Catholic Commentary
Israel's Fear and Flight
6When the men of Israel saw that they were in trouble (for the people were distressed), then the people hid themselves in caves, in thickets, in rocks, in tombs, and in pits.7Now some of the Hebrews had gone over the Jordan to the land of Gad and Gilead; but as for Saul, he was yet in Gilgal, and all the people followed him trembling.
1 Samuel 13:6–7 describes Israel's panic when threatened by the Philistines, with men hiding in caves, rocks, and tombs while others desert across the Jordan, leaving only Saul's trembling followers at Gilgal. The passage illustrates the collapse of Israelite courage and covenant confidence, with hiding places and desertion portraying a people spiritually defeated before battle even begins.
Fear untethered from faith produces not just cowardice but disobedience—Israel's soldiers hide in tombs while their king waits at Gilgal, trembling, poised to commit a sin born from panic.
1 Samuel 13:6 — The anatomy of panic
The narrator opens with a clinical observation: "the men of Israel saw that they were in trouble." The Hebrew root nāgas (pressed, harassed) behind "distressed" carries the sense of being squeezed from every side — the same word used of Israel's oppression in Egypt (Exodus 3:9). This is not incidental: the writer invites the reader to sense the full humiliation. A people liberated from slavery under Moses now find themselves cowering in the very landscape of Canaan they were called to inherit.
The catalogue of hiding places — caves, thickets, rocks, tombs, pits — is deliberately exhaustive. The five-fold list mimics the overwhelming scope of Israel's terror. "Tombs" (qeber) is especially pointed: men still living have retreated to the dwellings of the dead, a vivid figure for a living death of despair. The Judean wilderness terrain would have made such concealment literally possible, but the theological import is unmistakable — these are men of the covenant behaving as though the God of the covenant were absent or defeated.
1 Samuel 13:7 — Desertion and trembling loyalty
Verse 7 distinguishes two groups. The first — "some of the Hebrews" — have fled across the Jordan into the Transjordanian territories of Gad and Gilead. The use of "Hebrews" ('ibrîm) here is notable: it is frequently used in Samuel by or about non-Israelites as a slightly distancing, even contemptuous term (cf. 1 Sam 4:6; 14:11). Its use here may subtly echo how these deserters have, in their flight, stepped outside the covenant community and its obligations.
The second group remains with Saul at Gilgal — but they follow him "trembling" (hāradîm). The same root describes the trembling of Eli at the news of the ark's capture (1 Sam 4:13) and will later describe the trembling of Jesse's sons before Samuel (1 Sam 16:4). It is the trembling not of holy reverence but of dread — of men who remain not out of faith but out of inertia or inability to flee farther. Saul himself is strangely passive: he is "yet in Gilgal," waiting. The word "yet" ('ôd) is ominous — he is still there, but the clock is running. Samuel had appointed a seven-day rendezvous (1 Sam 13:8), and every verse is now shadowed by that deadline.
The typological and spiritual senses
The hiding in caves resonates with a recurring biblical figure: Elijah fleeing to the cave at Horeb (1 Kgs 19:9), the disciples locked in the upper room for fear (John 20:19), or the servants of the Apocalypse hiding in mountain clefts from the wrath of the Lamb (Rev 6:15–16). In each case, the cave figures the soul that retreats from its vocation under the pressure of fear. The antidote, consistently in Scripture, is not the removal of the threat but the renewal of encounter with God — the still small voice, the breath of the Risen Lord, the Lamb's final victory.
Gilgal itself carries typological weight. It was the site of Israel's first encampment after crossing the Jordan (Josh 4–5), where the reproach of Egypt was "rolled away" (gālal, the etymological root of Gilgal) and the covenant renewed through circumcision. That Saul waits here in the trembling of faithless fear — rather than the confident rest of covenant fidelity — makes the location a painful irony. The place of liberation has become the place of paralysis.
Catholic tradition reads this passage through the lens of the theological virtue of fortitude (courage), one of the four cardinal virtues. The Catechism teaches that fortitude "ensures firmness in difficulties and constancy in the pursuit of the good" and that it "strengthens the resolve to resist temptations and to overcome obstacles in the moral life" (CCC 1808). The collapse of Israel's army is not merely military failure; it is a moral and spiritual one — the failure of fortitude precisely when it was most demanded.
St. Thomas Aquinas, drawing on Aristotle but baptizing the insight thoroughly, taught that true fortitude is not the absence of fear but its right ordering (Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 123). The soldiers of Israel do not sin by feeling afraid; they sin by allowing fear to extinguish their trust in the God who had never abandoned them. This is the distinction the Church Fathers — particularly St. Ambrose in De Officiis — draw between the fear that is a passion of the body and the fear that becomes a vice of the will when we consent to it against the known will of God.
Pope John Paul II, in Veritatis Splendor (§93), speaks of martyrs as those who, by their fortitude, bear witness that the moral law cannot be purchased at the price of life itself. The inverse image — lives preserved by abandoning one's post before God — is precisely what 1 Samuel 13 portrays. Saul's moment of capitulation (vv. 8–10) is born directly from the atmosphere of panic these verses create: when leaders absorb the fear of those they lead rather than transfiguring it through faith, catastrophe follows.
St. John Chrysostom comments broadly on Israelite flight in the wilderness period: such retreats are always, at their root, a failure of memory — forgetting what God has already done (Homilies on the Psalms). The cave-dwellers of Gilgal have forgotten the Red Sea, the Jordan crossing, the walls of Jericho.
Contemporary Catholics live in a cultural moment that often feels like a Philistine encampment on the horizon — hostile to faith, numerically overwhelming, and apparently unstoppable. The temptation to "hide in caves" is real and takes modern forms: shrinking from proclaiming the faith in the workplace, disengaging from the Church's public moral witness, privately practicing a "tomb Christianity" that is alive to no one but oneself.
The specific detail of trembling loyalty — remaining with Saul but trembling — is a challenge to nominal, fearful discipleship. It is possible to stay in the pews, to technically remain in the community, while one's interior life is governed by dread rather than faith. The Church calls this kind of existence to conversion, not condemnation.
The practical antidote the passage implies is a return to Gilgal's original meaning: remembering what God has rolled away — sin, death, condemnation — in Baptism. Catholics facing social pressure or spiritual desolation are invited to return to the sacraments, especially the Eucharist and Confession, as the true "Gilgal" where the reproach of spiritual slavery is continually undone. Fear is not overcome by willpower but by renewed encounter with the God who is already victorious.
Commentary