NOTES for Sa1 1:14
When reading the Books of Samuel, one cannot help noticing David's careful and, one might say, reverent attitude toward the fact of Saul's anointing, that is, his blessing to rule the people of God. The simplest thing, of course, would be to see here the ancient Near Eastern tradition of sacralizing the ruler, who in countries such as Egypt or Babylonia, for example, was honored as a special sacred person connected with the world of the gods.
Ancient Israel never knew such sacralization: nowhere in the Bible is anything said about any "sacred nature" of royal power. And even in those countries where such sacralization existed, one could speak rather of the sacredness of the throne itself, and not of the concrete persons occupying it, who were honored as sacred only insofar as they occupied a sacred place.
David also had, no doubt, considerations of a strictly political order. He was not at all a poet "not of this world," as he is sometimes portrayed; he was a politician and a warrior, and therefore a realist fully and to the end. Had he decided to kill Saul, in Saul's relatives, and he belonged to the same tribe as Saul, though to different clans, he would have received implacable blood avengers, and this hostility could well have dragged on for centuries.
Yet the matter is neither the sacralization of royal power, of which Saul, incidentally, dreamed, nor political expediency alone. The matter is David's own attitude toward God's plans, about which he is certain only insofar as they concern him personally. One thing alone was clear to him: in the life of Saul, who had become David's rival, there was a moment of direct and immediate divine intervention that, even if only for a very short time, made him, according to the Book of Samuel, "another man." Let the touch have been fleeting, let Saul have become different only for a few hours; for David this event henceforth determines his attitude toward Saul as the anointed of God.
David is not an idealist at all; he sees perfectly what Saul has become and what megalomania and persecution mania have done to him. He understands that from the moment God touched Saul's heart, Saul's fate is no longer in human hands. Let Saul have long since forgotten what happened to him at the moment of prophetic initiation; still, now God Himself must dispose of his life and death, without David's intervention.
David waits for God's decision. When Saul dies, he does not rejoice: Saul's death is for him not so much triumph over a political opponent and personal enemy as a chance given by God and lost by man. A chance that cannot be recovered. Ever.