"Surpassing the Love of Women": What David and Jonathan Actually Was

There is a verse in the Bible that the internet is sure it has figured out.

Standing over the bodies of Saul and his son Jonathan, David sings a funeral song, and near the end he turns to his friend and says:

“I am distressed for you, my brother Jonathan; very pleasant have you been to me; your love to me was extraordinary, surpassing the love of women.” — 2 Samuel 1:26 (ESV)

Type that verse into a search bar and you will be told, confidently, that David and Jonathan were lovers, and that the church has spent three thousand years hiding it. It’s worth saying plainly, once, and then moving on: that reading tells us far more about the assumptions we bring to the text than about the text itself. The ancient world had a rich vocabulary for covenant loyalty that our culture has largely lost, so when we meet devotion this fierce, the only category many of us have left for it is romance. That’s our poverty, not the passage’s secret.

Because the passage is not being coy. It is telling us exactly what kind of love this was, if we know where to look.

A friendship that cost a crown

Go back to how these two met. In 1 Samuel, Saul is king and Jonathan is the crown prince — the heir, the next king, the young man with everything to gain by David’s failure. And early on, before anybody has said the quiet part out loud, Jonathan binds himself to David:

“Then Jonathan made a covenant with David, because he loved him as his own soul.” — 1 Samuel 18:3 (ESV)

The word there isn’t sentiment. It’s covenant — בְּרִית — bĕrît — a binding compact, a solemn and mutual bond of obligation (BDB).

Now, you could read that verse as nothing more than two young soldiers hitting it off. Except that a few chapters later Jonathan says out loud exactly what he understands to be happening, and it settles the question:

“Do not fear, for the hand of Saul my father shall not find you. You shall be king over Israel, and I shall be next to you. Saul my father also knows this.” — 1 Samuel 23:17 (ESV)

Read that slowly. You shall be king. I shall be next to you. The crown prince of Israel — the one man in the kingdom with the most obvious reason to hate David — says the throne is David’s, and then describes his own future as standing beside him. He isn’t guessing. He isn’t in denial. He knows, his father knows, and knowing it, he keeps the covenant anyway.

David isn’t just his friend. David is his replacement. And Jonathan chose him.

That choice cost him everything a man in his position had. He warns David when Saul means to kill him. He pleads for David before his own father. He makes David swear to protect his family after he’s gone, knowing full well that David’s house will replace his own. This is not two friends who simply enjoyed each other’s company. This is a man laying down his inheritance for the friend God had chosen over him — and doing it gladly, because Jonathan feared God more than he loved a throne.

That is what David is grieving. When he says the love was “extraordinary,” the Hebrew is stronger than it sounds in English: extraordinary — פָּלָא — pālāʾ (here in the Niphal, niplᵉʾatāh) — to be surpassing, wonderful, beyond the ordinary reach of things (BDB). It is a word the Old Testament uses for the works of God that leave people speechless. David has no shelf to set this friendship on. Compared to everything else he has known — and David, for all his greatness, had a complicated and often self-serving history with the women in his life — this covenant loyalty was in a category by itself. Not because it was romantic. Because it was faithful in a way almost nothing else in his experience had been.

What the old preachers saw

Long before anyone was arguing about this verse online, the early church read it as the high-water mark of friendship. A comment on this verse preserved under John Chrysostom’s name marvels that Jonathan — knowing the kingdom would pass to David — “felt no envy,” “restrained Saul’s unjust attempts” on David’s life, and finally “sacrificed his own life” alongside him. For Chrysostom this was friendship inseparable from justice: Jonathan loved David rightly because he loved God’s will more than his own claim. “Such friendship,” he said, “I would wish all to entertain, both toward the living and the dead.”¹

Modern scholars notice something else worth mentioning. Richard Hakvoort’s study of how the narrator handles point of view shows that the story spends most of its attention on Jonathan’s devotion — Jonathan’s initiative, Jonathan’s risk, Jonathan’s covenant — while leaving David’s love to be shown less in speeches and more in deeds.² And the greatest of those deeds comes years later, when David hunts down Jonathan’s surviving, disabled son Mephibosheth, not to eliminate a rival heir, as any other ancient king would have, but to seat him at the royal table for the rest of his life (2 Samuel 9). The covenant Jonathan made was kept, long after Jonathan was in the ground.

A. H. Van Zyl, working through the sound and wordplay of the whole lament, argues that David’s artistry across the poem is calibrated to arrive exactly here — that verse 26 is the song’s true climax, the place the whole thing has been travelling toward.³ The grief narrows, and narrows, and lands on one name.

Why it matters for us

We are, most of us, starved for exactly this and don’t have a name for it. We have romance and we have acquaintance, and not much in between. We have people we’re attracted to and people we network with. What we often lack is a Jonathan — someone bound to us by something sturdier than mood or usefulness, who would tell us the hard truth, guard our name when we’re not in the room, and rejoice when God lifts us up even past themselves.

That kind of friendship is not found by looking for it. It is built the way Jonathan built it: by wanting God’s will for another person more than you want your own advantage over them. It costs something every time. Jonathan paid a throne for it. Most of us will only ever be asked to pay our pride.

May God give us the grace to find a Jonathan. And may He give us the grace to be one.

Notes

Footnotes

1. Preserved in the catena tradition as a comment of John Chrysostom on 2 Samuel 1:26. The underlying homily has not been identified — the fragment circulates through the catenae and the modern digests that draw on them, and neither this project’s Phase 2 research nor a further source search located a primary locus. Treated here as catena-transmitted rather than as a verified passage from a named work. For Chrysostom’s fuller treatment of the David material, see his three homilies On David and Saul, and Maria Verhoeff, “Emotions and Friendship in John Chrysostom’s Homilies on David and Saul,” Studia Patristica 83 (Leuven: Peeters, 2017). ↩

2. Richard G. Hakvoort, “Internal Focalization in 1 Samuel – a new perspective on Jonathan’s love for David,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 47, no. 3 (2023): 343–56. ↩

3. A. H. Van Zyl, “Jy was baie na aan my hart (2 Sam 1:26)” [“You Were Very Dear to My Heart”], Verbum et Ecclesia 19, no. 3 (1998). In Afrikaans. ↩