The Expositor's Bible: The First Book of SamuelBlaikie, William Garden
Religion
The Expositor's Bible: The First Book of Samuel
Blaikie, William Garden
Bible. Samuel, 1st -- Commentaries
The third token was to be the most remarkable of any. It was to occur at
what is called "the hill of God." Literally this is "Gibeah of
God"--God's Gibeah. It seems to have been Saul's own city, but the name
Gibeah may have been given to the whole hill where the city lay. The
precise spot where the occurrence was to take place was at the garrison
of the Philistines. (Thus it appears incidentally that the old enemy
were again harassing the country.) Gibeah, which is elsewhere called
Gibeah of Saul, is here called God's Gibeah, because of the sacred
services of which it was the seat. Here Saul would meet a company of
prophets coming down from the holy place, with psaltery, and tabret, and
pipe, and harp, and here his mind would undergo a change, and he would
be impelled to join the prophets' company. This was a strange token,
with a strange result.
We must try, first, to form some idea of Saul's state of mind in the
midst of these strange events.
The thought of his being king of Israel must have set his whole being
vibrating with high emotion. No mind can take in at first all that is
involved in such a stroke of fortune. A tumult of feeling surges through
the mind. It is intoxicated with the prospect. Glimpses of this pleasure
and of that, now brought within reach, flit before the fancy. The whole
pulses of Saul's nature must have been quickened. A susceptibility of
impression formerly unknown must have come to him. He was like a cloud
surcharged with electricity; he was in that state of nervous excitement
which craves a physical outlet, whether in singing, or shouting, or
leaping,--anything to relieve the brain and nervous system, which seem
to tremble and struggle under the extraordinary pressure.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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