realize is that man’s blood was on his head, which disqualified him from building the temple of God. Jesus, who absorbed the crowd’s violence, became the chief cornerstone of the Messianic temple. As you and I take up our cross to follow Jesus, we are invited to be spiritual stones. By following Jesus to death, we are included in this new temple through resurrection.

Peter wrote,

Come to him, a living stone, though rejected by mortals yet chosen and precious in God’s sight, and like living stones let yourselves be built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. 1 Peter 2:4–5

The spiritual sacrifice we offer is our whole self (Romans 12:1-2). By rejecting the conformity of the world, which demands sacrifices of violence, war, and injustice, we becoming a living sacrifice, conformed to the image of Love and peace.

And where is Jesus? The Lord’s Christ is in the wounds of Saul, the Lord’s Christ. Jesus is in the slain Amalekite. Jesus, the son of David, is even in the bitter mixture of rage and sorrow of David, reminding us to see each person as the Lord’s Christ (Matthew 25:31ff). He takes all of this into himself on the Cross, and transforms every bit of it into a new creation.