STUDIES IN SAMUEL No. 39
1 Samuel 31:1-13
June 10, 2001
Text Comment
Now we are going to treat this chapter as a separate paragraph, which it is. But it is worth remembering that this is not the end of a book in any important sense. We think that as it is the last chapter in 1 Samuel, it is the completion of a story. And, no doubt, that is why the book was divided at precisely the point that it was. It made sense to divide Samuel into two parts at this point, at the death of Saul. However, as you can see if you glance at 2 Samuel 1, the run of the history goes right on past chapter 31 and into 2 Samuel. The story of the death of Saul is not really completed until the account of David's mourning for him and Jonathan has been given.
Samuel is a single book. It's mid-point is not here but at 1 Samuel 28:24. It is divided into two books only because scrolls held conveniently only a certain amount of text. The Book of Samuel was too long to put on one scroll. It had to be placed on two scrolls, hence it had to be divided somewhere. The division has no biblical, literary, or theological justification, in other words.
As we noted last week, the account of Saul's end is related with little detail.
v.1 When the battle began to go badly for Israel the soldiers fled to the hills behind them and many were chased down and slain there. Listen to this more complete account of the development of the battle.
"The major engagement of forces takes place in the Jezreel Valley, to the northwest of Mount Gilboa. The level ground of the valley would have given the Philistines the opportunity to deploy their iron chariots, one of their great strategic advantages over the Israelites. In the rout of the Israelites that ensues, Saul's forces retreat to the high ground of Mount Gilboa, where the Philistine chariots would have greater difficulty maneuvering. But the Philistines send contingents of archers - the bow being the ideal weapon to use against an army in flight - who exact heavy casualties from the Israelites forces." [Alter, Com., 189]
v.2 All of Saul's sons except Ish-bosheth were killed in the battle. In the civil war that followed, he, of course, became the rallying point for those loyal to the house of Saul.
v.3 At the end of the v. 3 the LXX adds "and he was wounded in the stomach."
v.4 Saul died ingloriously and under divine judgment, but he retained some courage to the end and some sense of the difference between the pagan peoples around (the "uncircumcised") and God's people. The armor bearer apparently would not kill his King because of the sanctity that attached to the Lord's anointed. This is exactly the point, in 2 Sam. 1:14, that David would make to the Amalekite man who thought to ingratiate himself with David by claiming to have dispatched his rival, King Saul.
v.7 We learn subsequently that there was still a good deal of Israelite territory that was not under Philistine control, but they had made deep inroads into Israel and David would have to deal with that in time. In fact, what they had done was to cut Israel in two, occupying a strip from the coastal plain to the Jordan valley across lower Galilee.
v.8 Ancient armies stripped the dead in large part to augment their own store of weapons.
v.9 The narrator wryly points out that the Philistine gods have to be informed of the victory of their armies just like the citizens do! [Gordon]
v.10 We learn in 1 Chron. 10:10 that Saul's head was displayed in the temple of Dagon. Beth Shan is in the Jordan valley at the eastern end of the plain of Jezreel, so not terribly far from the site of the battle.
v.13 The last three verses form an inclusio for the reign of King Saul. Remember his very first exploit as king and the act that vaulted him to universal recognition as the king of Israel was his coming to the aid of the town of Jabesh Gilead when it was besieged by the Ammonites. In 2 Sam. 2:4ff. David commends the men of Jabesh Gilead for what they did.
Now, I want to say something from this text that is really a matter of detail. The narrator is concerned, of course, to relate the end of Saul and the execution of God's judgment against him. But, we have discussed this at length in previous weeks. And, as we noticed, this account is quite simple and anti-climactic. God promised the judgment and it came. The way is now prepared for David to ascend to Israel's throne. God has kept his word to David and, for that matter, to Saul. Israel's enemies are used to execute his judgment, as often happened in the OT. But there is here also, along the way a matter of ethical application. Very often the Bible teaches its ethics in the course of its historical narrative. We learn many things from what the Lord Jesus did - how he lived, how he kept the Sabbath, how he treated others whom he encountered at various times, and so on - many things that are never reduced to commandments anywhere in the Bible. For example, we have a Sabbath commandment that, taken by itself, obviously means that we are to keep the day holy. What that means, in turn, is almost entirely determined for us in Holy Scripture by the evidence of the practice of the church and its holy men and women, the Lord Jesus first among them.
There are some ethical issues that are never expressly addressed in the form of commandment in the Bible. We learn our way either from the examples of behavior that are set before us - either to commend or to condemn - and from remarks that bear on the issue that may be found in biblical history, hymns, or sermons. Many of these sorts of matters are the more subtle, delicate aspects of godliness, for example, how one talks about oneself and what one communicates to others about one's inner life. But, some of them are matters more public and important to the life and witness of the church. For example, how are Christians to bear witness to their faith - an issue that every generation of Christians has wondered about and argued over, in part because the Bible is not explicit in telling us what we ought to do or how we ought to do it. We have some examples to go by and that is all. But that is not to say that we cannot discern the "mind of the Lord" from such material. All Scripture is God-breathed and profitable for training in righteousness.
One such issue upon which the Bible does not directly speak its mind, but concerning which it gives us ample material with which to form a judgment, is the one raised here in the treatment of Saul's body by the men of Jabesh Gilead. I am speaking of the proper disposition of a dead body. What ought Christian people to do with their dead. I've spoken of this before, many of you know the position I am going to maintain, but it is a matter worth considering more often in our day, precisely because, for the first time in the history of Western Civilization the Christian consensus on this point is disintegrating.
You will hear many ministers today, including I dare say Presbyterian Church in America ministers arguing that it is a matter of indifference whether we bury or cremate our dead. Whether then we bury the ashes in a cemetery, entomb them in a columbarium, or scatter them over our dead relative's favorite fishing hole. In the western United States, cremations now account for 40% or more of the dispositions of human remains and that figure is expected to climb steeply over the next several decades. Christians may wonder what they ought to do, but the pulpit is generally silent. Christians they know are doing one thing or the other and it certainly appears that this is a case of doing whatever the individual prefers. It isn't an easy subject to look up in your Bible dictionary or your concordance, in any case.
The arguments advanced by Christian advocates of cremation certainly have a certain plausibility. The practice of Christian burial is ancient, to be sure, but there are many ancient practices we have outgrown today. We don't walk from place to place; we take a car or an airplane. The antiquity of a practice is no guarantee that it is necessary or even best. What is more, the person is dead. He won't care what is done with his body. The issue is what is best for those who are left behind. And cremation is cheaper and so puts less pressure on the widow or children of the deceased. Besides, Christians are realists. The body is going to decay anyway. Many Christians have died in circumstances that prevented burial of any kind and they will not fail to be raised at the resurrection. Think of martyrs who were burned to death or the godly who through the ages died at sea and were buried in the depths of the sea. And, isn't it time for us to begin realizing that we have a stewardship for this earth. We simply haven't the space to bury everyone forever. It is a luxury that a densely populated world can no longer afford. And, then, the coup de grace: the Bible never commands us to bury or entomb our dead. We are free to cremate if we wish.
Well, what are we to think of this?
Well, this issue is raised for us here because the men of Jabesh Gilead are said to have burned the bodies of Saul and his sons when they stole them off the wall of Beth Shan. Now this is usually held up as an example of cremation in the Bible, cremation that is clearly approved. It is admitted by everyone that ordinarily, even that virtually without exception, the dead were buried or entombed in Israel and that this practice was carried over into early Christianity. That is not in dispute. But, exceptions like this one are said to prove that there is nothing in the Bible that amounts to a moral case against the practice of cremation. There may have been a cultural prejudice against it, but it is not forbidden in the Bible and on a few occasions the Bible actually countenances it.
Well, in the first place, we should paint the picture more accurately. In fact, this is the only place in the Bible where it might be argued that cremation is viewed as an acceptable practice. In every other place cremation is reserved as an image of God's wrath that is being executed against sinners (as in the case of Achan in Joshua 7:25; a priest's daughter who defiles herself by becoming a prostitute in Lev. 21:9; the pagan priests of the high places in Samaria that Josiah slaughtered and whose bones he burned in 2 Kings 23:20; or the bodies of the citizens of Samaria who were besieged by Assyria in judgment of their sins against the Lord and the covenant in Amos 6:10). But, does this passage here really provide support for cremation. It is doubtful. In the first place, I should tell you that there is an interpretation of v. 12 that takes "burned" to mean "burned spices for" or "burned incense for." The verb can be used to mean that and is in a few instances in the OT though, to be sure, in those other case with the preposition "for" which is missing here. Others have translated the verb "anointed with spices" which is the way we read the verse in the New English Bible. Now, this would not sound as plausible as an alternative except for the fact that a targum, one of the ancient Jewish translations with commentary on the text of the OT takes this verse that way. In that case there is nothing here about cremation at all. They brought the bodies back, burned incense as a kind of funeral rite, and then buried them.
Kimchi, the medieval Jewish commentator accepted that the bodies were burned, but, in an interpretation that has been followed by many since, suggests that they burned only because the flesh had already begun to rot - exposed as they had been for at least some days in the hot Mediterranean sun - and it was impossible to prepare the bodies for a normal burial. Others have suggested that the bodies, or what was left of them, were burned to prevent the Philistines from coming to disinter the royal remains in order to render some further insult to them. [Jamieson ad loc in S.M. Houghton, BOT, 70-71 (July-August 1969?), 41-42] In any case, the fact is, they buried the bones, they buried what was left of the bodies. This text provides, in other words, very little support for the practice of cremation and certainly no clear statement of biblical approval for cremation as it is practiced today.
Through the ages Christians have not used cremation even though they have been surrounded by cultures that practiced cremation as a matter of course, just as Israel was surrounded by such cultures. And the arguments for the Christian practice of burial or entombment - the universal Christian practice until very recently - are simple and straightforward.
1. The first argument has been the universal biblical witness to burial or entombment as the proper means of treating a human body after death.
Men of faith throughout Holy Scripture were buried or entombed. They were not cremated. They were never cremated, at least, not on purpose. The Lord was buried, of course, but buried precisely because it was the universal custom of God's people and always had been. From the patriarchs onward, burial is the biblical norm. Long before, when Moses died, God himself saw to the proper disposition of Moses' body and we are told explicitly that God buried him [Deut. 34:6].
2. What is more, the dead in Christ are always represented as buried and awaiting the Lord's return.
Paul, for example, as the Lord before him, speaks of them as "those who are in their graves" and of their "coming out" upon the return of the Lord Jesus. In fact, in a lovely image, the dead are represented as "sleeping" which is an image that is utterly destroyed by the practice of cremation. The word "cemetery," by the way, means simply "a place of sleeping." As our catechism has it, "The souls of believers are at their death made perfect in holiness and do immediately pass into glory, and their bodies, being still united to Christ, do rest in their graves till the resurrection."
3. Third, the biblical doctrine of the resurrection of the body is united to the practice of burial in Holy Scripture.
Paul, in his great argument for the eventual resurrection of the dead - by which he means the dead bodies of human beings - assumes the practice of burial. Remember his own analogy about the seed being sown or planted in the ground. "When you sow, you do not plant the body that will be, but just a seed, perhaps of wheat or of something else. … So it will be with the resurrection of the dead. The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body." [1 Cor. 15:37-44] To put it simply, cremation destroys the apostle's analogy.
All the great religions that practice cremation - it is Hinduism's method and common in Buddhism and now also in humanism - do so in the service of some principle: that the soul is the true part of man, that salvation occurs when the soul is released from the body, and so on or in the case of humanism, that there is no lasting significance to the human body. Christianity buries for precisely the same reason: to embody its convictions about the body and the future. It becomes even more important nowadays when the culture itself is losing touch with the Christian hope.
No one maintains, of course, that burial is necessary for resurrection. When we read at the end of Rev. 20 that when the Lord returns "the sea shall give up its dead" we realize that there will be nothing left of many who died at sea through the ages, nothing at all. God will not be prevented from raising the dead to life for want of the remnants of a body. But in the Bible, burial is a witness born to the expectation of resurrection. For a Christian, burial has always been a confession of faith! It is always the same body, the self-same body that will be raised to life, just as it was the Lord's own body that came back to immortal life on Easter Sunday.
4. Fourth, and most importantly in my judgment, the Bible always speaks of the dead as persons.
That is, the human body is not something that used to be a person, it is a person still. Personal pronouns are used to refer to the body. "They who are in their graves will hear his voice and come out…" and many such statements like that. We condemn abortion because we maintain that the Bible teaches that the fetus is a person, a human being. One of the ways it teaches us that is to speak of the baby in the womb by means of personal pronouns. "You formed me in the innermost places…" the psalmist writes. Well, just as at the very headwaters of life, so at its end, the personhood of human beings continues to be confessed in Holy Scripture, even concerning the body after death.
When, in cremation, you burn up a human body, you are not burning up what used to be your dear one, you are burning up your dear one. That is the doctrine of Holy Scripture. And it is precisely the doctrine that is being ignored or positively rejected in an effort to save some money on a burial. For, to put it bluntly, the arguments for cremation are of the very same type as the arguments for abortion: convenience, expense, the grief of those affected, the need to consider larger issues facing our culture, and so on.
We've got plenty of land for cemeteries and if the church insisted upon it, the land could be made to hold many more human bodies in the same square footage. Even today, with all the complaints you hear, the burial of a human being need cost and usually does cost just a fraction of what it costs to buy a car or even a high end refrigerator. And treating that body with holy regard for what it is and what it some day will be is an essential part of maintaining a witness to Christian faith in our culture. In fact, our culture now is offering us a golden opportunity to confess our faith in a way that is public and important, and the church instead is rolling over, being led around by the nose, and all to save a few bucks!
In the 4th century Julian the Apostate, the nephew of Constantine and a pagan who hoped to return the empire to paganism, acknowledged that one of the reasons why Christianity had gripped the imagination and gained the loyalty of so many in the imperial world was because of its treatment of the dead - its practices of burial enshrined a hope for the future that the rest of the world did not have. Surely we ought never to take a step in our practice that betrays that hope or obscures it from public view.
Now, listen to me carefully. My purpose is not to hurt your feelings if you have cremated a loved one upon his or her death. I am fully aware that few Christians have received much instruction regarding this matter and would have been entirely unaware either of the uniform Christian tradition they were violating or that the biblical case for cremation was weaker than they may have imagined. And, as I said, the Lord will not be pinched to supply a new body on the day of resurrection, no matter how that person's body was disposed of in the hour of death.
But, I cannot forbear to speak on the subject because of possible hurt feelings. The Church needs to stand up and be counted, to refuse to let the world do her thinking for her, and to bear witness to her faith in a manner consistent with the great tradition of Christian life in the world and with the teaching of God's world. It is very easy to let good habits die. All that need be done is to remain silent in the face of the world's pressure. Soon the church will have acquiesced and not even be aware that it gave up a sacred part of its testimony or that it has weakened that testimony in the hearts of its children. The world, this world, is not going to pressure us to show a greater reverence for human life. All through the Bible care, great care, was taken in the disposition of the body after death, precisely because of Christians' faith in the resurrection. We must do no less.
In England in the early 20th century, before radio and television, a form of entertainment and intellectual stimulation was provided by public debates between prominent figures in the political or literary or scientific world. One pair that was very popular was George Bernard Shaw and G.K. Chesterton. In one series they debated the question of cremation. Shaw, of course, the materialist, condemned bodily internment as "superstitious, slavery, stupidity." Chesterton replied that this was just the view he would have expected Shaw to take, and went on to argue the connection between burial and the conviction that burns in human hearts concerning the sanctity of human life.
Chesterton admitted that it made no difference to a man whether his body was burned up or not, but he thought it made a great deal of difference to those he had left behind. He saw the move to cremation as yet another sign of the onset of paganism in the modern world.
Indeed, he laid down a challenge. If one disagreed with Christianity and so with its established customs, then he should have the courage of his convictions and really do the opposite, instead of sheltering in a world made safe for paganism by the structure of Christian faith, even if no longer widely believed. In a typically Chestertonian barb, he said that the world would be "very much jollier if the people who preached polygamy would go away and keep harems and see what happened." [Ffinch, 192-193] And, if they wished to practice cremation, at least make it magnificent like consistent pagans had always done. And he put this idea into a famous poem:
If I had been a Heathen,
I'd have piled my pyre on high
And in a great red whirlwind
Gone roaring to the sky.
But Higgins is a heathen,
And a richer man than I;
And they put him in an oven,
Just as if he were a pie.
Well, we are not pies. Nor are the bodies of those who have died in Christ pies. Nor, for that matter, those who have died in their sins. And we should not behave as if we thought they were!
God my Redeemer lives,
And often from the skies
Looks down and watches all my dust,
Till he shall bid it rise (Watts)