The major sequence that runs, according to the conventional book and chapter divisions of later editorial traditions, from 1 Samuel 1 to 1 Kings 2 is one of the most astounding pieces of narrative that has come down to us from the ancient world. The story of David is probably the greatest single narrative representation in Antiquity of a human life evolving by slow stages through time, shaped and altered by the pressures of political life, public institutions, family, the impulses of body and spirit, the eventual sad decay of the flesh. It also provides the most unflinching insight into the cruel processes of history and into human behavior warped by the pursuit of power. And nowhere is the Bible’s astringent narrative economy, its ability to define characters and etch revelatory dialogue in a few telling strokes, more brilliantly deployed.
It must also be said, after nearly two centuries of excavative scholarship, that the precise literary history and authorship of this great narrative remain beyond recovery. To specialists who have exercised painstaking analysis in order to expose an intricate patchwork of sources and historical layers in the book as a whole and in most of its episodes, it may seem a provocation or an expression of ignorance to speak at all of the story of Samuel, Saul, and David. Even a reader looking for unity must concede that certain passages are not of a piece with the rest. The most salient of these is the coda placed just before the end of the David story (2 Samuel 21–24), which comprises material from four different sources, none of them reflecting the style or perspective of the David story proper. It may be unwise to think of these disparate passages as intrusions because creating a purposeful collage of sources was demonstrably a standard literary procedure in ancient Israel. In any case, the architectonic cohesion of the narrative from the birth of Samuel to the death of David has been made increasingly clear by the innovative literary commentary of the past four decades, and much of the richness and complexity of the story is lost by those who imagine this book as a stringing together of virtually independent sources: a prophetic Samuel narrative, a cycle of Saul stories, a History of the Rise of David, a Succession Narrative, and so forth.
Readers should not be confused by the conventional division into books. The entities 1 and 2 Samuel are purely an artifact of ancient manuscript production. Scrolls used by scribes were roughly the same length, and when the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek in the third century B.C.E., a single scroll was not long enough to encompass the whole book, so it was divided into two parts in no way intrinsic to the original composition. (The Talmud speaks of a single Book of Samuel.) It is also demonstrable that the first two chapters of 1 Kings, as I shall try to show in my commentary, are the real conclusion of the book, subtly echoing earlier moments in the story and evincing the same distinctive literary mastery. Later redactors placed these two episodes at the beginning of Kings so that they could serve as a preface to the story of Solomon.
But if the ancient editors passed this material down to posterity as a book, what are we to make of its composite nature? Two fundamental issues are involved: the presence of the so-called Deuteronomist in the book, and the introduction of purportedly independent narratives. In regard to the second of these two considerations, the baseline for modern scholarly discussion was set in a 1926 monograph by the German scholar Leonhard Rost. He concentrated on what he saw as two independent narratives—an Ark Narrative (1 Samuel 4–7:1, plus 2 Samuel 6) and a Succession Narrative (2 Samuel 9–20 and 1 Kings 1–2). The argument for an originally independent Ark Narrative has a good deal of plausibility: there are some stylistic differences in this segment; human agents, at the center of the surrounding narrative, are marginal; miraculous intervention by God, not in evidence elsewhere, is decisive; and the figure of Samuel with which the story began temporarily disappears. The Ark Narrative is often thought to be the oldest component of the Book of Samuel, perhaps actually pre-Davidic, because it does not envisage a royal cult in Jerusalem and has no interest in the more political concerns of the larger story. Even in this case, however, the narrative in question has to be read in the context of the comprehensive literary structure into which it has been integrated, whether by editorial ingenuity or by the allusive artistry of the author of the David story. Thus, the old priest Eli, sitting at the gate awaiting the news of disaster from the battlefield (news that will include the death of his sons), generates a haunting avatar in the aging David at Mahanaim, sitting between the two gates of the walled city, anxiously awaiting the messenger from the battlefield who will tell him of the death of his son. A second scene of receiving catastrophic tidings is tied in with Eli: the old priest hears an uproar in the town, asks what it means, and then a messenger arrives to give him a breathless report of the terrible defeat, just as the usurper Adonijah, at the end of the David story, will hear an uproar in the town and then a breathless report from an eyewitness of the developments that have destroyed his hopes for the throne.
The argument for an independent Succession Narrative, long embraced by scholarly consensus, is shakier. Rost’s contention that it is stylistically distinct from the preceding text is unconvincing, and his notions of style are extremely vague. One may question whether the succession to the throne is actually the central concern of this sequence of episodes, which are more powerfully focused on David’s sin and the consequent theme of the unfolding of the prophet’s curse on the house of David. (This theme has a certain affinity with Greek tragedy, as Faulkner, ultimately a better reader of the David story than Rost, keenly understood in Absalom, Absalom!) The powerful imaginative continuities in the representation of David from agile youth to decrepit old age speak for themselves. To read, for example, David’s grim response to the death of his infant son by Bathsheba (2 Samuel 12) as part of an independent Succession Narrative, unrelated to his previous public utterances and acts in a purported History of the Rise of David, is to do palpable violence to the beautiful integrity of the story as the probing representation of a human life. Over the past four decades, admirable work has been done by scholars from different points on the geographical and methodological map to illuminate the fine and complex interconnections among the various phases of the story of David, Saul, and Samuel. The most notable contributions are those of the Dutch scholar J. P. Fokkelman, the North American Robert Polzin, and the Israeli Shimon Bar-Efrat, and I shall frequently follow their precedent or build on their insights in my comments on the text.
The other pervasive question about the stratification of this book involves its Deuteronomistic editing. No one knows with certainty when the main part of the original narrative was written, though there is good reason to place it, as a recurrent scholarly view does, quite close to David’s own time, in the first half of the tenth century B.C.E. (Gerhard von Rad proposed the court of Solomon as the setting for the composition of the story.) Samuel is set into the larger history that runs from Joshua to the end of 2 Kings and that scholarly usage designates as the Deuteronomistic History. The book was probably edited at the time of King Josiah’s cultic and theological reforms in the late seventh century B.C.E., although it may well have undergone a secondary Deuteronomistic redaction in the Babylonian exile, during the sixth century B.C.E. But to what extent is Samuel a product of the work of the Deuteronomist? The bulk of the story shows no traces of the peculiar brand of nationalist pietism that marks the Deuteronomistic movement—its emphasis on the purity and the centralization of the cult, its insistence on a direct causal link between Israelite defection from its covenant with God and national catastrophe, and its distinctive and strikingly formulaic vocabulary for expressing this outlook. The compelling conclusion is that the Deuteronomistic editors did no more with the inherited narrative than to provide some minimal editorial framing and transition (far less than in the Book of Judges) and to interpolate a few brief passages. Thus I strenuously disagree with Robert Polzin, one of the most finely perceptive readers of this book (in his two volumes Samuel and the Deuteronomist and David and the Deuteronomist). Exercising great ingenuity, Polzin sees the historical perspective of the Deuteronomist manifested in all the minute details of the story.
Let me recall a signal instance I mentioned in my introduction to the Former Prophets (pages xlv–lvi), where the Deuteronomist has patently inserted a bit of dialogue of his own contrivance into the story that probably antedates his editing by more than three centuries, for the contrast with what immediately follows vividly illustrates the kind of world that defines David, Joab, Saul, Abner, and all these memorable figures steeped in the bitter juices of politics and history. Here, full quotation with commentary may be helpful. On his deathbed, David summons Solomon in order to convey to him an oral last will and testament (1 Kings 2: 2–6):
I am going on the way of all the earth. And you must be strong, and be a man. And keep what the LORD your God enjoins, to walk in His ways, to keep His statutes, His commands, and His dictates and His admonitions, as it is written in the Teaching of Moses, so that you may prosper in everything you do and in everything to which you turn. So that the LORD may fulfill His word that He spoke unto me, saying, “If your sons keep their way to walk before Me in truth with their whole heart and with their whole being, no man of yours will be cut off from the throne of Israel.” And, what’s more, you yourself know what Joab son of Zeruiah did to me, what he did to the two commanders of the armies of Israel, Abner son of Ner and Amasa son of Jether—he killed them, and shed the blood of war in peace, and put the blood of war on his belt that was round his waist and on his sandals that were on his feet. And you must act in your wisdom, and do not let his gray head go down in peace to Sheol.
Every word in the italicized section of the passage shows the fingerprints of the Deuteronomist. The phraseology is almost identical with recurrent phraseology in the Book of Deuteronomy: the heavy stress on “keeping” and “commands,” whole strings of terms such as “walk in His ways,” “His statutes, His commands, and His dictates and His admonitions,” “so that you may prosper in everything you do,” “to walk before Me in truth with their whole heart and with their whole being.” The very mention of the “Teaching [torah] of Moses” is a Deuteronomistic rallying point that would scarcely have been invoked in the tenth century. Stylistically, moreover, these long-winded sentences loaded with didactically insistent synonyms are nothing like the sentences spoken by characters in the David story.
Why did the Deuteronomist interpolate these lines of dialogue? The most plausible inference is that, given his brand of pious monotheism, he was uncomfortable with the vengeful way the founding king of the divinely elected dynasty speaks on his deathbed. David and Joab go back together half a century. David has been repeatedly dependent on Joab’s resourcefulness and ruthlessness as his principal strongman, but he also feels himself to have been terribly wronged by his henchman—above all, in Joab’s self-interested and treacherous murders of two army commanders whom David had embraced (and also in his killing of Absalom, against the king’s explicit orders, which David refrains from mentioning). The image of Joab splashed in blood from waist to feet strongly recalls the narrative report of his butchering Amasa with a stealthy sword thrust to the belly, and invokes the recurrence of spilled blood as material substance and moral symbol throughout the story. When David enjoins the proverbially wise Solomon to act in his wisdom, the quality in question is not the wisdom of the Torah of Moses but rather the wisdom of a Talleyrand. Soon after David’s death, Solomon will show how adept he is in exercising that faculty of wary calculation. The Deuteronomistic editor could not delete this material, but he sought to provide a counterweight to its unblinking realism by first having David on his deathbed speak in a high moral tone. In fact, nobody in the David story talks like this. The dialogues show nothing of this hortatory style, nothing of this unalloyed didacticism. It is not that the writer is devoid of any ideological viewpoint: he believes in a morally imperative covenantal relationship between God and Israel; he believes in the authority of prophecy; and he believes in the divine election of the Davidic line. But one must hasten to say that he believes in all these things only with enormous dialectic complication, an order of complication so probing that at times it borders on subversion.
The dialectic complication of national ideology is a phenomenon worth explaining, for it brings us to the heart of the greatness of the David story. Biblical scholarship by and large has badly underread this book by imagining that ideological strands can be identified like so many varieties of potatoes and understood as simple expressions of advocacy. In this fashion, it is repeatedly claimed in the critical literature that one component of the book is prophetic, promoting the interests of prophetic circles; that another is “Saulide”; that a third is basically a narrative apologetic for the Davidic dynasty; and so forth. All of this strikes me as badly misconceived, and it is blind to the complexity of vision of this extraordinary writer.
The representation of the prophet Samuel is instructive in this connection. It has been conjectured that a “prophetic” writer, active perhaps a century or two after the reported events, is responsible for this portion of the book as well as for the ones in which Nathan the prophet figures. But there is scant evidence in the text for the construction of this hypothetical entity. It is rather like assuming that Shakespeare must have been a “royalist,” or perhaps even royal, writer in order to have written Henry IV. What, in fact, is the writer’s attitude toward Samuel? There is no question that he is shown to be a prophet confirmed in his vocation by God Himself, as the dedication scene, in which God calls to him in the night at the Shiloh sanctuary (1 Samuel 3), makes clear. It is concomitantly stressed that Samuel has been chosen to exercise a spiritual authority that will displace the priestly authority of the house of Eli, on which an irrevocable curse is pronounced soon after the report of Samuel’s birth. The entire people becomes subservient to Samuel, and they feel that only through the initiative of the prophet (however grudging) can they get the king they want. In all this, one could claim that the story is confirming a prophetic ideology by reinforcing the notion of the indispensability of prophetic authority to Israelite national life.
Yet as in the case of Saul, David, and all the principal figures around them, Samuel is a densely imagined character, and, it must be said, in many respects a rather unattractive one. The Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai neatly catches the dubiety of the mature Samuel in a wry little poem: “When Samuel was born, she said words of Torah, / ‘For this lad I prayed.’ / When he grew up and did the deeds of his life, / she asked, ‘For this lad I prayed?’” The prophet Samuel may have God on his side, but he is also an implacable, irascible man, and often a palpably self-interested one as well. His resistance to the establishment of the monarchy may express a commitment to the noble ideal of the direct kingship of God over Israel, but it is also motivated by resentment that he must surrender authority, and the second of his two antimonarchic speeches is informed by belligerent self-defensiveness about his own career as national leader. When he chooses Saul, he wants to play him as his puppet, dictating elaborate scenarios to the neophyte king, even setting him up for failure by arriving at an arranged rendezvous at the last possible moment. He is proud, imperious, histrionic—until the very end, when he is conjured up by Saul as a ghost on the eve of the fatal battle at Mount Gilboa.
It would be misleading, I think, to imagine that any of this is intended to discredit the idea of prophetic authority. Samuel is invested with prophetic power by an act of God. But the writer understands that he is also a man, all too human, and that any kind of power, including spiritual power, can lead to abuse. Samuel toys with the idea of creating a kind of prophetic dynasty through his two sons, even though they are just as corrupt as the two sons of Eli, whose immoral behavior seals the doom of their father’s priestly line. Is Samuel’s choice of Saul really dictated by God, or rather by his own human preconceptions? (He is on the point of making the same mistake twice when he is ready to anoint David’s eldest brother, Eliab, another strapping young man who seems to stand out from the crowd.) When he insists it is God’s will that the entire population and all the livestock of Amalek should be slaughtered, and then offers King Agag as a kind of human sacrifice to the LORD, does he act with divinely authorized prophetic rightness, or, as Martin Buber thought, is he confusing his own human impulses with God’s will? The story of Samuel, then, far from being a simple promotion of prophetic ideology, enormously complicates the notion of prophecy by concretely imagining what may become of the imperfect stuff of humanity when the mantle of prophecy is cast over it.
The representation of David is another instance, far more complex and compelling, of the complication of ideology through the imaginative reconstruction of historical figures and events. Before I try to explain how that process is played out in the David story, a few words are in order about the relation of this entire narrative to history.
As with almost every major issue of biblical studies, there have been sharp differences among scholars on this particular question. On the one hand, Gerhard von Rad in the 1940s and others after him have seen the David story as the beginning of history writing in the Western tradition. On the other hand, one group of contemporary scholars, sometimes known as minimalists, is skeptical about whether there ever was a King David and likes to say that this narrative has about the same relation to historical events as do the British legends about King Arthur. The gritty historical realism of the story—what Hans Frei shrewdly identified as its “history-like” character—surely argues against the notion that it is simply legendary. Were David an invention of much later national tradition, he would be the most peculiar of legendary founding kings: a figure who early on is shown as a collaborator with the archenemies of Israel, the Philistines; who compounds adultery with murder; who more than once exposes himself to humiliation, is repeatedly seen in his weakness, and oscillates from nobility of sentiment and act to harsh vindictiveness on his very deathbed. (On this last point, the editorial intervention of the Deuteronomist that we observed suggests that he had inherited not a legendary account but a historical report that made him squirm.) If, moreover, the bulk of the story was actually composed within a generation or two, or perhaps three, after the reported actions, it is hard to imagine how such encompassing national events as a civil war between the house of Saul and the house of David, the Davidic campaigns of conquest east of the Jordan, and the usurpation of the throne by Absalom with the consequent military struggle, could have been invented out of whole cloth.
This narrative nevertheless has many signs of what we would call fictional shaping—interior monologues, dialogues between the historical personages in circumstances where there could have been no witness to what was said, pointed allusions in the turns of the dialogue as well as in the narrative details to Genesis, Joshua, and Judges. What we have in this great story, as I have proposed elsewhere, is not merely a report of history but an imagining of history that is analogous to what Shakespeare did with historical figures and events in his history plays. That is, the known general contours of the historical events and of the principal players are not tampered with, but the writer brings to bear the resources of his literary art in order to imagine deeply, and critically, the concrete moral and emotional predicaments of living in history, in the political realm. To this end, the writer feels free to invent an inner language for the characters, to give their dialogues revelatory shape, to weave together episodes and characters with a fine mesh of recurrent motifs and phrases and analogies of incident, and to define the meaning of the events through allusion, metaphor, and symbol. The writer does all this not to fabricate history but in order to understand it.
In this elaborately wrought literary vehicle, David turns out to be one of the most unfathomable figures of ancient literature. He begins as the fair-haired boy of Israel—if the term “red” or “ruddy” in his initial description refers to hair color, it might be something like auburn. Everyone seems to love him. He is beautiful, he is musical, and he is brave and brilliantly resourceful on the battlefield. He is also, from the start, quite calculating, and it can scarcely be an accident that until the midpoint of his story every one of his utterances, without exception, is made on a public occasion and arguably is contrived to serve his political interests. The narrative repeatedly reveals to us the churning fears and confusions within Saul while blocking access to David’s inner world. Beset by mortal dangers, David is constantly prepared to do almost anything in order to survive: with the help of his devoted wife, Michal, wordlessly fleeing Saul’s assassins; playing the drooling madman before the Philistine king Achish; serving as vassal to the Philistines, massacring whole towns in order to keep his real actions unknown to his overlords; profiting politically from the chain of violent deaths in the house of Saul while vehemently dissociating himself from each of the killings. He is, in sum, the first full-length portrait of a Machiavellian prince in Western literature. The Book of Samuel is one of those rare masterworks that, like Stendhal’s Charterhouse of Parma, evinces an unblinking and abidingly instructive knowingness about man as a political animal in all his contradictions and venality and in all his susceptibility to the brutalization and the seductions of exercising power.
And yet, David is more than a probing representation of the ambiguities of political power. He is also an affecting and troubling image of human destiny as husband and father and as a man moving from youth to prime to the decrepitude of old age. The great pivotal moment of the whole story in this regard is when he turns to his perplexed courtiers, after putting aside the trappings of mourning he had assumed for his ailing infant son, now dead, and says, “I am going to him. He will not come back to me.” These are the very first words David pronounces that have no conceivable political motive, that give us a glimpse into his inwardness, revealing his sense of naked vulnerability to the inexorable mortality that is the fate of all humankind. For the rest of the story, we shall see David’s weakness and his bonds of intimate attachment in fluctuating conflict with the imperatives of power that drive him as a king surrounded by potential enemies and betrayers.
The story of David, in turn, cannot be separated from the story of the man he displaces, Saul. (The moral and psychological complication with which both men are imagined argues powerfully against the simplification of sorting out the book into “Davidic” and “Saulide” narratives.) As a number of observers have proposed—perhaps most vividly, in a series of ballads, the early-twentieth-century Hebrew poet Saul Tchernikhovsky—Saul is the closest approximation of a tragic hero in the Hebrew Bible. A farm boy from Benjamin seeking his father’s lost donkeys, he is overtaken by a destiny of kingship of which he had not dreamed and that at first he tries to escape. Ambivalence and oscillation are the hallmarks of the story of Saul, and the writer may have been led to mirror this condition in his abundant use of paired or even tripled episodes: three different coronation scenes are required for the reluctant Saul; two tales of Saul among the prophets, the first elevating him at the beginning of his career and the second devastating him at the end; two incidents of Saul’s hurling his spear at David; two encounters with the fugitive David, who spares his life and receives a pledge of love and a kind of endorsement from Saul, still not to be trusted by David as the older man veers wildly between opposed feelings.
The stories of Saul and David interlock antithetically on the theme of knowledge. Saul, from first to last, is a man deprived of the knowledge he desperately seeks. At the outset, he has to turn to the seer Samuel in order to find his father’s asses. In subsequent episodes, he has no luck with oracles and divination in guiding him on his military way, and he tries to coerce fate by imposing a rash vow of fasting on his troops in the midst of battle. He seizes on the report of informers in his pursuit of David, but David continues to elude him. At the very end, on the eve of his last battle, he tries oracle and prophecy and dreams in order to find out what the impending future will be, but all fail, and he is compelled to resort to the very art of necromancy that he himself had made a capital crime. The knowledge he then receives from the implacable ghost of Samuel is nothing but the news of his own imminent doom.
David, on the other hand, at first seems peculiarly favored with knowledge. The position that he is brought to the court to fill is for a man “skilled in playing” (the literal meaning of the Hebrew is “knowing to play”) and “prudent in speech.” In what follows, David demonstrates impressive prudence and agile resourcefulness. It also emerges that once he has become a fugitive, he is rapidly equipped with an oracular ephod and a priest to use it and so, in contrast to Saul, has a direct line of communication with God in making his key decisions. Much later in the story, when things have begun to fall apart, the wise woman from Tekoa will tell David, “My lord is wise as with the wisdom of a messenger of God, to know everything in the land” (2 Samuel 14:20). By this point, however, it has become painfully evident that her words are a gesture of deference to the king that is ironically contradicted by fact. The knowing David of the earlier part of the narrative has become the king isolated in his palace. He must even send intermediaries to discover the identity of the naked beauty bathing on the rooftop in view of his palace, though she seems to be the daughter of one of the members of his own elite guard. He is singularly unaware of his son Amnon’s lust for his half sister Tamar, then of Absalom’s plot to murder Amnon in revenge, then of Absalom’s scheme to usurp the throne. The pitiful image of the shivering, bedridden David, ignorant of the grand feast of self-coronation arranged by his son Adonijah, then reminded or perhaps rather persuaded by Bathsheba and Nathan that he has promised the throne to Solomon, is the ultimate representation of the painful decline of knowledge in this once perspicacious figure, the brilliant successor to the purblind Saul.
Who could have written a story like this, and what could his motives have been? The way this question is typically posed in biblical studies is to ask what interests the writer could have been serving, but it seems to me that framing the issue in those terms involves a certain reductionism that harks back to the historical positivism of the nineteenth century. Although it is safe to assume that no biblical author wrote merely to entertain his audiences, and although there is no evidence of a class of professional storytellers in ancient Israel analogous to the bards of Greece, the social location and political aims of the biblical writer remain unclear. (The Prophets, who sometimes incorporated autobiographical passages in their writing, and who stand out sharply as critics of society and often of the royal establishment, are the one clear exception to this rule.) Scholars of the Bible often speak of “schools” or “circles” of biblical writing (Prophetic, Priestly, Wisdom, Davidic, and so forth), but in fact we have no direct knowledge of such groups as cultural institutions. The one school or movement for which a very strong case can be made is the Deuteronomistic movement. In this instance, a comprehensive, uncompromising reform of cultic practice, theology, and law was instituted during the reign of Josiah, around 621 B.C.E. The Book of Deuteronomy was composed, with abundant satellite literature to come after it, as a forceful literary instrument of the reform. In the great speeches of Deuteronomy, literature has patently been marshaled to inculcate an ideological program. Yet the very contrast we observed in 1 Kings 2 between the didacticism of the Deuteronomist and the worldly realism of the author of the David story argues for the idea that the latter had very different aims in mind from the simple promotion of a political program.
My guess is that the author of the David story thought of himself as a historian. But even if he frequented the court in Jerusalem, a plausible but not at all necessary supposition, he was by no means a writer of court annals or chronicles of the kings of Judah, and, as I have argued, he was far from being an apologist for the Davidic dynasty. I would imagine that he was impelled to write out of a desire to convey to his contemporaries and to posterity a true account of the significant events involved in the founding of the monarchy that governed the nation. It is conceivable that he had some written reports of these events at his disposal or at any rate drew on oral accounts of the events. Perhaps he had spoken with old-timers who were actual participants, or, if one places him very early, he himself might have been an observer of some of what he reports. He also did not hesitate to exploit etiological tales (Saul among the prophets) and folktales (David slaying the giant Goliath) in order to flesh out his historical account and dramatize its meanings. Although committed to telling the truth about history, his notion of historical factuality was decidedly different from modern ones. His conception of history writing involved not merely registering what had happened and who had been the principal actors but also reflecting on the shifting interplay between character and historical act, on the way social and political institutions shape and distort individual lives, on the human costs of particular political choices.
The author of the David story was in all likelihood firmly committed to the legitimacy of the Davidic line. In the book he wrote, after all, God explicitly elects David once Saul has been rejected and later promises that the throne of David will remain unshaken for all time. But the author approaches the David story as an imaginative writer, giving play to that dialectic fullness of conception that leads the greatest writers (Shakespeare, Stendhal, Balzac, Tolstoy, Proust, to name a few apposite instances) to transcend the limitations of their own ideological points of departure. Even though the vocational identity of “imaginative writer” was not socially defined in ancient Israel as it would be in later cultures, the accomplished facts of literary art in many cultures, ancient and modern, suggest that the impulse of literary creation, with the breadth of vision that at its best it encourages, is universal.
The person who wrote this story is not only a formidably shrewd observer of politics and human nature but also someone who manifestly delights in the writerly pleasures of his craft and is sometimes led to surprising insights by his exploration of those pleasures. He has an ear for dialogue, and for the contrastive treatment of the two interlocutors in particular dialogues, that Joyce might have envied. Though both narrator and characters are sparing in figurative language, the metaphors he gives them are telling, and sometimes set up electrically charged links between one moment of the story and another. This writer has a keen sense of the thematic uses of analogy between one episode and another, as when he gives us Amnon lying in a pretended sickbed so that he can summon his sister Tamar to serve his violent lust, right after the story of David’s rising from his siesta bed to see the bathing Bathsheba and then summon her to the palace for his illicit pleasure. (Both prohibited sexual acts lead to murder and political disarray.) Like most of the great masters of narrative art, the author of the David story is constantly asking himself what it must be like concretely—emotionally, psychologically, morally, even physically—to be one or another of these characters in a particular predicament, and it is this salutary imaginative habit that generates many of the dialectic complications of the historical account. Saul on the last night of his life is represented as not merely fearful of the Philistine foe but driven by desperation into the necromancer’s den. This last gesture of grasping for knowledge denied makes the fate of the defeated king seem wrenching, indeed, tragic. David’s flight from Absalom is not merely a story of political intrigue and opposing interests but also a tale of anguished conflict between father and king in the same man, culminating in David’s horrendous stutter of grief over Absalom’s death and followed by Joab’s harsh rebuke to him for his behavior.
One of the hallmarks of this whole writerly relation to the historical material is the freighted imagining of the detail not strictly necessary to the historical account. Let me offer one brief instance that may stand for all the others. David’s first wife, Michal, it will be recalled, is married off by her father, Saul, to a man named Paltiel son of Laish after David’s flight from his father-in-law’s assassins. We know nothing about Paltiel except his name, and nothing about Michal’s feelings concerning the union with him imposed by her father. When Abner, the commander of the forces of the house of Saul, comes to transfer his fealty to David and end the civil war, David stipulates that Michal daughter of Saul must first be sent back to him. (Presumably, his motive is strictly political.) Michal is duly removed by Abner’s decree from Paltiel, with no word or emotion of hers reported by the writer. What he does give us are these few, indelible words: “And her husband went with her, weeping as he went after her, as far as Bahurim. And Abner said to him, ‘Go back!’ And he went back” (2 Samuel 3:16). To a sober historian, this moment might well seem superfluous. To a great imaginative writer like the author of this story, such moments are the heart of the matter. Paltiel never even speaks in the story, but his weeping speaks volumes. He is a loving husband caught between the hard and unyielding men who wield power in the world—Abner, Saul’s tough field commander, and his adversary turned ally, David, who insists on the return of the woman he has acquired with a bloody bride-price because he calculates that as Saul’s daughter she will bolster his claim to be Saul’s legitimate successor. The tearful Paltiel walking after the wife who is being taken from him, then driven back by the peremptory word of the strongman with whom he cannot hope to contend, is a poignant image of the human price of political power. If history, in the hackneyed aphorism, is the story told by the victors, this narrative achieves something closer to the aim that Walter Benjamin defined as the task of the historical materialist, “to brush history against the grain.” Lacking all but the scantiest extrahistorical evidence, we shall probably never know precisely what happened in Jerusalem and Judah and the high country of Benjamin around the turn of the first millennium B.C.E., when the Davidic dynasty was established. What matters is that the anonymous Hebrew writer, drawing on what he knew or thought he knew of the portentous historical events, has created this most searching story of men and women in the rapid and dangerous current of history that still speaks to us, floundering in history and the dilemmas of political life, three thousand years later.
1And there was a man from Ramathaim-Zophim, from the high country of Ephraim, and his name was Elkanah son of Jeroham son of Elihu son of Tohu son of Zuph, an Ephraimite. 2And he had two wives; the name of the one was Hannah and the name of the other, Peninnah. And Peninnah had children but Hannah had no children. 3And this man would go up from his town year after year to worship and to sacrifice to the LORD of Armies at Shiloh, and there the two sons of Eli, Hophni and Phineas, were priests to the LORD. 4And when the day came round, Elkanah would sacrifice and give portions to Peninnah his wife and to all her sons and her daughters. 5And to Hannah he would give one double portion, for Hannah he loved, and the LORD had closed her womb. 6And her rival would torment her sorely so as to provoke her because the LORD had closed up her womb. 7And thus was it done year after year—when she would go up to the house of the LORD, the other would torment her and she would weep and would not eat.
8And Elkanah her husband said to her, “Hannah, why do you weep and why do you not eat and why is your heart afflicted? Am I not better to you than ten sons?” 9And Hannah arose after the eating in Shiloh and after the drinking, while Eli the priest was sitting in a chair by the doorpost of the LORD’s temple. 10And she was deeply embittered, and she prayed to the LORD, weeping all the while. 11And she vowed a vow and said, “LORD of Armies, if You really will look on Your servant’s woe and remember me, and forget not Your servant and give Your servant male seed, I will give him to the LORD all the days of his life, no razor shall touch his head.” 12And it happened as she went on with her prayer before the LORD, with Eli watching her mouth, 13as Hannah was speaking in her heart, her lips alone moving and her voice not heard, Eli thought she was drunk. 14And Eli said to her,
“How long will you go on drunk?
Rid yourself of your wine!”
15And Hannah answered and said, “No, my lord! A bleak-spirited woman am I. Neither wine nor strong drink have I drunk, but I have poured out my heart to the LORD. 16Think not your servant a worthless girl, for out of my great trouble and torment I have spoken till now.” 17And Eli answered and said, “Go in peace, and may the God of Israel grant your petition which you asked of Him.” 18And she said, “May your servant but find favor in your eyes.” And the woman went on her way, and she ate, and her face was no longer downcast. 19And they rose early in the morning and bowed before the LORD and returned and came to their home in Ramah. And Elkanah knew Hannah his wife and the LORD remembered her. 20And it happened at the turn of the year that Hannah conceived and bore a son, and she called his name Samuel, “For from the LORD I asked for him.”
21And the man Elkanah with all his household went up to offer to the LORD the yearly sacrifice and his votive pledge. 22But Hannah did not go up, for she had said to her husband, “Till the lad is weaned! Then I will bring him and we will see the LORD’s presence, and he shall stay there always.” 23And Elkanah her husband said to her, “Do what is right in your eyes. Stay till you wean him, only may the LORD fulfill what your mouth has uttered.” And the woman stayed and nursed her son till she weaned him. 24And she took him up with her when she weaned him, with a three-year-old bull and one ephah of flour and a jar of wine, and she brought him to the house of the LORD, and the lad was but a lad. 25And they slaughtered the bull and they brought the lad to Eli. 26And she said, “Please, my lord, by your life, my lord, I am the woman who was poised by you here praying to the LORD. 27For this lad I prayed, and the LORD granted me my petition that I asked of Him. 28And I on my part granted him for the asking to the LORD; all his days he is lent to the LORD.” And she bowed there to the LORD.
CHAPTER 1 NOTES
Click here to advance to the next section of the text.
The story of Hannah provides an instructive illustration of the conventions of narrative exposition that govern a large number of biblical stories. First the main character or characters are identified by name, pedigree, and geographical location. The only verb used is “to be” (verses 1–2). In this instance the standard biblical story beginning, “there was a man,” is in part a false lead because the real protagonist of the story is Elkanah’s wife Hannah. Then there is a series of reported actions in the iterative tense—that is, an indication of habitually repeated actions (verses 3–7). (In all this, compare Job 1.) The narrative then zooms in to a particular moment, one of those annually repeated events of Hannah’s frustration at Shiloh, by way of Elkanah’s dialogue (verse 8), which could not plausibly be an iterative event. At this point, we have moved from prelude to story proper. The writer himself seems quite conscious of this play between recurring units of time and specific moments in time: the word yamim—“days,” but often as in verse 3 with the sense of “annual cycle”—is used five times, together with the singular yom, in an iterative sense, at the beginning of verse 4. (These recurrences are complemented by “year after year,” shanah beshanah, in verse 7.)
2. And he had two wives. The reference to two wives, one childbearing, the other childless, immediately alerts the audience to the unfolding of the familiar annunciation type-scene. The expected sequence of narrative motifs of the annunciation scene is the report of the wife’s barrenness (amplified by the optional motif of the fertile co-wife less loved by the husband than is the childless wife); the promise, through oracle or divine messenger or man of God, of the birth of a son; cohabitation resulting in conception and birth. As we shall see, the middle motif is articulated in a way that is distinctive to the concerns of the Samuel story.
3. the two sons of Eli. The reference is initially puzzling but points forward to the focus on proper and improper heirs to the priesthood in Samuel’s story.
5. And to Hannah he would give one double portion. The Hebrew phrase, which occurs only here, means literally “one portion [for the?] face,” and has perplexed commentators. The conclusion of several modern translators that the phrase means “only a single portion” makes nonsense out of the following words that the allotment was an expression of Elkanah’s special love. It seems wisest to follow a long tradition of commentators who take a cue from the doublative ending of ʾapayim, the word for “face” (perhaps even a textual corruption for another word meaning “double”) and to construe this as a double portion to Hannah who, alas, unlike Peninnah, has no children.
7. And thus was it done. The Hebrew is literally “thus did he do,” but the impersonal masculine active singular is often used in this kind of passive sense.
the other. The Hebrew simply says “she,” but the antecedent is clearly Peninnah.
8. Am I not better to you than ten sons? The double-edged poignancy of these words is that they at once express Elkanah’s deep and solicitous love for Hannah and his inability to understand how inconsolable she feels about her affliction of barrenness. All the annunciation stories must be understood in light of the prevalent ancient Near Eastern view that a woman’s one great avenue to fulfillment in life was through the bearing of sons. It is noteworthy that Hannah does not respond to Elkanah. When she does at last speak, it is to God.
11. I will give him to the LORD. Hannah’s prayer exhibits a directness of style, without ornament or conventional liturgical phrasing, and an almost naïve simplicity: if you give him to me, I will give him to you. This canceling out of the two givings is reconciled by the introduction of another verb at the end of the story: Hannah “lends” to God the child He has given her.
no razor shall touch his head. As an expression of her dedication of the prayed-for child, Hannah vows that he will be a nazirite (like Samson), a person specially dedicated to God who took a vow of abstinence from certain activities. (The literal meaning of the Hebrew is “no razor will go up on his head.”) The nazirites also refrained from wine, which throws an ironic backlight on Eli’s subsequent accusation that Hannah is drunk. A few biblical texts link nazirite and prophet.
14. How long will you go on drunk? The central annunciation motif of the type-scene is purposefully distorted. Since Hannah receives no direct response from God—she prays rather than inquires of an oracle—Eli the priest should be playing the role of man of God or divine intermediary. But at first he gets it all wrong, mistaking her silent prayer for drunken mumbling, and denouncing her in a poetic line (marked by semantic and rhythmic parallelism) of quasiprophetic verse. When in verse 17 he accepts her protestation of innocent suffering, he piously prays or predicts—the Hebrew verb could be construed either way—that her petition will be granted, but he doesn’t have a clue about the content of the petition. The uncomprehending Eli is thus virtually a parody of the annunciating figure of the conventional type-scene—an apt introduction to a story in which the claim to authority of the house of Eli will be rejected, and ultimately, sacerdotal guidance will be displaced by prophetic guidance in the person of Samuel, who begins as a temple acolyte but then exercises a very different kind of leadership.
15. bleak-spirited. The Hebrew, which occurs only here as a collocation, is literally “hard-spirited.”
20. she called his name Samuel. There is a small puzzlement in the Hebrew because it is the name Saul, Sha’ul, not Samuel, Shmuʾel, that means “asked” (or “lent”). This has led some modern scholars to speculate that a story originally composed to explain the birth of Saul was transferred to Samuel—perhaps because Saul’s eventual unworthiness to reign made it questionable that he should merit a proper annunciation scene. But it must be said that the only evidence for this speculation is the seeming slippage of names here. That could easily be explained, as by the thirteenth-century Hebrew commentator David Kimchi, if we assume Hannah is playing on two Hebrew words, shaʾul meʾel, “asked of God.” In any case, biblical writers allowed themselves considerable license in etymologizing names.
21. the yearly sacrifice. The annual cycle of iterative actions invoked at the beginning is seemingly resumed, but everything is different now that Hannah has born a son, and she herself introduces a change in the repeated pattern.
votive pledge. Although this is the same Hebrew term, neder, that is used for Hannah’s vow at the beginning of verse 11, its most likely referent here is a vowed thanksgiving offering on the part of the husband for his wife’s safe delivery of a son.
22. Till the lad is weaned. The word for “lad,” naʿar, is quite often a tender designation of a young son. Though it typically refers to an adolescent, or even to a young man at the height of his powers (David uses it for the usurper Absalom), it evidently can also be used for an infant. Nursing and weaning (compare the end of this verse and the beginning of the next verse) are insisted on here with a peculiar weight of repetition and literalness. This usage surely intimates the powerful biological bond between Hannah and the longed-for baby and thus points to the pain of separation she must accept, whatever the postponement, according to the terms of her own vow. In the Ark Narrative that follows, there will be a surprising recurrence of this image of nursing mothers yearning for their young. At this point, the only other indication of her feelings about the child is the term “lad” that she uses for him.
we will see the LORD’s presence. Or, even more concretely, “the LORD’s face.” The anthropomorphism of this ancient idiom troubled the later transmitters of tradition sufficiently so that when vowel-points were added to the consonantal text, roughly a millennium after the biblical period, the verb “we will see” (nir’eh) was revocalized as nirʾah (“he will be seen”), yielding a more chastely monotheistic “he will appear in the LORD’s presence.”
23. what your mouth has uttered. The Masoretic Text has “His word.” But a fragment of Samuel found in Cave 4 at Qumran reads “what your mouth has uttered,” which, referring directly to Hannah’s vow at Shiloh, makes much better sense since God, after all, has made no promises.
24. a three-year-old bull. This is again the reading of the Qumran Samuel text. The Masoretic Text has “three bulls,” but only one bull is sacrificed in the next verse, and three-year-old beasts were often designated for sacrifice.
25. they slaughtered the bull … they brought the lad. The plural subject of these verbs is evidently Elkanah and Hannah. The simple parallelism of the brief clauses is eloquent: both the bull and the child are offerings to the LORD, and Samuel’s dedication to the sanctuary is, surely for the parents, a kind of sacrifice. It may be relevant that the term “lad,” naʿar, is precisely the one used for Isaac when he is on the point of being sacrificed and for Ishmael when he is on the brink of perishing in the wilderness. Perhaps that background of usage also explains the odd insistence on “the lad was but a lad” at the end of the preceding verse. Given the late weaning time in the ancient world, and given Hannah’s likely impulse to postpone that difficult moment, one might imagine the child Samuel to be around the age of four or five.
26. Please, my lord. As in their previous encounter, Hannah’s speech is full of deference and diffidence in addressing the priest—a reverence, we may already suspect, that he does not entirely deserve.
27. For this lad I prayed. She spells out the act of petition and its precise fulfillment, insisting twice on the root sh-’-l, “to ask.” The Hebrew is literally: “my asking that I asked of Him.”
28. granted him for the asking to the LORD; all his days he is lent to the LORD. The English here is forced to walk around an elegant pun in the Hebrew: in the qal conjugation, sh-’-l means to ask or petition; in the hiphʿil conjugation the same root means to lend; and the passive form of the verb, shaʾul, can mean either “lent” or “asked.”
And she bowed. The translation again follows the reading of the Samuel fragment discovered at Qumran. The Masoretic Text reads “and he bowed” (a difference of one initial consonant in the Hebrew), but it is Hannah, not Elkanah, who has been speaking for the last two verses.
1And Hannah prayed and she said:
“My heart rejoiced through the LORD,
my horn is raised high through the LORD.
My mouth is wide to bolt down my foes;
for I was gladdened by Your rescue.
2There is no one holy like the LORD,
for there is no one beside You,
and there is no bastion like our God.
3Do not go on talking high and mighty—
arrogance slips from your mouth—
for a God all-knowing is the LORD,
and His is the measure of actions.
4The warriors’ bow is shattered
and stumblers gird up strength.
5The sated are hired for bread
and the hungry cease evermore.
The barren woman bears seven
and the many-sonned woman is bleak.
6The LORD deals death and grants life,
brings down to Sheol and lifts up.
7The LORD impoverishes and bestows wealth,
plunges down and also exalts.
8He raises the poor from the dust,
from the dung-heaps the wretched He lifts
a throne of honor He bequeaths them.
For the LORD’s are the pillars of earth,
upon them He founded the world.
9The steps of His faithful he watches,
and the wicked in darkness turn dumb,
for not by might will a man prevail.
10The LORD shatters His adversaries,
against them in the heavens He thunders.
The LORD judges the ends of the earth:
may He grant strength to His king
and raise high His anointed’s horn.”
11And Elkanah went to Ramah to his home while the lad was ministering to the LORD in the presence of Eli the priest. 12And the sons of Eli were worthless fellows; they did not know the LORD. 13And this was the priest’s practice with the people: each man would offer his sacrifice, and the priest’s lad would come when the meat was boiling, a three-pronged fork in his hand. 14And he would thrust into the cauldron or the pot or the vat or the kettle, whatever the fork would pick up, the priest would take away with it. Thus they would do to all the Israelites who came there, to Shiloh. 15Even before they had burned off the fat, the priest’s lad would come and say to the man who was sacrificing, “Hand over meat to roast for the priest, for he won’t take boiled meat from you, only raw.” 16And the man would say, “Let them burn off the fat now and then take for yourself whatever you want,” and he would say, “No! For you shall hand it over now, and if not, I will take it by force.” 17And the lads’ offense was very great before the LORD, for they scorned the LORD’s offering. 18And Samuel was ministering in the presence of the LORD, a lad girt in linen ephod. 19And a little cloak would his mother make him and would bring up to him year after year when she came up with her husband to offer the yearly sacrifice. 20And Eli would bless Elkanah and his wife and would say, “May the LORD bestow on you seed from this woman in place of the loan she has lent to the LORD,” and they would go back to their place. 21For the LORD singled out Hannah and she conceived and bore three sons and two daughters. And the lad Samuel grew up with the LORD.
22And Eli was very old. And he heard of all that his sons did to all the Israelites, and that they lay with the women who flocked to the entrance of the Tent of Assembly. 23And he said to them, “Why do you do such things of which I hear—evil things about you from all these people? 24No, my sons! For it is not good, what I hear that the LORD’s people are spreading about. 25If a man offends against man, God may intercede for him, but if against the LORD a man should offend, who can intercede for him?” And they did not heed their father’s voice, for the LORD wanted to put them to death. 26And the lad Samuel was growing in goodness with both the LORD and with men.
27And a man of God came to Eli and said to him, “Thus says the LORD! Did I not reveal myself to your father’s house when they were in Egypt, slaves to Pharaoh’s house? 28And did I not choose him from all the tribes of Israel as a priest for me, to go up to My altar, to burn incense, to carry an ephod before Me? And I gave to your father’s house all the Israelites’ burnt offerings. 29Why do you trample on My sacrifice and My offering which I have commanded, and you honor your sons more than Me, to batten upon the first portions of each offering of Israel My people? 30Therefore, says the LORD God of Israel, I indeed said, ‘Your house and your father’s house will walk before Me forever,’ but now, says the LORD, God forbid I should do it! For those who honor Me will I honor, and my spurners shall be dishonored. 31Look, a time is coming when I will cut down your seed and the seed of your father’s house, and there shall be no elder in your house. 32And you shall look with a jaundiced eye at all the bounty bestowed upon Israel, and there will be no elder in your house for all time. 33Yet no man of you will I cut off from My altar, to make your eyes waste away and your spirit ache, and the increase of your house shall fall by the sword of men. 34And this is the sign for you—that which comes upon your two sons, Hophni and Phineas, on a single day the two of them shall die! 35And I will set up for Myself a stalwart priest, according to my heart and my spirit he shall act, and I will build him a stalwart house and he shall walk before My anointed for all time. 36And it will happen that whoever remains from your house shall come to bow before him for a bit of silver and a loaf of bread, and he shall say, ‘Add me on, pray, to one of the priestly details for a crust of bread to eat.’”
CHAPTER 2 NOTES
Click here to advance to the next section of the text.
According to the standard collagelike convention of biblical narrative composition, Hannah’s psalm has been set into the story at a later stage in the editorial process than the original tale, and it gives evidence of having been taken from a familiar repertory of thanksgiving or victory psalms. The reference to the anointed king at the end of the poem assumes the institution of the monarchy, not established until two generations after the moment when Hannah is said to have pronounced this prayer. It is clearly the invocation in verse 5 of the barren woman who bears seven that encouraged the introduction here of this particular text. But the larger thematic assertion in the poem of God’s power to reverse fortunes, plunging the high to the depths and exalting the lowly, is a fitting introduction to the whole Saul-David history. This psalm (verses 1–10) and David’s victory psalm (2 Samuel 22) echo each other and act as formal “bookends” to the extended narrative sequence that includes the stories of Samuel, Saul, and David.
1. my horn is raised high. This archaic Hebrew animal imagery is worth preserving literally in English, as did Tyndale and the King James Version. The idea seems to be that the animal’s horn is its glory and power, held high, perhaps in triumph after goring an enemy into submission. There is a sequence of body parts at the beginning of the first three versets of the poem, two literal and the middle one metaphorical: “my heart,” “my horn,” “my mouth.” The raising high of the horn is crucial to the thematic unfolding of the poem, which reiterates a pattern of vertical movement, elevation and descent, that manifests God’s power to reverse the fortunes of humankind. The upraised horn at the beginning returns in the envelope structure of the last line, a prayer that the LORD “raise high His anointed’s horn.” That final image, in turn, involves a hidden pun, because the Hebrew “horn” (qeren, actually one of the rare Semitic terms cognate with Indo-European—cornu/horn) is also the receptacle containing the oil with which the king is anointed.
My mouth is wide to bolt down my foes. The Hebrew does not express but implies “bolt down.” The conventional rendering of this idiom as “gloated” is an evasion of its intimation of predatory violence.
4. shattered. The verb used is restricted to poetry; a noun derived from it means “rubble” or “tiny broken fragments,” hence the sense seems to be more extreme than the standard term “to break.”
5. the hungry cease evermore. The Masoretic Text is rather cryptic. This translation revocalizes the last Hebrew word of the line ʿad (“until,” or, by a long conjectural stretch, “prey”) as ʿod, an adverb indicating persistence through time. The Masoretes attached the word to the beginning of the next clause, where, however, its semantic function is equally unclear.
8. to seat among princes. The language here might anticipate the monarchic flourish at the end of the poem. “Throne” (kisʾei) in the next line can mean either throne or chair. Robert Polzin has made an elaborate argument for seeing not only Hannah’s prayer but all the early chapters of 1 Samuel as a grand foreshadowing of the fate of the monarchy with the old and failing Eli, who will die falling off his chair or throne, as a stand-in for the Davidic kings.
9. the wicked in darkness turn dumb. The verb obviously refers to death—the underworld in other psalms is sometimes called dumah, the realm of silence or speechlessness, a noun cognate with the verb yidamu used here. Those who talked high and mighty, their mouths spewing arrogance (verse 3), are now forever silenced.
10. The LORD shatters His adversaries. The Masoretic Text reads, “LORD, Your adversaries are shattered.” But the Samuel fragment from Qumran has God as the subject of a verb in the singular (a difference of only one letter) with the adversaries as the object. This makes better syntactic sense, especially since it is God who is thundering against the enemies in the second half of the line. The verb “shatter” is the same one used for the warriors’ bow in verse 4.
14. the cauldron or the pot or the vat or the kettle. This catalogue of implements is quite untypical of biblical narrative (and in fact the precise identification of the sundry cooking receptacles is unsure). The unusual specification serves a satiric purpose: Eli’s sons are represented in a kind of frenzy of gluttony poking their three-pronged forks into every imaginable sort of pot and pan. This sense is then heightened in the aggressiveness of the dialogue that follows, in which Eli’s sons insist on snatching the meat uncooked from the worshippers, not allowing them, as was customary, first to burn away the fat.
18. ephod. A short garment, chiefly of linen, worn by priests. The Hebrew term has a second meaning, a device for divination manipulated by the officiating priests, and that is the evident sense of ephod when it recurs in verse 28.
19. And a little cloak would his mother make him. This is a poignant instance of the expressive reticence of biblical narrative. We have been told nothing about Hannah’s feelings as a mother after her separation from the child for whom she so fervently prayed. This minimal notation of Hannah’s annual gesture of making a little cloak for the son she has “lent” to the LORD beautifully intimates the love she preserves for him. The garment, fashioned as a gift of maternal love, stands in contrast to the ephod, the acolyte’s official garb for his cultic office. Moreover, the robe (meʿil) will continue to figure importantly in Samuel’s life, and even in his afterlife, as we shall have occasion to see.
year after year. The phrase takes us back to the iterative tense of the beginning of the story.
22. and that they lay with the women. This whole clause is missing in the Qumran scroll and in one version of the Septuagint; in fact, sexual exploitation was not mentioned in the initial narrative report of the sons’ misdeeds. There is, however, a consonance between their appetitive impulse in snatching the meat and grabbing the women, perhaps reinforced by the satiric, and phallic, image of thrusting forks into bubbling pots.
flocked. The Hebrew verb might also mean “ministered.”
27. a man of God came to Eli. This enunciation of a curse on the house of Eli, at the very beginning of the Samuel story, is introduced at precisely the corresponding place in the narrative as the denunciation and admonition of the divine messenger at the beginning of Judges (chapter 2). An analogous curse will be pronounced by Nathan the prophet on the house of David (2 Samuel 12) and will be enacted in the subsequent narrative.
slaves to Pharaoh’s house. The Masoretic Text lacks “slaves to” but it is attested in the Qumran Samuel scroll, in the Septuagint, and in the Targum of Yonatan ben Uziel.
29. My sacrifice and My offering which I have commanded. The Masoretic Text reads “which I commanded [as a?] habitation [maʿon].” Since that makes no sense, and all attempts to rescue a meaning seem forced, I have assumed that ma‘on is an excrescence, perhaps inadvertently transposed by a scribe from verse 32, where it also occurs rather enigmatically. Several points in the curse pronounced by the man of God look textually defective.
30. will walk before Me. The biblical idiom suggests dedicated service of a deity.
honor … dishonored. The Hebrew terms mean, etymologically, “heavy” and “light” (that is, “weighty” and “worthless”). These antonyms will recur at strategic moments in the Ark Narrative and in the story of David.
32. look with a jaundiced eye. The received text at this point is very doubtful, yielding, literally, a nonsense chain: “you will look narrow habitation.” This translation adopts an emendation that has considerable scholarly currency: ʿayin instead of maʿon (a difference of one consonant in the Hebrew). That yields the idiom tsar-ʿayin, “jealously” or “with a jaundiced eye.” But the Qumran text and one version of the Septuagint lack the entire clause.
33. no man of you will I cut off. The usual understanding of these words is that God will leave them alive to witness in pain the destruction of the family. This interpretation seems a bit strained because in the next verse God promises to destroy both of Eli’s sons on a single day. Perhaps the clause originally read, “every man of you will I cut off,” though this phrasing is not reflected in any of the ancient versions.
fall by the sword of men. Again, both the Qumran fragment and Version B of the Septuagint confirm this reading, which seems much likelier than the Masoretic Text’s cryptic “shall die [as?] men.”
35. a stalwart priest … a stalwart house. The Hebrew neʾeman in the first instance means “faithful” or “trustworthy,” in the second instance, “well-founded,” “enduring.” The present translation draws on an older sense of “stalwart,” which can be applied to structures and inanimate objects as well as to people. The probable referent of the prophecy is the house of Zadok, which was to become the priestly line in the Davidic monarchy.
before My anointed. Like Hannah’s psalm, this whole passage of prophecy appears to presuppose a historical context in which the monarchy was an established fact.
1And the lad Samuel was ministering to the LORD in Eli’s presence, and the word of the LORD was rare in those days, vision was not spread about. 2And it happened on that day that Eli was lying in his place, his eyes had begun to grow bleary, he could not see. 3The lamp of God had not yet gone out, and Samuel was lying in the temple of the LORD, in which was the Ark of God. 4And the LORD called to Samuel, and he said, “Here I am.” 5And he ran to Eli and he said, “Here I am, for you called me,” and he said, “I did not call. Go back, lie down.” And he went and lay down. 6And the LORD called once again, “Samuel!” And Samuel rose and went to Eli and said, “Here I am, for you called me.” And he said, “I did not call, my son. Go back, lie down.” 7And Samuel did not yet know the LORD, and the word of the LORD had not yet been revealed to him. 8And the LORD called still again to Samuel, a third time, and he rose and went to Eli and said, “Here I am, for you called me.” And Eli understood that the LORD was calling the lad. 9And Eli said to Samuel, “Go lie down, and should someone call to you, say, ‘Speak, LORD, for Your servant is listening.’” And Samuel went and lay down in his place. 10And the LORD came and stood poised and called as on each time before, “Samuel, Samuel!” And Samuel said, “Speak, for Your servant is listening.” 11And the LORD said to Samuel, “I am about to do such a thing in Israel that whoever hears of it, both his ears will ring. 12On that day I will fulfill against Eli all that I have spoken concerning his house, from beginning to end. 13And I have told him that I was passing judgment on his house for all time because of the sin of which he knew, for his sons have been scorning God and he did not restrain them. 14Therefore I have sworn against the house of Eli, that the sin of the house of Eli will not be atoned by sacrifice and offering for all time.” 15And Samuel lay until morning, and he opened the doors of the house of the LORD, and Samuel was afraid to tell the vision to Eli. 16And Eli called to Samuel and said, “Samuel, my son,” and he said, “Here I am.” 17And he said, “What is the thing He spoke to you? Pray, do not conceal it from me. Thus and more may God do to you if you conceal from me anything of all the things He spoke to you.” 18And Samuel told him all the things and he did not conceal from him, and he said, “He is the LORD. What is good in His eyes let Him do.”
19And Samuel grew up and the LORD was with him, and He let not fall to the ground any of his words. 20And all Israel, from Dan to Beersheba, knew that Samuel was stalwart as a prophet to the LORD. 21And the LORD continued to appear in Shiloh, for the LORD was revealed to Samuel in Shiloh through the word of the LORD, 4:1aand Samuel’s word was upon all Israel.
CHAPTER 3 NOTES
Click here to advance to the next section of the text.
1. the word of the LORD was rare … vision was not spread about. The “word of the LORD” is often a technical term referring to oracular message. Inquiring of the oracle would have been a priestly function, and so there is an intimation here of some sort of breakdown in the professional performance of the house of Eli. But the same phrase also is used to announce prophecy, and “vision” is a prophetic term: the whole episode concerns the transition from priestly to prophetic authority.
2. he could not see. Eli’s blindness reflects not only his decrepitude but his incapacity for vision in the sense of the previous verse. He is immersed in permanent darkness while the lad Samuel has God’s lamp burning by his bedside.
3. The lamp of God had not yet gone out. Since the sanctuary lamp would have burned through most of the night, this may be an indication, as Kyle McCarter Jr. has proposed, that the scene occurs close to dawn. But the symbolic overtones of the image should not be neglected: though vision has become rare, God’s lamp has not yet gone out, and the young ministrant will be the one to make it burn bright again (see verses 19–21, plus 4:1a). The actual lamp would have been a concave earthenware vessel filled with oil.
5. he ran to Eli and he said, “Here I am.” These words make clear that the previous “Here I am” is not a direct response to God but rather the boy’s calling-out from the inner chamber of the sanctuary to Eli in the outer room, thinking that it is Eli who called him. Samuel’s thrice-repeated error in this regard reflects not only his youthful inexperience but, as the sixteenth-century Hebrew exegete Yosef Karo has proposed, the general fact that “the word of the LORD was rare,” revelation an unfamiliar phenomenon.
6. “Samuel!” In an intensifying pattern, as the folktale structure of three repetitions with a final reversal unfolds, God’s address is now represented more immediately in dialogue instead of indirectly as in verse 4. The third time, God will say, “Samuel, Samuel!”
I did not call, my son. Until this point, we have been told nothing about Eli’s relationship with Samuel. The introduction of this single term of affection, “my son,” reveals the fondness of the blind and doomed Eli for his young assistant. His own biological sons have of course utterly betrayed his trust.
9. Speak, LORD, for Your servant is listening. This is virtually a formula of deferential response to superior authority. When Samuel repeats these words in verse 10, he omits “Lord,” perhaps, as Shimon Bar-Efrat has suggested, in diffidence about addressing God.
12. all that I have spoken concerning his house. This clause, and the one beginning “I have told him” in the next verse, refer back to the prophecy of doom pronounced by the man of God in chapter 2.
13. his sons have been scorning God. The Masoretic Text reads, “his sons have been scorning for themselves [lahem],” but the last Hebrew word has long been recognized as a tiqun sofrim, a scribal euphemism for ʾelohim, God—that is, the scribes were loath to write out so sacrilegious a phrase as scorning, or cursing, God. The verb here is commonly used in the sense of “to damn” or “to express contempt.” In this case, the sons’ contempt would have been expressed by their snatching of choice portions from the sacrificial meat.
he did not restrain them. The Hebrew kihah occurs only here as a transitive verb in the piʿel conjugation, although it is fairly common as an intransitive verb in the qal conjugation, meaning “to grow weak,” “to become dark,” or, as with the eyes of Eli in verse 2, “bleary.” The transitive sense of the verb would then be something like “to incapacitate,” to prevent someone from doing something. Its unusual usage in this sentence is obviously meant to align Eli’s failing in parental authority with the failing of his sight.
11–13. It is noteworthy that God’s first message to Samuel is a prophecy of doom. Its content not only indicates the overthrow of the priestly authority of the house of Eli and the implicit move to a different sort of authority to be embodied by the prophet Samuel, but also adumbrates the rather dour and dire role Samuel will play as leader, in relation to both Israel and to Saul.
15. And Samuel lay until morning. The verb does not necessarily imply that he fell asleep again after this riveting revelation, and if in fact the whole scene takes place close to dawn, there would be little time before the first light roused him.
he opened the doors of the house of the LORD. He resumes his usual business as faithful temple ministrant, almost as though he wanted to shrug off the divine revelation that implied a more portentous role for him than that of priestly acolyte.
Samuel was afraid to tell the vision. The divine message is called a vision though it was conveyed through words rather than images. The term used here, marʾeh, is different from ḥazon, the word that occurs in verse 1, though both refer to sight, the faculty Eli lacks.
17. Thus and more may God do to you. This is a set idiom for abjuration: may terrible things befall you if you fail to perform what I require of you.
18. What is good in His eyes let Him do. Old Eli’s response is pious resignation to the prophecy of doom. He of course is aware of his sons’ misdeeds and of his own failure to intervene successfully.
19. He let not fall to the ground any of his words. The antecedent of “his” is ambiguous, but since the point of the narrative report is to confirm Samuel’s prophetic authority, the more likely reading is that God did not allow any of Samuel’s words to go awry but fulfilled all of His prophet’s predictions.
20. from Dan to Beersheba. That is, from the far north, near Phoenician territory, to the Negeb in the south.
stalwart. Or, “faithful.” That is, Samuel’s authority as prophet was recognized by all Israel.
21. And the LORD continued to appear … the LORD was revealed. This emphatic indication is an obvious counterpoint to the first verse of the chapter: instead of being withheld, divine communication is now regular and repeated through the person of Samuel.
4:1a. Although the conventional chapter division attaches this brief clause to the next episode, it is clear that it is actually a final summary of Samuel’s new authority at the end of his dedication story. The next words of the text (chapter 4:1b) in fact refer to a military initiative undertaken by the Israelites without Samuel’s authorization.
1bAnd Israel sallied forth in battle against the Philistines, and they encamped by Eben-Ezer, while the Philistines were encamped at Aphek. 2And the Philistines drew up their lines against Israel, and the battle forces were deployed, and Israel was routed by the Philistines, and they struck down in the lines in the field about four thousand men. 3And the troops came into the camp, and the elders of Israel said, “Why has the LORD routed us today before the Philistines? Let us take to us from Shiloh the Ark of the Covenant of the LORD, that it may come into our midst and rescue us from the hands of our enemies.” 4And the troops sent to Shiloh and they bore from there the Ark of the Covenant of the LORD of Armies enthroned on the cherubim, and there the two sons of Eli were with the Ark of the Covenant of God—Hophni and Phineas. 5And when the Ark of the Covenant of the LORD came into the camp, all Israel let out a great shout, and the earth resounded. 6And the Philistines heard the sound of the shouting and said, “What is the sound of this great shouting in the camp of the Hebrews?” And they knew that the Ark of the LORD had come into the camp. 7And the Philistines were afraid, for they thought, “God has come into the camp.” And they said, “Woe to us! For it was never so in times gone by. 8Woe to us! Who will save us from the hands of these mighty gods? They are the very gods who struck Egypt with every blow in the wilderness. 9Muster strength and be men, O Philistines, lest you become slaves to the Hebrews as they were slaves to you. Be men and do battle!” 10And the Philistines did battle and Israel was routed, and every man fled to his tent and the blow was very great, thirty thousand foot soldiers of Israel fell. 11And the Ark of the LORD was taken, and the two sons of Eli died—Hophni and Phineas. 12And a man of Benjamin ran from the lines and came to Shiloh that day, his garments torn and earth on his head. 13He came, and, look, Eli was seated in a chair by the road on the lookout, for his heart was trembling over the Ark of God, and the man had come to tell in the town and the whole town cried out, 14and Eli heard the sound of the outcry and said, “What is this sound of uproar?” The man had hurried, and he came and told Eli. 15And Eli was ninety-eight years old, his eyes were rigid and he could not see. 16And the man said to Eli, “I am the one who has come from the lines, I from the lines fled today.” And he said, “What happened, my son?” 17And the bearer of tidings answered and said, “Israel fled before the Philistines, and what’s more, there was a great rout among the troops, and what’s more, your two sons died—Hophni and Phineas—and the Ark of God was taken.” 18And the moment he mentioned the Ark of God, Eli fell backward from his chair through the gate and his neckbone was broken and he died, for the man was old and heavy. And he had judged Israel forty years. 19And his daughter-in-law, Phineas’s wife, was big with child, and when she heard the report about the taking of the Ark, and that her father-in-law and her husband were dead, she crouched down and gave birth, for her birth pangs overwhelmed her. 20And as she was on the point of death, her attendant women spoke up, “Fear not, for you have born a son.” And she did not answer or pay heed. 21And she called the boy Ichabod, which is to say, “Glory is exiled from Israel”—for the taking of the Ark and for her father-in-law and her husband. 20And she said, “Glory is exiled from Israel, for the Ark of God is taken.”
CHAPTER 4 NOTES
Click here to advance to the next section of the text.
1b. the Philistines. The Philistines were part of the general incursion of the so-called Sea Peoples from the Aegean—the prophet Amos names Crete as their land of origin—into the eastern Mediterranean region perhaps less than a century before the early-eleventh-century setting of our story. (There is some evidence that they first migrated to Anatolia, then moved southward.) They established a powerful presence in Canaan on the coastal plain, concentrated in the region a little south of present-day Tel Aviv. They were intrepid warriors (note the martial exhortation of verse 9) and also exercised a mastery of military science and military technology. In the coastal plain, they were able to deploy iron chariots (which seem to have been lacking among the Israelites) as well as infantry. Perhaps their failure to extend their mini-kingdom of five allied cities more than a dozen or so miles eastward from the coast was related to a loss of the strategic advantage of chariots as they went up into the high country.
2. the Philistines drew up their lines … and the battle forces were deployed. Interestingly, the language of strategic deployment is attached only to the Philistines. “Battle forces” is, literally, “battle.” Although the precise indications of these terms are unclear, their use elsewhere in the Bible makes it evident that they had a technical military application.
the lines. The Hebrew, maʿarakhah, is a singular, with the sense of “battle formation” or “front line.”
3. Let us take to us. The addition of this seemingly superfluous personal pronoun suggests how the elders arrogate to themselves a sacred object for their own purposes, conceiving the Ark magically or fetishistically as a vehicle of power that they can manipulate for military ends.
the Ark of the Covenant of the LORD. This would have been a large case made of acacia wood, with carved cherubim on its top, containing the stone tablets of the Law given at Sinai. As the material residue of the defining encounter between God and Israel, these tablets were viewed as the most sacrosanct possession of the nation. Hence the horror at the end of this episode over the news that the Ark has been captured by the Philistines.
4. troops. The Hebrew has a collective noun, ‘am, “people,” which in military contexts refers to the ordinary soldiers.
the Ark of the Covenant of the LORD of Armies enthroned on the cherubim. This extravagantly full title is a kind of epic flourish reflecting the power that the elders of Israel attribute to the Ark. “Armies” (“hosts” in older translations) underscores the LORD’s martial nature. The cherubim are fierce winged beasts imagined as God’s celestial steeds, and so the carved cherubim on the Ark are conceived as the earthly “throne” of the invisible deity.
Hophni and Phineas. In an odd stylistic tie, each time the two sons are mentioned in this chapter, their proper names are stuck on at the very end of the sentence, as though their precise identity were being isolated for opprobrium.
6. the camp of the Hebrews. “Hebrews” is generally the designation of the Israelites when they are named by other peoples.
7. God has come into the camp. Here ʾelohim is the subject of a verb in the singular, but in verse 8, in proper polytheistic fashion, the Philistines use the same term but construe it grammatically as a plural, “gods.”
8. every blow. The Hebrew makah also means “plague,” an obviously appropriate sense here, but it is important that the writer uses the same word in verse 10, though with a military meaning, for a theological irony is intended in the pun: they feared the might of the LORD Who struck such terrible blows against Egypt, and then they themselves strike a blow against Israel, which actually does not have God in its midst, only His sacred paraphernalia. Here as elsewhere in the Bible, the national fiction is maintained that all the peoples of Canaan were intimately familiar with the Exodus story and deeply impressed by it.
9. Muster strength and be men. There may be a pointed antithesis in their speech between “gods” and “men.” In any case, they summon stirring rhetoric to rouse themselves from their fear of a supernatural adversary and to go out to do battle.
12. his garments torn and earth on his head. This disheveled appearance is not because of the fighting but reflects the customary signs of mourning.
13. Eli was seated in a chair by the road. Similarly, in chapter 1, he was seated in a chair in the temple—in both instances a token of his infirmity, his passivity or incapacity as leader. The Hebrew phrase behind “by the road” is textually problematic, as is the related phrase attached to the word “gate” in verse 18. Scholarly opinion differs as to whether Eli is sitting by the road, by the gate, or, like David in 2 Samuel 18, above the gate. The last of these possibilities would best explain his breaking his neck when he falls, but it is by no means the inevitable meaning of the Hebrew, and the Hebrew preposition in verse 18 actually indicates through the gate.
his heart was trembling over the Ark of God. Apprehension over the fate of his scurrilous sons is not mentioned.
14. What is this sound of uproar? Eli’s question pointedly, and ironically, parallels the question asked by the Philistines in verse 6 about the jubilant uproar from the Israelite camp. At the very end of the David story (1 Kings 1), the usurper Adonijah will ask virtually the same question about an uproar that spells disaster for him and his followers.
15. his eyes were rigid. The idiom for Eli’s blindness has a stark finality here that it does not have in 3:2. Presumably a good deal of time has elapsed since that moment of the young Samuel’s dedication as prophet, and the process of blindness is now complete. It is because Eli can see nothing that he must ask with particular urgency about the reason for all the shouting.
16. I am the one who has come from the lines, I from the lines fled today. This odd repetition may reflect a stammer of nervousness or confusion, as Shimon Bar-Efrat has proposed.
17. The report of the battle moves from a general indication of the defeat, to the admission of a rout, to the death of Eli’s two sons, and, finally, to what is assumed to be the worst catastrophe, the capture of the Ark. It should be noted that 1 and 2 Samuel are in part organized around a series of interechoing scenes in which a messenger brings ill tidings. The bearer of ill tidings to Adonijah at the very end of this long narrative also nervously repeats wegam, “what’s more” as he recounts the catastrophe.
18. And he had judged Israel forty years. This notice, with its use of the formulaic forty years, is odd because Eli certainly has not been a judge, either in the military-charismatic or the juridical sense. This sentence could be an attempt to establish a carryover from the Book of Judges, or it could be an inadvertent editorial repetition of the Judges formula.
19. big with child. The Hebrew says literally “was pregnant to give birth.”
she crouched down. In the ancient Near East, women generally gave birth in a kneeling position, leaning on a special birthing stone—examples have been uncovered by archaeologists—called in Hebrew a mashber.
21. Ichabod … Glory is exiled. The Hebrew name is conventionally construed to mean “Inglorious,” though Kyle McCarter Jr. has argued that the more probable meaning is “Where is glory?” or “Alas for glory!” In any case, it is a most peculiar name—the dying mother, overcome by the loss of the Ark (which affects her much more than her husband’s demise), inscribing the national catastrophe in her son’s name. Where one must agree unhesitatingly with McCarter is that the verb in this verse and the next should be rendered as “exiled” and not, as it is customarily translated, as “departed.” Exile is what it clearly denotes, and it is surely significant that this whole large sequence of stories that will provide an account of the founding of Israel’s dynasty and the crystallization of its national power begins with a refrain of glory exiled from Israel. It is also noteworthy that the term for “glory,” kavod, is transparently cognate with kaved, “heavy,” the adjective used to explain Eli’s lethal tumble from his chair—the leader who might be supposed to represent Israel’s glory exhibits only deadly heaviness.
1And the Philistines had taken the Ark of God and brought it from Eben-Ezer to Ashdod. 2And the Philistines took the Ark of God and brought it to the house of Dagon and set it up alongside Dagon. 3And the Ashdodites arose on the next day and, look, Dagon was fallen forward to the ground before the Ark of the LORD. And they took Dagon and set him back in his place. 4And they arose the next morning and, look, Dagon was fallen forward to the ground before the Ark of the LORD, and Dagon’s head and both his hands were chopped off upon the threshold—his trunk alone remained on him. 5Therefore the priests of Dagon, and all who enter the house of Dagon, do not tread on the threshold of the house of Dagon to this day. 6And the hand of the LORD was heavy upon the Ashdodites and He devastated them, and He struck them with tumors, Ashdod and all its territories. 7And the people of Ashdod saw that it was so, and they said, “Let not the Ark of the God of Israel stay among us, for His hand is hard upon us and upon Dagon our god.” 8And they sent and gathered to them all the Philistine overlords and they said, “What shall we do with the Ark of the God of Israel?” And they said, “To Gath let the Ark of the God of Israel be brought round.” And they brought round the Ark of the God of Israel. 9And it happened after they had brought it round that the hand of the LORD was against the town—a great panic. And He struck the people of the town, young and old, and they had tumors in their secret parts. 10And they sent the Ark of God on to Ekron, and it happened when the Ark of God came to Ekron that the Ekronites cried out, saying, “They have brought round to me the Ark of the God of Israel to bring death to me and my people.” 11And they sent and gathered all the Philistine overlords and they said, “Send the Ark of the God of Israel back to its place, and let it not bring death to me and my people.” For there was death panic throughout the city, the hand of God was very heavy there. 12And the people who did not die were struck with tumors, and the town’s outcry rose to the heavens.
CHAPTER 5 NOTES
Click here to advance to the next section of the text.
The Ark Narrative at this point leaves behind the house of Eli, Samuel, and the paramount question of Israel’s leadership in order to tell a bizarre satiric story of a battle between cult objects—the potent Ark of the Covenant, which is conceived as the conduit for the cosmic power of the God of Israel, and the idol of Dagon, vainly believed to be a real deity by the Philistines. The dominant tone of the story is a kind of monotheistic triumphalism; accordingly, themes from the story of the plagues of Egypt are replayed, though in a virtually scatological key.
1. from Eben-Ezer to Ashdod. The Ark is carried down from Eben-Ezer, in the western part of the territory of Ephraim (roughly ten miles from the coast and just a little to the north of present-day Tel Aviv) to Ashdod, on the Mediterranean, in the heart of Philistine territory.
2. Dagon. This god is now generally thought to be a vegetation or fertility god, its name cognate with the Hebrew dagan, “grain” (and not, as was once widely imagined, with the Hebrew dag, “fish”).
set it up alongside Dagon. Either to amplify the power of their own deity or to express the subservience of the God of Israel to Dagon.
3. and, look, Dagon was fallen forward to the ground. This clause and the parallel one in the next verse reflect the visual perspective of the Ashdodites when they come into the temple early in the morning and make their shocking discovery. Tyndale’s translation gets into the spirit of the scene, although with a certain creative license, by rendering this as “lay grovelling upon the ground.”
4. his trunk alone remained on him. The Masoretic Text has, cryptically, “Dagon alone remained on him,” but several of the ancient translations appear to have used a version which read geivo, “his trunk,” instead of Dagon. Dagon’s first downfall might be attributed to a natural, accidental cause—the idol’s somehow slipping from its pedestal. This second incident, in which the hands and head of the idol have been chopped off, offers to the Philistines clear proof of divine intervention. Hacking the hands and feet off war prisoners was a well-known barbaric practice in the ancient Near East, and similar acts of mutilation are attested in the Book of Judges.
5. Therefore. This is the introductory formula for etiological explanations. An observed Philistine practice of skipping over the sanctuary threshold, as a special measure for entering sacred space, is reinterpreted as a reminiscence of the victory of Israel’s God over Dagon.
6. the hand of the LORD was heavy upon the Ashdodites. The word kaved, previously associated with Eli’s corpulence and linked by root with kavod, “glory,” recurs here in a clause that introduces the first of several echoes of the plagues against Egypt.
tumors. Many translations render this as “hemorrhoids,” and there is a little confusion in the Masoretic Text: the consonantal written version (ketiv) has “tumors,” but the tradition for reciting the text (qeri) indicates “hemorrhoids.” This confusion is compounded because the Septuagint, seconded by Josephus, includes a plague of mice not in evidence in the Masoretic version, and the golden mice of the next chapter look very much like a response to just such a plague. The fact, moreover, that hemorrhoids are a humiliating but not lethal disorder and are not spread by epidemic, whereas the Philistines protest that they are dying, gives support to an interpretation at least as old as Rashi: the plague in question is bubonic plague, carried by rats (metamorphosed in this story into mice, and associated with the epidemic but perhaps not clearly understood as the bearers of the disease); the tumors are the buboes of bubonic plague, which might especially afflict the lower body, including the rectal area.
8. overlords. The Hebrew term seranim is a Philistine loanword and is applied only to Philistines as a touch of local color (like calling Spanish aristocrats “grandees”). Some scholars have linked the word with the Greek tyrranos. Since there is only one seren for each Philistine city, they are clearly more than just “lords.”
Gath. The Ark is carried around to three of the five Philistine cities. The other two are Gaza and Ashkelon.
9. the hand of the LORD was against the town—a great panic. This apposition reflects the Hebrew syntax, which sounds a little peculiar, but there is not convincing evidence of a defective text here.
they had tumors in their secret parts. The verb yisatru is peculiar. This translation follows Rashi, Kimchi, and the King James Version in linking it with seter, “secret place.”
12. the town’s outcry rose to the heavens. This clause balances on the edge of an ambiguity. “The heavens” (hashamayim) can be simply the sky or the abode of God. Is God, Who has been present in the story through His acts, His heavy hand—but not, as it were, in person—listening to the anguished cries of the Philistines, or is this merely an image of the shrieks of the afflicted Philistines echoing under the silent vault of the heavens?
1And the Ark of the LORD was in Philistine country seven months. 2And the Philistines called to the priests and the soothsayers, saying, “What shall we do with the Ark of the LORD? Tell us, how shall we send it back to its place.” 3And they said, “If you are about to send back the Ark of the God of Israel, do not send it back empty-handed, for you must give back to Him a guilt offering. Then you will be healed and there will be atonement for you. Why should His hand not relent from you?” 4And they said, “What guilt offering should we give back to Him?” And they said, “The number of the Philistine overlords is five. Five golden tumors and five golden mice. For a single plague is upon all of you and upon your overlords. 5And you shall make images of your tumors and images of your mice that are ravaging the land, and you shall give glory to the God of Israel—perhaps He will lighten His hand from upon you and from upon your god and your land. 6And why should you harden your hearts as Egypt and Pharaoh hardened their hearts? After He made sport of them, did they not let the Hebrews go, and off they went? 7And so, fetch and make one new cart, and two milch cows that no yoke has touched, and harness the cows to the cart, but bring their calves back inside. 8And you shall fetch the Ark of the LORD and set it on the cart, and the golden objects that you give back to Him as a guilt offering you shall place in a chest at its side, and you shall send it away and off it will go. 9And you will see—if on the road to its own territory, to Beth-Shemesh, it will go up, He it was Who did this great evil to us, and if not, we shall know that it was not His hand that afflicted us but chance that came upon us.” 10And so the men did: they took two milch cows and harnessed them to the cart, but their calves they shut up inside. 11And they placed the Ark of the LORD on the cart and the chest and the golden mice and the images of their tumors. 12And the cows went straight on the way, on the way to Beth-Shemesh, on a single road they went, lowing as they went, and they veered neither right nor left, with the Philistine overlords walking after them to the border of Beth-Shemesh. 13And the men of Beth-Shemesh were harvesting the wheat harvest in the valley, and they raised their eyes and saw the Ark, and they rejoiced at the sight. 14And the cart had come to the field of Joshua the Beth-Shemeshite and it came to rest there, and a great stone was there, and they split the wood of the cart, and the cows they offered up as a burnt offering to the LORD. 15And the Levites had brought down the Ark of the LORD and the chest that was with it, in which were the golden objects, and they placed them on the great stone, and the men of Beth-Shemesh offered up burnt offerings and sacrificed sacrifices on that day to the LORD. 16The five Philistine overlords saw, and they returned to Ekron on that day. 17And these are the golden tumors that the Philistines gave back as guilt offering to the LORD: for Ashdod, one; for Gaza, one; for Ashkelon, one; for Gath, one; for Ekron, one. 18And the golden mice were the number of all the Philistine towns, from the fortified cities to the unwalled villages. And the great stone on which they set the Ark of the LORD is to this day in the field of Joshua the Beth-Shemeshite. 19And He struck down men of Beth-Shemesh, for they had looked into the Ark of the LORD, and he struck down from the people seventy men [fifty thousand men], and the people mourned, for the LORD had struck down the people with a great blow. 20And the people of Beth-Shemesh said, “Who can stand before this holy LORD God, and to whom will He go up away from us?” 21And they sent messengers to the inhabitants of Kiriath-Jearim, saying, “The Philistines have brought back the Ark of the LORD. Come down and carry it up to you.” 7:1And the men of Kiriath-Jearim came and carried up the Ark of the LORD and brought it to the house of Abinadab on the hill, and Eleazar his son they consecrated to watch over the Ark of the LORD.
CHAPTER 6 NOTES
Click here to advance to the next section of the text.
This chapter—the episode actually ends in the first verse of chapter 7—which concludes the Ark Narrative, also brings to a climax the traits that set it off from the larger narrative of Samuel, Saul, and David in which it is placed. Instead of the sharply etched individual characters of the surrounding narrative, we have only collective speakers and agents. Instead of the political perspective with its human system of causation, the perspective is theological and the culminating events of the story are frankly miraculous. God, Who does not speak in this narrative, manifests His power over Philistines and Israelites alike through supernatural acts in the material realm, as the strange tale of the cart and the golden images vividly demonstrates.
3. send it back. The Hebrew meshalḥim is the same verb repeatedly used for Pharaoh’s sending Israel out of Egypt and thus sustains the network of allusions to the Exodus story. In Exodus, the Israelites, too, were told that they would not leave Egypt “empty-handed” but would take with them golden ornaments despoiled from the Egyptians.
there will be atonement for you. The Masoretic Text has “it will become known to you” (wenodʿa lakhem), but the reading of both the Qumran Samuel scroll and the Septuagint, wenikaper lakhem, “and it will be atoned for you,” makes far better sense.
5. you shall give glory to the God of Israel—perhaps He will lighten His hand. Once again, the writer harks back to the play of antonyms, kavod/kaved (glory/heavy) and qal (light, and in other contexts, worthless). Glory has been exiled from Israel with the capture of the Ark: now, with the restitution of the Ark together with an indemnity payment of golden images, glory will be restored. This process helps explain the insistence on the term “give back” associated with the guilt offering.
6. harden your hearts. This phrase is not only an explicit link with the Exodus story, but also continues the play on glory/heaviness because the literal Hebrew idiom is “make your heart heavy” (the verb kabed).
let the Hebrews go. The Hebrew says “let them go,” but the lack of antecedent for the pronoun would be confusing in English.
7. one new cart. It is to be an undefiled instrument made specifically for this ritual purpose.
that no yoke has touched. The cows, too, are uncompromised by use in ordinary labor, though the more important point is that they are entirely devoid of experience as draft animals, so that their ability to pull the cart straight to Beth-Shemesh would have to be a manifestation of God’s intervention, or of the intrinsic power of the Ark.
their calves back inside. This, of course, is the crux of the test: the milking cows will have to go against nature in plodding forward into Israelite territory with their calves behind them, shut up in the manger and waiting to be fed.
8. chest. The Hebrew ʾargaz appears only here. Postbiblical Hebrew consistently understood it as “chest,” though some scholars, on the basis of Semitic cognates, have argued for the meaning of “pouch.” It may be more plausible that precious objects would be placed in orderly fashion in a chest rather than piled up in a pouch.
11. the Ark of the LORD … and the chest and the golden mice and the images of their tumors. This whole scene has a certain grotesquely comic and incongruous effect: Israel’s most sacred cult object drawn in a cart by two cows with swollen udders, and alongside the Ark golden images of vermin and tumors.
12. straight on the way, on the way to Beth-Shemesh, on a single road they went … and they veered neither right nor left. Against the spareness and swift efficiency of normal Hebrew narrative style, the writer here lavishes synonyms and repetitions in order to highlight the perfect geometry of the miracle: against all conceivable distractions of biology or sheer animal unknowingness, the cows pursue an arrow-straight southeast trajectory from Ekron to Beth-Shemesh.
lowing as they went. This small but vivid descriptive detail is an even more striking exception to the stringent economy that governs biblical narrative. The last thing one would expect in a biblical story, where there is scant report of the gestures of the human actors, is a specification of sounds made by draft animals. The point, however, is that the milch cows—more driven by the Ark than hauling it—are going strenuously against nature: their udders full of milk for the calves they have been forced to leave behind, they mark with maternal lowing their distress over the journey they cannot resist. There is a peculiar resonance between this episode and Hannah’s story in chapter 1. There, too, a nursing mother does not want to be separated from her young, and, as we noted, special emphasis is placed on the physical acts of nursing and weaning. (The connection between the two episodes is underscored in the Hebrew, which literally calls the cows’ young their “sons,” not their calves.) In both stories, sacrifice is offered after mother and young are separated. Here, of course, the mothers become the objects of the sacrifice; in Hannah’s story, it is a bull, and, in symbolic rather than literal fashion, the son as well. Though all these correspondences seem too pointed to be coincidental, it is unclear whether they represent the literary artifact of the redactor, or an allusion by the author of the Samuel story to the Ark Narrative.
13. the men of Beth-Shemesh were harvesting. The Hebrew uses an ellipsis: “Beth-Shemesh were harvesting.”
14. the cows they offered up. One connection between the Ark Narrative, with its concern for sanctity, and the Samuel–Saul–David cycle, with its preoccupation with politics, is a kind of brooding sense of the cruel price exacted for dedication to the higher cause. The milch cows are burned on the improvised altar; Hannah and her son, Samuel, must be separated in his dedication to the sanctuary; and later both Saul and David will pay terrible costs in their personal lives for their adhesion to power.
17. And these are the golden tumors. The introductory formula suggests a kind of ritual or epic catalogue, so that we know there is in fact one golden image corresponding to each of the five Philistine towns, just as the soothsayers had stipulated.
18. the golden mice were the number of all the Philistine towns. This appears to contradict the explicit directions in verse 4, that there should be exactly five golden mice. Kimchi resolves the discrepancy by proposing that, in the event, as added insurance for all the villages (since the mice had overrun the fields), the Philistines went beyond their instructions and fashioned multiple images of the mice.
And the great stone. The Masoretic Text reads ʾavel (brook or meadow) instead of ʾeven (stone), but both the Septuagint and the Qumran scroll have the latter reading. The Masoretic Text also has “and to” (weʿad) preceding this word, but that is probably an inadvertent scribal duplication of the preposition that occurs twice before in the verse.
19. fifty thousand men. This figure makes no sense because Beth-Shemesh was a small agricultural village. It appears in all the ancient versions, but Josephus seems to have possessed a text in which only the much more plausible number seventy appeared. The fact that the Hebrew has no indication of “and” between “seventy” and “fifty thousand” is further evidence that the latter number is an intrusion in the text.
a great blow. As in 4:8, the Hebrew for “blow” can also mean “plague.” If there is a historical kernel to this whole story, an epidemic ravaging the Philistines could have easily spread to the bordering Israelites, perhaps even through the agency of the cart and the Ark.
20. Who can stand before this holy LORD God. Throughout the Ark Narrative, including what may be its epilogue in 2 Samuel 7, runs an archaic sense of God’s sacred objects as material precipitates of an awesome and dangerous power. This notion led Leonhard Rost, one of the earliest scholars to argue for an entirely distinct Ark Narrative, to assume that the author must have been a priest, although that is hardly an inevitable inference, as these attitudes were widely held in ancient Near Eastern cultures. The phrase “stand before” means idiomatically “to serve.”
will He go up. The Hebrew could equally be construed as “will it go up,” referring to the Ark. From the point of view of the terrified speakers, it may amount to the same thing.
21. And they sent messengers to the inhabitants of Kiriath-Jearim. There seems to be no question of sending the Ark back to Shiloh, which has led to the scholarly inference that the Shiloh sanctuary was destroyed in the wake of the defeat at Aphek. The destruction of Shiloh is in fact attested in other sources.
2And it happened from the day the Ark dwelled in Kiriath-Jearim that the days grew many and became twenty years, and the whole house of Israel was drawn after the LORD. 3And Samuel said to the whole house of Israel, saying, “If with your whole heart you now return to the LORD, put away the alien gods from your midst and the Ashtaroth, and set your heart firm for the LORD and serve Him alone, that He may rescue you from the hand of the Philistines.” 4And the Israelites put away the Baalim and the Ashtaroth and they served the LORD alone.
5And Samuel said, “Assemble all Israel at Mizpah that I may intercede for you before the LORD. 6And they assembled at Mizpah and they drew water and spilled it before the LORD and they fasted on that day and there they said, “We have offended the LORD.” And Samuel judged Israel at Mizpah. 7And the Philistines heard that the Israelites had assembled at Mizpah, and the Philistine overlords came up against Israel, and the Israelites heard and were afraid of the Philistines. 8And the Israelites said to Samuel, “Do not hold still from crying out for us to the LORD our God, that He rescue us from the hand of the Philistines.” 9And Samuel took one suckling lamb and offered it up whole as a burnt offering to the LORD, and Samuel cried out to the LORD on behalf of Israel, and the LORD answered him. 10And just as Samuel was offering up the offering, the Philistines drew near to do battle with Israel, and the LORD thundered with a great sound on that day upon the Philistines and panicked them, and they were routed before Israel. 11And the men of Israel sallied forth from Mizpah and pursued the Philistines and struck them down as far as below Beth-Car. 12And Samuel took a single stone and set it up between Mizpah and Shen, and he called its name Eben-Ezer and he said, “As far as here has the LORD helped us.” 13And the Philistines were brought low and they no longer came into Israelite country, and the hand of the LORD was against the Philistines all the days of Samuel. 14And the towns that the Philistines had taken from Israel were returned to Israel, from Ekron as far as Gath, and their territories Israel retrieved from the hand of the Philistines. And there was peace between Israel and the Amorite. 15And Samuel judged Israel all the days of his life. 16And he would go about from year to year and come round Bethel and Gilgal and Mizpah and would judge Israel in all these places. 17And his point of return was Ramah, for there his home was, and there he judged Israel. And he built there an altar to the LORD.
CHAPTER 7 NOTES
Click here to advance to the next section of the text.
This chapter, which offers a summary account of Israel’s religious reformation and military ascendancy under Samuel’s rule, serves as a bridge between the Ark Narrative and the great narrative of the founding of the monarchy that will occupy the rest of 1 and 2 Samuel and the first two chapters of 1 Kings.
2. twenty years. This is half the formulaic figure of forty years that recurs so frequently in the Book of Judges. The period of twenty years could refer to the time until David brings the Ark up to Jerusalem, though given the immediate narrative context, the more likely reference is the time until Samuel assembles the tribes at Mizpah. During this period, the presence of the Ark at Kiriath-Jearim inspires the people to cultic loyalty to God.
was drawn after. The Hebrew yinahu is anomalous. The usual meaning of this verbal root, “to weep,” makes little sense here (though it was followed by the King James translators). The present translation adopts the proposal of Rashi, who may simply have been interpreting from context. The Hebrew could also be a scribal error for yinharu, which clearly means “to be drawn after.”
3. with your whole heart. This phrase, and Samuel’s language here in general, is notably Deuteronomistic, and the narrative line in this chapter follows the Deuteronomistic theological assumption that cultic faithfulness leads to military success. Neither this language nor this assumption is much in evidence in the main body of the Samuel–Saul–David narrative.
Ashtaroth. The form is a feminine plural of Ashtoreth (Astarte), the Canaanite fertility goddess. The plural indicates either a plurality of goddesses or—more likely—the multiple icons of Astarte.
4. Baalim. This is the masculine plural of Baal, the principal Canaanite male deity.
5. Mizpah. Mizpah appears as a point of tribal assembly at two significant junctures in the Book of Judges. The name means “lookout” and in the Hebrew has a definite article.
6. they drew water and spilled it before the LORD. This act is a small puzzle because a water-drawing ritual is otherwise known only from the late Second Temple period (through Mishnaic sources), and there it is associated with fertility and the fall Festival of Succoth. The context makes clear that in this instance it must be a rite of penitence or purification. Rashi puts it succinctly: “It can only be a symbol of abnegation, that is, ‘Behold we are in your presence like this water spilled forth.’”
7. the Philistines heard that the Israelites had assembled. Either the Philistines assumed that the assembly was a mustering of the tribes for war, which might not have been far off the mark (compare the assembly at Mizpah at the end of Judges 10), or they decided to seize this opportunity of the gathering of Israel for cultic purposes in order to attack the assembled tribes.
9. one suckling lamb. The Hebrew is literally “milk lamb” (teleh ḥalav). The choice of the sacrificial animal strikes an odd little echo with the two milch cows sacrificed at the end of the Ark Narrative and with the emphasis on nursing and weaning in Samuel’s own infancy.
10. the LORD thundered … and panicked them. The key terms restate a recurrent pattern in 1 Samuel: God’s hand, or God’s voice (the thunder), comes down on the enemy, and the enemy is smitten with “panic” (mehumah). Compare, also, the end of Hannah’s poem: “the LORD shatters His adversaries, / against them in the heavens He thunders.” Essentially, it is God Who does battle, with the Israelite foot soldiers merely mopping up after His celestial bombardment. This Deuteronomistic view will fade from the Saul and David narratives.
12. Shen. If the Masoretic Text is correct (the Septuagint reflects a different place-name), this name means “cliff” and, like Mizpah, it is preceded by a definite article.
Eben-Ezer. The name means “stone of help,” with “help” bearing a particularly martial implication. This place may not be the same as the one where the Ark was captured. In any case, the recurring name is meant to signify the righting of old wrongs.
As far as here. The Hebrew phrase could be either temporal (“up until now”) or spatial, but the placing of a stone as a marker makes the latter more likely: as far as this point the LORD granted us victory.
13. the hand of the LORD was against the Philistines all the days of Samuel. Since under Saul’s kingship the Philistines remained a dominant military power, “all the days of Samuel” could refer only to the period of Samuel’s actual leadership. In any case, there are later indications that even under Samuel the Philistines remained powerful.
14. peace between Israel and the Amorite. This seemingly incongruous notice actually throws light, as Shmuel Avramsky has proposed, on Israel’s military-political situation. The Amorites—a designation often used loosely by the biblical writers for the indigenous Canaanite peoples—had also been dominated by the Philistine invaders, and Israel’s success against the Philistines may have been facilitated by an alliance, or at least a nonaggression pact, with the Amorites.
15. And Samuel judged Israel. The precise nature of his leadership is left ambiguous, as befits this transitional figure in Israel’s political evolution. Some of the “judging” may actually be performance of a judicial function, as the next verse indicates that Samuel operated as a kind of circuit judge, although he may well have carried out cultic or priestly duties as well (the towns at which he stopped are all cultic sites). He is also judge in the sense of “chieftain” or political leader, though he plays this role not as a warrior, according to the model of the Book of Judges, but as exhorter and intercessor. He is also, as we shall see in the Saul story, a seer and a reprover-prophet.
16. from year to year. This locution for iterative annual peregrination takes us back to Hannah and Elkanah at the very beginning of the Samuel story.
17. his point of return was Ramah. The Hebrew says literally “his return was Ramah.” This is evidently the same place as Ramathaim Zofim, where his parents lived. Samuel’s circuit is an uneven ellipsis roughly twenty miles across in the northern part of the territory of Benjamin (Saul’s tribe) and the southern part of the territory of Ephraim, in north-central Israel. It is far from encompassing all the tribal territories.
1And it happened when Samuel grew old that he set his sons up as judges for Israel. 2And the name of his firstborn son was Joel and the name of his secondborn was Abijah—judges in Beersheba. 3But his sons did not go in his ways and they were bent on gain and took bribes and twisted justice.
4And all the elders of Israel assembled and came to Samuel at Ramah. 5And they said to him, “Look, you yourself have grown old and your sons have not gone in your ways. So now, set over us a king to rule us, like all the nations.” 6And the thing was evil in Samuel’s eyes when they said, “Give us a king to rule us.” And Samuel prayed to the LORD. 7And the LORD said to Samuel, “Heed the voice of the people in all that they say to you, for it is not you they have cast aside but Me they have cast aside from reigning over them. 8Like all the deeds they have done from the day I brought them up from Egypt to this day, forsaking Me and serving other gods, even so they do as well to you. 9So now, heed their voice, though you must solemnly warn them and tell them the practice of the king that will reign over them.” 10And Samuel said all the words of the LORD to the people who were asking of him a king.
11And he said, “This will be the practice of the king who will reign over you: Your sons he will take and set for himself in his chariots and in his cavalry, and some will run before his chariots. 12He will set for himself captains of thousands and captains of fifties, to plow his ground and reap his harvest and to make his implements of war and the implements of his chariots. 13And your daughters he will take as confectioners and cooks and bakers. 14And your best fields and your vineyards and your olive trees he will take and give to his servants. 15And your seed crops and your vineyards he will tithe and give to his eunuchs and to his servants. 16And your best male and female slaves and your cattle and your donkeys he will take and use for his tasks. 17Your flocks he will tithe, and as for you, you will become his slaves. 18And you will cry out on that day before your king whom you chose for yourselves and the LORD will not answer you on that day.” 19And the people refused to heed Samuel’s voice and they said, “No! A king there shall be over us! 20And we, too, will be like all the nations and our king shall rule us and sally forth before us and fight our battles.” 21And Samuel listened to all the words of the people and he spoke them in the LORD’s hearing. 22And the LORD said to Samuel, “Heed their voice and make them a king.” And Samuel said to the men of Israel, “Go every man to his town.”
CHAPTER 8 NOTES
Click here to advance to the next section of the text.
1. he set his sons up as judges for Israel. It is a signal expression of the ambiguity of Samuel’s role as leader that he oversteps his mandate as judge (shofet—both judicial authority and ad hoc political leader) by attempting to inaugurate a kind of dynastic arrangement. The two sons who betray their trust of office are a nice parallel to Eli’s two corrupt sons, who essentially were displaced by Samuel.
2. judges in Beersheba. It is a little puzzling that Samuel should send both his sons from north-central Israel to this city in the south. Josephus evidently was familiar with a tradition in which one son was sent to Bethel in the north and the other to Beersheba, a more plausible deployment.
3. bent on gain … twisted justice. The two verbs are different conjugations of the same root, n-t-h, which means to bend off from the straight and narrow.
6. the thing was evil in Samuel’s eyes. Samuel is ideologically opposed to the monarchy because he is committed to the old idea of the ad hoc inspired leader, shofet, who is a kind of direct implementation of God’s rule through the divine spirit over the unique nation of Israel. God appears to agree with him but yields to political necessity. It is noteworthy that when the elders’ words are replayed in this verse from Samuel’s point of view, the very phrase rejecting covenantal status that must especially gall him, “like all the nations,” is suppressed.
8. forsaking Me and serving other gods. Both the locutions used and the preoccupation with cultic loyalty are notably Deuteronomistic, and the coupling of the shift in style with this theme leads one to suspect a seventh-century B.C.E. interpolation here, since there has been no question of idolatry in the immediate context. The elders’ expressed concern has been rather with the breakdown of the institution of the judge in Samuel’s corrupt sons. The grounds for the argument for and against monarchy will shift once again in Samuel’s speech (verses 11–18).
10. asking of him a king. The Hebrew participle shoʾalim takes us back to the verb of asking used in Samuel’s naming and points forward to Sha’ul, Saul.
11. the practice of the king. This whole episode turns repeatedly on an untranslatable pun. Mishpat means “justice,” the very thing that Samuel’s sons have twisted by taking payoffs. Mishpat also means “habitual behavior,” “mode of operation,” or “practice.” As a verb the same root means either “to judge” or “to rule”: it is used (in a verbal noun) in the former sense in verses 1 and 2, in the latter sense in verses 5 and 6. The recurrent scholarly assumption that this whole attack on the encroachments of the monarchy reflects a knowledge of Solomon’s reign or of later Davidic kings is by no means inevitable: all the practices enumerated—military conscription, the corvée, expropriation of lands, taxation of the agricultural output—could easily have been familiar to an early writer from observing the Canaanite city-states or the larger imperial regimes to the east and the south.
who will reign over you. The people had spoken of the king ruling/judging them (the verb shafat); Samuel unambiguously speaks of reigning (malakh, the cognate verb of melekh, king).
Your sons he will take. Samuel’s speech is solidly constructed as a hammering piece of antimonarchic rhetoric. All the cherished possessions to be expropriated by the king are placed emphatically at the beginning of each clause, followed by the verb of which they are objects. “He will take” (one word in the Hebrew, yiqaḥ) is insisted on with anaphoric force. The speech moves systematically from the expropriation of sons and daughters to land and produce to slaves and beasts of burden, ending with the climactic “you will become his slaves.” A modern American reader might easily be reminded of the rhetoric of a radical libertarian inveighing against the evils of big government and the encroachments of its bureaucracies and taxation. In no part of his pragmatic argument does Samuel mention the Deuteronomistic themes of abandoning the LORD or betraying His direct kingship.
11–12. chariots … cavalry … captains. The first item in the indictment of monarchy is military conscription. As is clear in the response of the people (verse 20), the consolidation of national military power under the king is precisely what attracts them to monarchy. All this leads one to suspect that the domination over the Philistines was by no means so comprehensive as claimed by the narrator in chapter 7.
12. to plow his ground and reap his harvest. The Hebrew is literally “to plow his plowing and harvest his harvest.”
to make his implements. After conscripting men to fight and men to perform agricultural service, the king will also draft the artisan class for his purpose—ironsmiths, carpenters, wheelwrights, and so forth.
his chariots. Samuel’s emphasis from the start on chariots signals the political shift he envisions, for chariots were the instruments of the monarchies with which Israel contended, whereas the Israelites in this early stage did not have this sort of military technology at their disposal, at least according to the Book of Judges.
14. give to his servants. “Servants” in a royal context would be the functionaries of the royal bureaucracy, whose service to the king was in fact often rewarded by land grants.
16. your cattle. The Masoretic Text has “your young men” (baḥureikhem), but the reading of the Septuagint, beqarkhem, “your cattle,” is much more likely, given the fact that the sons and daughters have already been mentioned and that the next term is “your donkeys.”
18. you will cry out … and he will not answer you. The language used here in relation to the king is precisely the language used elsewhere in relation to God (compare 7:9, where the people implore Samuel to “cry out” on their behalf to God). Cries to this power will not be answered by God.
19. A king there shall be over us. They do not say, “We will have a king” but “A king shall be over us.”
20. rule us. Again, the people use the ambiguous key verb, shafat, “to rule/judge.”
sally forth before us. This phrase reflects a specific military idiom—the full version of it is, literally, “to go out and come in before us,” that is, to lead in battle, to execute maneuvers. The military power that can accrue to the nation through the king is what is uppermost in the minds of the people.
22. Go every man to his town. Though God has just instructed Samuel to comply with the people’s demand for a monarchy, Samuel’s immediate response instead is to send them back to their homes. His acquiescence remains grudging: he appears to be buying time, perhaps with the claim that he needs to find a suitable candidate. The reluctance will persist, and grow, after he has encountered Saul and anointed him.
1And there was a man of Benjamin whose name was Kish son of Abiel son of Zeror son of Bechorath son of Aphiah, a Benjaminite, a man of great means. 2And he had a son whose name was Saul, a fine and goodly young fellow, and no man of the Israelites was goodlier than he, head and shoulders taller than all the people. 3And some asses belonging to Kish, Saul’s father, were lost, and Kish said to Saul his son, “Take, pray, with you one of the lads, and rise, go seek the asses.” 4And he passed through the high country of Ephraim and he passed through the region of Shalishah, but they did not find them. And they passed through the region of Shaalim, and there was nothing there, and they passed through the region of Benjamin, but they did not find them. 5They were just coming into the region of Zuf when Saul said to his lad who was with him, “Come, let us turn back, lest my father cease worrying about the asses and worry about us.” 6And he said to him, “Look, pray, there is a man of God in this town, and the man is esteemed—whatever he says will surely come to pass. Now then, let us go there. Perhaps he will tell us of our way on which we have gone.” 7And Saul said to his lad, “But look, if we are to go, what shall we bring to the man? For the bread is gone from our kits and there is no gift to bring to the man of God. What do we have?” 8And the lad answered Saul once again and he said, “Look, I happen to have at hand a quarter of a shekel of silver that I can give to the man of God, that he may tell us our way.” 9In former times in Israel, thus would a man say when he went to inquire of God, “Come, let us go to the seer.” For the prophet today was called in former times the seer. 10And Saul said to his lad, “What you say is good. Come, let us go.” And they went on to the town in which the man of God was. 11They were just coming up the ascent to the town when they met some young women going out to draw water, and they said to them, “Is there a seer hereabouts?” 12And they answered them and said, “There is. Look, he is straight ahead of you. Hurry now, for today he has come to town, for the people have a sacrifice today on the high place. 13As soon as you come into town, you will find him before he goes up on the high place to eat. For the people will not eat till he comes, as he will bless the sacrifice and then the guests will eat. So go up, for today you will find him.” 14And they went up to the town. They were just coming into the town when Samuel came out toward them to go up to the high place. 15And the LORD had disclosed to Samuel the day before Saul’s arrival, saying, 16“At this time tomorrow I will send to you a man from the region of Benjamin and you shall anoint him prince over My people Israel and he shall rescue My people from the hand of the Philistines. For I have seen the plight of My people, yes, their outcry has reached Me.” 17And Samuel saw Saul, and the LORD answered him, “Here is that man of whom I said to you, ‘This one will govern My people.’” 18And Saul approached Samuel in the gateway and said, “Tell me, pray, where is the house of the seer?” 19And Samuel answered Saul and said, “I am the seer. Go up before me to the high place, and you will eat with me today, and I shall send you off in the morning, and whatever is in your heart I shall tell you. 20And as to the asses that have been lost to you now three days, pay them no heed, for they have been found. And whose is all the treasure of Israel? Is it not for you and all your father’s house?” 21And Saul answered and said, “Am I not a Benjaminite, from the smallest of the tribes of Israel, and my clan is the least of all the tribe of Benjamin? So why have you spoken to me in this fashion?” 22And Samuel took Saul and his lad and brought them into the hall, and he gave them a place at the head of the guests, about thirty men. 23And Samuel said to the cook, “Bring the portion that I gave to you, about which I said, ‘Set it aside.’” 24And the cook lifted up the thigh and put it before Saul. And Samuel said, “Here is what is left. Put it before you and eat, for it has been kept for you for the appointed time as I said to the people I invited.” And Saul ate with Samuel on that day. 25And they came down from the high place into the town, and they made a bed for Saul on the roof, and he slept. 26And as dawn was breaking, Samuel called out to Saul on the roof, saying, “Arise and I shall send you off.” And Saul arose, and the two of them, he and Samuel, went outside. 27They were just going down past the edge of the town when Samuel said to Saul, “Tell the lad to pass on before us.” And he passed on. “As for you, stand now, that I may let you hear the word of God.”
CHAPTER 9 NOTES
Click here to advance to the next section of the text.
1. And there was a man of Benjamin whose name was Kish. The formulaic phrasing—“there was a man,” followed by name, home region, and genealogy—signals to the audience that we are beginning a discrete new story within the larger narrative. (Compare the beginning of Hannah’s story in 1:1–2.)
2. head and shoulders taller than all the people. The Hebrew says literally “from his shoulders taller than all the people.” Saul’s looming size, together with his good looks, seems to be an outward token of his capacity for leadership, but as the story unfolds with David displacing Saul, his physical stature becomes associated with a basic human misperception of what constitutes fitness to command.
5. They were just coming … when. This relatively infrequent indication of simultaneous actions occurs four times in this single episode. The writer seems to want to highlight a crucial series of temporal intersections and concatenations as Saul moves unwitting toward his destiny as king.
Zuf. This is, of course, Samuel’s home region.
Come, let us turn back. According to the general principle of biblical narrative that the first reported speech of a character is a defining moment of characterization, Saul’s first utterance reveals him as a young man uncertain about pursuing his way, and quite concerned about his father. This concern, especially in light of the attention devoted to tense relations between fathers and sons in the ensuing narrative, is touching, and suggests that the young Saul is a sensitive person—an attribute that will be woefully submerged by his experience of political power. But as this first dialogue unfolds, it is Saul’s uncertainty that comes to the fore because at every step he has to be prodded and directed by his own servant.
6. there is a man of God in this town … whatever he says will surely come to pass. The fact that neither Saul nor his servant seems to have heard of Samuel by name (and the town, too, is left unnamed) has led many scholars to conclude that this story comes from a different source. But, as Robert Polzin has vigorously argued, the palpable shift between chapter 8 and chapter 9 may rather reflect “the varying play of perspectives (between narrator and reader, between reader and character, and between character and character) that forms the stuff of sophisticated narrative.” Saul’s entire story, until the night before his death on the battlefield, is a story about the futile quest for knowledge of an inveterately ignorant man. Samuel may have been presented before as the spiritual leader of all the tribes, but this particular Benjaminite farm boy knows nothing of him, and Saul’s servant, who presumably has also spent all his time on the farm, has picked up merely a local rumor of his activity but not his name. From the rural-popular perspective of both, and in keeping with the themes of knowledge and prediction of this story, Samuel is not a judge and political leader but a “man of God” and a “seer” (compare verse 9) who can predict the future.
he will tell us of our way on which we have gone. The Hebrew verb clearly indicates some sort of past action and not, as one might expect, “on which we should go.” Perhaps they feel so lost that they need the seer to tell them where they have been heading. In the event, it is toward a kingdom, not toward lost asses.
7. But look, if we are to go, what shall we bring. The diffident Saul is on the point of quitting before the encounter. He needs the counsel, and the provident quarter-shekel, of his servant in order to move forward and make the portentous connection with Samuel.
bread. As in general biblical usage, this is a synecdoche for food.
9. In former times in Israel. This terminological notice simultaneously alerts the audience to the gap between the time of the story (the eleventh century B.C.E.) and the audience’s own time (at the very least, two or three generations later) and underscores the ambiguity of Samuel’s transitional role as leader: he is variously called judge, man of God, seer, and prophet, and he also performs priestly functions.
to inquire of God. The idiom means to inquire of an oracle.
10. What you say is good. Saul the future leader follows someone else’s lead—here, a slave’s.
11. they met some young women going out to draw water. The wells would have typically been outside the walls of the city. The encounter between a young man in foreign territory with young women (neʿarot) drawing water seems to signal the beginning of a betrothal type-scene (compare Rebekah, Rachel, and Zipporah at their respective wells). But the betrothal scene is aborted. Instead of a betrothal feast, there will be a sacrificial feast that adumbrates a rite of coronation. The destiny of kingship to which Saul proceeds will lead to grimmer consequences than those that follow in the repeated story of a hero who finds this future bride at a well.
12–13. The reply of the young women is notable for its garrulousness. One talmudic sage sought to explain this trait with a simple misogynistic formula: “women are talkative” (Berakhot 48b), whereas, more amusingly, the Midrash proposes that the young women kept repeating themselves because they were so smitten by Saul’s beauty. The clues in the immediately preceding narrative context suggest a less fanciful explanation: seeing the evident signs of confusion and incomprehension in Saul’s face, the women take elaborate measures to spell out where Samuel is to be found and what Saul should do in order to be sure not to miss him. In all this, it is noteworthy, as Polzin has observed, that Samuel, having agreed to find a king for Israel, has made no move whatever toward that purpose. Instead, the future king “finds” him.
the high place. The bamah was an elevated place, a kind of open-air natural altar, perhaps sometimes with a structure erected alongside it (see the “hall” in verse 22), where sacrifices were generally offered in the period before the centralization of the cult in Jerusalem. The kind of sacrifice involved here is one in which parts of the animal would be burned on the altar and the rest eaten in a ceremonial feast.
16. prince. The Hebrew nagid is not used to refer to leaders before this moment in Israelite history and is used only rarely after the very early years of the monarchy. It is a term that suggests the exercise of political power in a designated role of leadership rather than in the manner of the ad hoc charismatic leadership of the shofet, or Judge. But God, in keeping with this transitional moment and perhaps even in deference to Samuel’s keen resentment of the monarchy, pointedly does not use the word “king.”
he shall rescue My people. Again, the previously reported ascendancy over the Philistines seems to have vanished, and God endorses military effectiveness as the rationale for the monarchy.
the plight of My people. The Masoretic Text lacks “the plight of,” though the phrase appears to have been in the version used by the Septuagint translators. It is conceivable that what we have here is not an inadvertent scribal omission but an ellipsis.
17. And Samuel saw Saul. The seer sees the divinely designated object of his sight, and God immediately confirms that this is the man. Or, in the light of subsequent developments, Samuel is persuaded that he has received direct instruction from God. All the knowledge is on Samuel’s side rather than on Saul’s.
18. where is the house of the seer? Addressing the very seer himself, Saul picks up no clues that Samuel is anything but an ordinary passerby. He also assumes that the seer has a house in the town, although the young women have said that the seer has come to town for the sacrifice. (The scholarly assumption that the unnamed town must be Samuel’s hometown, Ramah, is not entirely compelling.)
20. as to the asses. It is at this point that Samuel reveals his access to supernatural knowledge: no one has told him that Saul was looking for asses, but Samuel knows both of the lost animals and where to find them.
whose is all the treasure of Israel? This is a deliberately oblique reference to kingship: if all the choice possessions of Israel are to be yours, why worry about a few asses? Although the Hebrew term ḥemdah can mean “desire,” it more often has the sense of “desired, or valued, thing,” as in the common idiom, kley ḥemdah, “precious objects.”
21. a Benjaminite, from the smallest of the tribes of Israel. The young Saul is no doubt overcome by Samuel’s hint of a throne, but the language is also part of an etiquette of deference. In fact, Benjamin was one of the most powerful tribes, and given Kish’s affluence, his clan would scarcely have been so humble.
all the tribe of Benjamin. The Masoretic Text has “tribes” but the Septuagint reflects the more logical singular. The plural form is in all likelihood a scribal replication of the plural in “tribes of Israel” at the beginning of the verse.
22. a place at the head of the guests. Samuel offers no explanation to the assembled company as to why this signal honor is accorded to the strangers.
23. Set it aside. The Hebrew reads literally “Put it by you.”
24. The text here seems clearly defective at two different points. The phrase “lifted up the thigh” is followed by an anomalously ungrammatical form of “and that which is on it” (weheʿaleyha). It seems best to delete this word, as does the Septuagint. The phrase “as I said to the people” is no more than an interpretive guess about an asyntactic chain of three words in the Hebrew, which literally are “saying the-people I-invited.”
25. they made a bed for Saul on the roof, and he slept. The Masoretic Text has “he spoke with Saul on the roof and they rose early.” The present translation follows the far more plausible reading of the Septuagint: the report of speech on the roof is odd because no content or explanation for it is given, and the rising early is contradicted by the fact that in the next phrase Samuel calls up to Saul on the roof in order to rouse him. Evidently, a scribe substituted the common word wayidaber, “he spoke,” for the more unusual word wayirbedu, “they made a bed” (the same consonants with the order reversed). Wayishkav, “and he slept,” differs from wayashkimu, “and they rose early,” by one consonant in the unvocalized text.
the roof. Presumably, the encounter takes place during the warm season, and the roof would be a cool sleeping place.
27. Tell the lad to pass on before us. Every step that Samuel takes here in conferring the kingship on Saul is clandestine. He speaks to him only after they have reached the outskirts of the town, and he is sure first to get Saul’s servant out of earshot. This course of action is rather puzzling because the people, after all, have already publicly declared to the prophet that they want him to choose a king for them. Samuel’s need to proceed in secrecy may reflect his persistent sense that the monarchy is the wrong path for the people, or it might be an expression of doubt as to whether this strapping young Benjaminite is really the right man for the job, despite the unambiguous indication that the prophet has just received from God.
1And Samuel took the cruse of oil and poured it over his head and kissed him, and he said, “Has not the LORD anointed you over His inheritance as prince? 2When you go away from me today you shall find two men by Rachel’s Tomb in the region of Benjamin at Zelzah, and they will say to you, ‘The asses that you went off to seek have been found, and, look, your father has put aside the matter of the asses and is worrying about you, saying, What shall I do about my son?’ 3And you shall slip onward from there and you shall come to the Terebinth of Tabor, and there three men will find you who are going up to God at Bethel, one bearing three kids and one bearing three loaves of bread and one bearing a jug of wine. 4And they will greet you and give you two loaves of bread, and you shall take from their hand. 5Afterward you shall come to Gibeath-Elohim, where the Philistine prefect is. And as you come into town there, you shall encounter a band of prophets coming down from the high place, preceded by lute and drum and flute and lyre, and they will be speaking in ecstasy. 6And the spirit of the LORD shall seize you, and you shall go into ecstasy with them and you shall turn into another man. 7And when these signs come upon you, do what your hand finds to do, for God is with you. 8And you shall go down before me to Gilgal, and, look, I shall be coming down to you to offer burnt offerings and to sacrifice well-being sacrifices. Seven days shall you wait until I come to you, and I shall inform you what you must do.” 9And it happened as he turned his back to go off from Samuel, that God gave him another heart and all these signs came to pass on that day.
10And they came there to Gibeah, and look, a band of prophets was coming toward him, and the spirit of the LORD seized him and he went into ecstasy in their midst. 11And so, whoever knew him from times gone by, saw, and, look, with the prophets he spoke in ecstasy, and each would say to his fellow,
“What has befallen the son of Kish?
Is Saul, too, among the prophets?”
12And one man from there would answer and say, “And who is their father?” Therefore it became a proverb, “Is Saul, too, among the prophets?” 13And he ceased from his ecstasy and came to the high place. 14And Saul’s uncle said to him and to his lad, “Where did you go?” And he said, “To seek the asses. And we saw that they were nowhere and we came to Samuel.” 15And Saul’s uncle said, “Tell me, pray, what did Samuel say to you?” 16And Saul said to his uncle, “He indeed told us that the asses had been found.” But the matter of the kingship of which Samuel had spoken he told him not.
17And Samuel mustered the people to the LORD at Mizpah. 18And he said to the Israelites, “Thus said the LORD God of Israel: ‘I brought Israel up out of Egypt and I rescued you from the hand of Egypt and from the hand of all the kingdoms that have oppressed you.’ 19And you on your part have cast aside your God Who rescues you from all your ills and troubles, and you have said, ‘No! A king you shall put over us!’ And so, stand forth before the LORD by your tribes and your clans.” 20And Samuel brought forward all the tribes of Israel and the lot fell to the tribe of Benjamin. 21And he brought forward the tribe of Benjamin by its clans and the lot fell to the Matrite clan, and the lot fell to Saul son of Kish, and they sought him but he was not to be found. 22And they inquired again of the LORD: “Has a man come here?” And the LORD said, “Look, he is hidden among the gear.” 23And they ran and fetched him from there, and he stood forth amidst the people, and he was head and shoulders taller than all the people. 24And Samuel said to all the people, “Have you seen whom the LORD has chosen? For there is none like him in all the people.” And all the people shouted and said, “Long live the king!” 25And Samuel spoke out to the people the practice of kingship and wrote it on a scroll and placed it before the LORD. And Samuel sent all the people away to their homes. 26And Saul, too, had gone to his home in Gibeah, and the stalwart fellows whose hearts God had touched went with him. 27And worthless fellows had said, “How will this one rescue us?” And they spurned him and brought him no tribute, but he pretended to keep his peace.
CHAPTER 10 NOTES
Click here to advance to the next section of the text.
1. Anointment is the biblical ritual of conferring kingship, like coronation in the later European tradition. Samuel carries out this act secretly, on the outskirts of the town, conferring on Saul, in keeping with the term God has used, the title nagid, “prince,” rather than “king.”
2. When you go away from me today. This elaborate set of instructions and predictions is, as Robert Polzin has argued, a strategy for asserting continued control over the man Samuel has just anointed. Every predictive step manifests Samuel’s superior knowledge as prophet, and all the instructions reduce the new king to Samuel’s puppet.
Rachel’s Tomb. The burial site of the mother of Benjamin, the eponymous founder of the tribe, underscores Saul’s own tribal affiliation.
at Zelzah. This otherwise unattested name may not be a place-name but an error in transcription in the Masoretic Text.
your father has put aside the matter of the asses and is worrying about you. According to the fixed procedure of verbal recycling in biblical narrative, the predicted words of the two men are nearly identical with Saul’s first words to his servant. One should note that in the scenario Samuel lays out for him, Saul has no opportunity to respond to his father’s concern for his absence: on the contrary, his new regal obligations rush him onward toward a daunting rite of initiation.
3. slip onward. The Hebrew verb ḥalaf suggests passing through a medium and may well indicate the clandestine nature of Saul’s movements.
the Terebinth of Tabor. Evidently, a cultic site.
three men … three kids … three loaves of bread. The triple three is a folktale pattern. It also manifests a mysterious design clearly grasped by Samuel, who annunciates this whole prediction, and into which Saul is thrust unwittingly. The three men bear meat (or animals that can be turned into meat), bread, and wine—the three symbolic staffs of life. They will offer Saul the primary of the three, bread (in counterpoint to the “worthless fellows” at the end of the episode who give the new king no tribute).
5. Gibeath-Elohim. The name means Hill of God, but it would seem to be the same as the Gibeah of Judges 19, in which the Benjaminites perpetrate a lethal gang-rape, and is also known as Gibeath-Benjamin and Gibeath-Saul.
the Philistine prefect. This glancing reference to a Philistine garrison deep within Benjaminite territory is still another indication of the Philistines’ military ascendancy. That might be another reason for keeping the anointment secret, at least until the new king can consolidate military force around him. The Masoretic Text has a plural “prefects,” but three different ancient translations reflect a singular.
a band of prophets. These are professional ecstatics who would whip themselves into a frenzy with the insistent rhythms of the musical instruments mentioned—a phenomenon familiar in enthusiastic religious sects worldwide—and then would “prophesy,” become caught up in ecstatic behavior, which could involve glossolalia (“speaking in tongues”), dancing, writhing, and the like. The chief connection between these figures and the later literary prophets is the idea that both are involuntarily inhabited by an overpowering divine spirit.
lute. The Hebrew word for this instrument, nevel, is identical with the word for “jug” used at the end of verse 3 (the homonymity may be explained by a perceived lyre shape in the jug). It is a fairly common procedure in biblical narrative to link segments in immediate sequence by using this sort of pun as a linchpin. Here it has the effect of intimating an uncanny link between the first and second stages of the script Samuel is designing for Saul.
6. you shall turn into another man. The drastic nature of this process is surely meant by Samuel to be startling: nothing less will do in order to transform this diffident farmer’s son into a king than to be devastated by the divine spirit, violently compelled to radical metamorphosis. This whole story of Saul among the prophets is repeated, with very significant changes, in chapter 19, near the end of his tortuous career. As we shall have occasion to see, the seeming repetition, far from being a regrettable “doublet” produced in redaction, is entirely purposeful: the same etiological tale is rotated 180 degrees to show us first Saul being invested with the spirit, and with the monarchy, and then divested of the monarchy by the spirit.
7. do what your hand finds. The biblical idiom means do whatever is within your power.
8. you shall go down before me to Gilgal … Seven days shall you wait. The third stage in the set of predictions/instructions that Samuel announces to Saul is in fact not carried out until much later. Saul’s divergence from the prophet’s script adumbrates his future failures of obedience in relation to Samuel. Polzin has made the shrewd argument that the unfulfilled prediction also reflects Samuel’s failure as a prophet, and that he has actually placed Saul in a double bind by telling him that he may do whatever he wants because God is with him and yet “has paradoxically commanded strict royal dependence upon prophetic direction.” Samuel, in other words, seems to want both a king and a puppet.
9. as he turned his back. The Hebrew shekhem is also the word for “shoulder,” and so reminds us of Saul’s regal stature, head and shoulders above all the people.
God gave him another heart and all these signs came to pass. These words are a kind of proleptic headnote for the narrative report that follows, and it is not implied that the transformation and the signs occurred the very moment Saul turned to go.
10. And they came there to Gibeah. There is no report of the first of Samuel’s predicted encounters, with the three men bearing kids, bread, and wine. It is unclear whether this reflects merely a narrative ellipsis or whether this, too, is an unfulfilled prophecy. The report of the meeting with the two men who announce that the asses have been found is also omitted. In any case, the transformative meeting with the band of ecstatics is obviously the chief focus of the writer’s attention.
the spirit of the LORD seized him. This same phrase, or a slight variant of it, is repeatedly used in the Book of Judges to indicate the inception of the judge’s enterprise as charismatic military leader. There is some overlap with Saul’s taking on the kingship, which will also involve military leadership, but the report of ecstasy or “prophesying” is a new element, with its more radical implication that the new leader must become “another man.”
11. Is Saul, too, among the prophets? This evidently proverbial question, its full origins scarcely remembered, is the perplexity that generates the etiological tale. The question seems to be proverbial of a case of extreme incongruity (like the English “bull in a china shop”)—what on earth is a man like Saul doing among the prophets? The tale then comes to explain how the saying arose. But the etiological tale, together with its antithetical counterpart in chapter 19, figures significantly in the literary design of the Saul story. Even the characterizing theme of Saul’s repeated exclusion from predictive knowledge is inscribed in the question “Is Saul, too, among the prophets?” The people ask their question about Saul in a line of poetry (consisting of two parallel versets). The verse form explains why Saul is first referred to as “son of Kish” because in poetry based on parallelism, it is the fixed procedure for treating proper names to use the given name in one verset and, in lieu of a synonym, the patronymic in the other. Thus, the claim made by some scholars that “son of Kish” is derogatory has no basis.
12. who is their father? The reference is obscure. The least convoluted explanation makes the prophets the antecedent of “their.” The meaning then would be that unlike Saul, whose father is Kish, a landholder and a man of substance, the ecstatics are a breed apart, with no father anyone can name (the leader of a band of prophets was called idiomatically their father). The prevalent attitude toward such prophets was ambivalent: they were at once viewed as vehicles of a powerful and dangerous divine spirit, and as crazies (compare Hosea 9:7).
14. Saul’s uncle. The appearance, without introduction, of an uncle (and not Saul’s father, who after his brief initial appearance is never brought into the narrative proper) is puzzling. It has been proposed that this uncle is Ner the father of Abner, who will become Saul’s commander in chief, but if that is the case, why is he left unnamed here?
16. But the matter of the kingship … he told him not. Saul’s studied reticence confirms the clandestine character of his anointment.
17. And Samuel mustered the people. This national assembly is the second of three episodes that inaugurate Saul’s kingship. One should not leap too quickly to the conclusion that these are merely a stitching together of variant sources. From the writer’s viewpoint, the institution of the monarchy, with Saul as first king, is both a difficult and a dubious process, and it cannot happen all at once. First there is the clandestine anointment, followed by an initiatory experience, under the nose of the Philistine prefect. Then there is a public proclamation of the king, at which time sufficient forces can be marshaled to bolster him against the Philistines.
18. Thus said the LORD God of Israel. Samuel begins his speech with the so-called messenger-formula, which is used to initiate prophetic messages. His speech is in fact a kind of prophetic denunciation of the people for having “cast aside” God in demanding a king and so is a reprise of his antimonarchic harangue in chapter 8, even as he implements the choice of a king.
20. the lot fell. The Hebrew verb lakad that is used for the drawing of lots means to be caught or trapped. As both Polzin and McCarter note, the only other biblical instances of such drawing of lots among the tribes are in order to discover a culprit, and so Samuel has chosen a mechanism associated with incrimination and punishment.
22. Has a man come here? This translation reads ʿad halom instead of the Masoretic ʿod halom, which would mean “again here.”
Look, he is hidden among the gear. This detail is virtually a parody of the recurring motif of the prophet-leader’s unwillingness to accept his mission. Saul the diffident farm boy had expressed a sense of unworthiness for the high office Samuel conferred on him. Now, confronted by the assembled tribes and “trapped” by the process of lot drawing, he tries to flee the onus of kingship, farcically hiding in the baggage.
24. there is none like him in all the people. Perhaps especially because Saul has been hauled out from the midst of saddle packs and sundry impedimenta, Samuel now executes a gesture of public relations: look at this strapping, handsome fellow—there is none in Israel who can match him. In the event, he proves wrong about Saul’s fitness for the throne, and one may even wonder whether Samuel’s proclamation that this is the one God has chosen (confirmed by the narrator’s previous report) is not a misperception to justify his own (erring) choice.
Long live the king. The people’s proclamation does not use nagid (prince) but the unambiguous melekh (king).
25. the practice of kingship. The phrase here, mishpat hamelukhah, is close enough to mishpat hamelekh, the term used in chapter 8, and so the reasonable inference is that the content of the speech is a reiteration of the dangers of encroachment of individual rights by the king that Samuel warned of in the assembly at Ramah.
26. stalwart fellows. The translation follows the Qumran Samuel text and the Septuagint in reading giborey haḥayil instead of the Masoretic haḥayil, “the troop.” The phrase, as many commentators have noted, is an obvious antithesis to “worthless fellows” in the next sentence.
27. How will this one rescue us? “This one” (zeh) is contemptuous.
but he pretended to keep his peace. The Masoretic Text has two Hebrew words here, wayehi kemaḥarish, which bear this meaning and have the attraction of indicating the inception of court intrigues and calculations at the very beginning of Saul’s reign—he is aware of political dissidence but chooses for the moment not to react. It must be said, however, that the Qumran Samuel fragment, supported by allied readings in the Septuagint and Josephus, has wayehi kemeḥodesh (the graphemes for r and d are quite similar), “And it happened after about a month,” affixing these two words at the beginning of the next episode rather than at the end of this one.
1And Nahash the Ammonite came up and encamped against Jabesh-Gilead. And all the men of Jabesh said to Nahash, “Make a pact with us, and we shall be subject to you.” 2And Nahash the Ammonite said to them, “This is how I shall make a pact with you—with the gouging out of the right eye of every one of you, and I shall make it a disgrace for all Israel.” 3And the elders of Jabesh said to him, “Leave us alone for seven days, that we may send messengers through all the territory of Israel, and if there is none to rescue us, we shall come out to you.” 4And the messengers came to Gibeath-Saul and spoke the words in the hearing of the people, and all the people raised their voices and wept. 5And, look, Saul was coming in behind the oxen from the field, and Saul said, “What is the matter with the people that they are weeping?” And they recounted to him the words of the men of Jabesh. 6And the spirit of God seized Saul when he heard these words, and he was greatly incensed. 7And he took a yoke of oxen and hacked them to pieces and sent them through all the territory of Israel by the hand of messengers, saying, “Whoever does not come out after Saul and after Samuel, thus will be done to his oxen!” And the fear of the LORD fell on the people, and they came out as one man. 8And Saul marshaled them in Bazek, and there were three hundred thousand Israelites and thirty thousand men of Judah. 9And he said to the messengers who had come, “Thus shall you say to the men of Jabesh-Gilead: ‘Tomorrow victory will be yours as the sun grows hot.’” And the messengers came and told the men of Jabesh and they rejoiced. 10And the men of Jabesh said [to the Ammonites], “Tomorrow we shall come out to you and you may do to us whatever is good in your eyes.” 11And it happened on the next day that Saul set the troops in three columns. And they came into the camp in the morning watch and struck down Ammon till the heat of the day, and so those who remained were scattered and not two of them remained together. 12And the people said to Samuel, “Whoever said, ‘Saul shall not be king over us,’ give us these men and we shall put them to death.” 13And Saul said, “No man shall be put to death this day, for today the LORD has wrought victory in Israel.”
14And Samuel said to the people, “Come, let us go to Gilgal and we shall renew there the kingship.” 15And all the people went to Gilgal and they made Saul king there before the LORD at Gilgal, and they sacrificed their well-being sacrifices before the LORD, and Saul rejoiced there, and all the men of Israel with him, very greatly.
CHAPTER 11 NOTES
Click here to advance to the next section of the text.
1. Nahash the Ammonite. During this period, the Ammonite kingdom, in the region to the east of the Jordan, was the second great military threat to the Israelites, after the Philistines to the west. David would later besiege the Ammonite capital, Rabbath-Ammon (near the site of present-day Amman). This episode, marking the inception of Saul’s military activity, has several details that will be echoed later in the David story.
Jabesh-Gilead. This Israelite settlement, in the tribal territory of Manasseh, was located several miles east of the Jordan and hence was exposed to Ammonite attack. In the story of the concubine at Gibeah—Saul’s hometown—the men of Jabesh-Gilead refuse to fight in the civil war against Benjamin, and so some special kinship between them and Saul’s tribe is inferable. The Samuel scroll found in Cave 4 at Qumran reports a general campaign by Nahash against the trans-Jordanian Israelites. Here are the verses from the Qumran version (brackets indicate reconstructed letters or words, where there are gaps in the scroll): “[and Na]hash king of the Ammonites oppressed the Gadites and the Reubenites mightily and gouged out the right eye of e[very] one of them and imposed fe[ar and terror] on [I]srael, and there remained not a man of the Israelites be[yond] the Jordan [who]se right eye Nah[ash king of] the Ammonites did n[ot] [gou]ge out. Only seven thousand men [fled from] the Ammonites and came to [J]abesh-Gilead. And after about a month”—the words that follow are identical with verse 1 in the Masoretic Text.
2. the gouging out of the right eye. Mutilation of captives was a fairly common practice. Josephus explains that the blinding of the right eye would have impaired the ability to fight because the left eye was largely covered by the shield in battle. In any case, submitting to this ghastly mutilation was a mark of great humiliation, or “disgrace” (ḥerpah).
3. Leave us alone for seven days. Nahash’s seemingly surprising agreement to this condition is by no means a sign of generosity but must be understood from his viewpoint as an additional opportunity to humiliate the Israelites: he scarcely imagines that the disunited tribes will produce a “rescuer,” and thus the impotent tribes will all be forced to witness helplessly the mutilation of their trans-Jordanian kinsmen.
4. the messengers came to Gibeath-Saul. The men of Jabesh-Gilead have told Nahash they would search through “all the territory of Israel.” But perhaps they know something he does not—that Israel already has a tribally acclaimed ruler and military leader who resides in Gibeah, but who has not yet begun to act. The scholarly assumption that this entire story blatantly contradicts the previous account of Saul’s election as king and hence must derive from an independent source is by no means necessary.
6. the spirit of God seized Saul. As many commentators have noted, the story here explicitly follows the model of the inception of the charismatic leader’s career in Judges, when a kind of berserker spirit enters him and ignites him with eagerness to do battle. Saul’s coming in from the field behind the oxen is also reminiscent of the pattern in Judges in which an agriculturalist (compare Gideon) is transformed by an access of the spirit into a warrior. Given the uncertainty about the new monarchic dispensation, it is quite possible that Saul, after having been proclaimed king at Mizpah, might have returned to his work in the field, awaiting the occasion when he would begin to act on his new royal authority. The archetypal tale of the farmer who steps forward to save the nation in time of crisis will recur in Roman tradition in the story of Cincinnatus at the plow.
7. he took a yoke of oxen and hacked them to pieces. This violent symbolism doubly distinguishes Saul from the model of the ad hoc warrior-leader in Judges. The dismemberment of the oxen is an explicit repetition of the dismemberment of the concubine at the end of Judges 19 after she has been gang-raped to death by the men of Gibeah (later the home of Saul). In Judges, too, the bloody members were used to assemble all the tribes of Israel to war, though the person who hacked the body to pieces was not a judge but rather a morally dubious Levite, the husband of the dead woman. The allusion here is exquisitely ambiguous. Is this an act of restitution, a setting right of the ghastly civil war caused by the atrocity at Gibeah, or does it inaugurate the narrative of Saul’s public actions under the shadow of an earlier act of turpitude? Saul also differs from the judges in behaving like a king, for he prepares for war by instituting a kind of military conscription binding on all the tribes (the judges depended on volunteers and worked locally). Kings, like mafia capos, operate through coercion: Saul, in sending the hacked-up oxen parts to his fellow Israelites with the threat “Whoever does not come out … thus will be done to his oxen,” is presenting them with an offer they cannot refuse.
after Saul and after Samuel. The medieval Hebrew commentator Kimchi offers a shrewd explanation for Saul’s adding Samuel to his exhortation. “Since not all of them had accepted him as king, he said ‘after Samuel.’”
the fear of the LORD. This seemingly pious phrase might also mean “a terrible fear,” and it is, after all, Saul’s frightening threat conveyed by the bloody oxen parts that moves the people.
8. three hundred thousand. As usual, the inflated figure does not reflect historical reality. The ten-to-one ratio between Israel and Judah does mirror the ratio of ten tribes to one.
10. [to the Ammonites]. The bracketed words, not in the Hebrew, are added to make clear that it is no longer the messengers who are being addressed.
Tomorrow we shall come out to you. These words are intended to lull the Ammonites into a false sense of security before Saul’s surprise attack in the last hours before dawn (“the morning watch”).
12. Saul shall not be king over us. The “not” appears in some variant manuscripts. The Masoretic Text as it stands is usually construed as a question: “Saul will be king over us?” Robert Polzin tries to save the simple declarative sense of the Masoretic Text by proposing that after Saul has just powerfully acted like one of the old-time judges, the people, with the implicit endorsement of Saul, are inclined to retract their own insistence on monarchy and return to the institution of judgeship. This reading is ingenious, but may create more problems than it solves. The report of continuing dissidence about Saul’s claim to the throne, as at the end of the previous chapter, in fact sets the stage for much that will follow.
13. No man shall be put to death this day. Saul’s magnaminity, after his demonstration of coercion and military effectiveness, strikes a positive note at the beginning of his reign, though he will later prove to be utterly ruthless against subjects he suspects of disloyalty.
14. we shall renew there the kingship. This clause helps make sense of the triple story of Saul’s dedication as king. First there was the clandestine anointment, with no publicly visible consequences. Then there was the tribal assembly at Mizpah in which a reluctant Saul was chosen by lot and proclaimed king. After that event, however, he appears to have returned for the time being to private life. Now, following his signal success in mustering the tribes and defeating Ammon, Samuel calls for a new assembly to reconfirm Saul’s standing as king, which will then be seen in subsequent episodes manifested in the institutions and power of a regular court.
1And Samuel said to all Israel, “Look, I have heeded your voice in all that you said to me and have set a king over you. 2And so now the king walks before you and I have grown old and gray, and my sons, they are here with you, and I have walked before you from my youth till this day. 3Here I am! Witness against me before the LORD and before His anointed. Whose ox have I taken and whose donkey have I taken, whom have I wronged and whom have I abused, and from whose hand have I taken a bribe to avert my eyes from him? I shall return it to you!” 4And they said, “You have not wronged us and you have not abused us, and you have not taken a thing from any man.” 5And he said to them, “The LORD is witness against you, and His anointed is witness this day, that you have found not a thing in my hand.” And they said, “He is witness.” 6And Samuel said to the people, “Witness is the LORD, Who appointed Moses and Aaron and Who brought up your fathers from the land of Egypt! 7And now, stand forth, that I may seek judgment with you before the LORD, and I shall tell you all the LORD’S bounties that He did for you and for your fathers. 8When Jacob came into Egypt, and your fathers cried out to the LORD, the LORD sent Moses and Aaron, and they brought your fathers out of Egypt and settled them in this place. 9And they forgot the LORD your God, and He delivered them into the hand of Sisera commander of Hazor, and into the hand of the Philistines, and into the hand of the king of Moab, and they fought against them. 10And they cried out to the LORD and said, ‘We have offended, for we have abandoned the LORD and served the Baalim and the Ashtaroth. And now, rescue us from the hand of our enemies, and we shall serve You.’ 11And the LORD sent Jerubaal and Bedan and Jephthah and Samuel, and He rescued you from the hand of your enemies all around, and you dwelled in safety. 12And you saw that Nahash king of the Ammonites had come against you and you said to me, ‘No! A king shall reign over us,’ though the LORD your God was your king. 13And now, here is the king you have chosen, for whom you have asked, and here the LORD has put over you a king. 14If you fear the LORD and serve Him and heed His voice and rebel not against the LORD’s words, and if both you and the king who reigns over you will follow the LORD your God, He will rescue you. 15But if you heed not the voice of the LORD and you rebel against the LORD’S words, the hand of the LORD will be against you and against your king to destroy you. 16Even now, take your stance and see this great thing that the LORD is about to do before your eyes. 17Is it not wheat harvest today? I shall call unto the LORD and He will send thunder and rain, and mark and see, that the evil you have done is great in the eyes of the LORD, to ask for yourselves a king.” 18And Samuel called unto the LORD, and the LORD sent thunder and rain on that day, and all the people feared the LORD greatly, and they feared Samuel as well. 19And all the people said to Samuel, “Intercede on behalf of your servants with the LORD your God, that we may not die, for we have added to our offenses an evil thing to ask for ourselves a king.” 20And Samuel said to the people, “Fear not. You have done all this evil, but swerve not from following the LORD and serve the LORD with all your heart. 21And swerve not after mere emptiness that will not avail or rescue, for they are mere emptiness. 22For the LORD will not desert His people for the sake of His great name, as the LORD has undertaken to make you His people. 23I on my part, too, far be it from me to offend the LORD by ceasing to intercede on your behalf. I shall instruct you in the good and straight way. 24Only fear the LORD and serve Him truly with all your heart, for see the great things He has done for you. 25And if indeed you do evil, both you and your king will be swept away.”
CHAPTER 12 NOTES
Click here to advance to the next section of the text.
1. And Samuel said to all Israel. It is not clear whether Samuel’s farewell speech takes place at Gilgal on the ceremony of “renewing the kingship” mentioned at the end of the preceding chapter, or whether this is a separate occasion. It does seem in character for Samuel that he would end up converting the coronation assembly into still another diatribe against the monarchy and an apologia for his own authority as prophet-judge.
I have heeded your voice. The phrase takes us back to the tribal convocation in chapter 8, when the grudging Samuel was enjoined by God to heed the people’s voice and make them a king.
2. the king walks before you. As we have had occasion to note earlier, this idiom means to serve or act as a functionary.
my sons, they are here with you. This slightly odd reference to Samuel’s sons is in all likelihood a final verbal gesture toward the dynasty he has failed to create: Samuel’s crooked sons have already disqualified themselves from assuming his mantle, but here he appears to take a last wistful look at that prospect—my sons are here among you, but you insist instead on a king.
3. Whose ox have I taken and whose donkey have I taken. Samuel’s profession of innocence, as Kyle McCarter Jr. has aptly noted, picks up antithetically his admonition against the “practice of the king” in chapter 8. There he warned repeatedly that the king would “take” all the people’s cherished possessions. Here he proclaims that he, the prophet-judge, has taken nothing. In both instances, he shows himself a master of rhetoric.
abused. The Hebrew verb means etymologically to crush or smash.
6. Witness is the LORD. The Masoretic Text lacks “witness” (ʿed), which is supplied by the Septuagint. (The next clause also looks textually problematic because the verb rendered here as “appointed,” ʿasah, actually means “made” and is not idiomatic.) It is noteworthy that Samuel sets up his entire speech as a legal disputation between him and the people in which all the evidence, as they are compelled to admit, stands in his favor.
7. and I shall tell you. The Masoretic Text lacks these words, but the next phrase, “all the LORD’s bounties,” preceded by the accusative particle ʾet, clearly requires a verb, and the appropriate verb is reflected in the Septuagint.
8. When Jacob came into Egypt, and your fathers cried out. The Septuagint inserts between these two clauses the words “the Egyptians oppressed them.” But the Greek translators may have simply filled out a narrative ellipsis in the original Hebrew text.
10. we have abandoned the LORD and served the Baalim and the Ashtaroth. Samuel’s speech seems to be an intertwining of an early story with a Deuteronomistic (seventh-century or sixth-century) editorial recasting. The vehement opposition to the monarchy would be original, perhaps even going back to the historical figure of Samuel. The Deuteronomistic school on its part was by no means antimonarchic, though it wanted to limit the monarch with the rules of the Book of God’s Teaching (the Torah). On the other hand, the sin of idolatry is not an issue in the Samuel story, but it is a Deuteronomistic preoccupation. It is at this point in the speech that we encounter clusters of Deuteronomistic verbal formulas: “abandoned the LORD and served the Baalim,” “delivered [literally, sold] into the hand of,” “fear the LORD and serve Him and heed His voice,” “serve Him truly with all your heart.”
11. Bedan. The name of this judge is otherwise unknown, but since there is no reason to assume that the list in the Book of Judges is exhaustive, it seems prudent not to emend this into a familiar name.
and Samuel. It makes sense that Samuel would refer to himself by name rather than with the first-person pronoun because he wants to set himself as a matter of official record in the great roll call of Judges.
12. Nahash king of the Ammonites. Since there had been no question of Nahash in the original demand for a king in chapter 8, many scholars have inferred that the present episode reflects a different tradition, in which the call for monarchy is specifically linked with the Ammonite incursion reported in chapter 11. But Moshe Garsiel proposes an interesting political reading that preserves the unity of the text. The original request for a king stresses the need for a military leader but mentions no particular enemy, perhaps because the people fear to name the dominant Philistines. Saul would have initially been installed in the ceremony at Mizpah as a sort of vassal king (or, alternatively, leader of an underground movement), for the Philistines had garrisons in the territory of Benjamin. Now, after Saul’s military success against the Ammonites, Samuel explicitly associates the call for a monarchy with Nahash’s assault on Israel. This meeting at Gilgal would also have been an occasion to enlist the allegiance to Saul of the trans-Jordanian tribes.
13. the king you have chosen, for whom you have asked. Several times Samuel plays sardonically on “asked” (shaʾal) and “Saul” (Shaʾul). Garsiel also suggests a pun as well in “chosen” (baḥar) and the introductory designation of Saul as a “fine fellow” (baḥur, literally “chosen one”). Although the story of the institution of the monarchy indicates that God does the choosing, there is no real contradiction—Samuel, in his acute discomfort with the monarchy that has displaced his own authority, readily imputes the choosing to the people, despite his awareness that God has supposedly chosen. God on His part no more than acquiesces in the people’s stubborn insistence on a king. The ambiguity of Saul’s divine election will continue to be manifested in the narrative.
14. rebel not against the LORD’s words. The Hebrew says literally “against the LORD’s mouth,” but the same verb (root m-r-h) appears elsewhere with “words” as object, and the two formulations are variants of the same idiom.
He will rescue you. The Masoretic Text lacks a clause stating what will happen if Israel remains faithful to God. These words (which would reflect a single verb with its suffix in the Hebrew) are supplied from the Septuagint.
15. against your king to destroy you. The Masoretic Text reads “against your fathers” (without “to destroy you”). This makes no sense because it is a prediction of future catastrophe. Some ancient and medieval interpreters construe the word “as against your fathers,” but the Septuagint’s reading, reflected in this translation, is more likely because Samuel repeatedly brackets “you and your king” sarcastically in this speech.
17. wheat harvest. That is, early summer, when no rain falls in Israel.
19. an evil thing to ask for ourselves a king. Through the pressure of Samuel’s oration, this “renewal of the kingship” most peculiarly turns into a collective confession of the sin of having wanted a king.
21. swerve not after mere emptiness. “Swerve” is once again Deuteronomistic terminology—to veer off from the straight and narrow path of the LORD. The Masoretic Text inserts “that” (ki) after this verb, creating a small problem of syntax, but the Septuagint deletes the word. The present translation adds the adjective “mere” to “emptiness” (tohu) in order to convey the full pejorative sense of the noun, which in many contexts suggests futility and is associated with the emptiness of the desert (compare the tohu wabohu, “welter and waste,” of the beginning of Genesis).
23. far be it from me to offend the LORD by ceasing to intercede on your behalf. One should note how deftly Samuel upstages the king whom he has just helped the people to confirm in office. It is true, his argument runs, that you have made the sinful error of choosing yourself a king. (Samuel of course makes no allowance for God’s role in the choice, which might express grudging divine recognition of a new political necessity.) That cannot be reversed, but never fear—I will still be here to act as the intercessor you will desperately continue to need.
1Saul was [] years old when he became king, and [-] two years he reigned over Israel.
2And Saul chose for himself three thousand from Israel, and two thousand were with Saul at Michmash and in the Bethel high country, and a thousand were with Jonathan at Gibeath-Benjamin, and the rest of the people he sent away each man to his tent.
3And Jonathan struck down the Philistine prefect who was in Gibeah and the Philistines heard of it. And Saul blew the ram’s horn throughout the land, saying, “Let the Hebrews hear!” 4And all Israel heard, saying, “Saul has struck down the Philistine prefect, and, indeed, Israel has become repugnant to the Philistines.” And the people rallied round Saul at Gilgal. 5And the Philistines had assembled to do battle against Israel—thirty thousand chariots and six thousand horsemen and troops multitudinous as the sand on the shore of the sea. And they came up and encamped at Michmash, east of Beth-Aven. 6And the men of Israel saw that they were in straits, for the troops were hard-pressed, and the troops hid in caves and among thorns and among rocks and in dugouts and in pits. 7And Hebrews had crossed the Jordan into the territory of Gad and Gilead, while Saul was still at Gilgal, and all the troops were trembling behind him. 8And he waited seven days for the fixed time Samuel had set, and Samuel did not come, and the troops began to slip away from him. 9And Saul said, “Bring forth to me the burnt offering and the well-being sacrifice,” and he offered up the burnt offering. 10And it happened as he finished offering the burnt offering that, look, Samuel was coming, and Saul went out toward him to greet him. 11And Samuel said, “What have you done?” And Saul said, “For I saw that the troops were slipping away from me, and you on your part had not come at the fixed time, and the Philistines were assembling at Michmash. 12And I thought, ‘Now the Philistines will come down on me at Gilgal, without my having entreated the LORD’s favor.’ And I took hold of myself and offered up the burnt offering.” 13And Samuel said to Saul, “You have played the fool! Had you but kept the command of the LORD your God that He commanded you, now the LORD would have made your kingdom over Israel unshaken forever. 14But now, your kingdom shall not stand. The LORD has already sought out for Himself a man after His own heart, and the LORD has appointed him prince to His people, for you have not kept what the LORD commanded you.” 15And Samuel arose and went up from Gilgal to Gibeath-Benjamin. And Saul mustered the troops remaining with him, about six hundred men. 16And Saul and Jonathan his son and the troops remaining with them were staying at Gibeath-Benjamin, and the Philistines had encamped at Michmash. 17And a raiding party sallied forth from the Philistine camp in three columns—one column turned toward the road to Ophrah, to the Shual region, 18and one column turned toward the road to Beth-Horon, and one column turned toward the border road that looks out over the Zeboim Valley, toward the desert. 19And no smith could be found in all the land of Israel, for the Philistines had said, “Lest the Hebrews make sword or spear!” 20And all Israel would go down to the Philistines for every man to put an edge on his plowshare and his mattock and his ax and his sickle. 21And the price of the sharpening was a pim for the plowshares and the mattocks and the three-pronged forks and the axes, and for setting the goads. 22And so it was, on the day of battle, that no sword nor spear was found in the hands of all the troops who were with Saul and Jonathan, but in the hands of Saul and Jonathan his son. 23And the Philistine garrison sallied forth to the pass of Michmash.
CHAPTER 13 NOTES
Click here to advance to the next section of the text.
1. Saul was [] years old … and [-] two years he reigned. The Masoretic Text, notoriously defective at this point, says “Saul was a year old … and two years he reigned.” This whole sentence is absent from the Septuagint, leading one to suspect that the redactor here stitched into the narrative a textual fragment in which there were lacunae in the numbers that he did not presume to fill in.
3. Jonathan struck down the Philistine prefect. Though the Hebrew uses the standard idiom for killing someone in battle, the context of Israel’s subservience to the Philistines suggests that this was an act of assassination, intended to trigger general rebellion. Jonathan enters the narrative without introduction. The neophyte king had himself seemed a rather young man, but with the casualness about chronology characteristic of the biblical storyteller, Saul now has a grown son.
in Gibeah. The text reads “Geba,” but the two names, which continue to alternate, appear to be variants of the same name.
Saul blew the ram’s horn … saying, “Let the Hebrews hear!” The ram’s horn, which produces shrill, piercing sounds, was often used for a call to arms. The “hearing” of the Israelites is counterpointed to the just reported “hearing” of the Philistines. “Hebrews” is usually the term used by foreigners for the Israelites. As J. P. Fokkelman has observed, Saul invokes “a name used in contempt by enemies such as Pharaoh and the Philistines … in order to arouse his people’s pride and fortify their will to resist.”
4. Saul has struck down. Though Jonathan was the assassin, Saul, as political leader of the rebel forces, is credited with responsibility for the act.
Israel has become repugnant. The literal meaning of the Hebrew idiom is very much like “to be in bad odor with,” but that antiquated English idiom has a certain Victorian fussiness not suitable to this narrator.
5. thirty thousand chariots. This inflated figure is reduced to three thousand in the Septuagint.
6. in dugouts. The Hebrew term tsariaḥ appears only here and in Judges 9:46. Although the context in Judges has led some interpreters to construe it as a tower, extrabiblical evidence from Late Antiquity argues for a chamber, or sepulcher, hewn out of rock.
7. And Hebrews had crossed. Here the narrator’s use of “Hebrews” may have been encouraged by the attraction of a folk-etymological pun: ʿivrim (Hebrews) ʿavru (had crossed).
Saul was still at Gilgal. This cultic site is, according to a common identification, near Jericho in the Jordan Valley. The “Hebrews”—perhaps the general population and not the army—who cross the Jordan appear to be fleeing the Philistines to the relative safety of the territory of Gad and Gilead to the northeast.
8. the fixed time Samuel had set. The words “had set” (one word in the Hebrew) are lacking in the Masoretic Text but are supplied by two of the ancient versions. The fact that the Hebrew word in question, sam, has the same consonants as the first two consonants of Samuel’s name may have led to the scribal error. The entire story of Samuel’s fixing a period of seven days for Saul to await him at Gilgal before the offering of sacrifices goes back to 10:8. The fulfillment of that initial instruction to the new king has been interrupted by the election of Saul by lottery, his campaign against the Ammonites, and the renewal of the kingship at Gilgal. One must assume either that the order to await Samuel at Gilgal was for an eventual meeting at an unspecified future time or that one literary strand of the Saul story has been interrupted by the splicing in of other strands (chapters 11–12).
the troops began to slip away from him. Battle could not be engaged without first entreating the favorable disposition of the deity through sacrifice (compare Saul’s words of explanation in verse 12). Saul’s men are beginning to give up hope and to desert; so he feels, with good reason, that he can afford to wait no longer.
10. as he finished offering the burnt offering that, look, Samuel was coming. The timing gives the distinct appearance of a cat-and-mouse game played by Samuel. He is not absolutely late, but he has waited until the last possible moment—sometime well into the seventh day (or it might even be the eighth day), by which time Saul has been obliged to take matters into his own hands.
12. I took hold of myself. The Hebrew verb hitʾapeq means to force yourself to do, or to refrain from doing, something. The same verb is used when the tearful Joseph “could no longer hold himself in check” in the presence of his brothers (Genesis 45:1).
13. Had you but kept the command of the LORD. The Masoretic Text has a declarative, “you have not kept,” but the structure of the whole sentence argues strongly for emending lo’ (“not”) to lu (“if” introducing a clause contrary to fact). Samuel flatly assumes that his own commands and the commandments of the LORD are entirely equivalent. In fact, it is he, not God, who has given Saul the elaborate instructions about waiting seven days at Gilgal. In a kind of prophet’s tantrum, Samuel insists again and again in this speech on the words “commanded” and “command.” (In verse 14, “appointed him prince” is literally “commanded him prince.”)
made your kingdom … unshaken forever. The Hebrew verb hekhin means both to establish and to keep on a firm foundation (makhon), and so it is misleading to translate it only as the initiating “to establish.”
14. your kingdom shall not stand. Samuel’s rage over the fact that Saul has offered the sacrifice derives from his construing that act as a usurpation of his own prerogatives as master of the cult (though there are other biblical instances of kings who offer sacrifices). One suspects that Samuel has set up Saul for this “failure,” and that he would have been content only with a puppet king.
The LORD has already sought out for Himself a man after His own heart. Although this would have to be a veiled prediction of the advent of David, in naturalistic terms, the incensed Samuel is in a way bluffing: fed up with Saul, he announces to the king that God has already chosen a successor—about whom Samuel himself as yet knows nothing whatever, nor has he even had time for a communication from God that there will be a successor.
appointed him prince to His people. As Polzin shrewdly notes, David will later use these very words (2 Samuel 6:21) when he angrily tells Saul’s daughter Michal that it is he who has been divinely elected to replace her father.
15. to Gibeath-Benjamin. It looks improbable that Samuel would now go off after this confrontation to Gibeah, which is Saul’s hometown. The text at this point in the Septuagint has him going “on the way,” leaving the more likely outcome that he abandons Saul and his small handful of men at Gibeah to tackle the Philistines.
about six hundred men. By this point, 1400 have “slipped away.”
17. the Shual region. The name literally means “Foxland.”
18. Zeboim Valley. Or, Jackal Valley.
19. no smith could be found in all the land of Israel. This bit of background notation vividly reflects the abject status of the Israelites under Philistine domination. Ironsmiths are banned among them to prevent their developing the weaponry needed for rebellion.
20. his sickle. The reading used here is, as in the Septuagint, ḥermesho, instead of the Masoretic maḥareshato, “his plowshare,” which repeats the first term in the list.
21. the price of the sharpening was a pim. The italicized term occurs only here in the Bible, but the archaeologists have found stone weights marked pim, which is two-thirds of a shekel (here, evidently, a silver shekel). The Philistines, then, not only deprive the Israelites of the technology for making weapons but also reap a profit from their smithless vassals for the maintenance of the agricultural tools they need for their livelihood.
the three-pronged forks. A commonly proposed emendation yields “a third of a shekel for the forks and the axes and for the setting of the goads.” This change would make sense if in fact the sharpening of these implements were half the work of sharpening plowshares and mattocks, but that is not entirely clear.
1And when the day came round, Jonathan son of Saul said to the lad bearing his armor, “Come, let us cross over to the Philistine garrison which is on the other side there,” but his father he did not tell. 2And Saul was sitting at the outskirts of Gibeah under the pomegranate tree which is at Migron, and the troops that were with him were about six hundred men. 3And Ahijah son of Ahitub brother of Ichabod son of Phineas son of Eli priest of the LORD at Shiloh was bearer of the ephod, and the troops did not know that Jonathan had gone. 4And in the pass through which Jonathan sought to cross over to the Philistine garrison there was a rocky crag on one side and on the other side, and the name of the one was Bozez and the name of the other Seneh. 5The one crag loomed to the north facing Michmash and the other to the south facing Gibeah. 6And Jonathan said to the lad bearing his armor, “Come, let us cross over to the garrison of these uncircumcised! Perhaps the LORD will act for us, for nothing holds the LORD back from rescue, whether by many or by few.” 7And his armor bearer said to him, “Do you whatever your heart inclines—here I am with you, my heart as yours.” 8And Jonathan said, “Look, we are about to cross over to the men and we shall be exposed to them. 9If thus they say, ‘Stand still until we get to you,’ we shall stand where we are and not go up to them. 10And if thus they say, ‘Come up to us,’ we shall go up, for the LORD will have given them in our hand, and that will be the sign for us.” 11And the two of them were exposed to the Philistine garrison, and the Philistines said, “Look, Hebrews are coming out of the holes where they’ve been hiding.” 12And the men of the garrison spoke out to Jonathan and his armor bearer and said, “Come up to us, and we’ll teach you something!” And Jonathan said to his armor bearer, “Come up behind me, for the LORD has given them into the hand of Israel.” 13And Jonathan climbed up on his hands and knees with his armor bearer behind him, and they fell before Jonathan with his armor bearer finishing them off behind him. 14And the first toll of dead that Jonathan with his armor bearer struck down was about twenty men, with arrows and rocks of the field. 15And terror shook the camp in the field and all the troops. The garrison and the raiding party were also shaken, and the earth trembled, and it became dire terror. 16And the lookouts attached to Saul at Gibeath-Benjamin saw and, look, the multitude was melting away and going off yonder. 17And Saul said to the troops who were with him, “Call the roll, pray, and see who has gone from us,” and they called the roll and, look, Jonathan and his armor bearer were absent. 18And Saul said to Ahijah, “Bring forth the ephod.” For on that day he was bearing the ephod before the Israelites. 19And it happened that as Saul was speaking to the priest, the tumult in the Philistine camp was growing greater and greater. And Saul said to the priest, “Pull back your hand.” 20And Saul and all the troops who were with him rallied and entered into the fighting, and, look, every man’s sword was against his fellow—a very great panic. 21And there were Hebrews who were previously with the Philistines, who had come up with them into the camp, and they, too, turned round to be with Israel under Saul and Jonathan. 22And all the men of Israel who were hiding out in the high country of Ephraim had heard that the Philistines were fleeing, and they, too, gave chase after them in the fighting. 23aAnd the LORD delivered Israel on that day.
23bAnd the fighting moved on past Beth-Aven. 24And the men of Israel were hard-pressed on that day. And Saul made the troops take an oath, saying, “Cursed be the man who eats food until evening, until I take vengeance upon my enemies!” And all the troops tasted no food. 25And the whole country came into the forest, and there was honey on the ground. 26And the troops entered the forest and, look, there was a flow of honey, but none touched his hand to his mouth, for the troops feared the vow. 27But Jonathan had not heard when his father made the troops swear, and he reached with the tip of the staff that was in his hand and dipped it into the honeycomb and brought his hand back to his mouth, and his eyes lit up. 28And a man from the troops spoke up and said, “Your father made the troops solemnly swear, saying, ‘Cursed be the man who eats food today.’ And so the troops were famished.” 29And Jonathan said, “My father has stirred up trouble for the land. See, pray, that my eyes have lit up because I tasted a bit of this honey. 30How much better still if the troops had really eaten today from the booty of their enemies that they found, for then the toll of Philistines would have been all the greater.” 31And they struck down the Philistines on that day from Michmash to Ajalon, and the troops were very famished. 32And the troops pounced on the booty and took sheep and cattle and calves and slaughtered them on the ground, and the troops ate them together with the blood. 33And they told Saul, saying, “Look, the troops are offending the LORD by eating together with the blood!” And he said, “You have acted treacherously. Roll a big stone over to me now.” 34And Saul said, “Spread out among the troops, and say to them, ‘Every man bring forth to me his ox and his sheep and slaughter them here and eat, and you shall not offend the LORD by eating together with the blood.’” And all the troops brought forth each man what he had in hand that night and they slaughtered it there. 35And Saul built an altar to the LORD, it was the first altar he built to the LORD.
36And Saul said, “Let us go down after the Philistines by night and despoil them till daybreak, and we shall not leave a man among them.” And they said, “Whatever is good in your eyes, do.” And the priest said, “Let us approach God yonder.” 37And Saul inquired of God, “Shall I go down after the Philistines? Will You give them in the hand of Israel?” And He did not answer him on that day. 38And Saul said, “Draw near, all you chiefs of the troops, mark and see, wherein is this offense today? 39For as the LORD lives Who delivers Israel, were it in Jonathan my son, he would be doomed to die!” And none answered him from all the troops. 40And he said to all Israel, “You will be on one side and I and Jonathan my son on the other side.” And the troops said to Saul, “What is good in your eyes, do.” 41And Saul said, “LORD, God of Israel! Why did You not answer Your servant today? If there is guilt in me or in Jonathan my son, O LORD God of Israel, show Urim, and if it is in Your people Israel, show Thummim.” And the lot fell on Jonathan and Saul, and the troops came out clear. 42And Saul said, “Cast between me and Jonathan my son.” And the lot fell on Jonathan. 43And Saul said, “Tell me, what have you done?” And Jonathan told him and said, “I indeed tasted from the tip of the staff that was in my hand a bit of honey. Here I am, ready to die!” 44And Saul said, “So may God do to me, and even more, for Jonathan is doomed to die!” 45And the troops said to Saul, “Will Jonathan die, who has performed this great rescue in Israel? Heaven forbid, as the LORD lives, that a single hair of his head should fall to the ground! For with God has he wrought this day.” And the troops saved Jonathan, and he did not die. 46And Saul went away from pursuing the Philistines and the Philistines went back to their place.
47And Saul had taken hold of the kingship over Israel, and he did battle round about with all his enemies, with Moab and with the Ammonites and with Edom and with the kings of Zobah and with the Philistines, and wherever he turned he would inflict punishment. 48And he triumphed and struck down Amalek and rescued Israel from the hand of its plunderers.
49And Saul’s sons were Jonathan and Ishvi and Malkishua, and the names of his two daughters were Merab the firstborn and Michal the younger. 50And the name of Saul’s wife was Ahinoam daughter of Ahimaaz. And the name of his commander was Abiner son of Ner, Saul’s uncle. 51And Kish, Saul’s father, and Ner, Abner’s father, were sons of Abiel. 52And the fighting against the Philistines was fierce all the days of Saul, and when Saul saw any warrior or valiant fellow, he would gather him to himself.
CHAPTER 14 NOTES
Click here to advance to the next section of the text.
1. but his father he did not tell. One assumes that his father would have forbidden him to go out on so dangerous a mission, but there is also an implicit contrast between Saul, sitting under the pomegranate tree, hesitant to act in the face of the superior forces of the enemy, and Jonathan, prepared to execute a daring commando raid.
3. Ahijah son of Ahitub brother of Ichabod. The genealogy here casts a certain suspect light on Saul: the priest who accompanies him to the battlefield, and on whose prognostication he relies, belongs to the blighted—and rejected—house of Eli.
bearer of the ephod. The title, noseʾ ephod, is formally parallel to “armor bearer,” noseʾ kelim, and so suggests a contrast between Saul, who relies on divination, and Jonathan, who relies on his weapons.
4. the pass through which Jonathan sought to cross over. The Philistines and the Israelites are encamped on the tops of two steep hills facing each other, with a deep gully, or wadi, running between them. Jonathan and his armor bearer are able to make their way down the slope unseen by taking cover among the crags and under overhangs. But Jonathan realizes that there will be a moment of truth in this tactic, for when they reach the floor of the gully, they will be “exposed” (verse 8) to the Philistine outpost.
5. loomed. The Hebrew mutsaq means literally “column.” It might conceivably be a scrambled scribal repetition of the next Hebrew word in the text, mitsafon, “from the north.”
6. these uncircumcised. This designation for the Philistines is of course contemptuous. Its spirit is precisely reflected, from the other side of the ethnic barrier, in Othello’s reference to a Turk he killed in battle as a “circumcised dog.”
7. Do whatever your heart inclines—here I am with you, my heart as yours. The translation follows the reading of the Septuagint. The Masoretic Text conveys the same general idea, though a bit less coherently: “Do whatever is in your heart, incline you—here I am with you as your heart.”
10. that will be the sign for us. Readers from the Talmud to our own times have construed this as a kind of divination. It is far more likely that a further contrast is implied between Saul, who depends on divination, and Jonathan, who is thinking in pragmatic military terms: if they invite us to come up to them, that will be our great opportunity; if they order us to await their descent, we may have no recourse (except, perhaps, flight at the last moment).
11. Look, Hebrews are coming out of the holes where they’ve been hiding. These words accord perfectly with the report in 13:6 of the Israelites hiding in every nook and cranny, and also vividly express the contempt of the Philistines for the Hebrews, whom they depict as so many vermin. The contempt is extended in the taunting challenge to Jonathan and his lad in the next verse.
13. Jonathan climbed up on his hands and knees. Although it is not easy to reconstruct the exact tactic of surprise, this notation makes clear that instead of walking up the slope directly to the Philistine outpost, Jonathan and his armor bearer manage to slip off to one side and make their way up the slope by a circuitous route, crouching and crawling in order to take shelter among the rocks, and thus come upon the outpost undetected.
14. the first toll of dead. The literal meaning of the Hebrew is “the first blow.”
with arrows and rocks of the field. The translation adopts the reading of the Septuagint. The Masoretic Text has here “within about half a furrow long, an acre [?] of field,” but that sequence of Hebrew words looks scrambled.
15. terror shook. The Hebrew ḥaradah means both terror and shaking.
dire terror. The Hebrew is literally “terror of God,” but the latter word, ’elohim, serves as an intensifier. In any case, the idiom functions as a kind of pun—dire terror is terror caused by God.
16. going off yonder. The translation presupposes halom (“yonder”), a repeated word in this episode, instead of the Masoretic wahalom, which could mean either, asyntactically, “and yonder” or “and hitting” (that is, the Philistines were going on, hitting each other).
18. Bring forth the ephod. The Masoretic Text, both in this clause and the next, has “Ark of God” instead of “ephod,” but the reading of the Septuagint, ephod, is compelling on several grounds. We have been informed earlier that the Ark of God was left, not to be moved for the foreseeable future, at Kiriath-Jearim. The Ark was not an instrument of divination, like the ephod, and what Saul wants Ahijah to do here is to divine. It is possible that Ahijah’s lineal connection with the keepers of the Ark at Shiloh led some early transmitter of the text to align this episode with the earlier story in which the Ark—quite misguidedly—was brought out from Shiloh to the battlefield. The Masoretic Text also reads, asyntactically, “for the Ark of God on that day was, and the Israelites,” whereas the Septuagint, far more coherently, has “for on that day he was bearing the ephod before the Israelites.”
19. Pull back your hand. That is, desist from the act of divination you have begun—it is no longer necessary, for the auditory evidence of the Philistine rout has reached our ears.
20. and, look, every man’s sword was against his fellow. This spectacle of total, self-mutilating panic (mehumah) in the camp of the enemy is a recurrent motif that goes back to Judges (compare the effect of Gideon’s surprise attack on the Midianite camp), and is a kind of narrative realization of God’s direct intervention in battle to grant victory to Israel. The foundational instance of this motif is the victory at the Sea of Reeds in Exodus.
21. Hebrews who were previously with the Philistines. Given the subject status of the Israelites, it is not surprising that some of them would have been conscripted by the Philistines, either as soldiers or to perform menial tasks for the troops. They are referred to here as “Hebrews” because that is how their Philistine masters would have referred to them.
24. And the men of Israel were hard-pressed. The explanation for being hard-pressed is not certain. The Hebrew term, nigas, most naturally refers to being at a military disadvantage, but here the Israelites appear to have the upper hand. The other possibility is that the men are weak from hunger, not having had the opportunity to eat in their hot pursuit of the Philistines. The oath Saul exacts would then compound this predicament. It should be said that the Septuagint reflects a different text for this entire clause: “And Saul committed a great blunder on that day.”
Cursed be the man who eats food. As we shall have occasion to see later in the David narrative, it was a fairly common practice (though by no means an automatic one) for fighting men to take on themselves a vow of abstinence from food, in order to enter the battle in what amounted to a state of dedicated ritual purity. But Saul in this instance makes a miscalculation, imposing a fast on hungry men, in an effort to force the hand of divinity. (Thus the Septuagint’s version of the first clause of this verse might be regarded as an interpretive gloss on the lapidary formulation of the received text.)
25. And the whole country came into the forest. This sounds as odd in the Hebrew as in translation because “country” (haʾarets) is not an idiomatic term for “people.” Extensive textual surgery yields this conjectural reconstruction of an original clause: “and there was honeycomb on the ground.” An additional difficulty in this passage is that the common Hebrew term yaʿar, “forest,” has a rare homonym that means honeycomb. (In verse 27, the term that occurs is yaʿarah, which is unambiguous both because with the feminine suffix it can refer only to honeycomb and because it is joined with devash, “honey.”) But the received text in our verse has the preposition “into” (be), which presumes that yaʿar means “forest” and not “honeycomb.”
27. his eyes lit up. The idiom used for the refreshing effect of a taste of food is a pointed one because, as Shimon Bar-Efrat has noted, the verb “to light up” (the Hebrew verb ʾor) plays antithetically on Saul’s “cursed (ʾarur) be the man.”
29. My father has stirred up trouble. The verb ʿakhar that is used here is doubly important. Etymologically, it means “to muddy,” as in stirring up muck in a pond. Thus, it is an antithesis to the lighting up of the eyes Jonathan has just experienced through partaking of food. It is also the verb Jephthah invokes when he sees it is his daughter who has come out to greet him: “and you have joined ranks with my troublers” (Judges 11:35). The echo sets up a network of intertextual links with the Jephthah story: here, too, a father who is a military leader seeks to influence the outcome of the battle by a rash vow that is an unwitting death sentence on his own child.
31. And they struck down the Philistines. Although the form of the two verbs does not indicate it, the narrative logic of the scene compels us to construe this sentence as a pluperfect summary of the day’s action, responding to Jonathan’s reference to the “toll” (literally, “blow”) exacted from the Philistines.
32. the troops pounced on the booty … ate them together with the blood. The first verb here has pejorative force, being generally used for birds of prey descending on their victims. Biblical law repeatedly prohibits the consumption of meat together with the blood because the blood is regarded as the sacred stuff of life. The slaughtering on the ground here would make it more difficult to allow the blood to drain off, as would have been done in slaughtering on a stone platform or altar. (Note Saul’s correction of the practice in verses 33–34.) Jonathan’s tasting a bit of honey thus leads to an orgy of gluttonous consumption of meat with blood. This consequence attaches an association of violation of sacred law to Jonathan’s act, but the ultimate fault lies with Saul, who by imposing a fast on already famished men has set them up to abandon all restraint the moment the taboo against eating is broken.
34. what he had in hand. This accords with the Septuagint, ʾasher beyado, against the Masoretic, “his bull in his hand,” shoro beyado.
37. And Saul inquired of God … And He did not answer him. Although it was extremely common for military leaders everywhere in the ancient Near East to consult an oracle before going into battle, Saul’s failed inquiry here participates in a larger pattern in his story: he is constantly seeking knowledge of what is about to happen (as in his quest for a seer to help him locate the asses at the very beginning), but this knowledge is repeatedly withheld from him.
38. wherein is this offense. Saul assumes that the oracle did not respond because someone among his troops committed some “offense.” The narrator does not necessarily endorse this assumption.
39. were it in Jonathan my son. “It” refers to the just mentioned “offense.” Is this a flourish of rhetorical emphasis, or, as J. P. Fokkelman has suggested, does it open the possibility that Saul has Jonathan in mind? In the immediately preceding episode, after all, Jonathan has gone out on a military operation without permission. Jonathan now is brought forth as the possible perpetrator of some further, not yet specified offense, which will prove to be the tasting of the honey. In any case, there seems to be some deep ambivalence between father and son well before the appearance of David at court.
41. LORD, God of Israel! Why did You not answer Your servant today? If there is guilt in me or in Jonathan my son … show Urim, and if it is in Your people Israel, show Thummim. This version comes from the Septuagint. The Masoretic Text here has the short and cryptic “Show Thammim [sic].” Saul’s frustrated reference to his failure to receive an answer from the oracle makes a great deal of narrative sense (see the comment on verse 37). The Septuagint version also makes intelligible the process of oracular lottery. The Urim and Thummim were two divinatory objects attached to the ephod, probably in a special compartment. They may have been in the form of stones or tokens with lettering on them. They provided indication of binary oppositions: thus the question addressed to the oracle had to take the form of yes or no, x or y. The opposition may have been underscored by the fact that Urim and Thummim begin, respectively, with the first and last letter of the Hebrew alphabet. More speculatively, Urim might be linked with ʾaror, “to curse,” and Thummim with the root t-m-m, whole or innocent.
the lot fell on Jonathan and Saul. The same idiom of being “caught” by the lot that was used for Saul’s election recurs here in the devolution of the curse on Jonathan.
42. Cast between me and Jonathan. Since the Urim and Thummim can provide only binary responses, it is necessary to divide again into two alternatives in order to get an answer.
43. indeed tasted … a bit of honey. Jonathan begins by clearly and emphatically admitting responsibility, using the infinitive absolute followed by the verb (literally, “taste I have tasted”). But he chooses, with precision, the minimal verb “taste” rather than “eat” and holds back its minimal object, “a bit of honey,” for the very end of the sentence.
45. And the troops said to Saul, “Will Jonathan die.” As several commentators have observed, this is a precise reversal of the incident after Saul’s victory over Nahash, in which the troops sought to kill dissidents and Saul saved their lives. Now he has become the severe autocrat, and his son’s well-earned popularity with the troops saves the prince.
47. Saul had taken hold of the kingship. The verb used, lakad, is the same one just invoked for the process of being caught, trapped, taken hold of, in the divine lottery. Saul himself was “caught” for kingship. Now, through conquest, he catches, or secures, the kingship. There is thus surely an undertone of ambiguity in this report of his success as monarch.
he would inflict punishment. The Hebrew yarshiʿa usually means to condemn someone as guilty in a court of justice. But a related idiom, “to do justice,” ʿasot shephatim, also means to carry out punitive acts against an enemy. The Masoretic version is to be preferred to the Septuagint’s yoshiʿa, “he would rescue,” because in this narrative, God, not Saul, is represented as the rescuer. Apparently, the implication is that he carried out punishing expeditions against Israel’s enemies to the east of the Jordan without actually conquering them, as David was to do.
49. And Saul’s sons. This entire notice of Saul’s family and of his conquests is placed as a formal marker of conclusion to the body of the Saul story. What follows is the episode that will definitively disqualify him for the throne in Samuel’s eyes, and then David will enter the scene. The episode in which Saul pronounces a death sentence on his son and heir heralds the climactic encounter with Samuel over Amalek in which the prophet will pronounce the end of Saul’s incipient dynasty. Eventually, Saul and Jonathan, the parties jointly indicated by the first cast of the Urim, will perish in battle on the same day.
50. Abiner. A variant vocalization of Abner.
52. And the fighting against the Philistines. Saul has greater success on the eastern front, but he is unable to subdue the Philistines. In the end, they will destroy him in their victory at Gilboa.
when Saul saw any warrior … he would gather him to himself. This report of constant military conscription indicates the institutionalization of the monarchy and also accords with Samuel’s warning about the burden of conscription that the king would impose.
1And Samuel said to Saul, “Me has the LORD sent to anoint you as king over His people Israel. And now, heed the voice of the words of the LORD. 2Thus says the LORD of Armies, ‘I have made reckoning of what Amalek did to Israel, that he set against him on the way as he was coming up from Egypt. 3Now, go and strike down Amalek, and put under the ban everything that he has, you shall not spare him, and you shall put to death man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.’”
4And Saul summoned the troops and assembled them at Telaim, two hundred thousand foot soldiers and ten thousand men of Judah. 5And Saul came up to the city of Amalek and lay in wait in the ravine. 6And Saul said to the Kenite, “Go, turn away, come down from amidst the Amalekite, lest I sweep you away together with him, for you did kindness to all the Israelites when they came up from Egypt.” And the Kenite turned away from the midst of Amalek. 7And Saul struck down Amalek from Havilah till you come to Shur, which is before Egypt. 8And he caught Agag king of Amalek alive, and all the people he put under the ban with the edge of the sword. 9And Saul, and the troops with him, spared Agag and the best of the sheep and the cattle, the fat ones and the young ones, everything good, and they did not want to put them under the ban. But all the vile and worthless possessions, these they put under the ban.
10And the word of the LORD came to Samuel, saying, 11“I repent that I made Saul king, for he has turned back from Me, and My words he has not fulfilled.” And Samuel was incensed and he cried out to the LORD all night long. 12And Samuel rose early in the morning to meet Saul, and it was told to Samuel, saying, “Saul has gone to Carmel and, look, he has put up a monument for himself, and has turned about and passed onward, and gone down to Gilgal.” 13And Samuel came to Saul, and Saul said to him, “Blessed be you to the LORD! I have fulfilled the word of the LORD.” 14And Samuel said, “And what is this sound of sheep in my ears, and the sound of cattle that I hear?” 15And Saul said, “From the Amalekite they have brought them, for the troops spared the best of the sheep and the cattle in order to sacrifice to the LORD your God, and the rest we put under the ban.” 16And Samuel said, “Hold off, that I may tell you what the LORD spoke to me this night.” And he said, “Speak.” 17And Samuel said, “Though you may be small in your own eyes, you are the head of the tribes of Israel, and the LORD has anointed you king over Israel. 18And the LORD sent you on a mission and said to you, ‘You shall put under the ban the offenders, Amalek, and do battle against them till you destroy them all.’
19And why did you not heed the voice of the LORD, for you pounced on the booty and did evil in the eyes of the LORD?” 20And Saul said to Samuel, “But I heeded the voice of the LORD and went on the way the LORD sent me, and I brought back Agag king of Amalek, but Amalek I put under the ban. 21And the troops took from the booty sheep and cattle, the pick of the banned things, to sacrifice to the LORD your God at Gilgal.” 22And Samuel said,
“Does the LORD take delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices
as in heeding the voice of the LORD?
For heeding is better than sacrifice,
hearkening, than the fat of rams.
23For the diviner’s offense is rebellion,
the transgression of idols—defiance.
Since you have cast off the word of the LORD,
He has cast you aside as king.”
24And Saul said to Samuel, “I have offended, for I have transgressed the utterance of the LORD, and your word, for I feared the troops and listened to their voice. 25Now then, forgive, pray, my offense, and turn back with me, that I may bow down before the LORD.” 26And Samuel said to Saul, “I will not turn back with you, for you have cast aside the word of the LORD and He has cast you aside from being king over Israel.” 27And Samuel turned round to go, and Saul grasped the skirt of his cloak, and it tore. 28And Samuel said to him, “The LORD has torn away the kingship of Israel from you this day and given it to your fellow man who is better than you. 29And, what’s more, Israel’s Eternal does not deceive and does not repent, for He is no human to repent.” 30And Saul said, “I have offended. Now show me honor, pray, before the elders of my people and before Israel, and turn back with me, that I may bow to the LORD your God. 31And Samuel turned back from Saul, and Saul bowed to the LORD. 32And Samuel said, “Bring forth to me Agag king of Amalek!” And Agag went to him with mincing steps, and he thought, “Ah, death’s bitterness is turned away!” 33And Samuel said,
“As your sword has bereaved women,
more bereaved than all women your mother!”
And Samuel cut him apart before the LORD at Gilgal. 34And Samuel went to Ramah, while Saul went up to his home in Gibeath-Saul.
35And Samuel saw Saul no more till his dying day, for Samuel was grieved about Saul, and the LORD had repented making Saul king over Israel.
CHAPTER 15 NOTES
Click here to advance to the next section of the text.
1. Me has the LORD sent. Samuel, by placing the accusative first-person pronoun at the beginning of his speech (normal Hebrew usage would simply attach an accusative suffix to the verb), once again highlights his own centrality to this whole process: it is only because he, as God’s unique delegate, has anointed Saul that Saul can claim to be king. In this way, Samuel sets the stage rhetorically for the prerogative of canceling Saul’s kingship that he will exercise later in this episode.
heed the voice of the words of the LORD. This redundant phrasing is a little odd, but it is dictated by the pressure of the thematically fraught key phrase, “heed [or listen to] the voice,” that defines the entire episode. Saul fails to listen as he fails to see.
2. reckoning of what Amalek did to Israel. After Amalek massacred the Israelite stragglers (see Deuteronomy 25:18), Israel was commanded to destroy all remnants of the Amalekites.
set against him. This phrase may be an ellipsis for “set ambushes against him.”
3. put under the ban everything that he has. The verb here is in the plural, evidently including the troops together with Saul, though the subsequent verbs in this verse are in the singular. The “ban” (ḥerem), one of the cruelest practices of ancient Near Eastern warfare, is an injunction of total destruction—of all living things—of the enemy. Amalek is, of course, the archetypal implacable enemy of Israel, but it should be said that here, as throughout the Samuel story, there is at least some margin of ambiguity as to whether the real source of this ferocious imperative is God or the prophet who claims to speak on His behalf.
you shall not spare him. The Hebrew verb ḥamal straddles two senses, to feel mercy for and to allow to survive, and the ambiguity between the emotional and the pragmatic sense is exploited throughout the story.
4. summoned the troops. The word for “summoned” (there are several more common terms for mustering troops in the Bible) is quite rare, and literally means “made them listen.” The same verb as “to listen” in a different conjugation, it continues to call attention to this thematically weighted activity.
two hundred thousand foot soldiers and ten thousand men of Judah. The troops from Judah are presumably also foot soldiers, and so an ellipsis is probable: “and another ten thousand foot soldiers from the men of Judah.”
6. Go, turn away, come down from amidst. These overlapping imperative verbs are obviously meant to underscore the urgency of the command. The Kenites appear to have been a tribe of migratory metalsmiths (the meaning of their name) somehow allied with Israel (compare Judges 4–5), although the nature of the “kindness” they did for Israel is not known.
9. And Saul, and the troops with him, spared Agag. The Hebrew says simply “Saul and the troops spared Agag,” but because a singular verb is used with the plural subject, it signals to the audience that Saul is the principal actor and the troops only accessories. (This highlighting of the first-mentioned agent through a singular verb for a plural subject is a general feature of biblical usage.) When confronted by Samuel, Saul will turn the responsibility for the action on its head. “Spared” momentarily sounds as though it could mean “had mercy on,” but then it is also attached to cattle and sheep. There is a morally scandalous pairing in the selective massacre Saul and his troops perpetrate: they kill all the defective animals and every man, woman, child, and infant, while sparing the good, edible animals and the king (perhaps with the idea that some further profit can be extracted from him).
the fat ones. The Masoretic Text has mishnim (two-year-olds?), but, in a reversal of consonants, the Syriac and the Targum reflect shmenim, fat ones.
11. Samuel was incensed. The reasons for his rage are wonderfully unspecified, or perhaps overdetermined. He may well be incensed with Saul, or with the people who coerced him into this whole distasteful monarchic business in the first place, or even with God for making him heed the people.
12. Carmel. This is not the Carmel near Haifa but a town in the tribal territory of Judah, in the general vicinity of Hebron.
he has put up a monument for himself. This would be a victory marker, probably in the form of a stele.
14. this sound of sheep … and the sound of cattle. “Sound” and “voice” are the same word in Hebrew (qol), and so the thematic key word of the episode comes to the fore: Saul had been enjoined to listen to the voice of the LORD; now Samuel tells him that all that can be heard (the same verb as “listen” in Hebrew) is the bleating and mooing “voice” of the very flocks which, according to God’s word, should have been destroyed.
15. they have brought them. Saul first uses a vague third-person plural, entirely shifting the responsibility to unnamed others who have done the bringing.
the troops spared the best of the sheep and the cattle. In verse 9, of course, it was expressly reported that Saul, with the troops as accessories, spared the flocks.
in order to sacrifice to the LORD your God. This pious justification for the act was nowhere in evidence in the narrator’s initial account of it (verses 8–9). Although it is common enough in biblical usage when addressing a holy man to say “the LORD your God,” that locution, invoked twice in this story by Saul, stresses the distance between him and God and his sense that it is Samuel who has proprietary claims on the divinity.
17. Though you may be small in your own eyes. Samuel is obviously harking back to Saul’s initial expression of unworthiness for the throne (“from the smallest of the tribes of Israel,” 9:21), as if to say, Well, you may not really amount to much, as you yourself said at the outset, but you nevertheless have taken upon yourself the solemn responsibility of king.
18. mission. Literally, “a way.”
till you destroy them all. The Masoretic Text, illogically, has “till they destroy them all,” but the second-person suffix is supplied in some of the ancient versions.
19. why did you not heed the voice of the LORD. Samuel hammers home the thematic point of the whole confrontation: Saul, actually the initiator, proclaims he has listened to the voice of the people (verse 24)—as, ironically, Samuel himself was enjoined by God to do in chapter 8—instead of to the voice of God. This antithesis is more pointed in the Hebrew because the more general meaning of the word for “troops,” ʿam, is “people.”
you pounced on the booty. Samuel uses the same verb for greedy predation that was used to describe the orgy of meat eating after the breaking of the vow of fasting in chapter 14.
21. the troops took. Once again, Saul shifts the responsibility for the act from himself to his troops.
22. Does the LORD take delight in burnt offerings. Samuel caps his prophetic denunciation with the declamation of a prophetic poem. The theme that God requires obedience, not rote performance of the cult, is a common one among the later “literary” prophets, though in their poetry obedience to God means refraining from acts of exploitation rather than carrying out a program of extermination.
heeding the voice of the LORD. The thematic phrase is now placed in the foreground of the prophetic poem, reinforced by “heeding [or listening] is better than sacrifice” and “hearkening” in the next lines.
23. the diviner’s offense is rebellion. That is, rebellion is as great a sin as divination or sorcery. The choice of the comparison is not accidental, considering Saul’s repeated futile attempts to divine the future.
the transgression of idols—defiance. The first phrase in the Hebrew is literally “transgression and idols,” but is readily construed as a hendiadys (two words for a single concept) without emending the text. The gist of this parallel verset: defiance is as great a sin as the worship of idols (teraphim).
24. I have transgressed the utterance of the LORD, and your word. The Hebrew is literally “the mouth of the LORD.” There is a kind of hesitation in Saul’s words: I have violated God’s command, and yours as well. Is there a difference between the two? Though there may well be, Saul is in no position to argue that Samuel’s words are not God’s.
25. turn back with me, that I may bow down. It would have been Samuel’s function to offer the sacrifice. For Samuel not to accompany Saul to the altar would be a manifest public humiliation, a gesture of abandonment.
27. Saul grasped the skirt of his cloak, and it tore. The “little cloak” that Hannah would bring each year for the child Samuel has now become the prophet’s flowing robe. Samuel, who never misses a cue to express his implacability toward Saul, immediately converts the tearing of the cloak into a dramatic symbol of Saul’s lost kingdom. The Saul story, as we shall see, will return to cloaks and to their torn or cut skirts.
29. Israel’s Eternal does not deceive and does not repent. Samuel’s use of the verb “repent” strikes a peculiar dissonance. We in fact have been told that God repented that He made Saul king. What Samuel says here is that God will not change His mind about changing His mind. But might not this verbal contradiction cast some doubt on Samuel’s reliability as a source for what God does and doesn’t want? There even remains a shadow of a doubt as to whether the election of Saul in the first place was God’s, or whether it was merely Samuel’s all-too-human mistake.
30. show me honor. Saul reverts to the recurrent term kabed—“honor” or “glory” (as in “glory is exiled from Israel”). Knowing that Samuel has rejected him, he implores the prophet at least to help him save face in offering the sacrifice.
31. Samuel turned back from Saul. All English versions render this, erroneously, to indicate that Samuel nevertheless accompanied Saul to the sacrifice. But the expression “turn back with” (shuv ʿim), as in verse 30, and “turn back from [literally, after]” (shuv ʾaḥarei) are antonyms, the latter meaning unambiguously “to abandon.” (It is precisely the latter idiom that we see in God’s condemnation of Saul in verse 11.) Samuel is completing his rejection of Saul here by refusing to accompany him in the cult, shaming him by forcing him to offer the sacrifice without the officiating of the man of God.
32. with mincing steps. The Hebrew adverbial term maʿadanot is much disputed. Some interpret it as “stumbling,” others, by a reversal of consonants, read it as “in fetters.” But the root of the word seems to point with the least strain to ʿ-d-n—“pleasure,” “delicate thing.” That makes sense if one construes Agag’s words (the meaning of which is also in dispute) as the expression of a last illusion: I have been spared in the general massacre, and now I am brought to parlay with the chief holy man of the Hebrews for some important purpose; so surely they will not kill me.
33. Samuel cut him apart before the LORD. There is a long-standing consensus that the unique verb used here means something to this effect. The ghastly idea seems to be a kind of ritual butchering.
34. Ramah … Gibeath-Saul. Each returns to his hometown. Their relationship is to all intents and purposes finished.
35. Samuel was grieved about Saul. Or is it over the fact that he made the mistake of first choosing Saul? As J. P. Fokkelman notes, this sentence includes both death (mot) and grieving or mourning (ʾabel), even though Saul is still alive: “we realize that Saul as king is dead; no stronger expression of the termination of his monarchy can be imagined.”
1And the LORD said to Samuel, “How long are you going to grieve about Saul when I have cast him aside from reigning over Israel? Fill your horn with oil and go. I am sending you to Jesse the Bethlehemite, for I have seen Me among his sons a king.” 2And Samuel said, “How can I go? For should Saul hear, he will kill me.” And the LORD said, “Take a heifer with you, and you will say, ‘To sacrifice to the LORD I have come.’ 3And you will invite Jesse to the sacrifice. And I Myself shall let you know what you must do, and you will anoint for Me the one that I say to you.” 4And Samuel did what the LORD had spoken, and he came to Bethlehem, and the elders of the town came trembling to meet him and they said, “Do you come in peace?” 5And he said, “In peace! To sacrifice to the LORD I have come. Sanctify yourselves and come with me to the sacrifice.” And Jesse sanctiified his sons and invited them to the sacrifice. 6And it happened when they came that he saw Eliab and he said, “Ah yes! Before the LORD stands His anointed.” 7And the LORD said to Samuel, “Look not to his appearance and to his lofty stature, for I have cast him aside. For not as man sees does God see. For man sees with the eyes and the LORD sees with the heart.” 8And Jesse called Abinadab and made him pass before Samuel, and he said, “This one, too, the LORD has not chosen.” 9And Jesse made Shammah pass by, and he said, “This one, too, the LORD has not chosen.” 10And Jesse made his seven sons pass before Samuel, and Samuel said to Jesse, “The LORD has not chosen these.” 11And Samuel said to Jesse, “Are there no more lads?” And he said, “The youngest still is left, and, look, he is tending the flock.” And Samuel said to Jesse, “Send and fetch him, for we shall not sit to eat until he comes here.” 12And he sent and brought him. And he was ruddy, with fine eyes and goodly to look on. And the LORD said, “Arise, anoint him, for this is the one.” 13And Samuel took the horn of oil and anointed him in the midst of his brothers. And the spirit of the LORD gripped David from that day onward. And Samuel rose and went to Ramah.
14And the spirit of the LORD had turned away from Saul, and an evil spirit from the LORD had struck terror in him. 15And Saul’s servants said to him, “Look, pray, an evil spirit from God has stricken terror in you. 16Let our lord, pray, speak. Your servants are before you—we shall seek out a man skilled in playing the lyre, and so, when the evil spirit of God is upon you, he will play and it will be well with you.” 17And Saul said to his servants, “See for me, pray, a man who plays well, and bring him to me.” 18And one of the lads answered and said, “Look, I have seen a son of Jesse the Bethlehemite, skilled in playing, a valiant fellow, a warrior, prudent in speech, a good-looking man, and the LORD is with him.” 19And Saul sent messengers to Jesse and said, “Send me David your son, who is with the flock.” 20And Jesse took a donkey laden with bread and a skin of wine, and a kid, and he sent them by the hand of David his son to Saul. 21And David came to Saul and stood in his presence, and Saul loved him greatly, and he became his armor bearer. 22And Saul sent to Jesse, saying, “Let him stand, pray, in my presence, for he has found favor in my eyes.” 23And so, when the spirit of God was upon Saul, David would take up the lyre and play, and Saul would find relief, and it would be well with him, and the evil spirit would turn away from him.
CHAPTER 16 NOTES
Click here to advance to the next section of the text.
1. And the LORD said to Samuel. In the preceding episodes, the typical form of divine communication was Samuel’s report of what God had said, although at Samuel’s first sighting of Saul, a brief direct message from God is offered. As we have observed, these reports open up a certain margin of doubt as to whether the purported divine injunctions are really God’s or Samuel’s. The present episode unfolds systematically through repeated dialogue between God and Samuel, and so God’s judgments are rendered with perfect, authoritative transparency. Evidently, the writer (or redactor) felt that the initial election of David had to be entirely unambiguous. As the story continues, God will no longer play this role of direct intervention.
I have seen Me among his sons a king. The verb “to see” (raʾah) followed by the preposition le has the idiomatic sense of “to provide,” but it is essential to preserve the literal meaning because this entire episode is built on the repetition of the thematically weighted word “to see,” just as the previous episode turned on “to listen.”
2. For should Saul hear, he will kill me. Suddenly, a whole new political perspective is thrown on the estrangement between Samuel and Saul. The prophet may claim the higher ground of divine authority, but it is the king who has the armed divisions, and who might be ready to use them if Samuel should take any active steps to replace him. At this point, Samuel’s “grieving” over Saul begins to look like grieving over the mistake he made in first choosing him. God, understanding Samuel’s political predicament, suggests to him a cover story for his trip from Ramah to Bethlehem, in the tribal territory of Judah.
3. invite Jesse to the sacrifice. The kind of sacrifice in question, zevaḥ, involves both the ritual act and a feast made of the substantial parts of the animal not burned on the altar.
4. came trembling. Their reaction is another reflection of the dangerous political situation: the estrangement between Samuel and Saul appears to be generally known, and the elders are terrified at the idea that Samuel may have come to designate a new king, or otherwise subvert the reigning monarch, which could bring royal retribution down on Bethlehem.
and they said, “Do you come in peace?” The Masoretic Text has “he said,” but both the Septuagint and the Qumran Samuel scroll show the plural. Both also add “O seer” to the question of the elders.
6. he saw Eliab. Nothing could illustrate more vividly Samuel’s persistent unreliability as seer (roʾeh). Having made a fatal mistake by electing Saul, “head and shoulders taller than all the people,” convinced he was directed by God, Samuel is poised to repeat his error in being impressed by the “appearance” and “lofty stature” of Jesse’s firstborn. This whole story is also a heightened and stylized playing out of the theme of the reversal of primogeniture that dominates Genesis. Instead of an elder and a younger son, Jesse has the formulaic seven sons, plus an eighth, the youngest of all, who will be chosen.
7. for I have cast him aside. The language of rejection links the strapping Eliab with the lofty Saul.
does God see. These words, absent from the Masoretic Text, are supplied by the Septuagint.
the LORD sees with the heart. Some construe this as “into the heart.” In any case, the heart is the seat of understanding, or insight, in biblical physiology.
8–9. The verbatim repetition reflects the stylization of the episode, which is set off from the surrounding narrative by its formal symmetries. After the first three named sons, the rest pass by in summary by invocation of a narrative “et cetera” principle, with the formulaic wrap-up at the end of verse 10, “the LORD has not chosen these.”
11. he is tending the flock. By his sheer youth, he has been excluded from consideration, as a kind of male Cinderella left to his domestic chores instead of being invited to the party. But the tending of flocks will have a symbolic implication for the future leader of Israel, and, in the Goliath story, it will also prove to have provided him with skills useful in combat.
12. he was ruddy, with fine eyes and goodly to look on. David’s good looks will play a crucial role in the magnetic effect he is to have on women and men. But he is not big, like his brother Eliab, and Samuel has no opportunity to make a judgment on his appearance, for David is brought from the flock sight unseen, and then God immediately informs Samuel, “this is the one.”
13. anointed him in the midst of his brothers. The anointment takes place within the family circle and is a clandestine act.
14. And the spirit of the LORD had turned away from Saul. In the transfer of election of monarchs, one gets the picture of a kind of spiritual seesaw. As the spirit of the LORD descends on and seizes David, it departs from Saul. That vacuum is promptly filled by “an evil spirit from the LORD.” In the theopsychology of ancient Israel, extraordinary states were explained as investments by a divine spirit. The charisma of leadership, now passed to David, was a descent of the spirit. Saul’s psychosis—evidently, fits of depression later manifested as paranoia—is possession by another kind of spirit from the LORD.
15. Saul’s servants. These would be his court officials or attendants.
16. we shall seek out a man. The Hebrew is literally “they will seek out a man.”
a man skilled in playing the lyre. In modern terms, what they have in mind is a kind of music therapist. But David’s mastery of the lyre evinces both his power over the realm of the spirit (or of spirits) and his future association with song and poetry.
17–18. See for me … I have seen. The insistence on this verb picks up the key word of the preceding episode. Saul first uses it in the sense God did in verse 1, “provide.”
18. Look, I have seen a son of Jesse. This volunteered information is a bit peculiar because, before any real search is undertaken, one of the young men in court already has a candidate, and from a different tribal region. Is it possible that word of David’s clandestine anointment has circulated among limited groups, and that the anonymous “lad” may be a kind of pro-David mole in the court of Saul? It is also noteworthy that, just as at the beginning of his story, in his quest for the lost asses, Saul did not know what to do and was dependent on the counsel of his “lad” (naʿar); here one of his lads (neʿarim) offers the needed advice for dealing with his melancholia.
a valiant fellow, a warrior. These details of the characterization are surprising, for all that should be known about David is that he is a handsome shepherd boy with musical skills. The influence of the subsequent narrative has clearly made itself felt here, and these epithets may even be an editorial maneuver to harmonize this episode with the next one, in which David makes his debut before Saul not as a lyre player but as a military hero.
20. a donkey laden with bread. The Hebrew uses what appears to be an ellipsis “a donkey of bread.”
bread … a skin of wine … a kid. As Robert Polzin has shrewdly observed, these items replicate the items that Samuel told Saul would be carried by the three men he was to encounter (10:3). David, then, is beginning anew the process on which Saul launched.
21. and Saul loved him greatly. As Fokkelman has noted, Saul is the first of many people in this narrative reported to love David—the very man he will come to think of as his bitter enemy.
he became his armor bearer. This is not the position proposed by Saul’s courtiers. Perhaps there was no set position of court lyre player, and so Saul gives David an appointment that will ensure his constant proximity.
22. Let him stand … in my presence. The Hebrew idiom means to be in someone’s service, though it also can suggest being presented to a dignitary, its evident meaning in verse 21.
23. would find relief. The Hebrew employs an untranslatable pun: the verb “would find relief,” rawaḥ, is a transparent cognate of ruaḥ, “spirit.”
the evil spirit would turn away from him. In an elegant verbal symmetry the episode that began with the (good) spirit of the LORD turning away from Saul concludes with the evil spirit turning away from him, thanks to David’s musical mastery over the domain of spirits.
1And the Philistines gathered their camps for battle, and they gathered at Socoh, which is in Judah, and they encamped between Socoh and Azekah, at Ephes-Dammim. 2And Saul and the men of Israel had gathered and encamped in the Valley of the Terebinth and they deployed to do battle against the Philistines. 3The Philistines took their stand on the hill on one side and Israel took its stand on the hill on the other side, with the ravine between them. 4And the champion sallied forth from the Philistine camps, Goliath was his name, from Gath, his height was six cubits and a span. 5A bronze helmet he had on his head, and in armor of mail he was dressed, and the weight of the armor was five thousand bronze shekels. 6And greaves of bronze were on his legs and a spear of bronze between his shoulder blades. 7The shaft of his spear like a weaver’s beam, and the blade of his spear six hundred iron shekels. And his shield bearer went before him. 8And he stood and called out to the Israelite lines and said to them, “Why should you come forth to deploy for battle? Am I not the Philistine, and you are slaves to Saul? Choose you a man and let him come down to me! 9If he prevail in battle against me and strike me down, we shall be slaves to you, but if I prevail and strike him down, you will be slaves to us and serve us.” 10And the Philistine said, “I am the one who has insulted the Israelite lines this day! Give me a man and let us do battle together!” 11And Saul heard, and all Israel with him, these words of the Philistine, and they were dismayed and very frightened.
12And David was the son of this Ephrathite man from Bethlehem in Judah named Jesse, and he had eight sons, and the man in the days of Saul was old, advanced in years. 13And the three oldest sons of Jesse went after Saul to the war. And the names of his three sons who went to the war were Eliab the firstborn and the second-born Abinadab and the third Shammah. 14As for David, he was the youngest, and the three oldest had gone after Saul. 15And David would go back and forth from Saul’s side to tend his father’s flock in Bethlehem. 16And the Philistine came forward morning and evening and took his stand, forty days. 17And Jesse said to David his son, “Take, pray, to your brothers this ephah of parched grain and these ten loaves of bread and rush them to the camp to your brothers. 18And these ten wedges of cheese you shall bring to the captain of the thousand and you shall see if your brothers are well, and you shall take their token. 19And Saul and they and all the men of Israel are in the Valley of the Terebinth fighting with the Philistines.” 20And David rose early in the morning and left the flock with a keeper and bore [the provisions] and went off as Jesse had charged him. And when he came to the staging ground, the army going out to the lines was shouting the battle cry. 21And Israel and the Philistines deployed line against line. 22And David left the gear that was on him with the keeper of the gear and he ran to the lines and came and asked his brothers if they were well. 23As he was speaking to them, look, the champion was coming up from the Philistine lines, Goliath the Philistine from Gath was his name, and he spoke words to the same effect, and David heard. 24And all the men of Israel, when they saw the man, fled from him and were very frightened. 25And a man of Israel said, “Have you seen this man coming up? Why, to insult Israel he comes up! And the man who strikes him down the king will enrich with a great fortune, and his daughter he will give him, and his father’s household he will make free of levies in Israel.” 26And David said to the men who were standing with him, “What will be done for the man who strikes down yonder Philistine and takes away insult from Israel? For who is this uncircumcised Philistine that he should insult the battle lines of the living God?” 27And the troops said to him to the same effect, “Thus will be done for the man who strikes him down.” 28And Eliab his oldest brother heard when he spoke with the men, and Eliab was incensed with David and he said, “Why is it you have come down, and with whom have you left that bit of flock in the wilderness? I’m the one who knows your impudence and your wicked impulses, for it’s to see the battle that you’ve come.” 29And David said, “What now have I done? It was only talk.” 30And he turned away from him toward someone else, and he spoke to the same effect, and the troops answered him with words like the ones before. 31And the words David had spoken were heard, and they told them to Saul, and he fetched him. 32And David said to Saul, “Let no man’s heart fail him! Your servant will go and do battle with this Philistine.” 33And Saul said to David, “You cannot go against this Philistine to do battle with him, for you are a lad and he is a man of war from his youth.” 34And David said to Saul, “A shepherd has your servant been for his father with the flock. When the lion or the bear would come and carry off a sheep from the herd, 35I would go out after him and strike him down and rescue it from his clutches. And if he would rise against me, I would seize his beard and strike him and kill him. 36Both lion and bear your servant has struck down, and this uncircumcised Philistine will be like one of them, for he has insulted the battle lines of the living God.” 37And David said, “The LORD Who has rescued me from the lion and the bear will rescue me from the hand of this Philistine.” And Saul said to David, “Go, and may the LORD be with you.” 38And Saul clothed David in his own battle garb and put a bronze helmet on his head and clothed him in armor. 39And David girded his sword over his garments, but he was unable to walk, for he was unused to it, and David said to Saul, “I cannot walk in these, for I am unused to it.” And David removed them. 40And he took his stick in his hand and chose five smooth stones from the creek and put them in the shepherd’s pouch he had, in the satchel, and his slingshot was in his hand, and he came forward toward the Philistine. 41And the Philistine was drawing near to David, the man bearing the shield before him. 42And the Philistine looked and saw David, and he despised him, for he was a lad, and ruddy, with good looks. 43And the Philistine said to David, “Am I a dog that you should come to me with sticks?” And the Philistine cursed David by his gods. 44And the Philistine said, “Come to me, that I may give your flesh to the fowl of the heavens and the beasts of the field!” 45And David said to the Philistine, “You come to me with sword and spear and javelin, and I come to you with the name of the LORD of Armies, God of the battle lines of Israel that you have insulted. 46This day shall the LORD give you over into my hand and I will strike you down and take off your head, and I will give your corpse and the corpses of the Philistine camp this day to the fowl of the heavens and the beasts of the earth, and all the earth shall know that Israel has a God! 47And all this assembly shall know that not by sword nor by spear does the LORD rescue, for the LORD’s is the battle and he shall give you into our hand!” 48And it happened as the Philistine arose and was drawing near David that David hastened and ran out from the lines toward the Philistine. 49And he reached his hand into the pouch and took from there a stone and slung it and struck the Philistine in his forehead, and the stone sank into his forehead and he fell on his face to the ground. 50And David bested the Philistine with sling and stone, and he struck down the Philistine and killed him, and no sword was in David’s hand. 51And David ran up and stood over the Philistine and took the sword from him and pulled it out of its sheath and finished him off and cut off his head with it. And the Philistines saw that their warrior was dead, and they fled. 52And the men of Israel and Judah rose and shouted and gave chase to the Philistines until you come to the ravine and until the gates of Ekron, and the Philistine dead fell on the way to Shaaraim and as far as Gath and Ekron. 53And the Israelites came back from pursuing the Philistines and looted their camps. 54And David took the Philistine’s head and brought it to Jerusalem, but his weapons he put in his tent.
55And when Saul saw David sallying forth toward the Philistine, he said to Abner the commander, “Whose son is the lad, Abner?” And Abner said, “By your life, king, I do not know.” 56And the king said, “Ask you, pray, whose son is the youth?” 57And when David returned from striking down the Philistine, Abner took him and brought him before Saul, the Philistine’s head in his hand. 58And Saul said, “Whose son are you, lad?” And David said, “The son of your servant Jesse the Bethlehemite.”
CHAPTER 17 NOTES
Click here to advance to the next section of the text.
3. the hill on one side … the hill on the other … the ravine between them. As we have seen before, this positioning of the opposing armies on opposite hilltops was a characteristic procedure of warfare in the hilly terrain of central Israel. But the opening verses also set up the strong spatial perspective through which this episode is organized. The perspective of the previous story was implicitly vertical: from God above to Samuel below, in the household of Jesse in Bethlehem. Here, by contrast, is a richly elaborated horizontal deployment of troops and individuals. God is out of the picture, except for the invocation through David’s words.
4. the champion. The literal meaning of the Hebrew is “the man between”—that is, the man who goes out between the opposed battle lines to fight a counterpart. That particular Hebrew term thus reinforces the spatial definition of the story.
six cubits and a span. This would make him over eight feet tall.
5–6. A bronze helmet … armor of mail … greaves of bronze … a spear of bronze. This “Homeric” enumeration of armor and weapons is quite untypical of the Hebrew Bible. The thematic effect is clear: Goliath is represented as a hulking man of material military impedimenta—everything is given gargantuan size or weight, again with untypical specification. All this will be counterposed to David’s declaration on the battlefield that “not by sword nor spear does the LORD deliver.”
five thousand bronze shekels. The armor alone is about 125 pounds.
7. his shield bearer went before him. For this reason the shield is not included in the catalogue of Goliath’s armor. The gargantuan proportions of his dependence on the material implements of warfare are reinforced by the fact that he enters the battlefield with a man walking before him carrying his (presumably massive) shield.
8. Am I not the Philistine. Most often in the body of the story he is referred to as “the Philistine” and not by the name Goliath. This has led many scholars to infer that a tradition about Goliath was superimposed on an original story featuring an archetypal “Philistine.”
9. we shall be slaves to you. In the event, this condition is not fulfilled: the Philistines retreat in disarray, but will later regroup to continue their war against the Israelites.
10. I am the one who has insulted the Israelite lines. Nearly all the English versions render the verb here as “defied,” which is one end of the semantic range of the Hebrew ḥeref. But the verb is transparently linked with the noun ḥerpah—insult, disgrace, shame. By his taunting words, Goliath has laid an insult on Israel that only a victorious champion can “take away” (see verse 26).
11. And Saul heard … and they were dismayed. Saul, as the man head and shoulders taller than all the people, might be thought to be the one Israelite fighter who stands a chance against Goliath. Instead, he leads his own troops in fearfulness: the stage is set for his deplacement by David.
12. David was the son of this Ephrathite man. The use of the demonstrative pronoun “this” is peculiar. It seems to be the first of several attempts (presumably, by the redactor) to harmonize this account of David’s debut in Saul’s court with the previous one, by referring to Jesse as someone already mentioned. Polzin has noted that demonstrative pronouns are unusually prominent in this whole episode: in many instances, they express contempt (“this Philistine”), but they are also sometimes necessary pointers in the emphatically spatial organization of the story.
15. And David would go back and forth from Saul’s side. The last phrase has a sense close to “from Saul’s presence” and is another strategem for harmonizing the two episodes. It invites us to suppose that David divided his time between playing the lyre for Saul and tending his father’s flocks. The implicit assumption, however, of the story that unfolds is that David is unknown in the court of Saul, and that any to-and-fro movement between Bethlehem and the front would be to bring provisions to his older brothers.
17. Take, pray, to your brothers. If Saul has organized a standing army, it seems that his quartermaster corps still leaves something to be desired, and whatever rations may be provided for the troops need to be supplemented. In the same connection of skimpy provisions, Jesse sends a gift of ten wedges of cheese to his sons’ commander.
18. take their token. Jesse expects his sons to send back some object with David as assurance that they are alive and well.
20. the staging ground. The Hebrew is literally “the circle,” but the context (and a few allied ones elsewhere in the Bible) suggests a technical military sense.
22. David left the gear that was on him with the keeper. The phrase used precisely echoes his leaving the flock with a keeper. The narrative invokes a series of divestments by David of impediments for which he has been made responsible—flock, provisions, and then Saul’s armor.
25. the man who strikes him down the king will enrich … and his daughter he will give him. It is at this point that the folkloric background of the second story of David’s debut becomes particularly clear. The folktale pattern is one that is very familiar from later European tradition: a community is threatened by a giant, ogre, or dragon that nobody can face. The king offers great wealth, and the hand of his daughter, to the man who can slay the giant. A young man from the provinces then appears on the scene, who in his youth and slight stature seems quite unfit for the daunting challenge, but by wit and resourcefulness, using unexpected means, he conquers the ogre. The appeal of this archetypal folktale no doubt made it attractive for inclusion in the David narrative. What must be emphasized, however, is that the folkloric materials have been historicized and even to an extent psychologized. The slaying of the giant becomes an emblem for Israel’s prevailing over the numerically superior forces all around it as well as for the resourcefulness of its first dynastic king in securing power. The dialogue between David and his oldest brother vividly evokes a thick background of sibling jealousies. And David appears here—in the first scene in which he is assigned speech in the narrative—as a poised master of rhetoric, who knows how to use publicly enunciated words to achieve political ends.
26. And David said … , “What will be done for the man.” These are David’s first recorded words in the narrative—usually, in biblical narrative convention, a defining moment of characterization. His first words express his wanting to know what will be gained—implicitly, in political terms—by the man who defeats Goliath. The inquiry about personal profit is then immediately balanced (or covered up) by the patriotic pronouncement “who is this uncircumcised Philistine that he should insult the battle lines of the living God?” David has, of course, just heard one of the troops stipulate the reward for vanquishing the Philistine, but he wants to be perfectly sure before he makes his move, and so he asks for the details to be repeated. One sees how the folktale has been artfully historicized, subtly drawn into the realm of politics and individualized character.
28. that bit of flock. Eliab prefixes a term of diminution, meʿat, to “flock” to express his contempt for David. The demonstrative pronoun, as elsewhere in the chapter, is also contemptuous, even as it points to the spatial distance between the battlefield and the pastureland around Bethlehem.
I’m the one who knows. The relative clause here reflects the special emphasis of the Hebrew first-person pronoun ʾani, which ordinarily would not be used because the verb that follows it, yadʿati, has a first-person ending. The same structure occurs in Goliath’s boasting speech in verse 10.
your wicked impulses. The literal meaning of the Hebrew is “the wickedness of your heart,” the heart being in biblical language the seat of understanding and the place where plans or desires are shaped.
29. It was only talk. The translation follows an interpretation that goes back to the Aramaic Targum of Late Antiquity and to Rashi in the Middle Ages. But the Hebrew—literally, “Is it not a word?”—is gnomic. The ambiguity is compounded because davar can mean “word,” “message,” “matter,” “thing,” “mission,” and more.
30. And he turned away from him toward someone else. Ignoring his brother’s rebuke, David wants to hear the details of the reward a third time.
32. Let no man’s heart fail him. The Septuagint has “Let not my lord’s heart fail him,” but this could easily be an explanatory gloss. David uses a generalizing phrase because he doesn’t want to come out and say directly what all can see, that the king’s heart is failing him (literally, “falling”).
34. A shepherd has your servant been. David’s carefully contrived speech proclaims his tested courage and strength but, interestingly, is silent about the shepherd’s weapon—the slingshot—that he intends to use against Goliath.
35. from his clutches. The Hebrew says literally, “from his mouth.”
I would seize his beard. This of course refers only to the lion, not to the bear, but this sort of focusing of the narrative report on one of its two instances is perfectly natural in biblical usage, and no emendation of the word for “beard” is called for.
37. And David said. This is a particularly striking instance of the biblical convention that can be schematized as: And X said to Y; (no response from Y); and X said to Y, with the intervening silence being dramatically significant. Saul is nonplussed by these extravagant claims on the part of the young shepherd from Bethlehem, and he doesn’t know what to say. David, observing the skepticism of his interlocutor, now invokes God by way of explanation (“The LORD who has rescued me from the lion and the bear”). This theological argument persuades Saul. For another instance of the X said to Y, X said to Y convention, compare Goliath’s boast and Israel’s silence in verses 8–10.
38. his own battle garb. The Hebrew madim is not the ordinary term for “garment” but is most often used for the special garments worn either by men in battle or by priests in the cult (hence the present translation adds “battle”). The fact that this word is related etymologically to midah, proportion or measure, is relevant to the incident as it unfolds, since David is clothed in battle gear too big for him.
39. he was unable to walk. The translation, with the Septuagint, reads wayilʾe, instead of the Masoretic wayoʾel (a simple reversal of letters in the consonantal text), which would yield “he undertook to walk.”
I cannot walk in these, for I am unused to it. David states the obvious fact that, as a shepherd boy, he is not used to marching about in heavy armor, with a big sword. What he chooses not to mention is that since this is the armor of the hulking Saul, it is in any case far too big for him. Thematically, heroic fitness will be seen to reside in something other than being head and shoulders taller than all the people, or six cubits tall, like Goliath.
40. he took his stick. That is, his shepherd’s staff, which he is used to carrying. David evidently does this as a decoy, encouraging Goliath to imagine he will use cudgel against sword (compare verse 43) and thus camouflaging the lethal slingshot.
40–41. he came forward toward the Philistine … the Philistine was drawing near. The spatial realization of the whole episode is nearing its climax: on the two hilltops, the opposing camps; in front of them, the battle lines; between the hostile lines, David and the Philistine “man between” approaching each other. In a moment, they will be close enough to exchange insults. Goliath will invite David to take the last few steps forward so that they can engage in hand-to-hand combat—“Come to me, that I may give your flesh to the fowl of the heavens” (verse 44). Instead of traversing this final interval of space, David will surprise his adversary by taking him down with a slung stone, accurately aimed at the exposed forehead beneath his huge bronze helmet.
45. You come to me with sword and spear and javelin. This short list of weapons harks back to the epic catalogue of weapons and armor that introduced Goliath to the story. David’s rejoinder to the Philistine is couched in impeccable terms of standard Israelite belief: as in the Psalms, it is not sword or might that gives victory but the LORD. David speaks almost as though he expects to prevail through a miracle of divine intervention (“all the earth shall know that Israel has a God!”), but in fact his victory depends on his resourcefulness in exploiting an unconventional weapon, one which he would have learned to use skillfully as a shepherd.
46. Your corpse and the corpses. This is the reading of the Septuagint. The Masoretic Text lacks “your corpse.”
48. David hastened and ran out from the lines toward the Philistine. This last gesture would encourage the Philistine to think David was rushing up for the awaited hand-to-hand combat. In fact, David is darting in close enough to get a good shot with his sling. To do this (verse 49), he will break his charge, stop, and let fly with the sling.
51. took the sword … and finished him off. The gigantic Philistine is stunned but perhaps not dead, and so David completes his kill with the sword he takes from the prostrate Goliath.
52. to the ravine. The Septuagint corrects gayʿ to Gath, with the end of this verse in mind. But there is a ravine between the two hills on which the armies are encamped, and what the narrator may be saying is that the Philistines fled westward by way of the ravine to their own territory.
54. brought it to Jerusalem. This notation is problematic because Jerusalem at this point is still a Jebusite city. The report is either proleptic or simply out of place chronologically. David’s bringing the sword into his tent may also be questionable because, as someone who has not been a member of the army, he would have no tent. Some scholars, influenced by the fact that Goliath’s sword later appears in the sanctuary at Nob, have proposed reading here “in the tent of the LORD.”
55. Whose son is the lad, Abner? It is at this point that the evident contradiction between the two stories of David’s debut is most striking. If David had been attending Saul in court as his personal music therapist, with Saul having explicitly sent a communication to Jesse regarding David’s entering his service, how could he, and Abner as well, now be ignorant of David’s identity? Efforts to harmonize the two stories in terms of the logic of later conventions of realism seem unconvincing (for example, amnesia has been proposed as a symptom of Saul’s mental illness, and Abner pretends not to recognize David in deference to the ailing king). The prevalent scholarly view that chapters 16 and 17 represent two different traditions about David’s beginnings is persuasive. (To complicate matters, most scholars detect two different strands in chapter 17.) What we need to ask, however, is why the redactor set these two stories in immediate sequence, despite the contradictions that must have been as evident to him as to us. A reasonable conclusion is that for the ancient audience, and for the redactor, these contradictions would have been inconsequential in comparison with the advantage gained in providing a double perspective on David. In the Greek tradition, there were competing versions of the same myths, but never in a single text. Modern Western narrative generally insists on verisimilar consistency. In the Bible, however, the variants of a single story are sometimes placed in a kind of implicit dialogue with one another (compare the two accounts of creation at the beginning of Genesis). Here, in the first, vertically oriented story, with its explicit instructions from God to man, David is emphatically elected by God, is associated with the spirit and with song, and gains entrée in the court of Saul by using song to master the spirit. In the second story, with its horizontal deployment in space, David makes his way into Saul’s presence through martial prowess, exhibiting shrewdness, calculation, and rhetorical skill. Interestingly, it is this folktale version of David’s debut rather than the theological one that will lead directly into the historical (or at least, history-like) narrative of David’s rise and David’s reign. But the redactor must surely have felt that both the “spiritual” and the political-military sides of the figure of David had to be represented in the account of his origins. It is also noteworthy that this whole episode, which launches David on his trajectory to the throne, ends with Saul once more in a state of ignorance, compelled to ask twice about David’s identity, and getting no answer until David himself speaks out.
1And it happened as he finished speaking with Saul, that Jonathan’s very self became bound up with David’s, and Jonathan loved him as himself. 2And Saul took him on that day and did not let him go back to his father’s house. 3And Jonathan, and David with him, sealed a pact because he loved him like himself. 4And Jonathan took off the cloak that was on him and gave it to David, and his battle garb, and even his sword and his bow and his belt. 5And David would sally forth, wherever Saul sent him he would succeed. And Saul set him over the men of war, and it was good in the eyes of the troops and also in the eyes of Saul’s servants. 6And it happened when they came, when David returned from striking down the Philistine, that the women came out from all the towns of Israel in song and dance, to greet Saul the king with timbrels and jubilation and lutes. 7And the celebrant women called out and said,
“Saul has struck down his thousands
and David his tens of thousands!”
8And Saul was very incensed, and this thing was evil in his eyes, and he said, “To David they have given tens of thousands and to me they have given the thousands. The next thing he’ll have is the kingship.” 9And Saul kept a suspicious eye on David from that day hence. 10And on the next day, an evil spirit of God seized Saul and he went into a frenzy within the house when David was playing as he was wont to, and the spear was in Saul’s hand. 11And Saul cast the spear, thinking, “Let me strike through David into the wall.” And David eluded him twice. 12And Saul was afraid of David, for the LORD was with him, but from Saul He had turned away. 13And Saul removed him from his presence and set him as captain of a thousand, and he led the troops into the fray. 14And David succeeded in all his ways, and the LORD was with him. 15And Saul saw that he was very successful, and he dreaded him. 16But all Israel and Judah loved David, for he led them into the fray.
17And Saul said to David, “Here is my eldest daughter, Merab. Her shall I give you as wife, only be a valiant fellow for me and fight the battles of the LORD.” And Saul had thought, “Let not my hand be against him but let the hand of the Philistines be against him.” 18And David said to Saul, “Who am I and who are my kin, my father’s clan in Israel, that I should be the king’s son-in-law?” 19And it happened at the time for giving Merab the daughter of Saul to David, that she was given to Adriel the Meholathite as wife. 20And Michal the daughter of Saul loved David, and they told Saul, and the thing was pleasing in his eyes. 21And Saul thought, “I shall give her to him, that she may be a snare to him, and that the hand of the Philistines may be against him.” And Saul said to David, “Through the second one you can be my son-in-law now.” 22And Saul charged his servants: “Speak to David discreetly, saying, ‘Look, the king desires you, and all his servants love you, and now, then, become son-in-law to the king.’” 23And Saul’s servants spoke these words in David’s hearing and David said, “Is it a light thing in your eyes to become son-in-law to the king, and I am a poor man, and lightly esteemed?” 24And Saul’s servants told him, saying, “Words of this sort David has spoken.” 25And Saul said, “Thus shall you say to David: ‘The king has no desire for any bride-price except a hundred Philistine foreskins, to take vengeance against the king’s enemies.’” And Saul had devised to make David fall by the hand of the Philistines. 26And Saul’s servants told these words to David, and the thing was pleasing in David’s eyes, to become son-in-law to the king. And the time was not done, 27when David arose and went, he and his men, and he struck down among the Philistines two hundred men, and David brought their foreskins and made a full count to the king, to become son-in-law to the king, and Saul gave him Michal his daughter as wife. 28And Saul saw and marked that the LORD was with David, and Michal the daughter of Saul loved him. 29And Saul was all the more afraid of David, and Saul became David’s constant enemy. 30And the Philistine captains sallied forth, and whenever they sallied forth, David succeeded more than all Saul’s servants, and his name became greatly esteemed.
CHAPTER 18 NOTES
Click here to advance to the next section of the text.
1. as he finished speaking with Saul. The speech referred to is the exchange between David and Saul after the vanquishing of Goliath. This is a clear instance in which the (late medieval) chapter division actually interrupts a narrative unit.
Jonathan loved him as himself. No reason is given, so one may infer that Jonathan was smitten by David’s personal charm and perhaps by the sheer glamour of his victory, which exceeded even Jonathan’s own military exploits. It is noteworthy that throughout this narrative David is repeatedly the object but never the subject of the verb “to love”—in this chapter, Jonathan, the people, and Michal are all said to love David.
3. And Jonathan, and David with him, sealed a pact. This is one of the most significant instances of the expressive grammatical pattern in which there is a plural subject with a singular verb, making the first member of the plural subject the principal agent: the initiative for the pact of friendship is Jonathan’s, and David goes along with it.
4. Jonathan took off the cloak. This gesture strongly invites comparison with Saul’s failed effort to dress David in his battle gear in the previous episode. This time David accepts the proffered garments and weapons: practically, they are presumably his own size, but he also is now ready to assume a regular role in the army. The first item Jonathan offers is his cloak, me‘il, the very piece of clothing Samuel associated symbolically with kingship. Bearing that in mind, J. P. Fokkelman has proposed that “with his cloak Jonathan is conveying to David the crown prince’s rights and claims to the throne.” Perhaps one should say that he is conveying these subliminally or proleptically rather than as a fully conscious act.
5. Saul set him over the men of war. The designation for fighting men is also the one Saul uses for Goliath. Moshe Garsiel has suggested that this may be a term for elite troops, and that later, when Saul appoints David captain of a thousand (verse 13), he is in effect transferring him to the position of an ordinary officer.
6. lutes. As is often the case with ancient musical instruments, the precise identification of the term is in doubt. The Hebrew shalishim derives from sheloshah, “three,” but it could refer either to a three-stringed lute, which was fairly common in the ancient Near East, or perhaps to a triangle.
8. To David … tens of thousands and to me … the thousands. It is a fixed rule in biblical poetry that when a number occurs in the first verset, it must be increased in the parallel verset, often, as here, by going up one decimal place. Saul shows himself a good reader of biblical poetry: he understands perfectly well that the convention is a vehicle of meaning, and that the intensification or magnification characteristic of the second verset is used to set David’s triumphs above his own. Saul, who earlier had made the mistake of listening to the voice of the people, now is enraged by the people’s words.
10. went into a frenzy. The verb here is the same one that refers to “speaking in ecstasy” or “prophesying” in the episode of Saul among the prophets, but in the present context only the connotation of raving and not that of revelation is relevant.
when David was playing as he was wont to. The present version of the story at this point seeks to integrate the account of David as victor over Goliath with the preceding report of David as Saul’s personal lyre player. Evidently, when he is not playing the lyre, he is sent out intermittently at the head of the elite troops. After this incident, Saul removes him entirely from the court by making him a regular commander. The one thing Saul cannot afford to do is to dispense with David’s brilliant services as a military leader. In the Hebrew, “was playing” is literally “was playing with his hand,” which sets up a neat antithesis to the spear in Saul’s hand (“with” and “in” are represented by the same particle, be in Hebrew).
11. Let me strike through David. Saul picks up the verb of striking from the song of the celebrant women that so galled him.
12. for the LORD was with him. This emphatic refrainlike phrase recalls the Joseph story (see especially Genesis 39), another tale of a handsome shepherd boy who ascends to regal grandeur. Like Joseph, David is repeatedly said to “succeed” (though different verbs are used in the two stories.) Allusions to the Joseph story will turn from this initial consonance to ironic dissonance.
15. Saul saw … and he dreaded him. Throughout this pivotal episode, Saul’s feelings and motives remain perfectly transparent—here, through the narrator’s report of his emotions, and in the next scene, through interior monologue. At the same time, David is pointedly left opaque. No word of his is reported when Jonathan gives him his cloak and battle gear. We know that Saul is afraid of David but not whether David is afraid of Saul, who, after all, has tried to kill him. And when David speaks in the next scene, it will be manifestly a speech framed for a public occasion, which leaves his real motives uncertain.
16. led them into the fray. The Hebrew says literally, “was going out and coming in before them,” an idiom that means to lead in battle.
17. Here is my eldest daughter, Merab. Only now is the promise of the hand of the king’s daughter for the vanquisher of Goliath implemented. But the fulfillment of that promise, as it turns out, is part of a plan to destroy David.
Let not my hand be against him. The interior monologue leaves no doubt about Saul’s intentions. Could it be that his very transparency as a political schemer, manifested in the means of narrative presentation, is a reflection of his incapacity in the harsh realm of politics? David, by contrast, knows how to veil his motives and intentions—a veiling replicated in the narrative strategies used to present him.
18. Who am I and who are my kin. The translation adopts a scholarly proposal of considerable currency to revocalize the Masoretic ḥayai, “my life” as ḥayi, “my kin,” a conjectured term based on the Arabic. David’s protestation of unworthiness recalls Saul’s when Samuel hinted he was going to confer the kingship on him. Perhaps these words are dictated by court etiquette, the commoner obliged to profess unworthiness when offered the honor of a royal connection. Perhaps the young David may actually feel unworthy of the honor. But it is also clearly in his interest to conceal from the jealous king any desire he may harbor to marry the king’s daughter, for such an alliance could be converted into an implicit claim to be successor to the throne.
20. And Michal the daughter of Saul loved David. Not only is she the third party in this chapter said to love David, but she is also the only woman in the entire Hebrew Bible explicitly reported to love a man. Nothing is said, by contrast, about what David feels toward Michal, and as the story of their relationship sinuously unfolds, his feelings toward her will continue to be left in question.
21. Through the second one. The Hebrew is quite cryptic, and the text might be defective here. Literally, it says, “through two” (bishtayim). This has variously been interpreted to mean: through two daughters (if not one, then the other); through two conditions (vanquishing the Philistines and bringing back their foreskins?); for two reasons (perhaps, “the king desires you” and “all his servants love you”).
22. discreetly. The root of the Hebrew adverb refers to covering up, but the usual translation of “secretly” is misleading. This is not a clandestine communication but one in which the servants—that is, Saul’s court attendants—must be careful to cover up their master’s real intentions.
24. Words of this sort David has spoken. Saul may well have counted on the fact that David would initially demur, perhaps because he was the youngest son of eight and thus lacked a suitable bride-price for a princess. This refusal would then set the stage for Saul’s extravagant proposal, which he assumed would be a fatal one, of a hundred dead Philistines.
25. The king has no desire for any bride-price except a hundred Philistine foreskins. The language Saul directs to David through his attendants—note that he now has begun to communicate with David only through intermediaries—makes it sound as though this were a small thing instead of an enormous thing. Beyond this story, there is no indication that the Israelites had a custom of collecting the foreskins of the uncircumcised Philistines like scalps. Fokkelman shrewdly notes that the foreskins are associated with (impure) sexuality and conjectures that “by this condition Saul really wants to contaminate David”—just as Saul is using his own daughter’s sexuality as a lure to destroy David. “He thinks,” Fokkelman goes on to observe, “that this rival has outdone him amongst the women and now uses woman as a trap.”
Saul had devised to make David fall. The narrator continues his systematic effort to make Saul’s intentions transparent.
26. And the time was not done. Literally, “the days were not filled.” The presumable reference is to a period fixed by Saul during which David was to go out and bring back the grisly trophies. Garsiel has interestingly proposed that the idiom here deliberately echoes a phrase used in the Jacob story (Genesis 29:21) and signals a whole network of allusions to the Jacob narrative: in both stories the young man is a candidate to marry two sisters and gets the one not at first intended; in both stories he must provide a bride-price he cannot pay for from material resources; in both stories he must “count out” (literally “fill”) payment to a devious father-in-law; eventually each man flees his father-in-law, aided and abetted by his wife; and in each instance, as we shall see, household idols (teraphim) are involved. Later in the David story, other kinds of parallels with Jacob will be invoked.
28–30. These verses constitute a formal concluding frame to the whole episode, much like the concluding verses in Genesis 39, which mirror the opening ones. Once again, in a pointed repetition of phrases, the following is brought to our attention: David’s success, the fact that the LORD is with him, Saul’s fear of David, Michal’s love of David, and David’s great reputation. The concluding words of the chapter, “his name became greatly esteemed,” are a pointed antithesis to his protestation of unworthiness, “I am a poor man, and lightly esteemed.”
1And Saul spoke to Jonathan his son and to all his servants to put David to death, 2but Jonathan the son of Saul was very fond of David, and Jonathan told David, saying, “Saul my father seeks to put you to death, and so now, be on the watch, pray, in the morning, and stay in a secret place and hide. 3And I on my part shall come out and stand by my father in the field where you are, and I shall speak of you to my father. And if I see something, I shall tell you.” 4And Jonathan spoke well of David to Saul his father and said to him, “Let not the king offend against his servant David, for he has not offended you, and his deeds have been very good toward you. 5He took his life in his hands and struck down the Philistine, and the LORD made a great victory for all Israel. You saw and rejoiced, and why should you offend with innocent blood to put David to death for no cause?” 6And Saul heeded Jonathan’s voice, and Saul swore, “As the LORD lives, he shall not be put to death.” 7And Jonathan called to David, and Jonathan told him all these things. And Jonathan brought David to Saul, and he served him as in times gone by.
8And there was still more fighting, and David sallied forth and did battle with the Philistines and struck a great blow against them, and they fled before him. 9And an evil spirit of the LORD came upon Saul as he was sitting in his house, his spear in his hand and David playing. 10And Saul sought to strike the spear through David into the wall, but he slipped away from Saul, and Saul struck the spear into the wall. Then David fled and escaped on that night. 11And Saul sent messengers to David’s house to keep watch over him and to put him to death in the morning. And Michal his wife told David, saying, “If you do not get yourself away tonight, tomorrow you’ll be dead.” 12And Michal let David down from the window, and he went off and fled and got away. 13And Michal took the household gods and put them in the bed, and the twist of goat’s hair she put at its head, and covered them with a cloth. 14And Saul sent messengers to take David, and she said, “He is ill.” 15And Saul sent messengers to see David, saying, “Bring him up to me in the bed, that he may be put to death.” 16And the messengers came, and, look, the household gods were in the bed and the twist of goat’s hair at its head! 17And Saul said to Michal, “Why have you thus deceived me, and let my enemy go, and he got away?” And Michal said to Saul, “He said to me: ‘Let me go. Why should I kill you?’”
18And David had fled and gotten away and had come to Samuel at Ramah and told him all that Saul had done to him. And he, and Samuel with him, went and stayed at Naioth. 19And it was told to Saul, saying, “Look, David is at Naioth in Ramah.” 20And Saul sent messengers to take David, and they saw a band of prophets in ecstasy with Samuel standing poised over them, and the spirit of God came upon Saul’s messengers and they, too, went into ecstasy. 21And they told Saul, and he sent other messengers, and they, too, went into ecstasy. And Saul still again sent a third set of messengers, and they, too, went into ecstasy. 22And he himself went to Ramah, and he came as far as the great cistern which is in Secu, and he asked and said, “Where are Samuel and David?” And someone said, “Here, at Naioth in Ramah.” 23And he went there, to Naioth in Ramah, and the spirit of God came upon him, too, and he walked along speaking in ecstasy until he came to Naioth in Ramah. 24And he, too, stripped off his clothes, and he, too, went into ecstasy before Samuel and lay naked all that day and all that night. Therefore do they say, “Is Saul, too, among the prophets?”
CHAPTER 19 NOTES
Click here to advance to the next section of the text.
1–2. Jonathan his son … Jonathan the son of Saul. In keeping with the biblical practice of using relational epithets to underscore a thematic point, Jonathan is identified as Saul’s son at the very moment when he takes David’s part against his father.
4. Let not the king offend. Saul’s royal power is palpable in the dialogue, for his own son is careful to address him by title in the deferential third person.
6. Saul heeded Jonathan’s voice, and … swore. Saul’s paranoia and uncontrolled outbursts manifest themselves in an intermittent cycle. He is amenable to the voice of reason and conscience, and vows in presumably good faith not to harm David, but further evidence of David’s military brilliance will unleash another round of violent impulses. In consequence, through this sequence of the narrative David oscillates between being a proscribed person and someone Saul expects to be a faithful member of his court.
9. his spear in his hand and David playing. As in the previous incident of the spear cast at David, the Hebrew exhibits the pointed antithesis of “his spear in his hand [beyado]” and David “playing by hand [beyad].” Conventional biblical scholarship explains the repetition of incident, and the other doublets in this narrative, as an inclusion of two versions of the same event from different sources. It is at least as plausible to assume that the author of the Saul and David narrative had a fondness for paired incidents that could be used to good literary effect. Saul’s mental disturbance involves compulsive repetition. He does his best to be reconciled with David, his soothing lyre player and indispensable military leader, but the recurrent flashes of jealousy drive him again to the same lethal action. After the second occurrence of spear throwing, David realizes he must flee the court, but he does not imagine that Saul will send assassins to surround his house.
10. Saul struck … David fled. As several interpreters have noted, these are the very two verbs used in verse 8 to report David’s military triumph over the Philistines: as David battles Israel’s enemies, the distraught king battles David.
11. Michal his wife. This is another pointed familial identification. Previously, she was referred to as Saul’s daughter.
If you do not get yourself away tonight, tomorrow you’ll be dead. It is striking that we are given Michal’s urgent dialogue here but not a word of response from David, only the chain of his rapid actions after she lets him down (by an improvised rope?) from the window—“he went off and fled and got away.” Perhaps this asymmetrical presentation of the two characters is meant to suggest David’s breathless flight, with no time for conversation. In any case, it continues the pattern of occluding David’s inner responses that we observed in chapter 18. Michal is risking a great deal in order to save David. We have no idea about his feelings toward her as she does this.
13. Michal took the household gods … and the twist of goat’s hair … and covered them with a cloth. She adopts the familiar trick used by prisoners round the world of concocting a dummy to mask an escape. But the means she chooses introduce another elaborate allusion to the Jacob story. The household gods (teraphim) are what Rachel stole and hid from her father when Jacob fled from him. Like Rachel, who pleads her period and does not get up from the cushions under which the teraphim are hidden, Michal also invokes illness (verse 14) to put off the searchers. Both stories feature a daughter loyal to her husband and rebelling against a hostile father. Michal puts goat’s hair at the head of the bed because, being black or dark brown, it would look like a man’s hair, but goats (and the color of their hair) are also prominent in the Jacob story. Finally, the cloth or garment (beged) used to cover the dummy recalls the repeated association of garments with deception in the Jacob story. Laban, of course, never finds his teraphim, whereas Saul’s emissaries, to their chagrin, find the teraphim instead of the man they are looking for.
15. Bring him up to me in the bed. If Michal claims David is ill, Saul will have him brought up bed and all.
17. Why have you thus deceived me. These words are close to the ones spoken by the outraged Laban to Jacob (Genesis 31:26).
Why should I kill you? This purported death threat by David is of course pure invention by Michal in order to make it seem that she was forced to help David flee.
18. David had fled and gotten away and had come to Samuel. The twice-repeated verbs of safe flight are reiterated once more. David takes refuge with the man who anointed him, although it is not entirely clear whether the prophet’s authority will really protect him, or the prophet.
Naioth. Some have claimed this is not a place-name but a common noun, nawot, “oases” (according to one suggestion, a collection of huts where the prophets resided). But then one would expect a definite article, which does not occur. Naioth is most plausibly construed as a little village or place of temporary residence in the vicinity of the town of Ramah.
20. Samuel standing poised over them. The image is implicitly military: the term for “poised” (nitsav) is cognate with the terms for garrison and prefect. Samuel, like the pope, commands no divisions, but the band of ecstatics are his troops, and the infectious spirit of God that inhabits them and devastates Saul’s emissaries acts as a defensive perimeter.
22. And he himself went. Again, we have the folktale symmetry of three identical repetitions, then a fourth repetition with a crucial change.
Where are Samuel and David? Once more, Saul (Shaʾul) has to ask (shaʾal). This particular question recalls his initial question in chapter 9 about where the seer was.
24. he … stripped off his clothes … and lay naked. In the clash between Saul and Samuel that marked their final estrangement, Samuel had explicitly associated garment with kingship. Now the frenzy that seizes Saul drives him to strip off his garments—implicitly, to divest himself of the kingship, just as the first episode of Saul among the prophets was an investment with kingship. Robert Polzin brilliantly links this moment with Michal’s use of a garment and the contrasting narrative presentations of David and Saul: “Whereas Michal covers David’s bed with his clothes (verse 13) Saul strips off his clothes and lies naked all day and night (verse 24)—a graphic picture of how the narrator hides David and bares Saul throughout the last two chapters.”
Therefore do they say, “Is Saul, too, among the prophets?” This is the same etiological tag as at the end of the first story of Saul among the prophets in chapter 10. The doublet, far from being a stammer of transmission or inept or automatically inclusive redaction, is vividly purposeful, providing a strong frame for Saul’s painful story. Fokkelman states the effect nicely: “The same faculty for the numinous and the same sensitivity for suddenly being lifted into a higher state of consciousness which occurred there [in chapter 10] under the positive sign of election, appear here under the negative sign of being rejected, and now bring Saul into a lower state of consciousness, a kind of delirium.” The conventions of verisimilitude of a later literary tradition would lead one to conclude that this encounter would have to have occurred either at the beginning of Saul’s career or at the end, but not twice. To the ancient audience, however, the recurrence would not have seemed a contradiction, and the conflicting valences given to the explanation of the proverbial saying add to the richness of the portrait of Saul, formally framing it at beginning and end.
1And David fled from Naioth in Ramah and came and said before Jonathan: “What have I done? What is my crime and what my offense before your father that he should seek my life?” 2And he said to him, “Heaven forbid! You shall not die! Look, my father will do nothing, whether great or small, without revealing it to me, and why should my father hide this thing from me? It cannot be!” 3And David swore again and said, “Your father surely knows that I have found favor in your eyes, and he will think, ‘Let not Jonathan know this, lest he be pained.’ And indeed, as the LORD lives and as you live, there is but a step between me and death.” 4And Jonathan said, “Whatever you desire, I shall do for you.” 5And David said to Jonathan, “Look, it is the new moon tomorrow, and I am supposed to sit with the king to eat. Let me go and I shall hide in the field till the evening of the day after tomorrow. 6Should your father in fact mark my absence, you shall say, ‘David has urgently asked of me that he run to Bethlehem his town, for the seasonal sacrifice is to take place there for the whole clan.’ 7If thus he says, ‘Good!,’ it is well with your servant. But if in fact he is incensed, know that the evil has been resolved by him. 8And you shall keep faith with your servant, for into a pact of the LORD you have brought your servant with you. And if there be any crime in me, put me to death yourself, for why should you bring me to your father?” 9And Jonathan said, “Heaven forbid you say it! If in fact I learn that the evil has been resolved by my father, would I not tell it to you?” 10And David said to Jonathan, “Who will tell me if your father answers you harshly?” 11And Jonathan said, “Come, let us go out to the field.” And the two of them went out to the field. 12And Jonathan said to David, “Witness the LORD God of Israel, that I will sound out my father at this hour tomorrow, [or] the day after, and whether he is well disposed to David or not, I will send to you and reveal to you. 13Thus may the LORD do to Jonathan, and even more, if it seems good to my father [to bring] the evil upon you, I will reveal it to you and I will send you off and you shall go safely and the LORD shall be with you as He was with my father. 14Would that while I am still alive you may keep the LORD’s faith with me, that I not die, 15and that you do not cut off your faithfulness from my house for all time, not even when the LORD cuts off all David’s enemies from the face of the earth. 16For Jonathan has sealed a pact with the house of David and the LORD shall requite it from the hand of David.” 17And Jonathan once again swore to David in his love for him, for he loved him as he loved himself. 18And Jonathan said to him, “Tomorrow is the new moon, and your absence will be marked because your place will be vacant. 19The day after tomorrow you will go all the way down and come to the place where you hid on the day of the deed and stay by the Ezel stone. 20As for me, I shall shoot three arrows to the side of it, as though I were aiming at a target. 21And look, I shall send the lad, ‘Go, find the arrows!’ If I expressly say to the lad, ‘Look, the arrows are on this side of you, fetch them,’ come, for it will be well with you, and nothing will be the matter, as the LORD lives. 22But if thus I say to the youth, ‘Look, the arrows are on the far side of you,’ go, for the LORD will have sent you away. 23And as for the matter of which you and I have spoken, look, the LORD is witness between you and me for all time.”
24And David hid in the field, and it was the new moon, and the king sat down to table to eat. 25And the king sat in his place as he was wont to do, in the seat by the wall, and Jonathan preceded him, and Abner sat by Saul’s side, and David’s place was vacant. 26And Saul spoke no word on that day, for he thought, “It is a mischance. He is unclean and has not been cleansed.” 27And it happened on the day after the new moon, the second day, that David’s place was still vacant. And Saul said to Jonathan his son, “Why has not the son of Jesse come to the feast either yesterday or today?” 28And Jonathan said to Saul, “David has urgently asked of me to go to Bethlehem. 29And he said to me, ‘Let me go, pray, for we have a clan sacrifice in the town, and my brother has summoned me to it. And so, if I have found favor in your eyes, let me, pray, get away that I may see my brothers.’ Therefore has he not come to the king’s table.” 30And Saul was incensed with Jonathan and he said to him, “O, son of a perverse wayward woman! Don’t I know you have chosen the son of Jesse to your own shame and the shame of your mother’s nakedness? 31For as long as the son of Jesse lives on the earth, you and your kingship will not be unshaken! And now, send and fetch him to me, for he is a dead man!” 32And Jonathan answered Saul his father and said to him, “Why should he be put to death? What has he done?” 33And Saul cast the spear at him to strike him down, and Jonathan knew that it was resolved by his father to put David to death. 34And Jonathan rose from the table in burning anger, and he ate no food on the second day of the new moon because he was pained for David and because his father had humiliated him.
35And it happened in the morning that Jonathan went out to the field for the fixed meeting with David, and a young lad was with him. 36And he said to his lad, “Run, find, pray, the arrows that I shoot.” The lad ran, and he shot the arrow beyond him. 37And the lad came to the place of the arrow that Jonathan had shot, and Jonathan called after the lad and said, “Look, the arrow is on the far side of you.” 38And Jonathan called after the lad, “Quick, hurry, don’t stand still!” And Jonathan’s lad gathered up the arrows and came to his master. 39And the lad knew nothing, but Jonathan and David knew the matter. 40And Jonathan gave his gear to his lad and said to him, “Go, bring them to town.” 41Just as the lad came, David arose from by the mound and fell on his face to the ground and bowed three times, and each man kissed the other and each wept for the other, though David the longer. 42And Jonathan said to David, “Go in peace, for the two of us have sworn in the name of the LORD, saying, ‘The LORD is witness between me and you, and between my seed and your seed, for all time.’” 21:1And Jonathan arose and came to the town.
CHAPTER 20 NOTES
Click here to advance to the next section of the text.
1. David … said before Jonathan. The seeming awkwardness of the preposition is actually strategically calculated. The normal usage would be “said to” (ʾel). “Before” (lifney) is a preposition that commonly designates approach to the presence of regal or seigniorial authority. (Compare its occurrence in David’s words, “what my offense before your father.”) This speech is a remarkable instance of the pattern of occluding the personal side of David that we have been following. Quite strikingly, these are David’s first reported words to Jonathan, though Jonathan’s devotion to David and one speech to David (19:2–3) have been duly recorded. It is noteworthy that this is not a personal communication to Jonathan but a kind of political statement—a protestation of innocence cast in patently rhetorical language (“What have I done? What is my crime …?”). David speaks to Jonathan less as an intimate friend than as a courtier, later in the dialogue even invoking the deferential self-reference of “your servant.”
2. why should my father hide this thing from me? If one considers Saul’s previous behavior and his relationship with Jonathan, this faith in his father’s openness with him seems singularly misplaced. Throughout, Jonathan remains well meaning and naïve, against the wary, calculating David.
3. David swore again. It is ill advised to emend the verb here, as some scholars have proposed. In fact, David’s first speech (“before” Jonathan) was a kind of oath of innocence, and now he continues to swear, rather than simply speaking.
there is but a step between me and death. This vivid image surely is meant to recall the quick dodging step that twice enabled David to elude Saul’s hurled spear.
5. the new moon. In early biblical times, this was an important festival. Sacrifices were offered, ceremonial feasts were held, and ordinary business was not transacted.
the day after tomorrow. The Masoretic Text has “the third evening,” treating hashelishit as an adjective modifying “evening,” although it has the wrong gender suffix. It is more likely a noun meaning the day after tomorrow (the day on which one speaks being day one in the sequence of three). One should then read ʿerev hashelishit instead of the Masoretic ha ʿerev hashelishit. In any case, the number three will play an important role as the episode develops.
7. If thus he says, “Good!,” it is well with your servant. After Saul’s attempts on David’s life by the “hand of the Philistines,” by the spear in his own hand, and by a team of assassins, can David really believe that any statement by the king of favorable disposition means it will be well with him? Polzin has shrewdly suggested that David’s real intention is “to provoke Saul to an angry outburst that would remove Jonathan’s misconceptions, not his own.”
8. faith. The two parties to a pact, contract, or other binding agreement owe each other ḥesed, faithful performance of their covenantal obligations.
into a pact of the LORD you have brought your servant with you. David’s formulation of the arrangement is pointed and quite accurate: it was Jonathan who initiated the pledge of mutual fealty out of his love for David, and who drew David into the commitment.
9. Heaven forbid you say it. The Hebrew has, elliptically, “Heaven forbid you.”
10. Who will tell me. David is not questioning Jonathan’s good faith but registering a practical difficulty: if Saul is in fact determined to kill him, how will Jonathan be able to get word to him?
12. Witness the LORD. The word “witness” (ʿed) is absent in the Masoretic Text but is reflected in Josephus and the Peshitta.
tomorrow, [or] the day after. Again, the time reference in the Hebrew is somewhat confusing. The text reads literally “tomorrow the third day” or even “the morrow of the third day.”
13. if it seems good to my father [to bring] the evil. The ironic antithesis of good and evil is patent. All ancient versions lack “to bring,” which seems required by the context. The word may have been inadvertently deleted by a scribe because it closely resembles the preceding word in the text—ʾavi (my father), lehavi’ (to bring).
the LORD shall be with you as He was with my father. Here Jonathan explicitly recognizes that the persecuted David is to displace Saul, his father.
14. Would that. This translation treats the Hebrew consonants as welu instead of the Masoretic welo’ (“and not”).
16. Jonathan has sealed a pact. The Hebrew idiom is literally “cut” (with “pact” implied) and so picks up the play of the two different occurrences of “cut off” in the previous sentence (the same verb in a different conjugation). Jonathan’s insistence that David not cut off Jonathan’s descendants once he gains power will have prominent ramifications later in the story.
requite it from the hand of David. The Masoretic Text has “from the hand of the enemies of David,” but the substitution of a person’s “enemies” for the person himself is a common Hebrew scribal euphemism (here, so as not to say something negative about David), as both Rashi and David Kimchi recognized in the Middle Ages.
19. The day after tomorrow. The Masoretic vocalization weshilashta treats this as a verb (to do something a third time or in a third instance), but it is more plausible to vocalize it as a noun, ushelishit, “and on the third day.” (See the second comment on verse 5.)
you will go all the way down. The Hebrew, literally “you will go down very much” (or, “you will wander very much”), is problematic.
the place where you hid on the day of the deed. The meaning has been disputed, but the most likely reference is to David’s hiding, and Jonathan’s speaking in his defense, in 19:1–7.
23. the LORD is witness. Again, “witness” is absent from the Masoretic Text but supplied by the Septuagint.
24. to table. The Hebrew is literally “to the bread.”
25. Jonathan preceded him. This translation reads weyiqdam instead of the Masoretic wayaqom (“and he rose”). The seating arrangement remains a little obscure, but the verb qadam cannot mean “to sit opposite,” as some scholars have claimed.
26. He is unclean. Since on the new moon celebrants partook of a sacrificial feast, they would have to be in a state of ritual purity. (A seminal emission, for example, which might be hinted at in the Hebrew term for “mischance,” would render a person impure until the evening of the day on which he cleansed himself by ablution.)
27. the son of Jesse. At the end of the Goliath episode, Saul wanted to know whose son David was. Now he refers to him repeatedly only by patronymic, which is dismissive, rather like our using a person’s last name only. David’s status in Saul’s eyes is a constant reflex of Saul’s acute ambivalence: the king wants him at court as a royal intimate, or, alternately, as someone under surveillance; yet he makes him flee the court as persona non grata.
29. my brother has summoned me. Jonathan, in playing out the scenario David has dictated to him, improvises one element—that David has gone off to his hometown at the express urging of his brother, and in order to be with his brothers. His evident intention is to provide a palliative to David’s absence: he had to go to Bethlehem because of family pressure. But Saul’s outraged response suggests that Jonathan’s invention has the opposite effect. Saul concludes that David’s loyalty to his clan takes precedence over his loyalty to his king, and he may even suspect that David means to use his clan as a power base to challenge the throne.
let me … get away. Jonathan inadvertently substitutes for “run” in David’s instructions the very verb of escape repeatedly used when David fled Saul’s assassins.
30. O, son of a perverse wayward woman. All English translations have treated the last Hebrew term here, mardut, as “rebellion,” deriving it from the root m-r-d, “to rebel.” But this form (with the ut suffix of abstraction) would be anomalous in the Hebrew, whereas the vocalization in the received text yields a Hebrew word well known in rabbinic Hebrew and meaning “discipline.” (The verbal root is r-d-h, “to rule sternly.”) She is “perverse against discipline”—hence “wayward” in this translation.
the shame of your mother’s nakedness. This is quite violent. “Nakedness” refers to the sexual part (as in the idiom for taboo intercourse, “uncovering the nakedness of”), and so, it has virtually the force of “your mother’s cunt,” though the language is not obscene.
31. he is a dead man. The Hebrew is literally “son of death,” thus playing back on “son of Jesse.”
32. Why should he be put to death? What has he done? These two questions are four compact words in the Hebrew.
33. Saul cast the spear at him to strike him down. Saul’s madness is vividly reflected in his attempt to kill his own son in the same way that he tried to kill David—just after he has been urging Jonathan to protect the security of his own future kingship. The act thus expresses his blind destructive impulse toward his own dynasty.
34. because he was pained for David and because his father had humiliated him. The Hebrew text does not have “and” but it is clearly implied.
35. And it happened in the morning. On the third day there are three figures in the field and three arrows will be shot. The triangle of two knowing persons and one ignorant one is an ironic replication of the David–Jonathan–Saul triangle. The lad’s running after the arrows may also pick up David’s (fictitious) “running” to Bethlehem.
36. the arrow. Some scholars, bothered by the switch from three arrows to one, have emended the text to reduce all plurals of arrow to a singular. The maneuver is misconceived because, as we have seen before, Hebrew narrative readily switches from multiple instances to a particular case.
37. Jonathan called after the lad. Again, the use of the preposition is quite precise because the lad has run on ahead of Jonathan.
38. gathered up the arrows. The Masoretic Text has “arrow” in the singular at this point, but the verb “to gather up” (laqet) accords much better with collecting several objects, and Jonathan’s having shot all three of the arrows earlier mentioned would require more time on the part of the lad and hence would give Jonathan and David more of an opportunity to talk in confidence.
40. Jonathan gave his gear to his lad. Fokkelman reminds us that Jonathan earlier gave his armor and weapons to David, and now “the successor to the throne indicated by Saul … devotes himself defenselessly to the intimate contact with the man who, according to his father, is his rival.”
41. arose from by the mound. This follows the Septuagint. The Masoretic Text has “arose from the south.”
42. The LORD is witness. As in the previous occurrences in Samuel of this formula of vow taking, the Masoretic Text lacks “witness,” but that word is reflected in the Septuagint. It may well be an idiomatic ellipsis in the original Hebrew version, but the problem with leaving it that way in the English is that it could sound as though Jonathan were saying that the LORD will intervene between him and David (“the LORD will be between me and you”). Polzin contends that the double meaning is intended, but that reading seems a little strained.
2And David came to Nob, to Ahimelech the priest, and Ahimelech trembled to meet David and said to him, “Why are you alone and no one is with you?” 3And David said to Ahimelech the priest, “The king has charged me with a mission, and said to me, ‘Let no one know a thing of the mission on which I send you and with which I charge you.’ And the lads I have directed to such-and-such a place. 4And now, what do you have at hand, five loaves of bread? Give them to me, or whatever there is.” 5And the priest answered David and said, “I have no common bread at hand, solely consecrated bread, if only the lads have kept themselves from women.” 6And David answered the priest and said to him, “Why, women were taboo to us as in times gone by when I sallied forth, and the lads’ gear was consecrated, even if it was a common journey, and how much more so now the gear should be consecrated.” 7And the priest gave him what was consecrated, for there was no bread there except the Bread of the Presence that had been removed from before the LORD to be replaced with warm bread when it was taken away. 8And there a man of Saul’s servants that day was detained before the LORD, and his name was Doeg the Edomite, chief of the herdsmen who were Saul’s. 9And David said to Ahimelech, “Don’t you have here at hand a spear or a sword? For neither my sword nor my gear have I taken with me, for the king’s mission was urgent.” 10And the priest said, “The sword of Goliath the Philistine whom you struck down in the Valley of the Terebinth, here it is, wrapped in a cloak behind the ephod. If this you would take for yourself, take it, for there is none other but it hereabouts.” And David said, “There’s none like it. Give it to me.”
11And David rose on that day and fled from Saul and he came to Achish king of Gath. 12And the servants of Achish said to him, “Is not this David king of the land? Is it not he for whom they call out in dance, saying,
‘Saul has struck down his thousands
and David his tens of thousands.’”
13And David took these words to heart, and he was very afraid of Achish king of Gath. 14And he altered his good sense in their eyes and played the lunatic before them, and he scrabbled on the doors of the gate and drooled onto his beard. 15And Achish said to his servants, “Look, do you see this man is raving mad! Why would you bring him to me? 16Do I lack madmen that you should bring this one to rave for me? Should this one come into my house?”
CHAPTER 21 NOTES
Click here to advance to the next section of the text.
2. Nob. This is the very beginning of David’s flight after the exchange with Jonathan in the field, and Nob is less than three miles south of Gibeah, his approximate point of departure.
Why are you alone and no one is with you? The doubling of the question (in a pattern that is reminiscent of the parallelism of verse) reflects Ahimelech’s astonishment: a prominent commander in Saul’s army would not ordinarily go about without his retinue. From his first sight of David, Ahimelech suspects that he may be a fugitive, which is why he “trembles” to meet him—fear of the powerful king’s retribution stalks the land.
4. five loaves of bread. The number five is sometimes used idiomatically in biblical Hebrew to mean “a few.”
5. if only the lads have kept themselves from women. Ordinarily, consecrated bread would be eaten only by the priests. Ahimelech is willing to stretch the point if David’s “lads”—his fighting men—are not in a state of ritual impurity through sexual intercourse.
6. women were taboo to us. This is the second reference in this narrative to a general practice of refraining from sexual activity during periods of combat.
the lads’ gear was consecrated. The term for “gear,” the all-purpose kelim, could equally refer to weapons, clothing, and vessels for containing food. There are no grounds for restricting the meaning here to the last of these three items, as some interpreters have done.
7. the Bread of the Presence. This would be twelve loaves laid out in display on a table in the sanctuary. When they were replaced with fresh loaves, the old loaves could be eaten by the priests. Robert Polzin proposes a link between the eating of forbidden food here and in the story of Jonathan and the honey. Death will ensue, although not for the eater.
8. And there a man of Saul’s servants. This seemingly intrusive notation is a piece of ominous foreshadowing. For the moment, all we can pick up is a certain dissonance in the presence of a foreigner in the sanctuary and the nearness of a high official of Saul’s to the fugitive David. The ghastly consequences of David’s visit to Nob (chapter 22) will pivot on Doeg’s fatal presence. His identity as Edomite reflects the enlistment of foreign mercenaries in the new royal bureaucracy. It also marks him as a man who will have no inhibitions in what he does to Israelites, even Israelite priests.
detained before the LORD. The verb is derived from the same root (ʿ-ts-r) as the one used for “taboo” in verse 6, but it is unclear whether the reference is to being detained at the sanctuary for some unspecified reason or being detained from participation in the cult.
9. For neither my sword nor my gear have I taken. David, of course, has fled weaponless from his encounter with Jonathan in the field. Now he uses the supposed urgency of his royal mission to explain his lack of arms and to ask for a weapon.
10. If this you would take for yourself, take it, for there is none other but it hereabouts. The last exchange between Ahimelech and David is a vivid instance of the biblical use of contrastive dialogue. The priest’s language is a wordy hesitation dance of repetitions and synonymous expressions. David responds with the most imperative succinctness (just four words in the Hebrew): “There’s none like it. Give it to me.” The fact that this huge sword might be too big for David is submerged by the symbolic notion that it is the weapon of the Philistine champion he vanquished which he now takes up. In any case, David is no longer a raw shepherd lad but a battle-hardened warrior.
11. he came to Achish king of Gath. David flees to the southwest to the one place where he imagines he will be safe from Saul’s pursuit—enemy territory. Such a crossing over to the enemy is a familiar enough move on the part of political refugees. Gath was the hometown of Goliath, and so one must assume that David planned to enter the city incognito, as an anonymous Hebrew fugitive. He would clearly have had to hide the telltale sword before coming into town.
12. David king of the land. The Philistine courtiers, unfortunately, immediately identify David and can even quote the song sung by the Israelite women after his victories. Their characterization of him as “king of the land” is no doubt a tribute to his preeminence on the battlefield but also is an inadvertent confirmation of his clandestine election, of his displacing Saul. Appropriately, though, as J. P. Fokkelman notes, they use a somewhat vague designation instead of the more official “king of Israel.”
13. he was very afraid of Achish. He has come unarmed and, evidently, alone, and now he realizes he has been recognized.
16. Do I lack madmen that you should bring this one to rave for me? Achish’s words are a mirror of outrage and disgust. As Shimon Bar-Efrat has nicely observed, Achish three times uses the root for raving mad (meshugaʿ), three times the first-person pronoun, and three times the root b-w-’ (“to bring” or “to come”). Thus David has succeeded in making himself so revolting that he arouses in Achish a primitive revulsion from the spectacle of the insane, so that the king simply wants to get David out of sight rather than have him killed. This is an extraordinary moment in the story of the founding king of Israel: David, the glamorous young hero of the preceding episodes, is prepared to do whatever is necessary in order to survive, even if it means making himself appear to be the most repulsive of humankind. It is an even lowlier disguise than Odysseus’s as beggar, and it is also not the last experience of humiliation into which David in adversity will willingly plunge. It is noteworthy that David feigns madness in order to survive and eventually become king, in contrast to Saul, whose genuine madness reflects his loss of control over the kingdom.
1And David went from there and got away to the Cave of Adullam, and his brothers heard, as well as all his father’s household, and they came down to him there. 2And every man in straits and every man in debt and every man who was embittered gathered round him, and he became their captain, and there were about four hundred men with him. 3And David went from there to Mizpeh of Moab. And he said to the king of Moab, “Pray, let my father and my mother come out with you until I know what God will do with me.” 4And he led them into the presence of the king of Moab and they stayed with him all the time that David was in the stronghold. 5And Gad the prophet said to David, “You must not stay in the stronghold. Go, and come you to the territory of Judah.” And David went and came to the forest of Hereth.
6And Saul heard that David was discovered, and the men who were with him, and Saul was sitting in Gibeah under the tamarisk on the height, his spear in his hand and all his servants poised in attendance upon him. 7And Saul said to his servants poised in attendance upon him, “Listen, pray, you Benjaminites: will the son of Jesse give every one of you fields and vineyards, will he make every one of you captains of thousands and captains of hundreds, 8that all of you should have conspired against me and none revealed to me when my son made a pact with the son of Jesse, and none of you was troubled for my sake to reveal to me that my son has set up my servant to lie in wait against me as on this very day?” 9And Doeg the Edomite, who was poised in attendance with Saul’s servants, spoke out and said, “I saw the son of Jesse coming to Nob to Ahimelech the son of Ahitub. 10And he inquired of the LORD, and provisions he gave him, and the sword of Goliath the Philistine he gave him.” 11And the king sent to summon Ahimelech the son of Ahitub and all his father’s household, the priests who were in Nob, and they all came to the king. 12And Saul said, “Listen, pray, son of Ahitub.” And he said, “Here I am, my lord.” 13And Saul said, “Why did you conspire against me, you and the son of Jesse, giving him bread and sword and inquiring of God for him, so that he set up to lie in wait against me on this very day?” 14And Ahimelech answered the king and said, “And who of all your servants is like David, loyal and the king’s son-in-law and captain of your palace guard and honored in your house? 15Did I this day for the first time inquire for him of God? Far be it from me! Let not the king impute anything to his servant or to all my father’s house, for your servant knew nothing of all this, neither great nor small.” 16And the king said, “You are doomed to die, Ahimelech, you and all your father’s house!” 17And the king said to the sentries poised in attendance on him, “Turn round and put to death the priests of the LORD, for their hand, too, is with David, for they knew he was fleeing and did not reveal it to me!” And the king’s servants did not want to reach out their hand to stab the priests of the LORD. 18And the king said to Doeg, “You, then, turn round and stab the priests,” and Doeg the Edomite turned round and he it was who stabbed the priests and he put to death on that day eighty-five men who wore the linen ephod. 19And he struck down Nob the priests’ town with the edge of the sword, man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and donkey and sheep, all by the edge of the sword.
20And one son of Ahimelech the son of Ahitub got away, and his name was Abiathar, and he fled after David. 21And Abiathar told David that Saul had killed the priests of the LORD. 22And David said to Abiathar, “I knew on that day that Doeg the Edomite was there, that he would surely tell Saul. I am the one who caused the loss of all the lives of your father’s house. 23Stay with me. Do not fear, for whoever seeks my life seeks your life, so you are under my guard.”
CHAPTER 22 NOTES
Click here to advance to the next section of the text.
1. Adullam. The location is in the hilly terrain at the western edge of the tribal territory of Judah, near the Philistine region.
his brothers … all his father’s household. Saul’s rage over the notion that David would have neglected the new moon festivity at the palace to join his brothers in Bethlehem is given an after-the-fact political confirmation here: David’s brothers and clansmen rally round him, forming a kind of family militia. But there is a push as well as a pull in their going out to David in the badlands: if they remained in Bethlehem, they would be subject to retribution by Saul’s soldiery. David’s decision to move his parents across the border to Moab (verse 3) is another reflection of fear of royal vengeance against the family. Jesse, earlier characterized as very aged, would have been too old to join the fighting men.
2. every man in straits … in debt … embittered. David’s guerilla band has a core drawn from his clan and a rank and file of the dispossessed and malcontent—men with nothing to lose who have been oppressed by the established order. David’s social base as guerilla chieftain is strongly reminiscent of Jephthah’s (Judges 11).
3. Mizpeh of Moab. The word mizpeh (or in some places, mizpah) means “outlook” or “vista,” and so this particular Mizpeh must be identified as the one in Moab, east of the Jordan. If the Book of Ruth provides reliable genealogy, David’s great-grandmother Ruth was a Moabite, and so David here may be calling on a family connection in requesting asylum for his parents.
4. all the time that David was in the stronghold. The identity of the stronghold has puzzled interpreters, especially because David is said to have set up headquarters in a cave. Some have argued that the two terms refer to the same place, but the Hebrew for “stronghold,” metsudah, usually refers to a height. Others read “cave,” meʿarah, for metsudah. That proposal is problematic because Adullam is in the territory of Judah, and in verse 5 David is enjoined to leave the stronghold and head for the territory of Judah. The most reasonable inference is that after the parlay with the king of Moab, David moves his fighting men from Adullam at the western border of the territory of Judah to an unspecified stronghold, probably in the craggy border region between Moab and Israel.
5. Gad the prophet. This figure appears in the story without introduction or explanation. What is important is that we see David with an open line of communication with the divinity, in sharp contrast to Saul.
6. Saul heard that David was discovered. From this point onward, the narrative will switch back and forth deftly between David and Saul. It now turns to an ominous piece of unfinished business—Saul’s response to the priest of Nob who helped David in his flight. The specific reference of Saul’s hearing “that David was discovered” could well be intelligence that places David’s hideout at the stronghold. That would explain why Gad urges David to move on from the stronghold to a forest in Judahite territory.
his spear in his hand. The same spear in hand with which he sought to kill David, and then Jonathan. This small detail thus foreshadows the massacre of an entire town that Saul will order.
7. you Benjaminites. Evidently, the inner circle at the court is enlisted from his own tribe. The tribal affiliation helps explain the sarcasm of his rhetorical questions: could they really expect someone from the tribe of Judah to bestow all these bounties on them?
fields … vineyards … captains. As Moshe Garsiel has aptly noted, Saul’s paranoid outburst picks up key terms from Samuel’s warning about the “practice of the king” in chapter 8. It is also noteworthy that Saul’s distraught speech takes the form of one lone onrushing sentence (all the way to the end of verse 8). Once again, Saul refers to David contemptuously solely by patronymic, as “the son of Jesse.”
8. none revealed to me. Once again, Saul’s problem, which is also the symptom of his paranoia, is that he feels essential knowledge is denied him.
10. he inquired of the LORD. There was no report in chapter 21 of Ahimelech’s inquiring of the oracle for David, and it seems unlikely that so essential a fact would have been simply elided by the narrator. The first item, then, in Doeg’s denunciation of Ahimelech looks like a fabrication—and one that would especially enrage Saul, who has repeatedly had access to divine knowledge blocked.
12. son of Ahitub. It is a shocking piece of rudeness for Saul to address someone invested with the authority of priesthood merely by patronymic.
14. who of all your servants is like David. Ahimelech may still be laboring under the delusion that the fugitive David was embarked on a special secret mission for Saul. His testimony to David’s loyalty and eminence will of course stoke Saul’s already blazing anger.
15. Did I this day for the first time inquire for him of God? Some interpreters read this as a declarative sentence, but the context compels one to construe it as a question: I never previously consulted the oracle for David, and why on earth would I do it now? (Perhaps he is suggesting that consultation of the oracle is a service to be offered only to the king.) He is silent, however, about providing bread and sword, which in fact he has done.
16. you and all your father’s house. Ahimelech is the great-grandson of Eli. The slaughter of the entire clan of priests here is the grim fulfillment of the curse on the house of Eli first enunciated by the man of God in 2:27–36.
17. for their hand, too, is with David. The Hebrew adverb gam, often a general term of emphasis, surely has the force of “too” here: the paranoid Saul sees conspirators on all sides—his son, his Benjaminite court attendants, and now the priests of Nob.
the king’s servants did not want to reach out. Beyond any moral considerations and any concern for the king’s sanity, it would be a violation of a taboo to murder the priests of the LORD.
to stab. The core meaning of the Hebrew verb pagaʿ is the meeting or intersection of two material bodies or human agencies. It can mean “to encounter,” “to accost,” and, by extension, “to entreat,” but in contexts of violent action, it refers to the “encounter” between forged blade and flesh. The verb “to strike down” (hikah, as in verse 19) indicates the consummated act of killing. In verse 21, the narrator uses harag, the unadorned verb that means “to kill.”
18. You, then. Saul emphatically adds the second-person pronoun ʾatah to the imperative verb: if none of my Israelite subjects will kill the priests, you, then, as an Edomite, may carry out my orders.
who wore the linen ephod. This is a kind of epic epithet for priests.
19. man and woman, infant and suckling. Saul, with the Edomite Doeg as his cat’s-paw, flings himself into an orgy of mass murder, killing not only the adult priests but every living creature in Nob. Now he is carrying out the ban he executed only imperfectly against Amalek (the terms used are virtually identical), but the massacre is directed at his own innocent people. Saul’s madness has become sinister and lethal, like that of Macbeth, who also becomes a murderer of children—the well-meaning farmer’s son who became king has turned into a bloody tyrant.
all by the edge of the sword. “All” catches the force of the Hebrew preposition ʿad (“even” or “as far as”) reiterated before each term in the catalogue of the massacre.
20. And one son of Ahimelech … got away. This sole survivor (his name means “my father remains”) will then be able to provide David with priestly services, including access to the oracle.
22. I am the one who caused the loss of all the lives. The Hebrew uses an ellipsis, “caused all the lives,” but the sense is clearly loss of life.
1And they told David, saying, “Look, the Philistines are fighting against Keilah and they are looting the threshing floors.” 2And David inquired of the LORD, saying, “Shall I go and strike down these Philistines?” And the LORD said to David, “Go and strike down the Philistines and rescue Keilah.” 3And David’s men said to him, “Look, we’re afraid here in Judah, and how much more so if we go to Keilah against the Philistine lines!” 4And David again inquired of the LORD, and the LORD answered him and said, “Rise, go down to Keilah, for I am about to give the Philistines into your hand.” 5And David, and his men with him, went to Keilah and did battle with the Philistines, and he drove off their cattle and struck them a great blow, and David rescued the inhabitants of Keilah. 6And it happened when Abiathar the son of Ahimelech fled to David at Keilah, that the ephod came down in his hand.
7And it was told to Saul that David had come to Keilah, and Saul said, “God has given him in my hand, for he is closed inside a town with double gate and bolt.” 8And Saul summoned all the troops for battle to go down to Keilah to lay seige against David and his men. 9And David knew that Saul was scheming evil against him and he said to Abiathar the priest, “Bring forth the ephod.” 10And David said, “LORD, God of Israel, Your servant has indeed heard that Saul seeks to come to Keilah to destroy the town on my count. 11Will the notables of Keilah hand me over to him? Will Saul come down, as Your servant has heard? LORD, God of Israel, tell, pray, Your servant.” And the LORD said, “He will come down.” 12And David said, “Will the notables of Keilah hand me over, and my men, to Saul?” And the LORD said, “They will hand you over.” 13And David arose, and his men with him, about six hundred men, and they came out from Keilah and moved about wherever they could, and to Saul it was told that David had gotten away from Keilah, and he ceased going out.
14And David stayed in the wilderness in strongholds, and he stayed in the high country in the wilderness of Ziph. And Saul sought him all the while but God did not give him into his hand. 15And David saw that Saul had come out to seek his life, and David was in the wilderness of Ziph in the forest. 16And Jonathan the son of Saul arose and went to David in the forest and bade him take heart in the LORD. 17And he said to him, “Do not fear, for the hand of Saul my father shall not find you, and it is you who shall be king over Israel, and I on my part will be your viceroy, and even Saul my father knows it.” 18And the two of them sealed a pact before the LORD, and David stayed in the forest but Jonathan went to his house.
19And Ziphites came up to Saul at Gibeah, saying, “Is not David hiding out among us in the strongholds in the forest on the hill of Hachilah to the south of the wasteland? 20And so whenever you may desire, O king, to come down, come down, and ours is the part to deliver him into the hand of the king.” 21And Saul said, “Blessed are you to the LORD, for you have shown pity on me. 22Go, pray, make certain, and mark and see the place where his foot treads, and who has seen him there, for it has been said to me that he is very cunning. 23See and mark all the hideouts where he may take cover there and come back to me when you are certain and I shall go with you. And if indeed he is in the land, I shall search for him among all the clans of Judah.” 24And they arose and went to Ziph ahead of Saul, and David and his men were in the wilderness of Maon in the desert south of the wasteland. 25And Saul went, and his men with him, to seek David. And it was told to David, and he went down to the crag and stayed in the wilderness of Maon, and Saul heard, and pursued David into the wilderness of Maon. 26And Saul went on one side of the mountain and David and his men on the other side of the mountain, and David made haste to go off from before Saul, while Saul and his men were circling the mountain after David and his men to catch them. 27Just then a messenger came to Saul, saying, “Hurry, and go, for the Philistines have invaded the land!” 28And Saul turned back from pursuing David and went to meet the Philistines. Therefore do they call that place the Crag of the Divide.
24:1And David went up from there and stayed in the strongholds of Ein-Gedi.
CHAPTER 23 NOTES
Click here to advance to the next section of the text.
1. Keilah. Keilah is a town on the western perimeter of the territory of Judah, facing the Philistine border. Its vulnerability to Philistine incursions is thus understandable. David’s men (verse 3) speak as though Keilah were not part of Judah because as a border town it seems to them much more dangerous than their location deep within their own tribal territory. Some scholars have speculated that Keilah was an independent town without tribal affiliation.
2. David inquired of the LORD. The means of inquiry are not specified, but since his questions invite the usual yes-or-no response, it seems likely he is using the ephod and not, as some interpreters have claimed, a more immediate mode of communication with God. The information, then, in verse 6 that the fugitive priest Abiathar has arrived from Nob with the ephod is probably retrospective. The phrase “at Keilah” (one word in Hebrew) in that verse perhaps should be deleted as an inadvertent scribal duplication of “Keilah” at the end of the preceding verse—by the testimony of chapter 22, Abiathar fled to David when David was in the forest of Hereth in Judah, before he undertook the rescue mission to Keilah.
6. the ephod came down in his hand. From the viewpoint of the ancient audience, the ephod would have been indispensable as an instrument of what we would call military intelligence. An ephod, we should recall, is also a priestly garment. At Nob, Saul slaughtered eighty-five priests “who wore the linen ephod.” Fokkelman perceptively describes the appearance of the oracular ephod in David’s camp as a “countermove by God”—“Saul may bloody the 85 linen priestly garments called the ephod, but the one ephod which acts as a medium for the decisive word of God turns up at the place of the alternative anointed one.”
7. given him in my hand. The Masoretic Text has nikar, “made a stranger,” but the Septuagint reflects a verb meaning “sold” or “handed over.”
11. Will the notables … hand me over …? Will Saul come down. Since the binary device of the ephod can give only one answer of yes or no, David receives an answer only to the second question and then is obliged to repeat the first question (verse 12) in order to get a response to it.
12. They will hand you over. It may seem base ingratitude on the part of the Keilah notables to betray the man who has just rescued their town from the Philistines. But they must fear Saul’s retribution should they collaborate with David at least as much as they fear the Philistines. The political paradox of the situation that has evolved is evident: David has achieved a victory against Israel’s principal enemy; Saul now moves to destroy that victor, enlisting the aid of the people David saved.
14. in the wilderness in strongholds. Since the Hebrew term for strongholds (metsadah or metsudah—attempts to distinguish the two being questionable) generally occurs in wilderness settings, it seems likely that these are not built-up structures but rather natural formations that afforded effective defensive positions, such as promontories surrounded by outcroppings of rock.
in the wilderness of Ziph. The location is in the tribal territory of Judah, about five miles southeast of Hebron and about ten miles southeast of Keilah, where David has just fought the Philistines.
16. bade him take heart in the LORD. The literal meaning of the Hebrew idiom used is “strengthened his hand in the LORD.” The Hebrew thus is able to pick up the word “hand” at the beginning of Jonathan’s speech, “the hand of my father Saul shall not find you.”
17. I on my part will be your viceroy. For the second time, Jonathan makes a pact with David in which he concedes that it is David who will inherit the throne. There is a pattern of incremental repetition here: only now does Jonathan specify that he will be David’s viceroy (literally “second,” mishneh, but this is an ellipses for mishneh lamelekh, “second to the king”). The faithful Jonathan persists in his naïveté, imagining that he will be able to serve as viceroy to his dear friend, who is also the man destined to displace the dynasty Saul would have established. As an alleged doublet, this episode has narrative plausibility: Jonathan first confirmed a pact with David when he told him he must flee from Saul; now, no doubt at some risk to himself, he is impelled to seek out the fugitive and beleaguered David in order to assure him of his continuing loyalty and encourage him in his adversity. Once again, characteristically, David’s response to Jonathan is not reported.
19. Ziphites. Since no definite article is used, this appears to be one group of Ziphites and not a delegation representing the entire clan. The motive for betraying David could equally be desire for a reward and fear of retribution should Saul discover that they had allowed David to hide out in their territory: the ruthless massacre at Nob would have been a grim object lesson duly noted throughout the Israelite populace.
in the strongholds in the forest on the hill of Hachilah to the south of the wasteland. The Ziphite informers want to make their identification of David’s whereabouts as precise as possible, hence the unusual string of geographical indications. As it emerges, the intelligence they provide is still not precise enough for the frustrated Saul, as his response (“make certain … when you are certain”) clearly shows. It should be said that most translators have treated the last geographical term used by the Ziphites, “the wasteland,” as a proper noun (yeshimon), but because it bears a definite article, and because yeshimon is a well-attested common noun, it is preferable not to construe it as a place-name. This episode uses three different terms for uninhabited terrain—wilderness, wasteland, and desert (or four, if one adds forest)—which has the cumulative effect of emphasizing how David is constrained to take refuge beyond the populated areas of Israel.
21. you have shown pity on me. Saul uses the same verb for pity or “sparing” that was prominently deployed in the Amalek story. The idea that the poor king, thwarted by a cunning and malicious David, needs to be shown pity is surely another manifestation of his paranoia—we might say, of its maudlin side.
22. where his foot treads. The Hebrew says literally “where his foot is.” The focus on David’s foot reflects the eye of the pursuer on the track of his elusive prey.
for it has been said to me. The Hebrew reads literally, “for he has said to me,” but there is no need to emend the text because biblical Hebrew sometimes uses a third-person masculine singular verb with no specified grammatical subject to perform the function of the passive. Notice that Saul claims someone has told him David is very cunning—not, which is the case, that Saul himself has decided that his “enemy” is cunning.
24. Maon. This would be roughly three miles due south of the wilderness of Ziph.
26. Saul and his men were circling the mountain. Kyle McCarter Jr. has made the plausible suggestion that what is indicated in this language is a pincer movement: Saul’s forces are moving around the circumference of the mountain on two sides in order to trap David between them, who is on the far side of the mountain. He, evidently realizing the nature of Saul’s maneuver, scrambles to flee—“David made haste to go off from before Saul”—before the pincer snaps shut.
27. Hurry, and go, for the Philistines have invaded the land. This last-minute diversion of course has the effect of rescuing David from Saul, but it also points up the madness of his obsessive pursuit of David: at a time when Israel’s major national enemy is repeatedly sending troops against the territory Saul is supposed to be governing and protecting, he is devoting his attention, and his troops, to the pursuit of David.
28. the Crag of the Divide. This etiological notice explains the place-name, sela‘hamaḥleqot, as deriving from the “divide” between Saul’s forces, which went one way, and David’s, which went another. Several commentators have proposed that the name derived not from maḥloqet, “division,” but from ḥalaq, “smooth,” and so the original meaning would have been Slippery Crag, or Unforested Crag.
24:1. the strongholds of Ein-Gedi. David now flees eastward from the forest area of Ziph, south of Hebron in the central region of Judah’s territory, to Ein-Gedi, in the rocky heights overlooking the Dead Sea. He would have felt safer in this remote region with its forbidding terrain. But Ein-Gedi is an oasis, which would have provided a water supply and vegetation for him and his troops
2And it happened when Saul turned back from the Philistines that they told him, saying, “Look, David is in the wilderness of Ein-Gedi.” 3And Saul took three thousand picked men from all Israel and he went to seek David over the rocks of the wild goats. 4And he came to the sheepfolds along the way, and there was a cave there, and Saul went in to relieve himself, while David and his men were sitting in the far end of the cave. 5And David’s men said to him, “Here is the day that the LORD said to you, ‘Look, I am about to give your enemy into your hands, and you may do to him whatever seems good in your eyes.’” And David rose and stealthily cut off the skirt of the cloak that was Saul’s. 6And it happened then that David was smitten with remorse because he had cut off the skirt of the cloak that was Saul’s. 7And he said to his men, “The LORD forbid me, that I should have done this thing to my master, the LORD’s anointed, to reach out my hand against him, for he is the LORD’s anointed.” 8And David held back his men with words and did not let them rise against Saul, and Saul rose from the cave and went on the way. 9And David then rose and came out of the cave and called after Saul, saying, “My lord the king!” And Saul looked behind him, and David knelt, his face to the ground, and bowed down. 10And David said to Saul, “Why should you listen to people’s words, saying, ‘Look, David seeks to harm you’? 11Look, this day your eyes have seen that the LORD has given you into my hand in the cave, and they meant to kill you, and I had pity for you and said, ‘I will not reach out my hand against my master, for he is the LORD’s anointed.’ 12And, my father, see, yes, see the skirt of your cloak in my hand, for when I cut off the skirt of your cloak and did not kill you, mark and see that there was no evil or crime in my hand and I did not offend you, yet you stalk me to take my life. 13Let the LORD judge between me and you, and the LORD will avenge me of you, but my hand will not be against you. 14As the proverb of the ancients says, ‘From wicked men does wickedness come forth,’ but my hand will not be against you. 15After whom has the king of Israel come forth, after whom are you chasing? After a dead dog, after a single flea? 16The LORD will be arbiter and judge between me and you, that He may see and plead my case and judge me against you.” 17And it happened when David had finished speaking these words to Saul, that Saul said, “Is this your voice, my son, David?” And Saul raised his voice and wept. 18And he said to David, “You are more in the right than I, for it is you who requited me good whereas I requited you evil. 19And you told today how you wrought good with me, when the LORD delivered me into your hand and you did not kill me. 20For if a man finds his enemy, does he send him off on a good way? The LORD will repay you with good for what you have done for me this day. 21And so, look, I know that you will surely be king and that the kingship of Israel will stay in your hands. 22And now, swear to me by the LORD that you shall not cut off my seed after me and that you shall not blot out my name from my father’s house.” 23And David swore to Saul, and Saul went home while David and his men went up to the stronghold.
CHAPTER 24 NOTES
Click here to advance to the next section of the text.
3. three thousand picked men. David, it should be recalled, commands a guerilla band of about six hundred men; so he is outnumbered five to one and is facing elite troops.
4. Saul went in to relieve himself … David and his men … in the far end of the cave. The topography is quite realistic, for the cliffs overlooking the Dead Sea in the region of Ein-Gedi are honeycombed with caves. Power and powerlessness are precariously balanced in this episode. David and his men are in all likelihood hiding in the far end of the cave from Saul’s search party. Had a contingent of soldiers entered the cave, they would have been trapped. Instead, Saul comes in alone, and he is in a double sense exposed to David and his men.
5. Here is the day that the LORD said to you. David’s eager men exhibit a certain theological presumptuousness. They surely know that their leader has been secretly anointed to be king, but nothing in the preceding narrative indicates a divine promise that God would deliver Saul into David’s hands.
do to him whatever seems good in your eyes. They carefully avoid the plain word “kill.”
6. David was smitten with remorse. The Hebrew is literally “David’s heart smote him.”
he had cut off the skirt of the cloak that was Saul’s. Clearly, what David feels is that he has perpetrated a kind of symbolic mutilation of the king by cutting off the corner of his garment—not with anything like a scissors, of course, but surely with his sword, his instrument for killing his enemies. The cloak (meʿil) has already been linked emblematically with kingship in the final estrangement between Samuel and Saul, and so David is in symbolic effect “cutting away” Saul’s kingship. For all the remorse he feels, he will continue to make double use of the corner of the cloak, as we shall see.
7. that I should have done this thing to my master, the LORD’s anointed. Some interpreters have read this whole episode as an apology for David’s innocence and piety in relation to Saul. But the very gesture of piety is also self-interested—David, after all, is conscious that he, too, is the LORD’s anointed, and it is surely in his long-term interest that the reigning king’s person should be held sacred by all his subjects.
8. David held back his men. The meaning of the verb shisaʿ is disputed, but it is most plausibly linked with the noun shesaʿ, a split or cleft. The sense here would then be: he “split off” his men from Saul, using his words to interpose a kind of barrier between them and the king. In any case, the first clause of this verse appears to respond to the men’s initial inclination to kill Saul (verse 5) rather than following from David’s remorse over the cutting of the garment—a chronological displacement noted as early as Rashi.
9. David … came out of the cave and called after Saul. David is taking a calculated risk. Saul could, after all, order his troops to attack David and the men behind him in the cave. David first throws Saul off his guard by paying obeisance to him as king and prostrating himself—hardly what one would expect of a fugitive or rebel. He then counts on the persuasive power of his own rhetoric, and on the telltale scrap of the king’s cloak that he clutches, to deflect Saul from his lethal intentions. David is cannily self-protective but he is also a gambler.
10–11. Why should you listen to people’s words … this day your eyes have seen. Instead of rumor heard about David’s harmful intentions, here is ocular evidence of his innocence—and of God’s having devised to give David the upper hand over Saul.
11. and they meant to kill you. The Masoretic Text has “he meant,” which may be either corrected to a plural, as some of the ancient versions do, or construed as “someone said.”
12. my father see, yes, see the skirt of your cloak in my hand. It is, appropriately, ambiguous whether “my father” is a form of respectful address to an authority or an attempt to reach back to the moment of affectionate intimacy in their relationship. We may note that David, for all the remorse he felt over having cut off the skirt of Saul’s garment, makes great display of it now as evidence of having had Saul entirely at his mercy. The proof of his innocence is thus inseparable from the reminder of the power he had over his rival.
13. Let the LORD judge between me and you … the LORD will avenge me of you. David’s great protestation of innocence and his purported gesture of reconciliation move toward a barely veiled threat: you are the one who has wronged me, and vengeance will be exacted, but by God, not by me.
14. the proverb of the ancients. The Masoretic Text has “ancient,” in the singular, but the Qumran Samuel scroll, more plausibly, shows the plural form.
From wicked men does wickedness come forth. The gnomic saying—only three words in the Hebrew!—that David chooses to cite is archly double-edged: Wicked acts are perpetrated only by the wicked, so I won’t be the one to touch you. But there is also the distinct hint that the wicked person in question could be Saul himself. Though David cannot know this, Saul will die by his own hand.
but my hand will not be against you. The words that the writer attributes to David ironically echo the words of Saul’s first murderous plot against David, conveyed in interior monologue, when Saul said, “Let not my hand be against him but let the hand of the Philistines be against him” (18:17).
15. has the king of Israel come forth. The very verb attached to the wicked in the proverb!
After a dead dog, after a single flea? In his peroration, David outdoes himself in professing his humble station. A dead dog was proverbial in ancient Israel as a contemptible, worthless thing, but David goes the idiom one better by saying he is scarcely more important than a single flea on the dead dog’s carcass, a brilliant adaptation to prose of the logic of intensification of biblical poetry, in which a term introduced in the first part of the line is raised to the second power semantically in the parallel second half.
16. judge me against you. The Hebrew is literally “judge me from your hand,” that is, judge me favorably and rescue me from your hand. The term thus picks up the insistence on “hand” throughout David’s speech.
17. Is this your voice, my son, David? These first words of Saul’s response to David are one of the most breathtaking instances of the biblical technique of contrastive dialogue. David’s speech had been, by biblical standards, quite lengthy, and very much a speech—a beautifully crafted piece of rhetoric, with complex political aims in mind. Saul responds with four choked Hebrew words, haqolkha zeh beni Dawid? His designation of David as “my son” is free of the ambiguity attached to David’s calling him “my father.” This is one of those extraordinary reversals that make biblical narrative such a probing representation of the oscillations and the unpredictability of human nature: David’s words have cut to the quick of the king’s conscience, and suddenly the obsessive pursuer feels an access of paternal affection, intertwined with remorse, for his imagined enemy. Saul asks his question because he has to shake himself to believe his enemy is his friend, because he stands at a certain distance from David (who has called out “after” Saul), and also because his eyes are blinded with tears. He is thus reminiscent of the blind father Isaac, who was able to make out the voice, but not the identity, of his son Jacob, and from whom a blessing was wrested.
18. You are more in the right than I. These words echo the ones pronounced by Judah, referring to his vindicated daughter-in-law Tamar, who will become the progenitrix of David’s line.
you who requited me good … I requited you evil. The antithesis of good and evil is played on through the next three verses and should not be sacrificed in the English for the sake of imagined idiomatic fluency.
21. I know that you will surely be king. This marks Saul’s first open admission that David is the “fellow man who is better than you” of whom Samuel spoke (15:28). He has been doubly convinced—by God’s having put him at David’s mercy and by David’s refusal to harm him, a kingly act and not the act of a rebel and usurper.
1And Samuel died, and all Israel gathered and mourned him, and they buried him at his home in Ramah. And David arose and went down to the wilderness of Paran.
2And there was a man in Maon, whose stock was in Carmel, and the man was very great; he had three thousand sheep and a thousand goats. And it happened when he was shearing his sheep in Carmel—3and the man’s name was Nabal and his wife’s name was Abigail, and the woman had a good mind and lovely looks, but the man was hard and evil in deeds, and a Calebite—4David heard in the wilderness that Nabal was shearing his sheep. 5And David sent ten lads, and David said to the lads, “Go up to Carmel, and come to Nabal and ask him in my name how he fares. 6And say, ‘Thus may it be this time next year, that you fare well, and your house fare well, and all that is yours fare well. 7And so, I have heard that they are doing your shearing. Now, the shepherds who belong to you were with us—we did not humiliate them and nothing of theirs was missing the whole time they were at Carmel. 8Ask your lads and they will tell you! And may our lads find favor in your eyes, for we have come on a festive day. Give, pray, whatever you can to your servants and to your son, to David.’” 9And David’s lads came and spoke to Nabal all these words in David’s name, and they paused. 10And Nabal answered David’s servants and said, “Who is David and who is the son of Jesse? These days many are the slaves breaking away from their masters. 11And shall I take my bread and my water and my meat that I slaughtered for my shearers and give it to men who come from I know not where?” 12And David’s lads whirled round on their way and went back and told him all these words. 13And David said to his men, “Every man, gird his sword!” And every man girded his sword, and David, too, girded his sword. And about four hundred men went up after David, while two hundred stayed with the gear.
14And to Abigail the wife of Nabal one of the lads told, saying, “Look, David sent messengers from the wilderness to greet our master, and he pounced on them. 15And the men have been very good to us and we were not humiliated and we missed nothing the whole time we went about with them when we were out in the field. 16They were a wall around us both night and day the whole time we were with them tending the sheep. 17And now, mark and see what you must do, for the evil is resolved against our master and against all his house, and he is such a scoundrel no one can speak to him.” 18And Abigail hurried and fetched two hundred loaves of bread and two jugs of wine and five dressed sheep and five seahs of parched grain and a hundred raisin cakes and two hundred fig cakes, and she put them on the donkeys. 19And she said to her lads, “Pass on ahead of me and I’ll be coming right after you.” But her husband she did not tell. 20And so she was riding on the donkey coming down under the cover of the mountain and, look, David and his men were coming down toward her, and she met them. 21And David had said, “All in vain did I guard everything that belonged to this fellow in the wilderness, and nothing was missing from all that was his, and he paid me back evil for good! 22Thus may God do to David and even more, if I leave from all that is his until morning a single pisser against the wall!” 23And Abigail saw David and hurried and got down from the donkey and flung herself on her face before David and bowed to the ground. 24And she flung herself at his feet and said, “Mine, my lord, is the blame! But let your servant speak in your ears, and hear the words of your servant. 25Pray, let not my lord pay mind to this scoundrel of a man, to Nabal, for just like his name he is, his name means Base and baseness is with him. And as for me, your servant, I never saw my lord’s lads whom you sent. 26And now, my lord, as the LORD lives and as you live—the LORD Who kept you from coming into bloodguilt with your own hand rescuing you—and now, like Nabal may your enemies be who seek evil against my lord. 27And now, this blessing that your servant has brought to my lord, let it be given to the lads who go about in the footsteps of my lord. 28Forgive, pray, the crime of your servant, for the LORD will surely make for my lord a stalwart house, for my lord fights the battles of the LORD and no evil will be found in you all your days. 29And when a person rises to pursue you, to seek your life, my lord’s life will be bound in the bundle of the living with the LORD your God, and the lives of your enemies He will sling from the hollow of the sling. 30And so, when the LORD does for my lord all the good that He has spoken about you and He appoints you prince over Israel, 31this will not be a stumbling and a trepidation of the heart to my lord, to have shed blood for no cause and for my lord to have carried out his own rescue, then will the LORD do well with my lord, and you will remember your servant.” 32And David said to Abigail, “Blessed is the LORD, God of Israel, Who has sent you this day to meet me. 33And blessed is your good sense and blessed are you, for this day you held me back from coming into bloodguilt with my own hand rescuing me. 34And yet, as the LORD, God of Israel, lives, Who kept me from harming you, had you not hurried and come to meet me, there would not have been left to Nabal by morning’s light a single pisser against the wall!” 35And David took from her hand what she had brought him, and to her he said, “Go up in peace to your house. See, I have heeded your voice and granted your petition.”
36And Abigail came to Nabal, and, look, he was having himself a feast in his house like a king’s feast, and Nabal’s heart was of good cheer, and he was exceedingly drunk. And she told him nothing, neither great nor small. 37And it happened in the morning when the wine was gone out of Nabal that his wife told him these things and his heart died within him and he became like a stone. 38And it happened after about ten days that the LORD smote Nabal and he died.
39And David heard that Nabal had died, and he said, “Blessed is the LORD Who has taken up my cause of insult against Nabal, and His servant He has withheld from evil, and Nabal’s evil the LORD has brought down on his own head.” And David sent and spoke out for Abigail to take her as wife. 40And David’s servants came to Abigail at Carmel and spoke to her, saying, “David sent us to you to take you to him as wife.” 41And she arose and bowed, her face to the ground, and said, “Look, your servant is but a slavegirl to wash the feet of my lord’s servants.” 42And Abigail hurried and rose and rode on the donkey, her five young women walking behind her, and she went after David’s messengers, and she became his wife. 43And Ahinoam David had taken from Jezreel, and both of them became his wives. 44And Saul had given Michal his daughter, David’s wife, to Palti son of Laish, who was from Gallim.
CHAPTER 25 NOTES
Click here to advance to the next section of the text.
1. the wilderness of Paran. This geographical indication is puzzling because, unless there is some other place called Paran, it would refer to the Sinai desert, where it would make no sense for David to go and where he could scarcely be if he and his men are engaged with Nabal’s shepherds in Judah. The Septuagint reads “wilderness of Maon.”
2. Maon … Carmel. Both places are in the tribal territory of Judah, in the vicinity of Hebron, and just a few miles apart.
3. the man’s name was Nabal. On the face of it, this is an improbable name because nabal in Hebrew plainly means “base fellow,” “churl,” or “fool,” as Abigail (verse 25) will point out. It is at least conceivable that the name is not originally Hebrew, and various meanings drawn from other ancient Near Eastern languages have been proposed for it, such as “archer” and “chosen one of the god.”
a good mind and lovely looks. As yet, we do not know why this characterization will be important. Her shrewd intelligence will be vividly demonstrated in her brilliant speech to David, and her physical attractiveness will stir his matrimonial interest in her.
and a Calebite. The Calebites were non-Israelites who in effect joined the tribe of Judah. Several medieval Hebrew commentators detected a double meaning because kalibi could also be construed as “doglike.”
6. Thus may it be this time next year. The compact Hebrew phrase koh leḥay occurs only here, and its meaning has been disputed. This translation adopts an interpretation that goes back to Rashi, which is based on the similarity to a well-known idiom, ka‘et ḥayah. That would make sense in terms of the narrative situation: the prosperous Nabal is obviously “faring well” at the moment, and David’s greeting of peace (to fare well in the Hebrew idiom is to possess shalom) contains a veiled threat—let us hope that you continue to fare well a year from now.
7. we did not humiliate them. This is the same verb used for Jonathan’s sense of his father’s treatment of him (20:34), although here it has the meaning of “molest.”
nothing of theirs was missing. The message is that David’s men did not permit themselves to take any of Nabal’s flock, and perhaps also that as armed men they defended Nabal’s people against marauders (compare verse 16, “They were a wall around us both night and day”). But there is a certain ambiguity as to whether David was providing protection out of sheer goodwill or conducting a protection racket in order to get the necessary provisions for his guerilla band.
8. our lads. The Hebrew says “the lads”—“our” is added for the sake of clarity, to distinguish David’s retainers from Nabal’s.
for we have come on a festive day. The time of sheepshearing was a sort of holiday, with feasting and drinking. Nabal’s own feast back home at Maon (verse 36) may have been encouraged by the festivities in which he joined with his shearers out in the field.
Give, pray, whatever you can to your servants. The request for a payoff is politely worded, and no quantities are specified.
to your son, to David. This is an expression of deference or humility to the powerful and presumably older Nabal. It also strikes an ironic note of correspondence with the language of David’s encounter with Saul at the cave near Ein-Gedi in the previous episode. There, David addressed Saul as “my father,” and the king, in an access of feeling, called David “my son.”
10. Who is David and who is the son of Jesse? This sarcastic question, in verse-like parallelism, picks up another ironic correspondence with Saul, who after the vanquishing of Goliath asked whose son this was. In Nabal’s case, of course, the question expresses the contempt of a rich landowner for David and his ragtag band of dispossessed men and malcontents (“men who come from I know not where”).
many are the slaves breaking away from their masters. On the surface, these words reflect the disdain of a propertied man (who would also be a slaveholder) for all landless rebels who threaten the established social hierarchy. But there is also a barbed hint that David himself is a slave or subject (the same word in Hebrew) who has rebelled against his master, Saul.
11. shall I take my bread and my water. The Septuagint has “wine” instead of “water.” In any case, Nabal’s harsh and contemptuous response to David’s men vividly illustrates that he is a “hard” man, and a churlish one. His outrage over the notion of parting with any of his possessions is nicely indicated, as Shimon Bar-Efrat has noted, by the fact that there are eight grammatical expressions of the first-person singular in this one sentence.
12. Every man, gird his sword. The angry David wastes no words: he merely gives the urgent command to take up weapons and move out for the kill.
15. And the men have been very good to us. In keeping with the general practice of biblical dialogue, the servant recycles the language of David’s message to Nabal—“we were not humiliated and we missed nothing the whole time”—but amplifies it by adding this clause as well as the image in the next verse, “They were a wall around us both night and day.” He thus makes emphatically clear that David’s men really provided protection faithfully, whether in the simple sense or in the racketeering sense.
17. And now, mark and see what you must do. Unlike the “lads” who address Saul, this one offers no specific advice to Abigail, for she is more than clever enough to figure out what steps she must immediately take.
20. And so she was riding on the donkey coming down under the cover of the mountain and, look, David and his men were coming. The two parties moving toward each other introduce a moment of suspense, for David, after all, as the next verse (with a pluperfect verb) makes utterly clear, is armed and angry. The “look” (hineh) is used in characteristic fashion to indicate Abigail’s visual perspective: he at first doesn’t see her because she is coming down the sheltered slope of the mountain, but she sees him and his men with their swords girded ready for battle.
22. a single pisser against the wall. The literal meaning of the Hebrew is properly followed in the King James Version, as it is in this translation. The phrase, of course, is a rough and vivid epithet for “male,” and one that occurs only in curses. Its edge of vulgarity seems perfectly right for David’s anger.
23–24. flung herself on her face … bowed to the ground … flung herself at his feet. In a world where an angry king could massacre every man, woman, and child in Nob, Abigail has no way of knowing whether David will have an impulse to kill her on the spot. (She has not heard the words that limit the threat of slaughter to the males.) Thus, her first move in this highly dangerous situation, before she speaks a word, is to demonstrate her absolute submission to David through these extravagant gestures of obeisance.
24. Mine. The shrewdness of her extraordinary speech begins with the very first syllable she utters. She immediately takes all the blame on herself, though in the next breath she will be sure to transfer it heartily to her contemptible husband. At the same time, she exploits a momentary pun, for the word bi (“mine,” “in me”) in other contexts can mean “I beseech you,” so she initiates her address to David with what sounds like a term of imploring.
25. this scoundrel of a man … his name means Base … And as for me. It is hard to think of another instance in literature in which a wife so quickly and so devastatingly interposes distance between herself and her husband. She rapidly denounces her spouse and then counterposes herself (“And as for me,” waʾani) as a person who had no part in the rude rejection of David’s emissaries. Abigail of course wants to save her own neck, but she clearly has been chafing over her marriage with a boorish, unpleasant, and probably older man, and she sees an opportunity here.
26. Who kept you from coming into bloodguilt. Abigail is no doubt speaking in general, but the reader can scarcely forget the immediately preceding episode, in which David refused to harm Saul when he had him in his power.
27. this blessing that your servant has brought. The obvious sense of “blessing” (berakhah) in context is “gift,” but the primary meaning of the word is worth preserving for two reasons. First, it is clearly intended to answer to David’s reiterated use of “blessed” in his response to Abigail. Then, as Moshe Garsiel has aptly observed, it is a key term in a network of allusions to the moment in Genesis 33 when Jacob is reunited with his brother Esau: Esau, too, approaches dauntingly with four hundred armed men; Jacob, like Abigail, prostrates himself before the figure he fears; and he, too, has brought with him generous tribute to be offered in conciliation, which he refers to not as a “gift” (minhaḥ) but as a “blessing.” And in Genesis 33, that term plays back against the fraught meanings of “blessing” in the larger Jacob–Esau narrative.
28. Forgive, pray, the crime of your servant. “Servant” is in the feminine, but the conventional “handmaiden” sounds too fussy. By way of deference, Abigail once again speaks as though the fault were hers, though she has made it quite clear that her husband alone is the guilty one.
a stalwart house. A stalwart, or enduring, house is precisely what was promised the priestly line that was to replace the house of Eli (2:35).
no evil will be found in you all your days. Abigail exploits the temporal ambiguity of the Hebrew imperfective verb to make a statement that is both descriptive of the way David has conducted himself and predictive of the way he will, or should, conduct himself.
29. when a person rises to pursue you. The generality of “a person” (ʾadam) picks up David’s use of the same word in the preceding episode when he addresses Saul (“Why should you listen to people’s words” [divrey ʾadam]), and, even more pointedly, recalls his very first speech to Saul in 17:32, “Let no man’s heart [levʾ adam] fail him,” where the term seems to refer to Saul himself, who may be the hidden referent here.
bound in the bundle of the living. Although Kyle McCarter Jr., following Tur-Sinai, has claimed that “bundle” (tsror) actually means document or book, a more plausible identification is the pouch in which little stones keeping a tally of live sheep were placed. Thus both this positive image and the negative one of the slingshot would be associated with sheepherding. And as Shimon Bar-Efrat had nicely observed, tsror in biblical Hebrew also means “stone,” the object that would normally be placed in the hollow of the sling; so there is a punning cross-link between the two images.
will sling from the hollow of the sling. Instead of being bound up and safely kept, their lives will be flung out into the void of extinction. (The literal sense of the preposition attached to “hollow” in the Hebrew is “in.”) Abigail has chosen her metaphor shrewdly because it would be general knowledge that David used his sling to destroy a formidable enemy.
30–31. when the LORD … appoints you prince over Israel, this will not be a stumbling and a trepidation of the heart to my lord. Abigail deftly pitches her argument to David’s political self-interest. Once he makes the move from guerilla chieftain to monarch, he will not want his record stained by blood he has spilled. It is therefore more prudent to let God take care of his enemies—“the LORD” in biblical parlance being the piously proper way to talk about the course of events, but its pragmatic equivalent being “other people” or “circumstances.”
31. and you will remember your servant. These final words of Abigail’s lengthy and carefully calculated speech are strategically chosen, and discreet. What, in fact, does she have in mind? The Israeli novelist Meir Shalev, in a perceptive and lively essay on this story, makes a bold and, to my mind, persuasive proposal. Abigail has matrimony in view, once her cantankerous old husband is out of the way, but why does she think she will deserve so signal an honor, or reward, from David? Shalev argues that when Abigail dissuades David from killing Nabal, repeatedly assuring him that the LORD will pay off David’s scores against him, she is really suggesting herself as the agency for “the LORD.” She is, in other words, proposing to David that she carry out a kind of contract killing of her husband, with the payoff that she will become the wife of the handsome young warrior and future king.
32–34. David, though persuaded by Abigail’s prudent advice, cannot resist one last reminder that he was indeed about to cut down every pisser against the wall in the house of Nabal.
36. And she told him nothing. Abigail again makes a careful calculation: she does not want to convey the scary news to him while he is enveloped in an alcoholic haze.
37. in the morning when the wine was gone out of Nabal. She catches him cold sober, and perhaps even with a painful hangover.
his heart died within him and he became like a stone. The terrifying information that David had been on his way—or did she say, was still on his way?—with four hundred armed men intent on mayhem triggers a paralyzing heart attack or, perhaps, a stroke (the biblical understanding of physiology not being ours). Abigail gives the distinct appearance of counting on her husband’s cowardice and on a bad heart she might have been aware of from previous manifestations of ill health. If this assumption is correct, she would be using her knowledge of his physical frailty to carry out the tacit contract on his life—bloodlessly, with God Himself left to do the deed (compare the end of verse 38). Robert Polzin perceptively notes that the figurative use of the stone for paralysis cinches a circle of images: the enemies flung from the hollow of the sling and the smooth stone with which David killed Goliath.
39. David … spoke out for Abigail. In biblical idiom, the verb “to speak” followed by the preposition be instead of the usual ʾel (“to”) means to enter into discussion about a betrothal. David, losing no time, has certainly grasped the veiled implication of Abigail’s last words to him.
41. your servant is but a slavegirl to wash the feet of my lord’s servants. In one last flourish of the etiquette of humility, she professes herself unworthy of so great an honor as to become David’s wife. But perhaps this is just what she has been aiming to become, and so, once again “hurrying,” she sets off to join her new husband. She then vanishes from the subsequent narrative.
44. And Saul had given Michal his daughter, David’s wife, to Palti. The legality of this act is questionable. David’s having taken two wives—of Ahinoam all we know is her place of origin—while hiding out from Saul is no justification because, given the practice of polygamy, he could have done that even if he were living under the same roof with Michal. Saul’s motive is political, to deprive David of one claim to the throne by removing the connection through marriage with the royal family. But that connection has already been established, as the narrator’s identification of Michal as “David’s wife” is meant to remind us. We can only guess what Michal, who we know loved David, feels about being passed around in this fashion, or what she feels about the man her father has imposed on her. Later, we will be accorded a brief but unforgettable glimpse into Palti’s feelings for Michal.
1And the Ziphites came to Saul at Gibeah, saying, “Is not David hiding out at the hill of Hachilah facing the wasteland?” 2And Saul arose and went down to the wilderness of Ziph, and with him three thousand picked men of Israel, to seek David in the wilderness of Ziph. 3And Saul camped at the hill of Hachilah which is facing the wasteland, along the way; and David was staying in the wilderness, and he saw that Saul had come after him into the wilderness. 4And David sent spies and he knew with certainty that Saul had come. 5And David arose and came to the place where Saul had camped. And David saw the place where Saul lay, and Abner son of Ner and Saul were lying within the staging ground, and the troops were encamped around him. 6And David spoke up and said to Ahimelech the Hittite and to Abishai son of Zeruiah, saying, “Who will come down with me to Saul, to the camp?” And Abishai said, “I on my part shall go down with you.” 7And David came, and Abishai, to the troops by night, and, look, Saul was lying asleep within the staging ground, his spear thrust into the ground at his head, and Abner and the troops were lying around him. 8And Abishai said to David, “God has this day delivered your enemy into your hand, and now, let me, pray, strike him through with the spear into the ground just once, I will need no second blow.” 9And David said to Abishai, “Do no violence to him! For who can reach out his hand against the LORD’S anointed and be guiltless?” 10And David said, “As the LORD lives, the LORD will smite him, or his day will come and he will die, or in battle he will go down and perish. 11The LORD forbid that I should reach out my hand against the LORD’S anointed! And so now, take, pray, the spear which is at his head and the water jug and let us go off.” 12And David took the spear and the water jug at Saul’s head, and they went off, with no one seeing and no one knowing and no one waking, for they were all asleep, for the LORD’S deep slumber had fallen upon them. 13And David crossed over to the opposite slope and stood on the mountaintop from afar, great was the distance between them. 14And David called out to the troops and to Abner son of Ner, saying, “Will you not answer, Abner?” And Abner answered and said, “Who are you, that you have called out to the king?” 15And David said to Abner, “Are you not a man, and who is like you in Israel, and why have you not guarded your lord the king? For one of the troops has come to do violence to the king your lord. 16It is not good, this thing that you have done, as the LORD lives, for you all deserve death, because you did not guard your master, the LORD’s anointed. And now, see, where are the king’s spear and the water jug that were at his head?” 17And Saul recognized David’s voice and he said, “Is this your voice, my son, David?” And David said, “It is my voice, my lord the king.” 18And he said, “Why is it that my lord chases after his servant, for what have I done, and what evil is in my hand? 19And now, let my lord the king hear, pray, the words of his servant. If the LORD has incited you against me, let Him be appeased by an offering, and if it be men, cursed are they before the LORD, for they have banished me today from joining the LORD’s inheritance, saying, ‘Go, serve other gods.’ 20And now, let not my blood fall to the ground away from the LORD’S presence, for the king of Israel has come forth to seek a single flea, as he would chase a partridge in the mountains.” 21And Saul said, “I have offended. Come back, my son, David, for I will not harm you again inasmuch as my life was precious in your eyes this day. I have played the fool and have erred gravely.” 22And David answered and said, “Here is the king’s spear. Let one of the lads cross over and take it. 23And the LORD will pay back to a man his right actions and his loyalty, for the LORD gave you today into my hand and I did not want to reach out my hand against the LORD’S anointed. 24And, look, just as I valued your life highly today, may the LORD value my life highly and may He save me from every strait.” 25And Saul said to David, “Blessed are you, my son, David. You shall surely do much and you shall surely win out.” And David went on his way, but Saul returned to his place.
CHAPTER 26 NOTES
Click here to advance to the next section of the text.
1. And the Ziphites came to Saul at Gibeah. This verse, echoing much of the language of 23:19, announces the beginning of the last of the elaborately paired episodes that structure the story of David and Saul. Scholarly consensus assumes that these doublets reflect different sources or traditions bearing on the same events, although the possibility cannot be rejected out of hand that the original writer may have deliberately composed his story with paired incidents. In any case, the pairings need to be read as part of the purposeful compositional design of the redacted version of the narrative that we have. As the Russian formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky observed long ago, every parallelism in a literary text serves to point up a certain semantic difference. Here, we note at the outset that the elaborately detailed intelligence about David’s whereabouts provided by the Ziphites in 23:19 is largely absent from this briefer account: this story will prove to be an inversion of the earlier one, David discovering Saul instead of the other way around. Another indication that the doublet is manipulated as an element of purposeful design is the fact that this episode simultaneously repeats two different previous episodes—not only the earlier story of Saul’s pursuit of David into the wilderness of Ziph but also the encounter between David and Saul at the cave near Ein-Gedi (chapter 24). There, just as here, David refused to kill Saul when he, or one of his men, could have done so, and there he professed his innocence to a remorseful Saul who called him as he does here, “my son, David.”
3. he saw that Saul had come after him. The placement of this second account of pursuit in the wilderness of Ziph after Saul’s solemn pledge in chapter 24 not to harm David underlines the compulsive character of his obsession with David. Whatever his avowed good intentions, Saul cannot restrain his impulse to destroy his rival. There is thus strong narrative logic in the recurrence: after this last encounter with Saul, David will sensibly conclude that he can no longer trust the king’s professions of good faith, and he will take flight beyond the borders of Israel.
4. David sent spies and he knew with certainty. In contrast to the episode in chapter 23, it is David here who commands military intelligence. The writer makes this point neatly by using the same (relatively unusual) phrase, ʾel nakhon, “with certainty,” which in chapter 23 was spoken by Saul, referring to the information about David he expected to get from the Ziphites.
6. Ahimelech the Hittite. In biblical usage, “Hittite” is a loose designation for Canaanite peoples and does not necessarily refer to the Indo-European group that originated in Anatolia. The presence of a foreigner in David’s inner circle of warriors suggests an openness of his band of disaffected men to adventure seekers, freebooters, and other mobile types in the Canaanite population. Ahimelech is nowhere else mentioned in the biblical record, which has led some scholars to infer that the mention of this foreigner may be an authentic early notice of a historical personage. The name itself is Hebrew.
Abishai son of Zeruiah. If the report in Chronicles is reliable, Zeruiah was David’s sister—hence the unusual matronymic instead of a patronymic. David the warrior-chieftain is surrounded by his three nephews, the three bloody-minded sons of Zeruiah: two of them impetuous (Abishai and Asahel), the third, who is David’s commander, ruthlessly calculating (Joab).
8. God has this day delivered your enemy into your hand. These words explicitly echo the words of David’s men when they discover Saul unawares in the cave.
strike him through with the spear … just once, I will need no second blow. This bit of warrior’s bravado helps us make an important connection, as J. P. Fokkelman has nicely observed: twice Saul hurled this same spear at David, who eluded him. Abishai on his part vows he will deliver one swift, lethal blow.
9. And David said. Abishai, dumbfounded, offers no response to David’s forbidding him to harm this archenemy, and so David has to explain that God will settle accounts with Saul in His own good time.
Do no violence to him. Instead of one of three expected verbs, “to strike down,” “to kill,” “to put to death,” David uses the verb hishḥit, which basically means “to destroy,” but which can carry the association, as Kyle McCarter Jr. rightly observes, of mutilation or defacement, the taboo acts that should not be perpetrated on the person of the king.
11. take … the spear. In the episode at the cave, David carried away the cut-off corner of Saul’s garment, which had been symbolically linked with kingship. The spear is an alternative image of kingship, obviously more directly associated with martial potency, and so this version conveys a greater sense that David is depriving Saul of something essential in the token of kingship he bears off. Again, the placement of this version of the paired episodes is telling, for the next time we see Saul in the narrative he will be undone on the battlefield by the Philistines and will turn his own weapon against himself.
and the water jug. The spear protects life by destroying; the water jug sustains life for the warrior in battle under the hot sun.
12. And David took the spear and the water jug. David takes them himself, after having ordered Abishai to do it. The medieval Hebrew exegete David Kimchi offers a shrewd explanation: “He changed his mind and didn’t want Abishai to approach the king, lest he prove unable to restrain himself and kill Saul.”
14. Who are you, that you have called out to the king? Some ancient versions omit “to the king” because David has called out to Abner, not to Saul. David’s shouting from the prominence, however, occurs in the middle of the night, and it clearly has awakened Saul, which seems to be what is bothering Abner. David has chosen Saul’s commander as his first interlocutor in order to stress the sacred responsibility of those around the king to protect his person. His noble words are not devoid of self-interest because David is clearly conscious of the fact that he is the future king.
15. one of the troops has come to do violence to the king. Although this could refer to Abishai, the essential referent is David himself—something he does not want to say in so many words.
16. you all deserve death. “All” is supplied in the translation in order to convey the fact that here the pronoun “you” is a plural in the Hebrew. This death sentence pronounced on Saul’s entire entourage is extravagant, but Abner at least will die a violent death.
17. Is this your voice, my son, David? These are the identical words he pronounces outside the cave near Ein-Gedi. Here, he “recognizes” the voice—as, symbolically, in this remission of his madness, he recognizes his paternal bond with David—but he is not entirely sure because of the darkness, and so he asks.
18. what evil is in my hand? As elsewhere, “hand” and “in my hand” have multiple valences. What David literally has in his hand as he speaks is the king’s spear!
19. If the LORD has incited … if it be men. These two alternatives are a kind of diplomatic maneuver. David doesn’t want to put the blame squarely on Saul, so he proposes that the king was “incited” either by God for some mysterious reason or by malicious people.
let Him be appeased by an offering. The Hebrew says literally, “let Him smell [the fragrant odor of] an offering.”
banished me … from … the LORD’s inheritance. The LORD’S inheritance clearly refers to the Land of Israel. Since every national region had its own cult, David is saying that to be excluded from his own national borders is tantamount to being obliged to worship other gods. In fact, his flight from Saul has been mostly within Israelite territory, but he seems to be anticipating that his next move, for his own safety, will have to be into Philistine country.
20. to seek a single flea, as he would chase a partridge in the mountains. The language of the entire clause recycles the words David used to conclude his speech outside the cave. But the dead dog has been deleted and a partridge has been introduced instead. This image is less forceful, but its attraction in the Hebrew, as several commentators have noted, is a witty pun: partridge (qore’) is a homonym for “he who calls out.” David (verse 14) was identified by Abner as the one who called out to the king—a caller out on the mountain, a partridge pursued on the mountains.
22. 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).
24. I valued your life highly. The literal Hebrew idiom is “your life was great in my eyes.”
25. Blessed are you, my son, David. These words of fatherly blessing are the last ones Saul speaks to David: the two never meet again. It is notable that in their previous encounter, Saul explicitly conceded that David would replace him as king, whereas here he merely says in general language, “You shall surely do much and you shall surely win out.”
David went on his way, but Saul returned to his place. This is a biblical formula for marking the end of a narrative unit, but it also nicely distinguishes between the two men: David continues on the move while Saul goes back to his set place of residence.
1And David said in his heart, “Now, I shall perish one day by the hand of Saul. There is nothing better for me than to make certain I get away to Philistine country. Then Saul will despair of seeking me anymore through all the territory of Israel, and I shall get away from him.” 2And David arose, and he crossed over, he and the six hundred men who were with him, to Achish son of Maoch, king of Gath. 3And David stayed with Achish in Gath, he and his men, each man with his household, David with his two wives, Ahinoam the Jezreelite and Abigail wife of Nabal the Carmelite. 4And it was told to Saul that David had fled to Gath, and he no longer sought after him. 5And David said to Achish, “If, pray, I have found favor in your eyes, let them give me a place in one of the outlying towns that I may dwell there. For why should your servant dwell in the royal town with you?” 6And Achish gave him Ziklag on that day. Therefore has Ziklag belonged to the kings of Judah until this day. 7And the span of time that David dwelled in Philistine country was a year and four months. 8And David went up, and his men with him, and they raided the Geshurite and the Gerizite and the Amalekite, for they were the inhabitants of the land of old, till you come to Shur and to the land of Egypt. 9And David struck the land, and he left not a man or woman alive, and he took sheep and cattle and donkeys and camels and clothes, and he returned and came to Achish. 10And Achish said, “Where were you raiding now?” And David said, “The Negeb of Judah and the Negeb of the Jerahmeelite and the Negeb of the Kenite.” 11And neither man nor woman did David leave alive to bring to Gath, thinking, “Lest they tell about us, saying, ‘Thus did David do.’” And such was his practice all the time he dwelled in Philistine country. 12And Achish trusted David, saying, “He has surely become repugnant to Israel and he will be my perpetual vassal.”
28:1And it happened at that time that the Philistines had gathered their ranks for the army to do battle with Israel, and Achish said to David, “You surely know that with me you must sally forth in the ranks, both you and your men.” 2And David said, “Then you yourself know what your servant will do.” And Achish said to David, “Then I shall make you my bodyguard for life.”
CHAPTER 27 NOTES
Click here to advance to the next section of the text.
1. And David said in his heart. This is the first actual interior monologue given for David. The decision to “cross over” (verse 2) to the enemy is a momentous one, and the writer wants to make it perfectly clear that David had definitively realized Saul was bound to kill him sooner or later (“I shall perish one day by the hand of Saul”) unless he moved to the safety of enemy territory.
2. he crossed over … to Achish … king of Gath. For those scholars who have argued that David is no more a historical figure than King Arthur, this whole episode constitutes a problem: why would a much later, legendary, and supposedly glorifying tradition attribute this act of national treachery to David? (It would be rather like the invention of a story that Winston Churchill spent 1914–1918 in Berlin, currying the favor of the kaiser.) The compelling inference is that the writer had authentic knowledge of a period when David collaborated with the Philistines; he was unwilling to omit this uncomfortable information, though he did try to mitigate it.
3. David stayed with Achish in Gath … each man with his household. The circumstances have changed drastically since David arrived in Gath alone and was obliged to play the madman. Now he comes with six hundred men under his command, a fighting unit that could be of great use to Achish, and essentially offers to become Achish’s vassal. The notice about the households sets the stage for the Amalekite raid on Ziklag in chapter 29, for we now become aware that David’s guerilla band carries in its train a sizable group of wives and children.
5. For why should your servant dwell in the royal town with you? On his part, David would like to establish his own headquarters and enjoy much greater freedom of movement. But given that his six hundred men with multiple wives and children could easily have made up a group of two or three thousand people, they would have in fact been a rather burdensome presence in a modest-sized Philistine city.
6. Ziklag. The best archaeological guess is that this is a site a few miles to the northwest of Beersheba, in an area under Philistine jurisdiction but facing the border with Israel.
Therefore has Ziklag belonged to the kings of Judah. This seemingly technical geopolitical notice serves a function of historical foreshadowing, as Fokkelman observes: David, the Philistine vassal and fugitive from Saul, is destined to found a lasting dynasty, “the kings of Judah.”
8. for they were the inhabitants of the land of old, till you come to Shur. There might be a textual distortion here: several versions of the Septuagint read “the inhabited land from Telem to Shur.” But the Masoretic version has a certain logic: what David sets out to do is to attack the age-old inhabitants of the land, who are Israel’s staunch enemies, throughout this southern region. In doing this, he is also serving Achish’s purposes, for these peoples are equally hostile to the Philistines (like the Israelites, latecomer interlopers in Canaan).
9. he left not a man or woman alive. The narrator offers no indication of whether he thinks these massacres are morally objectionable or merely what Israel’s traditional enemies deserve. A pragmatic reason for the butchery will be given in verse 11. It should be noted that David is not carrying out a total “ban” (ḥerem) against these groups because he keeps all the livestock as booty, thus palpably building up a base of wealth for himself and his followers.
10. Where were you raiding now? Achish of course wants to know about the military activities of his vassal. David answers with a flat lie, claiming he has been conducting raids against his own tribe, Judah, and against two ethnic groups more or less attached to Judah. In fact, he has been attacking only non-Israelite groups.
The Negeb. The term Negeb means “dry land” and refers to the desert stretching across southern Israel from near the Dead Sea to near the coastal plain. Its subregions are then identified by the tribe or ethnic group that inhabits each.
11. Lest they tell about us, saying, “Thus did David do.” David wipes out all these populations because he wants no one surviving to bring word back to Gath that he has restricted his attacks entirely to Canaanite and related peoples, and also that he has been enriching himself with more booty than he has been sharing with Achish his overlord by way of tribute. David is clearly a man who will do anything to survive. His words here will come back in a surprising new context in his elegy for Saul and Jonathan, when he says, “Tell it not in Gath.”
12. Achish trusted David. He believes the lie, or so it seems.
my perpetual vassal. The Hebrew ‘eved has the general meaning of “slave” or “servant,” but the present episode makes the sense of “vassal” compelling.
28:1. You surely know that with me you must sally forth. Despite the just reported “trust” in David, Achish appears to harbor a lingering doubt (hence the coercive edge of “you surely know”) as to whether David will actually fight against his fellow Israelites, something that, to Achish’s knowledge, David has only claimed to do (27:10).
2. you yourself know what your servant will do. This is an artful dodge: it could be construed, as David means it to be construed, as “yes, of course, I’ll do it,” but the language evasively does not repeat Achish’s words about sallying forth (against Israel).
I shall make you my bodyguard for life. As befits a ruler addressing a former enemy with whom he is in uneasy alliance, Achish’s gesture is a studied ambiguity—either he is rewarding David for his loyalty by making him a permanent bodyguard, or he is seeking to maintain surveillance over David by an appointment that would keep him close to the court.
3And Samuel had died, and all Israel mourned him, and they buried him in Ramah, in his town. And Saul had taken away the ghosts and the familiar spirits from the land.
4And the Philistines gathered and came and camped at Shunem. And Saul gathered all Israel and they camped at Gilboa. 5And Saul saw the Philistine camp, and he was afraid, and his heart trembled greatly. 6And Saul inquired of the LORD, and the LORD did not answer him, neither by dreams nor by the Urim nor by prophets. 7And Saul said to his servants, “Seek me out a ghostwife, that I may go to her and inquire through her.” And his servants said to him, “There is a ghostwife at Ein-Dor.” 8And Saul disguised himself and put on different clothes, and he went—he together with two men—and they came to the woman by night, and he said, “Conjure me, pray, a ghost, and summon up the one I say to you.” 9And the woman said to him, “Look, you yourself know what Saul did, that he cut off the ghosts and the familiar spirits from the land, and why do you entrap me to have me put to death?” 10And Saul swore to her by the LORD, saying, “As the LORD lives, no blame will befall you through this thing.” 11And the woman said, “Whom shall I summon up for you?” And he said, “Samuel summon up for me.” 12And the woman saw Samuel and she screamed in a loud voice, and the woman said to Saul, “Why did you deceive me, when you are Saul?” 13And the king said to her, “Do not fear. But what do you see?” And the woman said to Saul, “A god do I see rising up from the earth.” 14And he said to her, “What does he look like?” And she said, “An old man rises up, and he is wrapped in a cloak.” And Saul knew that it was Samuel, and he bowed to the ground and did obeisance. 15And Samuel said, “Why have you troubled me to summon me up?” And Saul said, “I am in dire straits, and the Philistines are fighting against me and God has turned away from me and no longer answers me, neither through prophets nor dreams, and I called to you to let me know what I should do.” 16And Samuel said, “And why do you ask me, when the LORD has turned away from you and become your foe? 17And the LORD has done to you as He spoke through me, and the LORD has torn the kingship from your hand and given it to your fellow man, to David. 18In as much as you did not heed the voice of the LORD and you did not carry out His burning wrath against Amalek, therefore has the LORD done this thing to you this day! 19And the LORD shall give Israel, too, together with you, into the hands of the Philistines. And tomorrow—you and your sons are with me. The camp of Israel, too, shall the LORD give into the hand of the Philistines.” 20And Saul hastened and flung himself full length on the ground and was very frightened by Samuel’s words. Neither did he have strength, for he had eaten no food all day and all night. 21And the woman came to Saul and saw that he was very distraught, and she said to him, “Look, your servant has heeded your voice, and I took my life in my hands and heeded your words that you spoke to me. 22And now, you on your part, pray heed the voice of your servant, and I shall put before you a morsel of bread, and eat, that you may have strength when you go on the way.” 23And he refused and said, “I will not eat.” And his servants pressed him, and the woman as well, and he heeded their voice and arose from the ground and sat upon the couch. 24And the woman had a stall-fed calf in the house. And she hastened and butchered it and took flour and kneaded it and baked it into flatbread, 25and set it before Saul and before his servants, and they ate, and they arose and went off on that night.
CHAPTER 28 NOTES
Click here to advance to the next section of the text.
3. And Samuel had died. This second obituary notice for Samuel, with a pluperfect verb, is introduced in order to set the stage for the conjuration of Samuel’s ghost.
Saul had taken away the ghosts and the familiar spirits from the land. The two Hebrew terms, ʾovot and yidʿonim, are generally paired, and both refer to the spirits of the dead. (The latter is derived from the verbal root y-d-ʿ “to know,” and so prepares the way for the reappearance of the theme of [withheld] knowledge that has been stalking Saul from the beginning of his story.) The ghosts and familiar spirits are linked metonymically with the necromancers who call them up—it is the latter who of course would have been the actual object of Saul’s purge—but the terms themselves primarily designate the spirits. Biblical views about postmortem existence tend to fluctuate. Often, the dead are thought to be swallowed up in “the Pit” (sheʾol) where they are simply silenced, extinguished forever. Sometimes, the dead are imagined as continuing a kind of shadowy afterlife in the underworld, rather like the spirits of the dead in Book 11 of the Odyssey. Following on this latter view, necromancy in the ancient Hebrew world is conceived not as mere hocus-pocus but as a potentially efficacious technology of the realm of spirits, which, however, has been prohibited by God, Who wants no human experts interfering in this realm. Saul, then, has been properly upholding monotheistic law—reflected in Leviticus—in proscribing necromancy, but in his desperation, he is now about to violate his own prohibition.
6. the LORD did not answer. One last time, Saul is excluded from divine knowledge, all the accepted channels for its conveyance, being enumerated here—dream interpretation, oracular device, prophecy.
8. Saul disguised himself and put on different clothes. The narrative motivation is obvious: as the very ruler who has made necromancy a capital crime (see verse 9), Saul can scarcely come to engage the services of a necromancer unless he is disguised as a commoner. But his disguise also is the penultimate instance of the motif of royal divestment. As we have seen, clothing is associated with Saul’s kingship—the torn or cut garment is the tearing of his kingship, and among the ecstatics surrounding Samuel, Saul stripped himself naked. Now, in an unwitting symbolic gesture, he divests himself of his royal garments before going to learn of his own impending death.
9. you yourself know. An ironically emphatic use of “to know” to the man who never knows what he needs to.
he cut off the ghosts. In place of the more abstract term, “to take away,” used by the narrator in verse 3, she, from her perspective as a threatened practitioner, chooses the violent verb “to cut off.”
why do you entrap me. She uses the verb of entrapment with neat precision, for she fears that the stranger who has come to her may be an undercover agent for Saul’s necromancy enforcement authority.
10. Saul swore to her by the LORD. The irony of Saul’s doing this in a negotiation with a conjurer of spirits is vividly caught by the Midrash: “Whom did Saul resemble at that moment? A woman who is with her lover and swears by the life of her husband” (Yalkut Shimoni 2:247:139).
12. the woman saw Samuel and she screamed in a loud voice. What terrifies her is not the apparition of Samuel but the sudden realization of the identity of her nocturnal visitor. How does she know it is Saul? The most persuasive explanation has been offered by Moshe Garsiel. As other biblical references to conjuration of the dead suggest, the usual method would be for the necromancer to listen to and interpret the supposed “chirping” (tsiftsuf) or murmuring sounds made by shadows or wispy wraiths believed to be the presences of the dead. (There is scant biblical evidence for the claim that the necromancer was a medium from whose throat the ghost spoke.) In this case, however, the spirit appears not as a murmuring wisp or shadow but as the distinctly defined image of Samuel, in his prophet’s cloak (see verses 13–14), and the woman of Ein-Dor immediately realizes that it is only for the king that the prophet Samuel would have thus risen from the underworld in full-body image. It is noteworthy that the narrator is discreetly silent about the actual mechanics of the conjuration procedure, perhaps out of a kind of monotheistic reticence.
13. Do not fear. But what do you see? Saul assures her that even though he is the very king who prohibited necromancy, he will stand by his vow that no blame will be attached to her. What he urgently wants to know is the identity of the conjured presences—she can see the spirit, but he cannot, so once more Saul needs some mediation for the knowledge he seeks.
A god do I see rising up from the earth. The Hebrew balances precariously on a linguistic ambiguity that has no happy English equivalent. The word for “god” here is ʾelohim, which when treated grammatically as a singular (it has a plural ending) usually means God. In the plural, it often refers to “gods” in the polytheistic sense. It also occasionally means “angel” or “divine being,” and some have argued, unconvincingly, that it sometimes means “judge.” A further complication here is that the ghostwife uses ʾelohim with a plural participle (and hence the King James Version renders it as “gods”). It seems likely that the grammatical crossover we have just reviewed encouraged a fluidity of usage in which the plural might sometimes be employed with a singular sense, even when the referent was not the one God. In the immediately following question and response between Saul and the woman, it is presupposed that she has seen only one male figure, and the narrator has already told us she has seen Samuel. When she says she sees ’elohim rising up, she probably means an imposing figure like unto a god or an angel, or perhaps she is using it as a term for “spirit.”
14. wrapped in a cloak. It is the cloak, meʿil, that clinches the identification for Saul—the same prophet’s cloak that he clung to and tore. From childhood, when Samuel’s mother would make him a new meʿil each year, to the grave, Samuel is associated with this garment.
15. Why have you troubled me. In perfect character, Samuel begins by addressing an angry question to Saul, using a verb that refers to disturbing a person from sleep, or from the sleep of death. In divergence from the usual necromantic procedure, the ghost of Samuel speaks directly to Saul, who in turn questions Samuel himself. In fact, the ghostwife appears to have absented herself at this point, for the indication in verse 21, “And the woman came to Saul and saw that he was very distraught,” is that she is returning to the room after having left it.
I am in dire straits, and the Philistines are fighting … and God has turned away … and I called to you. The desperate Saul spills out all the causes for his desperation in one breathless run-on sentence, which this translation tries to reproduce.
neither through prophets nor dreams. Addressing a prophet, Saul makes prophecy the first item. He deletes the Urim—perhaps, it has been suggested, because of his guilty recollection of his massacre of the priests at Nob.
16. why do you ask me. Once again, in this case sardonically, there is a play on Saul’s name (Shaʾul) and the verb “to ask” (shaʾal).
17. the LORD has torn the kingship from your hand. As this particular clause highlights, Samuel’s entire speech is a recapitulation of the denunciatory speech he made to Saul at the end of the Amalek episode (chapter 15). The tearing of the kingship “from your hand” visually recalls Saul’s hand grasping the torn skirt of Samuel’s cloak. There, Samuel had said God would give the throne to “your fellow man who is better than you.” Now, of course, he can spell out the name David.
18. you did not heed the voice of the LORD. The phrasal motif of “heeding the voice” from chapter 15 is again invoked. After Samuel’s return to the underworld, the woman of Ein-Dor, on a purely mundane plane, will speak twice about heeding voices (verses 21–22).
19. And tomorrow—you and your sons are with me. Saul, having come to seek advice on the eve of a great battle, is given a denunciation concluding with a death sentence, conveyed in these words with spooky immediacy, as the ghost of Samuel beckons Saul and his sons down into the underworld. This entire scene is conceivably one of the inspirations for Macbeth’s encounter with the three witches, though the biblical writer, in contrast to Shakespeare, places it at the penultimate moment of his doomed king’s story.
The camp of Israel, too. There is no need to perform textual surgery on this sentence simply because it repeats the burden of the first sentence of the verse. It would be perfectly in character for Samuel to rub in the news of the imminent catastrophe: not only will you and your sons perish, but, as I have said, all your forces will be defeated by the Philistines, your kingship ending in wholesale failure.
20. Saul hastened and flung himself full length on the ground. Most translators have interpreted the second verb here as an involuntary one (“fell”). But the verb “to hasten” (miher) is generally part of a sequence of voluntary actions, as its use in verse 24 (“and she hastened and butchered it and took”) neatly illustrates. Saul, in his terror and despair, flings himself to the ground, and then scarcely has the strength to get up. The Hebrew for “full length” includes the component qomah, “stature,” and so is a reminder that the man of majestic stature is now cast to the ground in final defeat.
for he had eaten no food. There is no convincing evidence to support the claim of some scholars that a person had to fast before seeing a necromancer. Perhaps Saul’s fasting is a reflex of his distraught condition, but he may well be fasting because he is about to enter into battle. (It appears that his two bodyguards have also not eaten.) This would invite a connection, which has been made by both Fokkelman and Garsiel, with the vow of abstinence from food that Saul earlier imposed on his troops (chapter 15). There, he was ready to put Jonathan to death for having tasted a bit of honey; here, he will end by partaking of a feast.
22. a morsel of bread. She says this to play down what she will serve him, which is a hearty dinner, with a main course of veal.
24. the woman had a stall-fed calf. It would have taken several hours to accomplish this slaughtering and cooking and baking. One must imagine Saul sitting in the house at Ein-Dor, brooding or darkly baffled or perhaps a little catatonic. It is an odd and eerie juncture of the story. David has already twice been saved, from death and then from bloodguilt, by women. Saul is now given sustaining nurture by a woman—but only to regain the strength needed to go out to the battlefield where he will die.
1And the Philistines gathered all their camps at Aphek, while Israel was encamped by the spring in Jezreel. 2And the Philistine overlords were advancing with hundreds and with thousands, and David and his men were advancing at the rear with Achish. 3And the Philistine captains said, “Who are these Hebrews?” And Achish said to the Philistine captains, “Is this not David, servant of Saul king of Israel, who has been with me these many days or years, and I have found nothing amiss in him from the day he fell in with me until this day?” 4And the Philistine captains were furious with him, and the Philistine captains said to him, “Send the man back and let him go back to his place that you set aside for him there, and let him not come down with us into battle, so that he become not our adversary in battle. For how would this fellow be reconciled with his master—would it not be with the heads of our men? 5Is this not David for whom they sing out in the dances, saying,
‘Saul has struck down his thousands
and David his tens of thousands’?”
6And Achish called to David and said to him, “As the LORD lives, you are upright, and your going into the fray with the camp has been good in my eyes, for I have found no evil in you from the day you came to me until this day. But in the eyes of the Philistine overlords you are not good. 7And so now, return, and go in peace, and you shall do no evil in the eyes of the Philistine overlords.” 8And David said to Achish, “But what have I done, and what have you found in your servant from the day I appeared in your presence until this day, that I should not come and do battle with the enemies of my lord the king?” 9And Achish answered and said to David, “I know that you are as good in my eyes as a messenger of God. But the Philistine captains have said, ‘He shall not go up with us to battle.’ 10And so now, rise early in the morning, you and the servants of your lord who have come with you, and rise early in the morning when it is just brightening for you, and go.” 11And David rose early, he and his men, to go in the morning to return to Philistine country, while the Philistines went up to Jezreel.
CHAPTER 29 NOTES
Click here to advance to the next section of the text.
1. the Philistines gathered all their camps at Aphek. The “all” stresses that this is a massing of the entire Philistine army, not merely a division or two, for a decisive confrontation with the Israelites. As Robert Polzin notes, the first major clash with the Philistines in 1 Samuel began with the Philistines’ camping at Aphek (4:1b), so the mention of their encampment here at the same site creates a kind of symmetrical frame for the book. Aphek is roughly forty miles south of Jezreel, not far from Philistine territory, and would have served as a general staging ground. The Philistine army then advances northward to camp at Shunem (28:4), just opposite Saul’s forces at the spring of Jezreel and near Mount Gilboa.
2. David and his men were advancing at the rear with Achish. Given David’s double role as Achish’s vassal and as his special bodyguard, his position in battle should have been alongside Achish. Until this mention of David, we might have imagined that the report of the deployment of forces was a direct continuation of the account of Saul’s seance at Ein-Dor on the night before the battle. Now it rapidly becomes clear that the narrative has again switched tracks from Saul to David, suspending the fulfillment of Saul’s dire fate in order to follow the movement of his successor, who approaches the very same battlefield as part of the enemy forces, only to be turned away. The switch in narrative focus also involves backtracking in time: we left Saul in the dark of the night (also a symbolic darkness for him); the deployment of armies and the Philistine dialogues take place on the previous day; David’s early departure, “just when it is brightening” (an antithesis to Saul in the dark, as J. P. Fokkelman notes), will be on the morning of the battle.
3. the Philistine captains. These are the military commanders, sarim, and they should not be thought of as synonymous with the overlords (seranim) of the five Philistine cities. It is the military men who, understandably, fear a serious security risk in the presence of a Hebrew contingent in their ranks.
Who are these Hebrews? The Hebrew is literally “What are these Hebrews?,” which many translations interpret as “What are these Hebrews doing here?” Again, “Hebrews” is the term used by foreigners for the Israelites.
David, servant of Saul king of Israel. Achish means to stress that Saul’s former courtier and commander has defected to the Philistine side, but his choice of words inadvertently reminds the Philistine captains that David may still be loyal to Saul.
these many days or years. Some scholars suspect that these two terms reflect a conflated text, and that one should simply read “these many days.” It could, however, make sense for Achish to be a little vague about the time and to exaggerate it in order to emphasize David’s loyalty—in fact, David has been with him one year and two months.
fell in with me. Kyle McCarter Jr. proposes that the verb has the sense of “to defect.”
4. would it not be with the heads of our men? They actually use a euphemism, “the heads of these men,” in order to avoid pronouncing a terrible fate on themselves. Perhaps another euphemism is involved, through upward displacement, since in chapter 18 it was a different part of the anatomy of the slain Philistines that David brought back to Saul.
6. As the LORD lives. It is curious that a Philistine should be swearing by the LORD, unless, as has been argued, he is leaning over backward to adopt David’s perspective.
you are upright. In fact, David has been lying to Achish about the object of his raids (27:8–11).
good in my eyes … I have found no evil in you. This entire exchange turns on the neat antithesis between good and evil, rather like the exchange between Saul and David outside the cave near Ein-Gedi. Achish will go on to say, quite extravagantly, that David is “as good in my eyes as a messenger of God” (verse 9). The reader, however, may well wonder whether David is in fact so unambiguously good.
in the eyes of the Philistine overlords you are not good. Some scholars, following the Septuagint, read here “you are good,” contending that Achish claims a difference of opinion between the overlords and the captains. It makes better sense simply to assume that he is referring the negative view of David to the highest echelon of authority, though in fact the complaint came from the field commanders.
8. what have I done … that I should not … do battle with the enemies of my lord the king? Continuing to play the role of the perfect Philistine vassal, David protests his eagerness to fight the Israelites, although in point of fact he must be immensely relieved to escape from the intolerable position of battling against his own people. As several interpreters have noticed, the words he archly chooses have a double edge because “my lord the king” could be a covert reference to Saul, in which case the “enemies” would be the armies of Achish and his confederates. Whether David, lacking this providential way out, would really have pitted himself against his own people is another imponderable in the character of this elusive figure.
from the day I appeared in your presence. The idiomatic force of the phrase is “from the day I entered your service.” Achish had simply said, “from the day you came to me.”
10. you and the servants of your lord. The translation follows the reading in the Septuagint. The Masoretic Text, a little less coherently, lacks “you.”
11. to Philistine country. They are in fact headed to the place Achish has “set aside” for them at the eastern border of Philistine country—the town of Ziklag. Disaster awaits them there.
1And it happened when David and his men came to Ziklag on the third day that the Amalekites had raided the Negeb, and Ziklag, and they had struck Ziklag and burned it in fire. 2And they had taken the women captive, from the youngest to the oldest, they put no one to death. And they drove them off and went on their way. 3And David, and his men with him, came to the town, and, look, it was burned in fire, and their wives and their sons and their daughters were taken captive. 4And David, and the troops who were with him, raised their voices and wept until there was no strength left in them to weep. 5And David’s two wives were taken captive, Ahinoam the Jezreelite and Abigail wife of Nabal the Carmelite. 6And David was in dire straits, for the troops thought to stone him, for all the troops were embittered, every man over his sons and his daughters. And David took strength in the LORD his God. 7And David said to Abiathar the priest, son of Ahimelech, “Bring forth, pray, the ephod.” And Abiathar brought forth the ephod to David. 8And David inquired of the LORD, saying, “Shall I pursue this raiding party? Shall I overtake it?” And He said, “Pursue, for you will surely overtake it, and you will surely rescue.” 9And David went, he and the six hundred men who were with him, and they came to the Wadi Besor, and those to be left stayed behind. 10And David continued the pursuit, he and four hundred men, and the two hundred men who were too exhausted to cross the Wadi Besor stayed behind. 11And they found an Egyptian man in the field and took him to David, and they gave him bread and he ate, and they gave him water. 12And they gave him a slice of pressed figs and two raisin cakes. And he ate, and his spirits revived, for he had eaten no bread and drunk no water three days and three nights. 13And David said to him, “To whom do you belong, and where are you from?” And he said, “I am an Egyptian lad, the slave of an Amalekite man, and my master abandoned me, for I have been sick now three days. 14We on our part had raided the Negeb of the Cherithites and that of Judah and the Negeb of Caleb, and Ziklag we burned in fire.” 15And David said to him, “Will you lead me down to this raiding party?” And he said, “Swear to me by God that you will not put me to death and that you will not hand me over to my master. Then I shall lead you down to this raiding party.” 16And he led him down, and, look, they were sprawled out all over the ground eating and drinking and reveling with all the vast booty they had taken from the land of the Philistines and the land of Judah. 17And David struck them from daybreak till the evening of the next day, and not a man of them got away except for four hundred lads who rode off on camels and fled. 18And David rescued all that the Amalekites had taken, and his own two wives David rescued. 19And nothing of theirs was missing, from the youngest to the oldest, from sons to daughters to booty, all that they had taken for themselves, David restored it all. 20And David took all the sheep and the cattle. They drove before them that livestock and said, “This is David’s booty.”
21And David came to the two hundred men who had been too exhausted to go with David, so he had them stay at the Wadi Besor. And they came out to greet David and to greet the troops who were with him, and David approached with the troops and asked how they fared. 22And every wicked and worthless man of the men who had gone with David spoke up and said, “Inasmuch as they did not go with us, we will give them nothing from the booty that we rescued, only each man his wife and his children, that they may drive them off and go.” 23And David said, “You must not do so, my brothers, with what the LORD has given us. For He has guarded us and has given into our hands the raiding party that came against us. 24And who would listen to you in this matter? Rather, as the share of him who goes down into battle is the share of him who stays with the gear, together shall they share.” 25And so from that day hence it became a set practice in Israel until this day. 26And David came to Ziklag and he sent from the booty to the elders of Judah, to his friends, saying, “Here is a gift for you from the booty of the LORD’s enemies,” 27to those in Bethel, and to those in Ramoth-Negeb, 28and to those in Jattir, and to those in Aroer, and to those in Siphmoth, and to those in Eshtamoa, 29and to those in Racal, and to those in the towns of the Jerahmeelite, and to those in the towns of the Kenite, 30and to those in Hormah, and to those in Bor-Ashan, and to those in Athach, 31and to those in Hebron and in all the places where David, with his men, had moved about.
CHAPTER 30 NOTES
Click here to advance to the next section of the text.
1. on the third day. If, as seems plausible, David and his men were sent away from the Philistine ranks just before the engagement with the Israelites, the battle, ending in the catastrophic defeat of Saul’s forces, took place while David was traveling southward. The writer, it seems, wants to get David as far away as he can from the battlefield in the Valley of Jezreel, perhaps to remove him from any possible implication in Saul’s death. But an indirect question lurks in the margin of the narrative, for we are left to wonder what would have been the outcome of the battle had David turned against his Philistine allies, as their field commanders feared he would.
the Amalekites had raided the Negeb, and Ziklag. David must initially confront a military disaster on his own home front that mirrors the disaster which, unknown to him, has unfolded in the north. His habitual enemies, the Amalekites, have of course exploited the absence of the fighting men at Ziklag.
burned it in fire. It is possible, although not entirely certain, that the idiomatic force of this seemingly redundant idiom, which occurs frequently, is “utterly consumed,” “burned to the ground.”
2. they put no one to death. At first blush this notice casts a favorable light on the Amalekites in comparison to David, whose practice as a raider has been general massacre of the conquered population. What becomes clear, however, is that the Amalekites (who do not have David’s motive of secrecy) consider the women and children to be part of the booty and have carried them off in order to exploit them as slaves. The appearance of the Egyptian man (verse 11) serves as a reminder of the Amalekites’ role as slaveholders, and of how inhumanely they treat their slaves.
they drove them off. This rather brutal verb is typically used for driving animals as in verse 20, and so highlights the rapaciousness of the Amalekites.
6. And David was in dire straits, for the troops thought to stone him. The initial phrase might momentarily be construed as referring to David’s feelings (“and he felt very distressed”), but it is immediately made clear that the reference is to the practical predicament in which he suddenly finds himself in relation to his men. As before, David’s real emotions remain opaque—we know only of his participation in the public orgy of weeping. This moment is also a vivid reminder, as are others in the Saul–David story, of how precarious political power is: David, the charismatic and brilliant commander who has led his men through a host of dangers, suddenly discovers that these hard-bitten warriors are ready to kill him because of the disastrous turn of events. It was he, after all, who drew them to the north with the Philistine army, leaving Ziklag exposed.
David took strength in the Lord his God. He finds encouragement in the face of mortal despair—specifically, as the next verse explains, by calling for the oracle. In this fashion, he staves off the assault his men are contemplating by dramatically showing that they still have means of redress against the Amalekites, and that he has a special channel of communication with God.
7. Bring forth, pray, the ephod. As several interpreters have observed, there is an antithetical contrast here between David, who has priest and ephod to convey to him God’s oracular counsel, and Saul, who, frustrated in all his attempts to discover God’s intentions, resorts to forbidden necromancy.
8. you will surely rescue. The ephod, as we have noted before, can yield only a binary yes-or-no answer, so the gist of the oracle is that David should pursue the raiding party. But rescuing the captives, which is surely paramount in the minds of the embittered guerilla fighters, was not an explicit part of David’s inquiry of the oracle—perhaps because he was afraid to presume so much. The “yes” from the oracle is now taken to imply that David and his men will both overtake the raiders and rescue their dear ones.
9. those to be left stayed behind. The first phrase (literally, “the ones being left”) has bothered some commentators, but it is in keeping with occasional biblical usage to introduce this sort of proleptic reference, creating what from a modern point of view is a redundancy between the first and second phrases.
10. were … exhausted. The verb piger may be related to the noun peger, “corpse,” and so would have the sense of “dead tired.” It should be kept in mind that David and his men had been traveling three days from the Philistine camp, and now they have had to continue on into the desert at top speed in order to overtake the raiding party.
11. they found an Egyptian man in the field. This is the first of three memorable instances in the David story in which a foreigner brings intelligence of a dire event, although in this case the subject of the intelligence is not the event itself but the whereabouts of the perpetrators.
12. for he had eaten no bread and drunk no water. The act of abandoning a sick slave in the desert to perish of thirst and hunger dispels any illusions we may have harbored about the humanity of the Amalekites. Fokkelman has proposed a correspondence (in his calculation, also a synchronicity) between the starving Egyptian and the fasting Saul at Ein-Dor.
13. I am an Egyptian lad. The term “lad” (naʿar) does not necessarily indicate chronological age here but rather subservient status, a decorous synonym for “slave,” which the Egyptian proceeds to use.
16. and, look, they were sprawled out. The presentative “look” (hineh) as an indicator of transition from the narrator’s overview to the character’s point of view has particular tactical importance here. The Amalekites, as we can infer from the fact that four hundred escape the general slaughter, must number well over a thousand. David arrives with only four hundred men. But he finds the raiders entirely vulnerable to a surprise attack—drunk, sated, and sleeping (rather like the Hessian mercenaries whom Washington caught unawares by the Delaware after their Christmas feast). The term rendered as “sprawled out” (netushim) derives from a verbal root that means to abandon or cast away, and so in this context suggests some kind of dissipation. The people who left the Egyptian to starve to death in the desert are now exposed to destruction through their unrestrained indulgence in food and drink.
17. four hundred lads. Again, the versatile naʿar is not an indication of chronological age but is used in its military sense, which appears to be something like “elite troops,” or perhaps simply “fighting men.”
20. They drove before them that livestock. The Masoretic Text has the syntactically problematic “before that livestock” (lifney hamiqneh hahuʾ). This translation is based on a small emendation, lifneyhem (“before them”), assuming a haplography—an inadvertent scribal deletion of repeated letters, since the last two letters of lifneyhem (heh and mem) are also the first two letters of hamiqneh.
This is David’s booty. Since the Amalekites had been raiding throughout the Negeb, both in Judahite and Philistine territory, they would have assembled a very large collection of plundered flocks. Thus David has abundant livestock to distribute as “gifts”—the word also means “blessing” or “greeting”—to the sundry elders of Judah.
21. he had them stay. The Masoretic Text has “they had them stay” (a difference of one vowel). The Septuagint has the singular subject.
22. that they may drive them off. The coarseness of the ill-spirited men is reflected in the verb they use for taking away the wives and children, nahag, which, as we have noted, usually means to drive cattle. (Compare the irate Laban’s use of the same verb in reference to Jacob’s treatment of Rachel and Leah, Genesis 31:26.)
23. with what the LORD has given us. The syntactical link of this clause with what precedes is not entirely clear. Given the ideology of victory that David assumes—all triumph and all spoils of war come from God—it is best to construe the particle ʾet that introduces the clause not as a sign of the accusative but as “with.”
24. who stays with the gear. There is an implicit rationale for giving an equal share to those who remain behind—beyond the consideration of exhaustion, they have played a role in guarding the gear, thus enabling the other fighting men to proceed to battle with a lightened load. It is for this reason that David “had them stay” (or “posted them”) at the ford of the wadi. In all respects, this episode is meant to demonstrate David’s attributes as leader: he finds strength in the face of disaster, consults God’s oracle, intrepidly leads his troops in a counterattack, and now makes the most equitable arrangement for the division of spoils.
26. he sent from the booty to the elders of Judah, to his friends. This act shows David the consummate political man, shoring up support among the sundry leaders of his home tribe of Judah (hence the catalogue of place-names), and preparing for himself a base in Hebron (at the end of the catalogue), the principal town of Judah, where he will soon be proclaimed king. Some scholars have been troubled by “to his friends” (lereiʿeihu, which would normally mean “to his friend”) and have sought to emend it. David Kimchi, however, persuasively argues that the ostensibly singular noun can be legitimately read as a plural on the basis of other biblical precedents, and that the reference to “friends” makes good political sense: these are the same elders of Judah who provided cover for David during the period when he was hiding out from Saul in his own tribal territory. The verb “move about” (hithalekh) in the wrap-up verse of this section is an allusion to precisely this period, for it recalls David’s flight with his men from Saul at Keilah in 23:13—“and [they] moved about wherever they could.”
1And meanwhile the Philistines were battling against Israel, and the men of Israel fled before the Philistines, and they fell slain on Mount Gilboa. 2And the Philistines followed hard upon Saul and his sons, and the Philistines struck down Jonathan and Abinadab and Malkishua, the sons of Saul. 3And the battle went heavy against Saul, and the archers, the bowmen, found him, and he quaked with fear of the archers. 4And Saul said to his armor bearer, “Draw your sword and run me through with it, lest these uncircumcised come and run me through and abuse me.” But the armor bearer did not want to do it because he was very frightened, and Saul took the sword and fell upon it. 5And the armor bearer saw that Saul was dead, and he, too, fell upon his sword, and he died with him. 6And Saul died, and his three sons and his armor bearer, and all his men as well, together on that day. 7And the men of Israel who were on the other side of the valley and on the other side of the Jordan saw that the men of Israel had fled and that Saul and his sons were dead, and they abandoned the towns and fled, and the Philistines came and occupied them.
8And it happened the next day that the Philistines came to strip the slain, and they found Saul and his three sons fallen on Mount Gilboa. 9And they cut off his head and stripped him of his armor, and they sent throughout the Philistine country to bring the tidings to the temples of their idols and to the people. 10And they put his armor in the temple of Ashtaroth, and his body they impaled on the wall of Beth-Shan. 11And the inhabitants of Jabesh-Gilead heard what the Philistines had done to Saul. 12And every valiant fellow arose, and they went all night long, and they took Saul’s corpse, and the corpses of his sons from the wall of Beth-Shan, and they came back to Jabesh and burned them there. 13And they took their bones and buried them under the tamarisk in Jabesh, and they fasted seven days.
CHAPTER 31 NOTES
Click here to advance to the next section of the text.
1. And meanwhile the Philistines were battling. The Hebrew does not explicitly say “meanwhile,” but it is implied by the unusual use of the participial form of the verb (literally, “are battling”) to begin the narrative unit. Rashi neatly catches the effect: “As when a person says, ‘Let us return to the previous subject.’”
3. the archers, the bowmen. It has been argued that the duplication reflects a conflation of two textual variants, but it may be that the writer intended to highlight the use of the bow, in contrast to other weapons. In characteristic biblical fashion, the narrative offers no details of the battle, but the following broad outline can be reconstructed: The major engagement of forces takes place in the Jezreel Valley, to the northwest of Mount Gilboa. The level ground of the valley would have given the Philistines the opportunity to deploy their iron chariots, one of their great strategic advantages over the Israelites. In the rout of the Israelites that ensues, Saul’s forces retreat to the high ground of Mount Gilboa, where the Philistine chariots would have greater difficulty maneuvering. But the Philistines send contingents of archers—the bow being the ideal weapon to use against an army in flight—who exact heavy casualties from the Israelite forces.
he quaked with fear. A revocalization of the verb favored by many scholars yields “he was badly wounded.” But there is much to be said for the Masoretic vocalization: Saul’s fear has been a recurring theme in the narrative; here it would be matched by the armor bearer’s great fear of violating the king; and it is far from clear that Saul is seriously wounded when he decides to commit suicide (if he were, would he have the strength to fling himself on his sword?).
4. and abuse me. Like the urgent request of the dying Abimelech in Judges 9, with whom the dying Saul has sometimes been compared, Saul’s last wish will be denied him—the Philistines, though deprived of the opportunity to kill him, will decapitate his body and defile it by hammering it up on the wall of Beth-Shan.
6. and all his men as well. The parallel texts in both 1 Chronicles 10 and in the Septuagint lack this phrase. The argument for it is that it reinforces the image of martial solidarity in defeat: Saul, his sons, his armor bearer, his men, all perish “together” (yaḥdaw).
7. they abandoned the towns … and the Philistines came and occupied them. After this major victory, the Philistines manage to cut the Israelite settlement in two by establishing a sedentary presence across the lower Galilee from the coastal plain to the Jordan, separating the tribes in the far north from Benjamin and Judah to the south.
9. they cut off his head and stripped him of his armor. Saul’s successor, David, had marked his entry on the scene by cutting off the head of a Philistine; now they cut off Saul’s head. The stripping of the armor—and the all-purpose Hebrew kelim could also include his clothing—is the final divestment of Saul, who is stripped before the prophets, stripped of his royal garments at Ein-Dor, and now lies naked on the battlefield in ultimate defeat.
they sent throughout the Philistine country. There is some grammatical ambiguity as to whether they simply sent tidings, or Saul’s armor as visible token of the victory. The parallel verse in Chronicles lacks “temples of.”
10. his body they impaled on the wall of Beth-Shan. Throughout the ancient Mediterranean world, there was a horror about leaving a corpse unburied (compare, for example, the potency of this question in Sophocles’s Antigone). Saul’s corpse, moreover, is disfigured through decapitation. Beth-Shan (or, Beth-Sheʾan) is a town about eleven miles to the southwest of Mount Gilboa, near the Jordan.
11. the inhabitants of Jabesh-Gilead. This settlement is roughly another twelve miles to the southeast of Beth-Shan, on the eastern side of the Jordan, and hence just beyond the perimeter of the new Philistine occupation. It was Jabesh-Gilead that Saul rescued from Nahash the Ammonite (chapter 11) to inaugurate his career as king and general, and there are kinship bonds between Jabesh-Gilead and Saul’s tribe of Benjamin.
12. every valiant fellow arose. It would have been a very dangerous exploit to sneak into the territory now controlled by the Philistines and, under the cover of night, to make off with the corpses.
the corpses of his sons. This is an amplification of the Philistine atrocity, since we were not previously informed that the bodies of the sons were impaled along with Saul’s.
and burned them there. Cremation was not the usual Israelite practice, but it may be, as Kimchi has proposed, that in this case the bodies were burned because the flesh had already begun to rot.
13. and they fasted seven days. This, too, is an unusual practice as a mourning rite. Perhaps it merely reflects the grievousness of the loss that the men of Jabesh-Gilead have experienced, though Fokkelman makes the interesting proposal that the seven days of fasting are a counterpart to the seven days Nahash the Ammonite allowed Jabesh-Gilead for a deliverer (who turned out to be Saul) to appear.
