And David answered and said,
“Here is the king’s spear.” It is noteworthy that David does not
immediately respond to Saul’s renewed profession of regret and good faith. (The
Masoretic consonantal text, the ketiv, tries to rescue this lapse by
representing these words as a vocative, “Here is the spear, king,” but the qeri,
or pronounced Masoretic version, properly renders it as ḥanit hamelekh,
“the king’s spear.”) In the encounter at the cave, David vowed he would not
harm Saul’s descendants, though his actual words were not reported. Here, he
first gives an impersonal order to have the spear brought back to Saul. It is
only when he goes on to recapitulate his profession of innocence that he again
addresses Saul. By this point, he no longer trusts any promises Saul may make
not to harm him but hopes that God will note his own proper conduct and
therefore protect him (verse 24). (Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible, 3
vols. [New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019], 2:290)