Today, I am reading and commenting on  1 Samuel 18-20.

On a couple of occasions in this passage it says that an evil spirit from the Lord came upon Saul.  The idea that an evil spirit might be from the Lord bothers me, so I looked at the translators notes.  They mention that the word translated as “evil” might also be translated as “harmful”.  I am much more comfortable with the idea that a harmful spirit was sent from God upon someone.  Each time this spirit came upon Saul he attempted to kill David right then and there.  The implication being that when these incidents happened, Saul’s personality changed on a dime and he acted in a way uncharacteristic for him.  It struck me today that there seems to be a relationship between the occasions when the evil, or harmful, spirit came upon Saul and the times when he prophesied along with a band of prophets.  One of those latter times happened when Saul pursued David after David fled to Samuel.  However, a similar thing had happened after the first time Saul and met with Samuel before he became king.  I was really hoping that once I wrote about these things I would have some insight into all fit together, but that did not happen.

I had always thought that David was ambitious and that his reluctance to marry Saul’s daughter (first one and then a second one was offered to him as his wife) was because he was aware of Saul’s plans to use it against him.  Today, as I read this, I felt like David’s reluctance to become Saul’s son-in-law was actually out of humility.  Yesterday, I noted that David’s comments about Goliath to members of Saul’s army were perhaps meant to encourage someone to stand up to Goliath in the name of God.  In a similar fashion, it occurred to me today that David’s reluctance to become Saul’s son-in-law was because he genuinely did not believe he was a prominent enough person for that role.  Or, perhaps the reason that David was willing to marry Michal, when he had resisted marrying her older sister Merab was because Michal actually wanted to marry him, while Merab would only have done so because she had no choice.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.