“His thousands and his tens of thousands”
And as the women danced, they sang out: 'Saul has slain his thousands, and David his tens of thousands.' (1 Samuel 18:7 BSB)
What it sounds like today
A claim that David literally killed ten times more than Saul.
The cultural key
The chant follows a fixed rule of Hebrew poetry: parallelism, in which a second line restates and often heightens the first. Pairs like 'thousands / ten thousands' are a conventional poetic escalation (compare 'a thousand shall flee, ten thousand put to flight'), a way of piling up praise, not a statistical claim that David killed exactly ten times as many as Saul. The women are simply singing an exuberant victory song celebrating both men. But Saul, hearing his own name attached to the smaller number and David's to the larger, takes the parallelism literally as a ranking: 'They have credited David with tens of thousands, but me with only thousands. What more can he have but the kingdom?' From that day he eyes David with jealousy. So a misread poetic device becomes the spark of Saul's murderous envy. A modern reader hears an odd numerical boast; the first hearers recognized standard parallelism, and saw a king dangerously misreading a song.
Recovered meaning
'Thousands... tens of thousands' is standard Hebrew poetic parallelism heightening praise for both men, not a literal count ranking David above Saul. But Saul reads it as a ranking, and his jealousy of David begins.