The Men Who Walked All Night to Bury Their King

The city of Beth-shan had a wall, and on that wall the Philistines hung the bodies of Saul and his three sons. It was meant as a public humiliation, proof of their victory and Israel's defeat. The bodies were left on display. No burial. No honor. The conquerors' message was clear: this is what happens to kings who fight us.

That night, the men of Jabesh-Gilead walked to Beth-shan, took the bodies down from the wall, carried them home, and buried them.

This is the founding story of Jewish mourning practice, according to Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer.

Why Jabesh-Gilead Owed Saul Everything

The connection between Jabesh-Gilead and Saul was not sentimental. It was debt. At the beginning of Saul's reign, the Ammonite king Nahash had besieged Jabesh-Gilead and offered a grotesque peace treaty: surrender and he would gouge out the right eye of every man in the city. A month after Saul's anointing as king, before he had even consolidated his power, he rallied Israel and broke the siege. He saved Jabesh-Gilead from mutilation and servitude.

The men of Jabesh-Gilead never forgot. When Saul fell at Mount Gilboa and the Philistines displayed his body at Beth-shan, they walked through the night to retrieve what could be retrieved. The 3,205 texts of the midrash-aggadah collection treat this act as the paradigmatic example of chesed shel emet, true loving-kindness, which is loving-kindness performed for the dead, for those who cannot reciprocate.

Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer, the narrative midrash from eighth-century Palestine, frames the question directly: from where in our tradition do we learn the obligation of showing loving-kindness to mourners? The answer it gives is Jabesh-Gilead. The city that could not help Saul in life honored him in death, and in doing so established the template for every act of communal mourning that followed.

The Ethics of Burying the Enemy's Prize

Retrieving the bodies from the wall of Beth-shan was not a safe act. The Philistines had displayed the bodies as a statement of power. Taking them down was a political act as much as a religious one. The men of Jabesh-Gilead were defying Philistine authority in enemy-controlled territory, under cover of darkness, for a king who was already dead and could not protect them.

The Legends of the Jews, Louis Ginzberg's monumental synthesis of rabbinic tradition, emphasizes that the men of Jabesh-Gilead carried the bodies back and burned them before burying the bones. The burning was an act of preservation and dignity in a context where the Philistines might otherwise have retrieved the bodies. The bones were then buried under the tamarisk tree in Jabesh, in their own soil, among their own people.

David, when he learned what they had done, blessed them. He sent messengers to Jabesh-Gilead saying: may you be blessed by the Lord because you showed this kindness to Saul your lord and buried him. The new king of Israel went out of his way to validate what these men had done for his predecessor. The gesture was generous and also politically shrewd: it established that loyalty to one's king was honored in the new order as well as the old.

What Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer Adds to the Story

Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer adds a dimension that the Book of Samuel does not: the theological framing of the act as the origin point of the practice of bringing food and drink to mourners. The text cites (Proverbs 31:6): give strong drink to the one who is perishing, and wine to those who are bitter in soul. The offering of bread and wine to the bereaved, a practice embedded in Jewish mourning custom for over two millennia, is traced back through this verse to the act of the men of Jabesh-Gilead, who mourned and fasted after the burial.

The connection is structural rather than direct. Jabesh-Gilead did not receive comforters; they were the comforters. But their fast and their grief after the burial established the emotional reality that Jewish mourning practice is designed to address. They showed that the loss of a leader produces a specific and serious kind of grief that requires communal acknowledgment. The food brought to mourners is a response to the kind of devastation Jabesh-Gilead felt after burying Saul.

The King Who Did Not Deserve to Be Forgotten

Saul is the most tragic figure in the books of Samuel. He was chosen when Israel should not have asked for a king. He was given gifts and a spirit of prophecy. He was undermined by his own anxiety, his impatience, his inability to wait for Samuel or follow instruction precisely. He lost the kingship. He lost the spirit. He lost two sons to war, including the beloved Jonathan. He died in battle on Mount Gilboa and asked his armor-bearer to kill him before the Philistines could capture him.

The kabbalistic tradition associated with the Lurianic school of sixteenth-century Safed interpreted Saul's soul as one that came into the world with a specific spiritual correction to complete, and the tragedy of his reign as the result of the soul's encounter with forces it was not yet ready to face. The potential was enormous. The failure was real. Both were true simultaneously.

What the men of Jabesh-Gilead did, walking through the night to take a dead king down from a wall, was to refuse the Philistine interpretation of his death. The Philistines said: he is a defeated enemy displayed as a lesson. Jabesh-Gilead said: he is our king, who once walked through the night to save us. Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer says: and everything we now do for the dead descends from what they did that night.