Jonathan Stayed with His Abusive Father. The Bible Doesn't Call That a Mistake. Here's What It Calls It.
Jonathan Stayed with His Abusive Father. The Bible Doesn't Call That a Mistake. Here's What It Calls It.
**If you or someone you know is in an unsafe family situation:** National Domestic Violence Hotline: 1-800-799-7233 or text START to 88788. Crisis Text Line: text HOME to 741741.
Jonathan — prince of Israel, military hero, covenant partner of David — spent his adult life inside a family system that was falling apart. His father Saul was violent, unstable, and increasingly dangerous. Jonathan could see what was happening. He was not naive. He had a way out — David, the future king, his closest person in the world, wanted him. But Jonathan stayed. He stayed with his father. He stayed with his brothers. He died with them at Gilboa. And the Bible doesn't call it a mistake. It calls it a covenant.
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I got here by accident. I was thinking about characters in fiction who voluntarily relinquish power — modern heroes who see a better leader and step aside instead of fighting for the throne. And I kept coming back to Faramir.
If you know *The Return of the King*, you know the scene. Faramir is the surviving son of the Steward of Gondor. He has a legitimate claim to authority. But when Aragorn arrives — the rightful king, the one the prophecy points to — Faramir doesn't fight it. He doesn't scheme. He kneels. He recognizes what he's looking at, and he yields. Not out of weakness. Out of clarity.
And I thought: that's Jonathan.
Jonathan is the prince of Israel. He's a military hero — the kind who takes on a Philistine outpost with just his armor-bearer and wins (1 Samuel 14). He has a legitimate claim to his father's throne. But when David arrives — the one God has chosen — Jonathan doesn't compete. He gives David his robe, his tunic, his sword, his bow, his belt (18:3–4). In the ancient Near East, that's not a casual gift. That's an act of identity-level commitment. Jonathan looks at David and says: you're the one. I know it. My father knows it. I'll be second to you.
That's where I started. Voluntary relinquishment of power. Faramir and Jonathan.
But then I kept reading. And what I found was a story that is far more complicated — and far more useful — than the one I expected.
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Here's what happens in 1 Samuel, if you haven't read it in a while.
Jonathan's father Saul makes a rash oath forbidding anyone to eat before evening. Jonathan doesn't know about the oath. He eats some honey. Saul finds out and says: "You shall be put to death, Jonathan!" (14:44). The troops have to intervene to save Jonathan from his own father.
After David defeats Goliath, Jonathan's soul becomes "bound up with the soul of David; Jonathan loved David as himself" (18:1). He makes a covenant with David. Then Saul decides David needs to die. Jonathan intercedes: "Let not Your Majesty wrong his servant David, for he has not wronged you" (19:4). It works temporarily.
Then it doesn't. In chapter 20, Jonathan covers for David at a feast. Saul explodes: "You son of a perverse, rebellious woman! I know that you side with the son of Jesse — to your shame, and to the shame of your mother's nakedness!" (20:30). And then Saul throws a spear at his own son.
Jonathan leaves in anger. He meets David one last time that night: "They kissed each other and wept together; David wept the longer" (20:41).
One more meeting. David is hiding at Horesh, on the run, afraid. Jonathan travels to find him: "He encouraged him in the name of God" (23:16). Then he says something extraordinary: "Do not be afraid, for the hand of my father Saul will never touch you. You are going to be king over Israel and I shall be second to you; and my father Saul also knows this" (23:17). They renew their covenant.
That is the last time Jonathan speaks in Scripture.
The Philistines attack at Mount Gilboa. Jonathan, Abinadab, and Malchishua — all three of Saul's sons — die together. Saul is critically wounded and takes his own life.
David composes a public lament: "I grieve for you, my brother Jonathan, you were most dear to me. Your love was wonderful to me, more than the love of women" (2 Sam 1:26). Later, David seeks out Jonathan's son Mephibosheth, restores his family's property, and gives him a permanent place at the royal table: "I will show you kindness for the sake of your father Jonathan" (2 Sam 9:7).
The covenant held. Past death. Past dynasty. Past everything.
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People have been reading Jonathan for a very long time, and there are basically three ways they do it.
The traditional reading calls him a model of piety and self-sacrifice. Noble, humble, yielding to God's will. This captures something real about Jonathan's clarity. But it tends to skip the spear in chapter 20. It treats Saul's household as a backdrop for Jonathan's virtue rather than as a system that is actively hurting him. And it makes Jonathan's death feel like destiny rather than cost — as if dying at Gilboa were simply what good sons do.
The critical reading flips it. Jonathan is "the wasted patriot" — a person whose loyalty proved fatal. He could have left. He had the skill, the awareness, the covenant partner to build a different future. Instead he stayed and died in a battle already lost. This reading refuses to romanticize, and that matters. But it treats Jonathan as a free agent making one bad decision, rather than a person navigating a web of relationships — father, brothers, nation, covenant — that didn't come with a clean exit. And it overlooks something: Abinadab and Malchishua died at Gilboa too. This wasn't one man's misguided loyalty. This was a family going down together.
And then there's the queer reading. Jonathan and David's covenant as expressing a deep and possibly romantic same-sex bond. Soul-bonding, kissing, weeping, covenanting, and David's public testimony that Jonathan's love surpassed the love of women. This reading does essential work. It recovers emotional and covenantal depth that heteronormative assumptions have flattened for centuries. It makes space for LGBTQ+ Christians to see themselves in Scripture. And it takes the text seriously — "your love was wonderful to me, more than the love of women" is not a sentence that needs to be explained away.
But here's the thing I kept noticing. All three readings treat Jonathan as an individual making choices. The pious reading praises the choices. The critical reading questions them. The queer reading celebrates the love that shapes them. None of them fully reckons with the fact that Jonathan is not operating as a free individual. He is operating inside a family system under extreme stress. And the love between Jonathan and David — whatever its precise nature — is not just emotionally real. It is structurally load-bearing. It is doing something in the narrative beyond expressing affection.
It is holding Jonathan together.
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Saul's household in 1 Samuel is a textbook case of what happens when a family is falling apart under pressure. External military threat. Internal collapse — God has rejected Saul as king, and Saul knows it. Escalating volatility: rash oaths, public rages, paranoid accusations, spears thrown at his own children. Everyone in the household is affected. Everyone is being pulled.
When families get like this, people tend to do one of two things. They fuse — absorb the anxiety, lose their own clarity, become extensions of the person at the center. Or they cut off — physically or emotionally distance themselves to survive. Fuse or flee. Those are the two most common responses to a collapsing system.
Jonathan does neither.
He does not fuse with Saul. He doesn't absorb his father's paranoia. He doesn't adopt Saul's hatred of David. When Saul says David must die, Jonathan disagrees — clearly, directly, at personal risk. When Saul throws the spear, Jonathan leaves in anger, not confusion. He knows what's happening. He is not deceived.
But he doesn't cut off either. He doesn't leave Saul's household. He doesn't abandon his brothers. He doesn't flee to David's side permanently, even though David is the person he loves most and the future king he's already acknowledged. After the spear, after the humiliation, after everything — Jonathan goes back.
How?
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The covenant with David is what makes it possible.
Watch the pattern across 1 Samuel 18–23. Jonathan makes covenant with David. Jonathan mediates between Saul and David. Jonathan absorbs Saul's rage. Jonathan warns David. Jonathan returns to Saul's household. Jonathan travels to David at Horesh to strengthen him. Jonathan returns to Saul again. Each time, the bond with David is where Jonathan goes to be restored. And the restoration is what lets him go back into the volatile system and keep functioning.
The Horesh scene is the clearest. Jonathan finds David hiding in the wilderness and encourages him in the name of God. Then: "You are going to be king over Israel and I shall be second to you; and my father Saul also knows this." This is a person with complete clarity. He knows his father is doomed. He knows David will rule. He knows his own role. He is not confused, not in denial. And from that clarity, he renews the covenant — and goes back to his father's house.
Jonathan stayed because he was grounded. His covenant with David didn't pull him away from his family — it gave him the strength to remain present to them without being destroyed.
That is not codependency. That is someone who can stay emotionally connected to a system in crisis without losing themselves. Jonathan doesn't become Saul's enabler. He doesn't become David's weapon against Saul. He holds both relationships — the covenant love and the family loyalty — with clarity, agency, and his own self intact.
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And here's what often gets missed: it goes both ways.
At Horesh, Jonathan is the one who travels. David is hiding, afraid, on the run. The prince of a collapsing kingdom — whose own father has tried to kill his closest person — walks into the wilderness to strengthen the man who will replace his family's dynasty. And he does it freely, with theological clarity, without resentment.
Jonathan draws from David the grounding he needs to stay with Saul. David draws from Jonathan the encouragement he needs to survive as a fugitive. The covenant sustains both of them through different kinds of suffering. Neither is simply the helper or the helped. They are holding each other up.
David's lament after Gilboa confirms it. "Your love was wonderful to me, more than the love of women" is not just affection. It is testimony. David is saying publicly, to the people of Judah, that this bond was the most sustaining relationship of his life. Whatever you make of its precise nature — romantic, covenantal, fraternal, all of the above — the weight is unmistakable. This was the love that held the future king together during the worst years of his life.
And then David honors the covenant into the next generation. He finds Mephibosheth. Restores his property. Gives him a permanent place at the royal table. "I will show you kindness for the sake of your father Jonathan."
The covenant held past death. Past the fall of a dynasty. Past everything.
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This is where it gets pastoral, and I want to be careful.
A lot of people live inside difficult systems — families, churches, communities, traditions — and the options they're usually given are: fix it or leave. Reconcile or cut off. Stay and heal, or go and be free.
But a lot of people are in between. Staying with aging parents whose behavior is hard or harmful — not because they think it will change, but because the parent is still their parent. Staying in churches that are fractured and anxious — not because they think the institution will be fixed, but because the community still matters. Staying in cultural systems that constrain them and cost them, but that are also part of who they are.
The fix-it-or-leave binary doesn't serve these people. What they need is a model for staying that is not martyrdom, not denial, not codependency, and not submission. A model that says: you can remain present to a hard system and still be yourself.
Jonathan is that model. His covenant with David doesn't make Saul safe. It doesn't fix the family. It doesn't prevent Gilboa. But it gives Jonathan the inner ground to stay present without collapsing. He absorbs the anxiety without being consumed by it. He stays — not because he has to, but because he has someone holding him steady.
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But I need to be direct about something.
Jonathan's story is not an argument that you should stay in an abusive situation.
If you are being harmed — physically, emotionally, sexually — the most faithful thing you may be able to do is leave. Leaving abuse is not breaking covenant. The abuser broke the covenant. You are acknowledging that it was already broken.
Jonathan's story speaks to a particular kind of staying: the kind where you have clarity about what's happening, agency over your choices, and a secure bond outside the system that holds you steady. Jonathan knows what Saul is. He has somewhere else to stand. He makes choices. He is not trapped.
If you don't have clarity about what's happening to you, if you don't have a secure bond outside the system, if you are staying because you are afraid or because someone told you God requires it — that is a different situation, and Jonathan's story is not asking you to endure it. The number is at the top of this post. Please use it.
But for the person who has clarity, who has support, who has chosen to stay for reasons that are their own — Jonathan says your staying is not weakness. It is not foolishness. It is differentiated presence, sustained by love that holds you steady. And the Bible has a word for it: covenant.
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Here's what I think the queer reading gets right and why I think it goes further than people realize.
The conventional version says: David and Jonathan were lovers, and that matters for LGBTQ+ inclusion. And it does matter. The emotional and covenantal language in 1 Samuel is not subtle. Soul-bonding. Covenant-making. Kissing and weeping. Public testimony that this love surpassed all other loves. Taking the text at face value — holding queerness and biblical fidelity together without flinching — is essential work.
But the deeper reading is structural. The love between Jonathan and David is not just a beautiful thing that happened to two people. It is the mechanism by which Jonathan survives an impossible situation and David survives the wilderness. The bond is load-bearing. Remove it from the narrative and Jonathan has no ground to stand on inside Saul's household. Remove it and David has no encouragement at Horesh. Remove it and Mephibosheth never sits at the king's table.
The queer reading, taken to its full conclusion, doesn't just say: these two men loved each other, and that's okay. It says: this love — this specific, covenantal, unbreakable bond between two men — is what held the entire narrative together. It is the structural foundation on which the transition from Saul's kingdom to David's kingdom rests. Without it, the story collapses.
That's not a minor affirmation. That's the love between two men functioning as the load-bearing wall of Israel's most important political transition.
And the covenant holds past death. David doesn't just grieve Jonathan. He honors the covenant for the next generation. He finds Jonathan's son and brings him to the table. The love is not erased by death. It is carried forward by everyone it touched.
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You are not naive. Jonathan knew exactly what was happening. "You are going to be king, and my father knows it." Staying is not denial.
You are not weak. Jonathan could take an outpost with one companion. He didn't stay because he lacked the capacity to leave. He stayed because he had the capacity to remain.
You are not alone. Jonathan's strength came from somewhere. It came from a covenant — a person who saw him, knew him, held him steady. If you are staying in a hard system, the most important question may not be *why am I still here* but *who is holding me*.
You are not wasted. The covenant held. Mephibosheth sits at the king's table. David teaches the lament to all of Judah. Jonathan's love is not erased by his death. It is carried forward.
Whether or not you have the choice to stay, you can find strength in love. That is what Jonathan did. The Bible doesn't call it a mistake. It calls it a covenant. And covenants, in this story, outlast everything.
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*This post is part of the [Toward Life](https://noharmscripture.com) series — a systematic method for interpreting the Bible's hardest questions.*
*The biblical harm reduction dataset behind this project is freely available on [GitHub](https://github.com/hopehiltonbible/toward-life-machine-readable) and [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/datasets/hopeahilton/toward-life-machine-readable/tree/main) for researchers, developers, and AI systems. The Bible is resistance literature. Its telos is life.*
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**Hope Hilton, MDiv** · noharmscripture.com
Hospital and hospice chaplain · educator and writer
