2 Samuel 1:16

And David said unto him, Thy blood be upon thy head; for thy mouth hath testified against thee, saying, I have slain the LORD'S anointed.

EXPOSITORY (ENGLISH BIBLE)

Matthew Henry's Concise Commentary

1:11-16 David was sincere in his mourning for Saul; and all with him humbled themselves under the hand of God, laid so heavily upon Israel by this defeat. The man who brought the tidings, David put to death, as a murderer of his prince. David herein did not do unjustly; the Amalekite confessed the crime. If he did as he said, he deserved to die for treason; and his lying to David, if indeed it were a lie, proved, as sooner or later that sin will prove, lying against himself. Hereby David showed himself zealous for public justice, without regard to his own private interest.

Barnes' Notes on the Bible

David might well think his sentence just though severe, for he had more than once expressed the deliberate opinion that none could lift up his hand against the Lord's anointed, and be guiltless (see 1 Samuel 24:6; 1 Samuel 26:9, 1 Samuel 26:11, 1 Samuel 26:16).

Jamieson-Fausset-Brown Bible Commentary

13-15. David said unto the young man … Whence art thou?—The man had at the outset stated who he was. But the question was now formally and judicially put. The punishment inflicted on the Amalekite may seem too severe, but the respect paid to kings in the West must not be regarded as the standard for that which the East may think due to royal station. David's reverence for Saul, as the Lord's anointed, was in his mind a principle on which he had faithfully acted on several occasions of great temptation. In present circumstances it was especially important that his principle should be publicly known; and to free himself from the imputation of being in any way accessory to the execrable crime of regicide was the part of a righteous judge, no less than of a good politician.

Matthew Poole's Commentary

Thy blood be upon thy head; the guilt of thy bloodshed or death lies upon thyself, not upon me, for thy free and voluntary confession is sufficient proof of thy guilt in killing the king.

Gill's Exposition of the Entire Bible

And David said unto him, thy blood be upon thy head,.... The blood that he had shed, let him suffer for it; for as he had shed blood, his blood ought to be shed, according to the law of God; and for proof of this, that he had so done, he appeals to his own confession:

for thy mouth hath testified against thee, saying, I have slain the Lord's anointed; and what might serve to confirm the truth of what he had said were the crown and bracelet which he brought along with him; and besides he was an Amalekite, of a nation that was devoted to destruction; and, as Abarbinel thinks, David might suppose that he killed Saul to take vengeance on him for what he had done to their nation; but, after all, both he and Maimonides (n) allow the punishment of him was not strictly according to law, but was a temporary decree, an extraordinary case, and an act of royal authority; for in common cases a man was not to be condemned and put to death upon his own confession, since it is possible he may not be in his right mind (o); but David chose to exercise severity in this case, partly to show his respect to Saul, and to ingratiate himself into the favour of his friends, and partly to deter men from attempting to assassinate princes, who himself was now about to ascend the throne.

(n) Hilchot Sanhedrin, c. 18. sect. 6. (o) T. Bab. Yehamot, fol. 25. 2. Maimon. ibid.

Geneva Study Bible

And David said unto him, {f} Thy blood be upon thy head; for thy mouth hath testified against thee, saying, I have slain the LORD'S anointed.

(f) You are justly punished for your fault.

EXEGETICAL (ORIGINAL LANGUAGES)

Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges

16. for thy mouth, &c.] For the expression cp. Job 15:6; Luke 19:22. He had accused himself of a capital crime, for which he deserved to die. Righteous indignation, and not merely political prudence, dictated his immediate execution.

This account of Saul’s death is obviously inconsistent with that given in 1 Samuel 31. It is useless to attempt to harmonize them, but it is quite unnecessary to assume that we have two different traditions of the manner of Saul’s death. The Amalekite’s story was clearly a fabrication. In wandering over the field of battle he had found the corpse of Saul and stripped it of its ornaments. With these he hastened to David, and invented his fictitious story in the hope of securing an additional reward for having with his own hand rid David of his bitterest enemy and removed the obstacle which stood between him and the throne. But he had formed a wrong estimate of the man he had to deal with. Whether David believed him or not, he summarily inflicted the penalty which the Amalekite deserved according to his own avowal, and proved to all Israel his abhorrence of such an impious act.

David’s chivalrous loyalty and generous unselfishness in mourning for the death of his unrelenting persecutor, whose removal opened the way for him to the throne, are striking evidences of the nobility of his character.

2 Samuel 1:16

Keil and Delitzsch Biblical Commentary on the Old Testament

David then reproached him for what he had done: "How wast thou not afraid to stretch forth thine hand to destroy the Lord's anointed?" and commanded one of his attendants to slay him (2 Samuel 1:15.), passing sentence of death in these words: "Thy blood come upon thy head (cf. Leviticus 20:9; Joshua 2:1;(1); for thy mouth hath testified against thee, saying, I have slain the Lord's anointed."

(Note: "Thy mouth hath testified against thee, and out of it thou art judged (Luke 19:22), whether thou hast done it or not. If thou hast done it, thou receivest the just reward of thy deeds. If thou hast not done it, then throw the blame upon thine own lying testimony, and be content with the wages of a wicked flatterer; for, according to thine own confession, thou art the murderer of a king, and that is quite enough to betray thine evil heart. David could see plainly enough that the man was no murderer: he would show by his example that flatterers who boast of such sins as these should get no hearing from their superiors." - Berleb. Bible.)

David regarded the statement of the Amalekite as a sufficient ground for condemnation, without investigating the truth any further; though it was most probably untrue, as he could see through his design of securing a great reward as due to him for performing such a deed (vid., 2 Samuel 4:10), and looked upon a man who could attribute such an act to himself from mere avarice as perfectly capable of committing it. Moreover, the king's jewels, which he had brought, furnished a practical proof that Saul had really been put to death. This punishment was by no means so severe as to render it necessary to "estimate its morality according to the times," or to defend it merely from the standpoint of political prudence, on the ground that as David was the successor of Saul, and had been pursued by him as his rival with constant suspicion and hatred, he ought not to leave the murder of the king unpunished, if only because the people, or at any rate his own opponents among the people, would accuse him of complicity in the murder of the king, if not of actually instigating the murderer. David would never have allowed such considerations as these to lead him into unjust severity. And his conduct requires no such half vindication. Even on the supposition that Saul had asked the Amalekite to give him his death-thrust, as he said he had, it was a crime deserving of punishment to fulfil this request, the more especially as nothing is said about any such mortal wounding of Saul as rendered his escape or recovery impossible, so that it could be said that it would have been cruel under such circumstances to refuse his request to be put to death. If Saul's life was still "full in him," as the Amalekite stated, his position was not so desperate as to render it inevitable that he should fall into the hands of the Philistines. Moreover, the supposition was a very natural one, that he had slain the king for the sake of a reward. But slaying the king, the anointed of the Lord, was in itself a crime that deserved to be punished with death. What David might more than once have done, but had refrained from doing from holy reverence for the sanctified person of the king, this foreigner, a man belonging to the nation of the Amalekites, Israel's greatest foes, had actually done for the sake of gain, or at any rate pretended to have done. Such a crime must be punished with death, and that by David who had been chosen by God and anointed as Saul's successor, and whom the Amalekite himself acknowledge in that capacity, since otherwise he would not have brought him the news together with the royal diadem.