Tucked away in the Hebrew Bible at the end of 1 Samuel and then resumed near the end of 2 Samuel is a provocative tale recounting the final fate of Saul, Israel's first king. At the beginning of this two-part narrative (1 Sam 31:1), we find Saul atop Mount Gilboa, badly wounded by Philistine archers and nearly dead. Fearing the Philistine armies will rush upon him and continue the humiliation—perhaps by stabbing him repeatedly while still alive, as Saul suggests in 31:4, or something worse—Saul commits suicide. As the rest of the chapter recounts, upon finding his corpse, the enemy army abuses him in a different but perhaps not less dreadful manner, i.e., by beheading the king and hanging the remainder of his body on the wall of Beth Shan (along with the bodies of his sons, who died with their father in the battle). The residents of Jabesh Gilead, however, hear of these events and abscond with the bodies, burying the bones in their own territory and thus ending this particular episode of conflict between Israel and Philistia.
The Fate and Power of Heroic Bones and the Politics of Bone Transfer in Ancient Israel and Greece
