2 Samuel 1:17

DAVID’S LAMENTATION OVER SAUL AND JONATHAN, 2 Samuel 1:17-27.

17. This lamentation, which evidently sprang from deep and sanctified emotions, is an elegy of surpassing tenderness, and one of the most beautiful odes of the Old Testament. The fallen power and beauty of Israel, as represented by the king and his noble-hearted son, is the poet’s theme, and though that king had burned with a deadly fury towards David, chased him like a partridge in the mountains, and sought his life in many ways, not the slightest trace of resentment or cherished passion, not the most distant allusion to the persecutions which he had suffered from him, appear in all this tender song. It is the pure lamentation of a loving heart that has forgiven and forgotten the injuries of the past, and knows no other feeling than that of profoundest sympathy and sorrow for the heroic dead. “It is almost impossible,” says Dr. Clarke, “to read the noble original without feeling every word swollen with a sigh or broken with a sob. A heart pregnant with distress, and striving to utter expressions descriptive of its feelings, which are repeatedly interrupted by an excess of grief, is most sensibly painted throughout the whole.” We give, as usual in our notes on poetical passages, a new and literal version, in which the order and idiom of the Hebrew original is, as far as possible, exhibited.