Properties
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- text
- 499 And that brings me to Jonathan—a character so noble and beautiful that one has rarely been found to match it. Jonathan was the eldest son of King Saul, and a man of magnificent powers as a fighter. The story of the garrison at Michmash is a specimen of what he could do, and it is a story well worth reading. I may not tell it here, but this is the end of it: “And that first slaughter, which Jonathan and his armor-bearer made, was about twenty men, within as it were a half-acre of land, which a yoke of oxen might plough” (1 Samuel, xiv. 14). Two against twenty at least, and twenty dead on the field. “It was like
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503 butchers’ work,” we say. Yes, but those were days when men knew no better, and with Jonathan and his countrymen it was a matter of self-preservation.
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505 But the greatest charm in Jonathan was not his courage nor his skill as a soldier, splendid as these were, but his matchless loyalty as a friend.
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507 The time soon came when King Saul grew jealous of the youthful David, and not only drove him from his presence, but hunted him for his life. The rare gifts of David as a soldier, a leader, and a man had drawn to him the hearts of all the people, and the nation demanded him as its king. But if he was to be king, then Jonathan was shut out from the throne. No matter, said Jonathan, “thou *shalt* be king over Israel, and I shall be next unto thee” (1 Samuel, xxiii. 17).
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509 And so we come to the story of the meeting at Ziph, and of that wonderful friendship which explains it. It is the first instance of such a friendship between young men, romantic, unchanging, and tenderly
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511 DAVID AND JONATHAN
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515 devoted, of which we have any account in the pages of Hebrew history. Such friendships were not unknown in other histories. The story of Damon and Pythias, with its record of the heroic devotion of Damon, who, when Pythias, condemned to death, asks leave to return home and arrange his affairs, takes his place, expressing his readiness to die for his friend if Pythias should not return, is matched by other heroisms of friendship in other classic pages than those of Greece. But none of them is more beautiful in its mutual loyalty and love than the story of David and Jonathan. Three times they met to pledge to one another an undying friendship, and three times circumstances which they could not resist nor control tore them apart. But their hearts were one until the end; and when it came, the cry that the death of Jonathan wrung from the lips of David was one so poignant, so passionate, and so pathetic that to-day one cannot read it without tears.
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517 The first of the three meetings was in
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