NOTES for Sa1 1:14
When reading the Books of Samuel, one cannot fail to notice David's careful and, one might say, reverent attitude toward the fact of Saul's anointing, that is, his blessing to rule God's people. The easiest thing, of course, would be to see here the traditional ancient Near Eastern sacralization of the ruler, who in countries such as Egypt or Babylonia was venerated as a special sacred person, involved in 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 in those countries where such sacralization did take place, one could speak rather of the sacredness of the throne itself, not of the specific persons occupying it, who were venerated as sacred only insofar as they occupied a sacred place.
David probably also had considerations of a purely political order, and he was by no means a poet "not of this world," as he is sometimes portrayed; he was a politician and a warrior, and therefore fully and completely a realist. Had he decided to kill Saul, in the person of Saul's relatives, and he and Saul belonged to one tribe though to different clans, he would have gained irreconcilable blood avengers, and this enmity could well have dragged on for centuries.
At the same time, the point is not the sacralization of royal power, of which Saul, incidentally, dreamed, nor political expediency alone. The point is David's very attitude toward God's plans, about which he is sure only insofar as they concern him personally. Only one thing was clear to him: in the life of Saul, who had become his, David's, rival, there had been a moment of direct and immediate intervention by God, which, if only for a very short time, made him, in the words of the Book of Samuel, "another man." Though the touch was fleeting, though Saul became another man only for a few hours, for David this event henceforth determines his attitude toward Saul as God's anointed.
David is by no means an idealist; he sees perfectly what Saul has become, what megalomania and persecution mania have done to him. He understands that from the moment when God touched Saul's heart, Saul's fate is no longer in human hands. Even if Saul has 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: for Saul's death is not so much triumph over his political opponent and personal enemy as a chance given by God and lost by a human being. A chance that cannot be returned. Ever.