Jonathan's covenant with David; their final meeting

David comes back from Ramah and puts the question to Jonathan directly: what have I done? What is my crime? How have I wronged your father, that he is trying to take my life?

Jonathan does not believe it. His father tells him everything, great or small, and would not do this without saying so. That is the position of a son who has watched his father swear an oath not to harm the man and assumes the oath holds.

They design a test. The new moon festival is tomorrow and David is expected at the king's table. He will hide in the field instead, and if Saul asks where he is, Jonathan will say he asked permission to go to Bethlehem for an annual family sacrifice. If the answer is calm, David is safe. If the king is angry, the intention is settled.

The covenant they make before that is not a friendship pact. Jonathan asks David to show him unfailing kindness while he lives, and not to cut off his kindness from his family, not even when the LORD has cut off every one of David's enemies from the face of the earth. He is asking, in advance, for his children to be spared. New dynasties in that world routinely eliminated the previous royal line, and Jonathan is negotiating for his descendants with the man who is going to replace them. That request is honoured decades later, when David finds Jonathan's crippled son Mephibosheth and gives him a permanent place at the royal table.

At the festival Saul says nothing on the first day and assumes David is ritually unclean. On the second he asks, and when Jonathan gives the agreed answer his father's fury is directed at his son rather than at the absent man. You son of a perverse and rebellious woman, he says, and then puts the political fact in one sentence: as long as the son of Jesse lives on this earth, neither you nor your kingdom will be established. Then he throws his spear at his own son.

Jonathan leaves the table in fierce anger and eats nothing, grieved at the shameful way his father had treated David.

The signal in the field is a boy sent to fetch arrows, with the position of the shot carrying the message. When the boy has gone, the two men see each other one last time. David bows three times with his face to the ground, and they weep together, and David weeps the most.

Jonathan's last recorded words to him are the terms of the oath: the LORD is witness between you and me, and between your descendants and my descendants, for ever. They see each other only once more, briefly, in a forest, and Jonathan dies in the same battle as his father.