And the women sang to one another as they played, and said, Saul has slain his thousands, and David his ten thousands.
All Commentaries on 1 Samuel 18:7 Go To 1 Samuel 18
John Chrysostom
AD 407
But now notice in this incident how much trouble the passion of envy caused: when the king saw this young man enjoying such popularity and the dancing crowds calling out, “Saul’s conquests ran into thousands, David’s into tens of thousands,” he didn’t take kindly to their words … but overwhelmed by envy, he now repaid his benefactor with the opposite treatment, and the one whom he should have recognized as his savior and benefactor he endeavored to do away with. What an extraordinary degree of frenzy! What excess of madness! The man who had won him the gift of life and had freed his whole army from the foreigner’s rage he now suspected as an enemy, and, instead of the man’s good deeds remaining fresh in his memory and prevailing over passion, the clarity of his thinking was dulled with envy as though by a kind of drunkenness, and he regarded his benefactor as his enemy.
That is what the evil of this passion is like, you see: it first has a bad effect on the person giving birth to it.
