Jonathan's victory at Micmash

Two men decide to attack an army. Jonathan tells his armour-bearer they will go over to the Philistine outpost, and the sentence he uses is one of the better statements of faith anywhere: perhaps the LORD will act on our behalf, for nothing can hinder the LORD from saving, whether by many or by few. He does not claim to know the outcome. He proposes a plan on the possibility.

The armour-bearer's reply is equally short: do all that you have in mind, I am with you heart and soul.

The plan includes its own test. If the Philistines call down to them to wait, they will stay. If they call down to come up, they will take it as a sign. The garrison shouts down the line that would insult men hiding in holes, come up to us and we will teach you a lesson, and the two of them climb up on their hands and feet with the armour-bearer behind.

The terrain is described precisely enough to be identified. Two cliffs, one called Bozez and the other Seneh, on either side of a pass, one facing north towards Micmash and the other south towards Geba. The wadi between Micmash and Geba is steep, and the approach they take is the one nobody would defend, because nobody would use it.

They kill about twenty men in an area of about half an acre, and then panic spreads through the whole Philistine camp, joined by an earth tremor. The camp starts fighting itself. Saul's lookouts at Gibeah see the army melting away in all directions, and he calls a roll to see who is missing before joining in. Israelites who had deserted to the Philistines turn on them, and men who had been hiding in the hill country come out and join the pursuit.

Then Saul ruins it. He binds the army under an oath that anyone who eats before evening is cursed, and the exhausted troops go the whole day without food. Jonathan, who was not there when the oath was made, eats honey from a forest floor and says plainly that his father has made trouble for the country. When the army finally reaches the plunder they are so famished that they slaughter animals on the ground and eat the meat with the blood still in it, which is one of the few universal prohibitions in Israelite law.

The lots are cast to find who broke the oath, and they fall on Jonathan. Saul says he must die, and the army refuses. Should Jonathan die, he who has brought about this great deliverance in Israel? Never! They rescue him.

A king whose son has just won a national victory is prepared to execute him over a rule of his own devising, and is stopped by the soldiers.