Saul attempts to kill David

The hostility stops being deniable when Saul tells his son and all his attendants to kill David. Until then it had been spears thrown in a fit and dangerous missions arranged in the hope of an accident. This is an instruction.

Jonathan warns him, hides him in a field and then argues his father out of it, and the argument he makes is worth quoting because of what it costs him. Let not the king do wrong to his servant David; he has not wronged you, and what he has done has benefited you greatly. He took his life in his hands when he killed the Philistine. The LORD won a great victory for all Israel, and you saw it and were glad. Why then would you do wrong to an innocent man by killing David for no reason?

The heir to the throne is defending the man who will take the throne from him, on the grounds that he is innocent, to a father who has already tried to kill him too.

Saul swears an oath that David will not be put to death, and David comes back to court.

It does not last. War breaks out again, David wins again, and the evil spirit comes on Saul again while he is sitting in his house with his spear in his hand and David playing the lyre. He throws it, David dodges, the spear goes into the wall, and David runs.

What follows that night is domestic and desperate. Saul sends men to watch the house and kill him in the morning. Michal, Saul's daughter and David's wife, tells him that if he does not run tonight he will be dead by morning, and lets him down through a window. Then she takes a household idol, lays it in the bed, puts goats' hair at the head and covers it with a garment, and tells the messengers he is ill. Saul sends them back with orders to bring him up in the bed, and they find the idol.

Two details in that make it more interesting than a trick. There is a household idol in the house of the LORD's anointed, large enough to pass for a man in a bed, and nobody comments on it. And Michal, questioned by her father, protects herself by claiming David threatened to kill her, which is a lie that saves her life and ends her marriage in every way that matters.

David runs to Samuel at Ramah, and the last episode is almost comic. Saul sends three groups of men to arrest him and each group joins the prophets and starts prophesying. Then he goes himself, and the same thing happens to him on the road, and he strips off his robes and lies there all day and night, which revives the proverb people had been using since the start of his reign: is Saul also among the prophets?