Gigi Kammeyer

I Samuel: 17-27--Saul is chosen as the first king of Israel

DearFr iend in Christ:

The first book of Samuel is about the presence and absence of voices, the history of a tribe that has become tone-deaf. The Hebrews have forgotten how to listen. They cannot hear God’s voice. The Lord is absent from their lives. They go into battle with God’s own Ark and lose it to the Philistines. It’s a sad and evil time for the Hebrews. “And the word of the Lord was absent in those days; there was no frequent vision” (3:3).

Enter Samuel. He is God’s chosen, the boy who was “lent” to the Lord (1:28). He grows into a prophet, priest, and judge of Israel. Samuel alone of all the Hebrews can hear God’s voice. His nearness to God is the one bit of unity the Hebrews have. Samuel is the nation, but his own sons are bad priests, and the older Samuel gets, the more that “nation” begins to worry.

The elders of Israel say to Samuel, “Behold you are old, and your sons do not walk in your ways, now appoint for us a king for to govern us like all the nations” (8:4).  Uneasy about the notion of a king, Samuel prays to the Lord, and the Lord tells him, “Harken to the voice of the people in all that they say to you; for they have not rejected you but have rejected me for being King over them” (8:7).

And the child of that rejection is Saul. The Lord chooses him as Israel’s first secular king. He’s handsome and tall. “There is none like him among all the people” (10:24). But Saul hides among the family’s baggage when Samuel comes to get him. He’s an outcast from the moment he’s anointed by Samuel. He’s the very idea of king as a lonely man.  The Bible can’t even tell us how old Saul was when he began to rule; the number is missing.

There is something cursed about Saul, something forlorn. The real prince of his army is Samuel, not Saul. When Samuel fails to appear at a certain battle site Saul grows frightened and offers up in sacrifice sheep and oxen he should have destroyed, as God had dictated to Samuel, and Samuel had dictated to Saul. The Lord will not forgive him. Saul can pray and grovel, but he has become like a dead man. He rules without the word of God. The Lord provides his own king, David, a young shepherd boy who is ruddy and handsome, and has beautiful eyes. Yet, while Samuel anoints the boy, Saul still rules the nation.

The Lord torments him with an evil spirit, and it is only young David who can cure it. “’And whenever the evil spirit from God was upon Saul, David took the lyre and played it with his hand; so, Saul was refreshed and was well, and the evil spirit left him” (16:23).  Saul takes the shepherd boy into his service as an armor-bearer and loved him greatly” (16:21).

And Saul has nothing but his rages, his fears, and his own silence. He cannot pull magic out of a sling and kill a giant for his people. Jehovah has cursed Saul by making him king. Saul’s madness returns. He starts to hunt David, and David hides among the Philistines. Samuel is dead. David is gone. And Saul’s divided army destroys itself.  The king and his entire house turn to dust.

After the Philistine archers surround Saul and wound him, the king falls upon his sword.  Thus, Saul’s story ends: The reluctant King who fell out of grace with the Lord. His very selection ruins him. And it’s the awfulness of his fate- the king as doomed man- that moves us.

Our own lives seem as arbitrary as Saul’s. The blessing of his kingship was only another form of curse. In a century of mass migration and mass murder, of poverty and dreamlike wealth, of businessmen-philosophers and cardboard kings, Saul seems as familiar as our own brooding face.

In Christ,
Gigi Kammeyer