Cain/Abel, Saul/Jonathan

Saul’s three sins in 1 Samuel 13-15 correspond to the sins of Adam, Cain, and the sons of God. Like Adam, he sins with regard to worship; like Cain, he attacks his fellow Israelites; like the sons of God, he makes an alliance with an enemy.

At each point, of course, there is a variation. He doesn’t eat forbidden fruit, but offers a prohibited sacrifice. He doesn’t intermarry with Gentiles but refuses to kill one, king Agag of the Amalekites.

The most interesting variation is the second: Instead of attacking a brother, Saul is on the verge of killing his son, Jonathan, despite the fact that Jonathan is the hero of the day’s battle with Philistia. 

There are two main differences with Genesis 4: First, the rest of the army intervenes to save Jonathan; his blood doesn’t fall to the ground like Abel’s. Second, the conflict is shifted from a uni-generational brother-brother conflict to an intergenerational father-son conflict. That’s fitting in 1 Samuel, which is centrally concerned with Saul’s assaults on his erstwhile son-in-law, David. 

In the light of Genesis, further, it suggests a variation on the archetypal murder. In an inversion of Freud, what was fratricide becomes not patricide but (attempted) filicide. Call is the “Saul Complex,” and watch for it, for it’s very common.