SUMMARY
DavidSecond king of Israel, David united the northern and southern kingdoms. More laments the death of SaulThe first king of Israel More and Saul’s son, his friend JonathanSon of King Saul and friend of David More, in this poignant elegy.
ANALYSIS
Some of the strangeness of this passage as the beginning of a biblical book is obviated by the fact that 1 and 2 SamuelThe judge who anointed the first two kings of Israel More were originally a single literary work. Nevertheless, the violence with which David treats the Amalekite messenger who reported the death of Saul has troubled readers for centuries. The narrative section of 2 Samuel 1 (vv. 1-16) serves to display the depth of David’s emotion; the beautiful poetic section (vv. 17-27) has a similar point to make.
The elegy/dirge/lament (qinah in Hebrew) displays a characteristic meter in which the poetic line has three beats followed by two beats. The shortened second half of each poetic line lends a plaintive or melancholy feeling to the poetry. David’s lament falls into two unequal sections marked by the refrain, “How the mighty have fallen!” (vv. 19, 25, 27):
- Part one: a prayer that the rejoicing of the “daughters of the Philistines” might be prevented (v. 20) and a request that the “daughters of Israel” weep for their fallen heroes (v. 24) frame a poetic description of Saul and Jonathan’s bravery and weapons, a curse upon Mount Gilboa as the site of their demise (vv. 21-23).
- Part two: praise of Jonathan for the love, loyalty, and friendship that Saul’s son gave to David (v. 26)
It is appropriate that David (and most would agree that this elegy is from the pen of David himself) avoids mention of the difficulties both he and Jonathan endured at the hand of Saul. Less obviously, it also avoids mention of God or anything religious and is solely a tribute to the fallen.
As elsewhere in these books, regarding similar phrases, the phrase “your love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women” (v. 26b), has been interpreted as evidence of a same-gender sexual relationship between David and Jonathan. Whether this is true or whether the closeness of their relationship, apart from sexual innuendo, is all that is meant is impossible to discern, though the homoerotic interpretation seems highly unlikely to most scholars.
