1 Samuel 15:33

The LORD had commanded Saul to destroy Amalek completely, sparing neither person nor possession (1 Samuel 15:1–3). A command of this kind is called herem, the devoting of an enemy and all he owns to the LORD, usually by destroying it, so that Israel took no forbidden spoil and was kept from what would corrupt it. It was a judgment for one people and one time, and it was never Israel’s general way of making war.

Amalek had earned that judgment over a long history. The Amalekites were descended from Esau through Eliphaz and Timna (Genesis 36:12). When Israel came out of Egypt, they attacked from the rear and struck down the weak and weary who lagged behind (Deuteronomy 25:17–19). After that first battle the LORD swore that he would have war with Amalek from generation to generation and would blot out its remembrance (Exodus 17:8–16). Their hostility to Israel, and so to God’s purpose for Israel, continued for centuries.

Saul fought the war and won it, but he spared Agag and the best of the sheep and oxen (1 Samuel 15:7–9), and he said the animals had been kept for sacrifice. God called this rebellion, and through Samuel he rejected Saul as king (1 Samuel 15:10–23). Saul then made a late confession (1 Samuel 15:24–31), yet Agag was still alive and the command still stood. So Samuel, who was both prophet and judge, finishes what the king left undone: “Bring ye hither to me Agag the king of the Amalekites.” His order is firm and immediate. Saul had weighed God’s command against what looked useful to him and his soldiers, and Samuel simply does what God said.

The Hebrew word behind “delicately”, maʻădân, comes from a root associated with delicacies and pleasures, and its sense in this verse is uncertain. Believers differ on how Agag walked in. On one understanding he came with a stately, easy, even cheerful step, as a king who expected to be treated as a king now that his life had been spared. On the other, the word is connected with trembling, and he came unsteadily and in fear.

His own words favour the first. “Surely the bitterness of death is past,” he says. The word mar means bitter, and “the bitterness of death” is the dread and anguish of facing execution. The verb çûwr means to turn aside or be removed. Agag is saying that the terror he had lived under has been taken away. Saul had spared him, the battle was over, and he supposed that the danger had ended with it.

He speaks these words moments before he dies. Samuel knows what is coming, and so do we, while Agag walks in at ease. He took a delay for a pardon, and his confidence rested on Saul’s leniency while God’s sentence on him was still in force.

Samuel gives the reason before he acts: “As thy sword hath made women childless, so shall thy mother be childless among women.” The word for sword, chereb, is the ordinary word for a sword or other cutting blade, and “thy sword” lays the killing at Agag’s own door. As a king and a warrior he had been responsible for many deaths. The verb shakol means to be bereaved of children, and Samuel uses it of both the women Agag bereaved and Agag’s own mother. In Israel the loss of children was among the heaviest of griefs, since it threatened the family’s line and name. The sorrow Agag brought on others now comes to his own house. The punishment answers the crime, measure for measure, and Samuel speaks it as a judge passing sentence.

“And Samuel hewed Agag in pieces before the LORD in Gilgal.” The verb shatsaph is a forceful one, meaning to cut in pieces, and it leaves the completeness of the judgment in no doubt. “Before the LORD”, lifnei Yᵉhôvâh, is literally “in the face of the LORD”, in his presence. The execution is a solemn and public act, done in God’s sight and under his authority. Saul had claimed that what he spared was meant for the LORD as sacrifice. Agag is given over to the LORD after all, in judgment, as the command had required from the start.

Verse 34 is brief, and it shows the two men walking away from each other. Samuel goes to Ramah, his home town and a centre of prophetic activity. Saul goes “up to his house to Gibeah of Saul”, his own home town (1 Samuel 10:26) and his capital. The name Gibʻâh means hill, and ‘âlâh is the ordinary verb for going up, which suits a town set on a hill. The word for house is bayith, and the town carries the king’s own name, Shâʼûwl, which means “asked”.

The parting on the road shows the breach that had opened between them. Kingship in Israel differed from kingship among the nations, because the king ruled under God’s law and under the word of God’s prophet. Israel had asked for a king so that they could be “like all the nations” (1 Samuel 8:5), and God had given them one who was still bound to obey him. Saul goes home with his crown, his house and his town, and he goes home having lost the prophet’s counsel. Soon afterwards we read that the Spirit of the LORD departed from Saul (1 Samuel 16:14), and the rest of his reign is marked by isolation, suspicion and trouble.

The Hebrew of “came no more” uses the verb yâçaph, to add, so that Samuel literally “did not add to see” Saul. The visits and the counsel of the prophet who had anointed him came to an end. Through Samuel God had guided Saul, and that guidance now ceased.

“Nevertheless Samuel mourned for Saul.” The verb ʼâbal means to mourn or lament, and it is the word for grief at a death or a great loss. Samuel had anointed Saul, taught him and stood beside him, and he had just delivered God’s verdict against him. He accepts that verdict fully and grieves over the man all the same. A faithful messenger can speak God’s judgment and feel its cost. The Lord Jesus wept over Jerusalem as he foretold its destruction (Luke 19:41–44), and Paul carried great sorrow for Israel, his own people (Romans 9:1–5).

The LORD’s repenting here is his sorrow over what Saul’s reign had become. The verb nâcham has a range of meaning that includes to sigh, to be sorry, to grieve and to console oneself. Scripture is speaking of God in human terms so that we can understand him, and what it tells us is that he is grieved by sin. He is deeply engaged with the people he has made, and their rebellion matters to him.

God made no mistake in choosing Saul, and his own character and eternal purpose stood exactly as they were. Scripture is plain about this: “God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent” (Numbers 23:19). The LORD does not change (Malachi 3:6), and his gifts and calling are irrevocable (Romans 11:29). What changed was his dealing with Saul. God had told his people that he deals with a nation according to whether it turns to him or away from him (Jeremiah 18:7–10), and Saul’s persistent disobedience brought his kingship under that rule. God’s holiness and justice stayed the same, and for that very reason his relationship with a rebellious king had to change.

The grief leads on to grace. The LORD had already sought “a man after his own heart” (1 Samuel 13:14), and his next word to Samuel sends him to Bethlehem to anoint a son of Jesse (1 Samuel 16:1).

The whole account of Saul’s rejection in 1 Samuel 15 shows how much God’s people need a king who obeys completely, and that King is Jesus Christ. He came down from heaven to do the will of the Father who sent him (John 6:38). He fulfilled all righteousness (Matthew 3:15) and was obedient all the way to death on a cross (Philippians 2:8). Where Saul spared what God had condemned, Christ spared nothing of his own will and destroyed the works of the devil (1 John 3:8).

At Gilgal a guilty king was cut down for his own violence. At the cross the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29), was himself “cut off” for the sins of his people (Isaiah 53:8). God made him to be sin for us, so that in him we might be made the righteousness of God (2 Corinthians 5:21). There God’s justice and his mercy meet, for he is shown to be just and the justifier of the one who believes in Jesus (Romans 3:25–26). Saul’s disobedience ended in separation, and Christ’s obedience reconciles us to God (2 Corinthians 5:18–19).

Agag’s words were false on his lips, and they are true for everyone who is in Christ. Death has been swallowed up in victory and has lost its sting (1 Corinthians 15:54–57), and whoever hears Christ’s word and believes has passed from death to life (John 5:24). Jesus is the good shepherd who gives his life for the sheep (John 10:11) and the surety of a better covenant, a priest who lives for ever (Hebrews 7:22–28). He is also the judge who will ride out as King of kings and Lord of lords and bring every enemy of God to its end (Revelation 19:11–16).

Saul’s sin was partial obedience. He did most of what God said and kept back the part he preferred, and he gave it a religious reason. Samuel had already answered that reason: “to obey is better than sacrifice” (1 Samuel 15:22). God looks for a yielded heart, and he counts obedience mixed with self-will as disobedience.

Agag has long stood as a picture of the sin we spare. Paul tells believers to put to death what belongs to the old life (Colossians 3:5), and Samuel’s thoroughness shows how completely that is meant. We do it by the Spirit of Christ who lives in us, and our own strength was never the means. Agag also warns us about false security. Judgment that is delayed has been neither forgotten nor cancelled, and God’s patience is given to lead us to him.

The last verse lets us see into the heart of God. He judged Saul and he grieved over Saul. Our sin is never a small thing to him, because we are never a small thing to him. Samuel shows the same heart in a man: he held to God’s verdict and mourned for the one it fell on, and that is a pattern for how we feel toward those who fall. The prophet’s counsel was a gift Saul lost, and the faithful counsel God gives us through his word and his servants is a gift to be valued while we have it.