Saul
The short answer
The Bible gives us two men named Saul, and reading them side by side is one of the most illuminating exercises in Scripture. The first is Israel's first king, chosen by God, tall and impressive, anointed by the prophet Samuel. The second is a zealous persecutor of the early church, later known as the apostle Paul. Both men had a dramatic encounter with what God was doing in the world — and they went in opposite directions.
King Saul's story turns in 1 Samuel 18. After David kills Goliath, the women of Israel sing that Saul has slain his thousands but David his ten thousands. From that moment, something curdles in Saul. The chapter traces his unraveling almost verb by verb: he grows angry, he raves, he hurls a spear, he grows afraid, he sends David away, and finally he stands in awe of him. The text says "Saul eyed David" — and that watching, envious eye becomes the lens through which he sees everything for the rest of his life. Saul's tragedy is not that God abandoned him out of nowhere; it is that he could not bear God's blessing resting on someone else.
The other Saul, on the road to Damascus in Acts 9, was riding high on religious certainty when a blinding light knocked him to the ground and a voice asked why he was persecuting Jesus. His world turned inside out. Where King Saul saw God's purposes in David and hardened into jealousy, Saul of Tarsus saw the glory of God in the face of Jesus and was remade. The question both stories pose is the same: what happens to a Saul when God's glory shows up somewhere he did not expect it?
What scholars say
Eugene Peterson follows the string of verbs in 1 Samuel 18 that chart King Saul's slide from anger to raving to fear to grudging awe, as he senses God's purposes at work in David. N.T. Wright describes the other Saul's Damascus road experience — a world turned upside down, and a seeing of heavenly reality that Saul would point to for the rest of his life.
“In contrast to Jonathan’s covenantal friendship with David and the people’s extravagant and celebratory love, King Saul became jealous. A succession of verbs develops the enmity that will dominate his soul until his death: he was “very angry” (v. 8); “raved” (v. 10); “threw the spear” (v. 11); “was afraid” (v. 12); “removed him” (v. 13); and, finally, “stood in awe of him” (v. 15), sensing, for the first time, perhaps, that more than mere popularity was involved—that God’s purposes were being worked out in this young man. When we read that “Saul eyed David” (v. 9), we know that it was a very evil eye indeed.”
“Suddenly Saul’s world turned upside down and inside out. Terror, ruin, shame, awe, horror, glory and terror again swept over him. Years later he would write of seeing ‘the glory of God in the face of Jesus the Messiah ’ (2 Corinthians 4.6), and though, to show that this was something he shared with all Christians, he described it as God shining ‘in our hearts’, elsewhere he makes it clear that his own ‘seeing’ was unique, a seeing, like Stephen in his death, which involved the coming together of heaven and earth, earthly eyes seeing heavenly reality. ‘Am I not an apostle ?’ he wrote to the Corinthians (1 Corinthians 9.1). ‘Have I not seen Jesus our Lord?”
What it means for you
Most of us will not throw spears, but nearly all of us know the moment King Saul knew: when someone else gets the recognition, the gift, or the calling we quietly wanted for ourselves. Jealousy rarely announces itself; it starts as a way of eyeing another person. The two Sauls suggest that such moments are actually invitations. We can watch God's work in someone else and let it hollow us out, or we can let it upend our assumptions and reorient our lives. The difference is not talent or circumstance — it is whether we insist on being the center of the story.
In context
King Saul's jealousy erupts in 1 Samuel 18, just after David's victory over Goliath. The chapter also describes Jonathan's covenant friendship with David and the people's open delight in him — the very love that Saul cannot share. From here, the rest of 1 Samuel traces Saul's long pursuit of David and his decline. The other Saul appears in Acts 9, where his encounter with the risen Jesus on the Damascus road interrupts his campaign against the church and sets the course for the rest of the New Testament.