David Prayed That God Would Not Let Him Kill Saul

Everyone knows the cave. Saul, the first king of Israel, had walked into the mouth of a cave in the Judean wilderness to relieve himself. He did not know that David, the man he had been hunting for years, was pressed against the back wall of that same cave with a dozen men and a drawn knife. David crept up behind him and cut off the corner of Saul's robe. He did not kill him. And that, according to 1 Samuel 24, was supposed to be the end of the story.

The rabbis were not satisfied with where the text put the emphasis. They wanted to know what happened inside David's head the moment he decided not to strike.

Midrash Tehillim, the medieval collection of rabbinic interpretations on the Book of Psalms compiled in the Land of Israel sometime before the twelfth century, reads Psalm 57 as David's internal monologue inside that cave. "Have mercy on me, O Lord, have mercy on me." Why, the midrash asks, does David ask for mercy twice? One plea would have been enough to ask for safety. Two pleas mean David was asking for two different kinds of mercy. The first was obvious. Please do not let me fall into Saul's hands. The second is what made the rabbis sit up.

The second plea, in the midrash's reading, was this: please do not let Saul fall into my hands. Please do not let the yetzer hara, the evil inclination, tempt me to kill him. David was not only afraid of Saul. He was afraid of David. He knew that if the man who wanted him dead fell asleep beside him in a cave, his own hand might move before his conscience did. So he prayed for divine protection against his own reflexes.

That is the conscience that picked up the knife in the cave and used it only on the fringe of a robe. And the fringe mattered. Another passage in Midrash Tehillim reads Psalm 7 as David's anguish over exactly what he had cut. Rabbi Nehemiah, cited in the passage, says that the corner of Saul's robe had tzitzit on it, the ritual fringes Israelites wore to remind themselves of God's commandments. When David cut the corner, he technically annulled the commandment woven into that cloth. His heart "smote him," as 1 Samuel puts it, not just because he had embarrassed his king but because, for one instant, he had tampered with a mitzvah. That is the conscience we are dealing with here. David was the kind of man who could not shave a ritual tassel off a dead man's cloak without his own heart turning on him.

Josephus, the first-century Roman-Jewish historian, tells the wider war around the cave in his Antiquities of the Jews, completed around 93 CE. His Saul is a man slowly unraveling. When the women of the cities poured out singing "Saul has slain his thousands, David his ten thousands," Josephus says Saul realized in that instant that there was nothing left for David to inherit except the kingship itself. From that day forward, Saul tried three times to kill David with a spear, demanded six hundred Philistine foreskins as a bride-price for his daughter Michal (Saul thought David would die trying to collect them; David brought them all), and finally chased him into the wilderness with three thousand picked men.

But why had God taken the kingship away from Saul in the first place? The rabbis wrestled with this. Saul's recorded sins, on the scorecard, were smaller than David's later ones. So what got him dethroned? Ginzberg, in Legends of the Jews, records the sages' surprising answer: Saul was too mild to be a king. He was too forgiving, too reluctant to use force, too willing to let the Amalekites keep a few sheep and a king. A ruler needs a certain hardness. Saul's compassion, which would have made him an admirable private citizen, was a catastrophe on the throne. Some lineages, the midrash adds, are so proud that if they keep the crown too long their descendants become tyrants. God removed the crown to save Saul's grandchildren from themselves.

The kingship passed to a man who wept over a cut piece of cloth.

And yet, when Saul finally died on Mount Gilboa, pierced by his own sword rather than let the Philistines capture him alive, David did not gloat. He tore his clothes. He wrote a lament (2 Samuel 1:17-27) that called Saul the "beauty of Israel" on his high places. Years later, when David was finally secure on the throne, he sent to Jabesh-Gilead to retrieve the bones of Saul and Jonathan. Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer, the eighth-century aggadic work that has become one of the cornerstones of medieval midrash, records that when they opened the grave at Jabesh-Gilead, no worm had touched the bones of Saul. David placed them in a coffin and carried them across the border of every tribe in Israel so that every family in the country could come out and pay their respects to the first king. The entire nation fulfilled the commandment of chesed, loving-kindness, for a man who had spent his final years trying to kill their new king.

David was not performing. He meant it. He had been praying, from the back of a cave in the wilderness, that God would not let the evil inclination make him into the kind of man who could step over Saul's body on the way to the throne. God had answered that prayer.

The throne turned out to be heavier than the cave. But David got there with clean hands, and he buried Saul with honor, because the man who cannot bear to tear off a tassel cannot bear to leave a king unmourned.