September 28, 2019: Day 14 – I Samuel 14

A lot of battles are recounted in this chapter, primarily against the Philistines.  Remember the Philistines?  They were the ones who were after Samson and didn’t let up on his wife Delilah, who was also a Philistine, until she told them and found out what made him weak.  So the Philistines were historic enemies to the Israelites.  We once again see Jonathan, although this time he is described as Saul’s son.  We don’t know how old he is, but we do see that he has a mind of his own and definitely wants to kill Philistines, the enemies of Israel.

So he leaves the camp where there are hundreds of soldiers and and sets out with his armor bearer to see if he can scare up any Philistines.  He does and he kills over a dozen and Saul sees the commotion in the camp of the Philistines and wonders what is going on.  We see that Saul was quite a stern commander.  He reminds me a lot of my basketball coach in college.  A great guy, but pretty stern in some ways.  He told the troops not to touch any food until they had completely annihilated the Philistines.  Of course, his son Jonathan was busy sneaking behind enemy lines to hear this command and so missed out.

Jonathan eats and encourages others to eat until everyone is doing the opposite of what the king said and he has no clue how this started.  He says the person who started this will die, even if it is my own son.  It is his own son, he decides he should die, but the people tell him: You do know that he is a mighty warrior.  It would be a huge mistake to kill him.  So, he ends up not killing him.  That pretty much sums up the stories that take place in this chapter.  The stories of Saul and his son Jonathan.  We haven’t seen David yet, but we are close.  We know that there will be a new king because Samuel had said that the disobedience of Saul was going to make that happen.  That seems like a long time ago and it could easily be forgotten because of the intensity and the success of Saul at this point.