《The Pulpit Commentaries – 2 Samuel (Vol. 1)》(Joseph S. Exell)
Contents and the Editors
One of the largest and best-selling homiletical commentary sets of its kind. Directed by editors Joseph Exell and Henry Donald Maurice Spence-Jones, The Pulpit Commentary drew from over 100 authors over a 30 year span to assemble this conservative and trustworthy homiletical commentary set. A favorite of pastors for nearly 100 years, The Pulpit Commentary offers you ideas and insight on "How to Preach It" throughout the entire Bible.
This in-depth commentary brings together three key elements for better preaching:
· Exposition-with thorough verse-by-verse commentary of every verse in the Bible.
· Homiletics-with the "framework" or the "big picture" of the text.
· Homilies-with four to six sermons sample sermons from various authors.
In addition, this set also adds detailed information on biblical customs as well as historical and geographical information, and translations of key Hebrew and Greek words to help you add spice to your sermon.
All in all, The Pulpit Commentary has over 22,000 pages and 95,000 entries from a total of 23 volumes. The go-to commentary for any preacher or teacher of God's Word.
About the Editors
Rev. Joseph S. Exell, M.A., served as the Editor of Clerical World, The Homiletical Quarterly and the Monthly Interpreter. Exell was also the editor for several large commentary sets like The Men of the Bible, The Pulpit Commentary, Preacher's Homiletic Library and The Biblical Illustrator.
Henry Donald Maurice Spence-Jones was born in London on January 14, 1836. He was educated at Corpus Christi, Cambridge where he received his B.A. in 1864. He was ordered deacon in 1865 and ordained as a priest is the following year. He was professor of English literature and lecturer in Hebrew at St. David's College, Lampeter, Wales from 1865-1870. He was rector of St. Mary-de-Crypt with All Saints and St. Owen, Gloucester from 1870-1877 and principal of Gloucester Theological College 1875-1877. He became vicar and rural dean of St. Pancras, London 1877-1886, and honorary canon since 1875. He was select preacher at Cambridge in 1883,1887,1901, and 1905, and at Oxford in 1892 and 1903. In 1906 he was elected professor of ancient history in the Royal Academy. In theology he is a moderate evangelical. He also edited The Pulpit Commentary (48 vols., London, 1880-97) in collaboration with Rev. J. S. Exell, to which he himself contributed the section on Luke, 2 vols., 1889, and edited and translated the Didache 1885. He passed away in 1917 after authoring numerous individual titles.
00 Introduction
Introduction.
THE Second Book of Samuel is virtually the history of David's reign, while the First had comprised a twofold narrative, that, namely, of Samuel's reformation of Israel, followed by the account of the uprise and fall of Saul. And never had king a more pathetic history than Israel's first monarch. Full of hope and vigour, yet modest, brave, and generous, he had entered in a most praiseworthy spirit upon the duties of his high but difficult office. Unhappily, there was a flaw in a character otherwise so noble. Throughout the history of Israel one great principle is never forgotten, and that is the presence of a higher than any human power, ever ruling in the affairs of men, and making right and justice prevail. And Saul could not bring himself into accord with this power, and again and again crossed the boundary which lay between the king's authority and that of God. It might seem a small matter, that at a time of great urgency Saul could not wait fill the expiry of the seven days appointed for Samuel's coming to Gilgal (1 Samuel 13:13); and to lose a kingdom for such hastiness seems to many modern commentators a hard measure. Nor are excuses wanting for his leniency towards the Amalekites, and Saul himself could see in it at first no violation of God's command (1 Samuel 15:20). But in both cases there was present the same spirit which made him murder in cruel haste the high priests at Nob, and put even their women and babes at the breast to death for the supposed violation of his royal authority. Saul could not submit to the Power that is higher than man, nor consent to make his own will bend to that of God; and this wilfulness was rebellion as hateful and contrary to right as open dealings with unclean spirits, or the actual abandonment of Jehovah for idols (1 Samuel 15:23). It is easy to see its hatefulness in such deeds as the murder of the priests and the repeated attempts to slay David. The unerring judgment of God condemned it at its first outbreak, and before it had ended in crime; and this condemnation was in mercy. Had Saul repented and humbled himself in heart, his course would have been one ever brightening into light. But he was stubborn and rebellious, and the gloom deepened round him till all was dark.
Saul was not prepared to do right because it was right; and when Samuel and those who loved the right for its own sake drew away from him, his vanity was wounded, and jealousy took possession of his heart. Undoubtedly he was a man possessed of great mental and bodily gifts, and his achievement in so rapidly raising the militia of Israel and crushing Nahash the Ammonite gave him just reason for exultation. It was a deed in which he gave proof of high courage, strong will, and great military capacity. He must have been himself surprised at the rapidity and completeness of his success. And in that hour of gratified self-love he could be generous and noble minded (1 Samuel 11:13). But it was largely vanity as well as fanaticism which led to the rash vow which nearly cost Jonathan his life; and when he heard the women sing of David having slain his ten thousands, this wrong done to his self-love filled him with a mean spite against one who would have been the truest of his friends, and his strong bulwark against the evils which filled his latter years with distress. And it was this brooding jealousy which disturbed the balance of Saul's mind, and made him subject to fits of mania, marked generally by intense depression, but breaking out occasionally into deeds of fierce violence.
Saul, in the midst of his violent acts, had never ceased to be a religious man, though there was none of that personal love and loyalty to Jehovah which so distinguished David. It was the national religion to which he gave his allegiance; and it was as a statesman and patriot that he respected it, though doubtless he never shook off the influence of Samuel. But there was little genuine piety in his heart, and no trust in God, nor any feeling of union with him. In domestic life he retained his simple manners, and did not give way to that voluptuousness which disgraced David, and filled the last twenty years of his life with shame and sorrow. But as a ruler he had failed. It had seemed at first as if the hope of Israel, that under a king the nation might dwell safely, would be fulfilled in him. For many years he was a vigorous and successful chieftain, and a hero in war. And Israel under him war, rapidly advancing in the arts also of peace. Protected by the military successes of the king, Samuel was able in tranquillity to carry on his schools, and through the sons of the prophets to promote the great work of internal reform. Justice was administered (1 Samuel 7:15), and the rudiments of learning were being generally acquired. When the younger son of a farmer, evidently little thought of at home, and in his brother's estimation fit only to look after a few sheep, could read and write, education must have been a thing not uncommon. For David thus taught was but a mere drudge at home. His elegy over Saul and Jonathan Sells us of domestic refinement; of women clad in scarlet, and with jewels of gold. Saul had done much; but in his last years he brought all to ruin, and at his death he left his country in abject thraldom, and with all its national liberties trampled underfoot.
In his fall Saul involved in equal ruin his son Jonathan, one of the most generous and beautiful characters that ever the world saw. And his death at Gilboa was but the ending of a path wrapped in deepening shadow and leading inevitably to misery and disaster. In 1 Samuel 14. we see Saul in almost as bad a light as when he murdered Ahimelech and his brethren. The youthful Jonathan and his armour bearer had wrought one of those feats of desperate valour which are not uncommon in the history of the Israelites. And their bravery had stricken the raw levies of the Philistines with panic, increased by the action of a body of Hebrews drawn from the districts conquered by the Philistines, and forced to serve in their army. They were posted in the rear to guard the camp, and their defection placed revengeful enemies in the very pathway of flight. Saul meanwhile concludes from the absence of Jonathan and his armour bearer that it was some brave exploit of theirs which was causing this confusion in the Philistine host; but when the priest asks counsel of God, with just the same absence of self-control as had made him refuse to wait for Samuel at Gilgal, Saul bids him withdraw his hand from the ephod and desist. He needs no counsel from above. He will act for himself, and with extraordinary rashness and absence of good sense he commands the people under a solemn curse to abstain from food until all is over. They must fight the battle and pursue fasting. Had he given himself time for reflection, he would have felt that the slight loss of time spent in taking refreshment would be more than compensated by increased vigour of body and power of endurance. The pursuit, too, had come suddenly, and his men were not prepared; and to have partaken of the provisions cast aside by the runaways would have kept up their strength. They must at last stop from sheer exhaustion, and then the whole army would be in a state of ravenous hunger. Worst of all, he was laying a trap for those who had gained the victory. Saul's body guard would hear his orders, and obey with grumbling. Jonathan and all who joined in the pursuit from a distance, rushing from caves and from the hills of Ephraim, would be in danger unwittingly of bringing upon themselves a curse.
The results were most disastrous. When they reached Aijalon the people were so faint with hunger that they began slaying sheep and oxen, and eating them without observing the command of the Law, that they must carefully free the flesh from the blood. And Saul, aghast at this violation of a solemn ceremonial ordinance, bids his body guard disperse themselves among the people, and compel them to bring their oxen to a large stone, and there slay them in the manner prescribed. There was thus long delay before the wants of the troops could be supplied, and when at last they had taken a hurried meal, and Saul was eager to resume the pursuit, they gave him so sulky an answer as to be virtually a refusal. And now the priest, mediating between king and people, purposes to ask counsel of God, and Saul consents. But no answer comes. Saul had refused God's counsel in the morning, and now the oracle is silent.
But Saul sees no fault in himself. Fault he assumes there is, and he will find it out by drawing lots. He bids the people stand on one side, and himself and Jonathan on the other; and again, with a sulky answer, the people assent. Again and again the lot falls, till Jonathan is left, and Saul, nothing doubting that he is guilty, asks for confession; whereupon Jonathan tells him how, unwitting of his command, he had tasted almost by chance a little honey. Never was man more innocent than Jonathan, and God by him that day had wrought a great deliverance for Israel. Yet his guilty father, with dark fanaticism, condemns him to death. The people indeed rescue him, but all his legal rights were gone. In the eye of the Law he was a dead man, and henceforward Jonathan ever acts as if there was a bar between him and the kingdom. He never once speaks as if it were possible for him to inherit Saul's throne, or as if he were ceding to David anything to which he had a claim. His father's curse, his father's condemnation, still rested upon him. The people had saved him by force, but the legal act remained, and the father had destroyed the son.
From first to last Saul was the destroyer of himself, his family, and his kingdom. Samuel foretold his fall, but the warning was given personally to the king to move him to repentance. Repentance would have saved him, and Samuel allowed him ample time; for, during four or five years, he did absolutely nothing to help on his words to their accomplishment. Only after this long delay, spent by Samuel in mourning (1 Samuel 15:35), at God's express command he arose and anointed David; but neither of them, either openly or by secret conspiracy, took any steps to compass Saul's ruin. All that David did he was driven to do. To the last he was loyal to his king. And when in an evil hour he deserted his country, and entered the service of the Philistine king of Garb, it was almost a renunciation of his anointing. He seems himself to have given up all idea of ever becoming king, and, in a fit of desperation, to have thought only of saving his life. To his countrymen this open alliance with their enemies put him entirely in the wrong, and sorely he was punished for it by a seven years' delay. Yet slowly both predictions were moving on to their fulfilment, and if the purpose was Divine, the human agency was that of the self-willed Saul.
There is thus a tragic interest in the First Book of Samuel. Unrepentant, stubborn, wilful even in his deepest depression, the king struggles against his fate, but each effort only entangles him in fresh difficulties, and burdens his conscience with darker crimes. The one pathway of safety which David tried, and not in vain, in his season of terrible sin, Saul will not try. He sees his doom; is driven by it to melancholy, is unhinged in mind; but the prophet's words, "rebellion," "stubbornness," indicate the unyielding elements of his nature, and stubbornly he died in the lost battlefield. Like Prometheus, he defied the Almighty, in deeds if not in words, but the heroism was gone, and in that last sad scone, when, in mental and moral degradation, the despairing monarch sought the witch's cave, stubbornness alone remained. And, meanwhile, the other purpose of God was growing in strength, and, through strange scenes of heroism and feebleness, the shepherd boy becomes the nation's champion, the king's son-in-law, an outlaw and a deserter, before finally he becomes a king.