Day 83. 1 Samuel 18-20

We look long and hard in scripture to find examples of what we would call romantic love, and it is ironic that the closest we come is the friendship between David and Jonathan, King Saul's son. It would be a mistake, I think, to burden this story with our obsessive modern concern with sexuality. Is this a "man crush?" Is this something more? These are questions that never enter the mind of the writer of 1st Samuel.
So we have to set aside our curiousity and look at the text to see what it says to us and not go beyond it. The relationship between Jonathan and David is presented to us as an ideal of friendship (18:1). Early on Jonathan's loyalty to his father is transferred to David (18:3). Saul's jealousy is aroused by David's popularity. Everyone falls under his spell. The song of the women (18:6-7) is not intended as an insult to the king, but he takes it that way, and begins to see David as a rival in every area of his life (18:9).
This distorted jealousy makes Saul violent and his moods make him capable of anything. Saul is both afraid of David (18:12) and also in awe of him (18:15). David's reluctance to marry Saul's daughter Merab (18:18) is motivated not so much by becoming modesty as by fear of being drawn further into the intimate family of the king. We are told that Saul's other daughter Michal "loved" David (18:20)—she is yet another who falls under his spell—and the king urges the match. Again David shows reluctance, and Saul's ulterior motives—he "planned to make David fall by the hand of Philistines" (18:25)—shows that David's fears about his prospective father-in-law are well founded.
Saul does in the end give David his daughter Michal to be his wife (18:27) and thus gives the younger man another claim to the throne. But when he realizes that his daughter loves David, he is "still more afraid." So Saul "was David's enemy from that time forward" (18:29).
David may be an enemy to Saul, but part of his charisma is that uncanny ability of commanding loyalty in everybody else. In chapter 19 Jonathan protects David, speaking well of him and seeking to make peace between his friend and his father. Michal, David's wife and Saul's daughter, protects him, helping him to escape her father's murderous plot (19:12). She arranges a dummy in David's bed—it is a "teraphim," the image of a household god with a goat-skin wig—to fool her father, who was seeking to stab David as he slept.
Not least of all, God protects David by sending a prophetic frenzy first upon Saul's messengers (19:20-21) and then upon the king himself, so that "he too stripped off his clothes, and he too fell into a frenzy before Samuel. He lay naked all that day and all that night" (19:24), and David escapes in the meantime.
But it is Jonathan who is most remarkable in unshakable loyalty to his friend. They are united in what David calls a "sacred covenant," which is not far what we call a marriage. They both are deeply and emotionally committed to each other. The text says that Jonathan makes David "swear again by his love for him; for he loved him as loved his own life" (20:17). And when they are parted by Saul's intractable anger, it says that the friends "kissed each other, and wept with each other." But it is David who "wept the more" (20:41).
If this were the story about man and a woman, like the story of Ruth and Boaz, we would not hesitate to call it not only the greatest romance in the Bible, but one of the greatest in all of human literature. That the author of 1st Samuel records it in such intimate detail indicates that he regards it as nothing shameful or prurient, but as what it is—a story about how much human beings are capable of loving each other.