If Saul had been asked the reason for his hostility, he would have been compelled to admit that it was the favors received from David’s hand. Moreover, even though Saul had been found asleep by David during the very time that the latter was being pursued, and although Saul lay, an easy victim, before his enemy, his life was again spared by that just man, for he refrained from doing him violence.

But what great and wonderful and Christian patience is to be found in David from whom Christ descended according to the flesh! David often had the opportunity to kill King Saul, his persecutor, who was eager to destroy him. Yet when Saul was subject to him and in his power, David preferred to save his life and did not retaliate on his enemy but, on the contrary, even avenged him when he was killed. In short, many prophets have been killed, many martyrs have been honored with glorious deaths, and all have attained their heavenly crowns through the merit of patience, for a crown for sorrow and suffering cannot be obtained unless patience in sorrow and suffering precede. THE ADVANTAGE OF PATIENCE 10.^[1]

For this reason, just as those who produce the more notable inscriptions on stones cut the characters deeply by frequently applying the chisel with blows to the carving of the letters, so the Holy Spirit contrives, by means of continuous repetition, that this great saying may become more distinct and quite clear on the stela^[2] of our memory, so that this inscription, having been carved in us distinctly and without confusion, might be known well in the time of misfortunes. For, in my opinion, the goal of the economy of the Holy Spirit is to set forth the previous accomplishments of holy ones for guidance for the life after these accomplishments, the representation leading us forward to good which is equal and similar. For whenever the soul swells with revenge against someone who is provoking it, and the blood around the heart boils with anger against the one who has grieved the soul, then, when one has looked up at this stela which the Holy Spirit set up for David, and has read the word on it which David uttered on behalf of him who was eager for his own blood, he will not fail to calm the troubled thoughts in his soul and appease his passion by his desire to imitate the same things.

Jesus has passed from this world to his Father and remains upon the heights of his Father’s kingdom, clearly out of human sight, where a great distance exists between him who sat at the right hand of God now that he in the flesh had become victorious over everlasting death, and those wretched mortals and godless ones of this world who labored to fight against him. Nonetheless, as he preached through his apostles, he called out to the people of Israel and to the experts in the law and forced them to rouse themselves from the slumber of their guilty indolence and to answer him by believing in him. Abner, whose name means lamp of the father, points to those who ought to have imparted the light of the truth of that time to the people. His father, Ner, which means lamp, alludes to their teachers who excelled in kindling the light of knowledge of the law in a spiritual fashion and in revealing to the ordinary teachers and to the people at large.

The apostles say, Now look, where is the scepter of your kingdom? You lost it on earth, and you have ceased to hope to find it in heaven. Where is your contemplative keeping of the law, for which you wholeheartedly thirsted and by which you boasted that you could wash your hands of your deeds and purify them from every filth of sin? . . . Although all these things had not yet fully taken place in the days of the apostles, nonetheless they had already begun in part, both in the time before the apostles and while they were still alive, as anyone who reads history can discover. Finally, among the countless disasters which Herod the Great and his sons brought upon the Jews, they took away the sacred garb from the priests, they did not grant the priests permission to minister in their sacred garb, and they gutted the rules of the law about the priesthood and changed them in turn to fit their own pleasure. Pilate defiled the temple by bringing in the images of Caesar during the middle of the night. He was simply following Herod’s example of godlessness, since Herod had earlier profaned the temple by affixing a golden eagle on it and ordered any pious individual who tried to remove it to be burned alive. Caligula ordered the temple itself to be profaned, as well as all their synagogues, by offering pagan sacrifices there. He ordered it to be filled with statues and images and commanded them to worship him as a god. There is no end to listing all these ways in which both the worship and the political power of the Jews were curtailed until at last they perished altogether.

In the case of David also, we read of both good and bad actions. But where David’s strength lay, and what the secret of his success was, is sufficiently plain, not to the blind malevolence with which Faustus assails holy writings and holy men, but to pious discernment, which bows to the divine authority and at the same time judges human conduct correctly. The Manichaeans^[1] will find, if they read the Scriptures, that God rebukes David more than Faustus does.^[2] But they will read also of the sacrifice of his penitence, of his surpassing gentleness to his merciless and bloodthirsty enemy, whom David, pious as he was brave, dismissed unhurt when now and again he fell into his hands. They will read of his memorable humility under divine chastisement, when the kingly neck was so bowed under the Master’s yoke, that he bore with perfect patience bitter taunts from his enemy, though he was armed and had armed men with him. And when his companion was enraged at such things being said to the king and was on the point of requiting the insult on the head of the scoffer, he mildly restrained him, appealing to the fear of God in support of his own royal order and saying that this bad happened to him as a punishment from God, who had sent the man to curse him.