David Prayed That God Would Not Let Him Kill Saul

The King Who Walked Into the Wrong Cave

Saul was hunting David with three thousand men when he stopped at the mouth of a cave in the Judean wilderness to relieve himself. He did not know that David and a dozen of his men were pressed against the back wall of that same cave, listening to him breathe.

David's men saw it as a sign from heaven. "Here is the day the Lord has promised you." They barely had to whisper it. David was already moving. He crept up behind Saul in the dark, close enough to smell the road on him, and cut off the corner of Saul's robe. Then he stopped. He went back to the wall. He crouched down with the scrap of cloth in his hand and waited for the king to finish and walk back out into the light.

The moment Saul was gone, David's heart struck him. Not for killing. For the corner of the robe.

The Second Mercy David Asked For

The midrash on Psalms, Midrash Tehillim, compiled in the Land of Israel before the twelfth century CE, reads Psalm 57 as David's internal monologue inside that cave. The psalm opens: "have mercy on me, O Lord, have mercy on me."

The rabbis counted the repetitions. One plea for mercy would have been enough to ask for safety. Two pleas mean two different requests. The midrash names them. The first was obvious: "do not let me fall into Saul's hands." The second was the surprising one: "do not let Saul fall into mine."

David was not asking to be protected from his enemy. He was asking to be protected from his own hands, from the moment where the yetzer hara, the evil inclination, would win the argument it was already making inside him. He was in a cave with a king at his mercy and a voice in his chest saying: "this is your right. This is your moment. You will never be safer or closer again."

He was asking God to take the knife.

Why God Took the Kingdom From Saul

The Talmudic tradition Ginzberg aggregates makes a careful point about why the kingdom was stripped from Saul and given to David, one that runs counter to the obvious reading. It was not the severity of Saul's sins that cost him the throne. It was the quality of them. Saul was too mild, the rabbis said. Too forgiving. Too reluctant to wield the necessary authority of the position. He spared Agag when God told him to destroy. He could not bring himself to perform the full judgment.

David's sins were worse in their content and better in their character. A man who can commit a great sin is also a man who has the force to do great things. Saul had force enough for a middling king. He did not have force enough for the father of the dynasty that would produce the Messiah.

This is not a comfortable argument, and the rabbis did not make it comfortable. They made it precise.

What David Did With Saul's Bones

Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer, a narrative midrash from eighth-century Palestine, records what David did after Saul died at Gilboa. He gathered the elders and nobles of Israel, and they crossed the Jordan to Jabesh-Gilead to retrieve the bones of Saul and Jonathan. He brought them home. He gave them a burial.

The man who had prayed in a cave not to be given the chance to kill the king now carried the king's bones on his shoulders. The prayer had been answered in a form he had not anticipated: not that he would never be close enough to strike, but that by the time he held what was left of Saul in his hands, he would be holding them the right way.