Saul's offer sounds generous. His own daughter will go to the young man who has just become a national hero. The narrator will not let the reader miss what lies underneath it: 17Saul wanted the hand of the Philistines against David instead of his own. The proposal is an assassination plan wearing a wedding garment. Saul cannot bring himself to kill David outright, so he arranges for someone else's sword to do it and keeps his own hands clean.
David's answer is striking. 18"Who am I, and who are my relatives, my father's clan in Israel, that I should be son-in-law to the king?" He has already killed a giant, been anointed, and won the loyalty of the whole nation, and he still asks the question sincerely. He is not reaching for the honor dangled in front of him. Merab is then given to another man, a small humiliation in a scheme already built on betrayal.
Then Michal comes into the story, and something tender interrupts the calculating. 20"Now Saul's daughter Michal loved David." The narrator says it outright. For one verse it looks like an ordinary happy match. Then Saul hears of it, and his mind runs the same arithmetic: 21"that she may be a snare for him." His daughter's love becomes, in his hands, another piece of the trap.
David has no wealth to offer as a bride-price, so Saul names one designed to kill. 25"a hundred foreskins of the Philistines" is the price Saul names. The narrator states the motive again in case anyone missed it. Twice in a short passage the plan appears in two disguises, a marriage and then a dowry, both aiming at the same outcome.
David's response is eager. 26"It pleased David well to be the king's son-in-law." He does not stop at a hundred. 27"David arose and went, along with his men, and killed two hundred of the Philistines." The count comes back in full measure, and Saul, with no honest way left to refuse, gives him Michal. The snare built to destroy David becomes the door to the royal family.
The last verses show Saul learning something he cannot use. 28"Saul saw and knew that the LORD was with David," and 29"Saul was even more afraid of David." Each scheme in this chapter failed in the same direction, and the narrator names the cause, since luck cannot account for it. Joseph would say it plainly to his brothers many years earlier: "As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good" (Genesis 50:20). Saul meant a wedding as a weapon, and God used it to establish the man Saul feared.
The pattern reaches its greatest instance at the cross, where men plotted against God's Anointed and thought a tomb would end it. Their worst scheme became the means of the victory they wanted to prevent. Whatever is aimed at you today, the God who turned Saul's snare into David's steps is still turning harm toward good.
Prayer
Father, thank you that no scheme against your purposes has ever succeeded, however threatening it looked. Give us David's humility to ask who we are, in place of a grasping heart eager for whatever honor is offered. Thank you that the greatest evil ever plotted against your Anointed became our salvation. We trust you with whatever is aimed at us now. In Jesus' name, amen.