King Saul. John C. Holbert

its solidity, its certainty, its reality. He lay down on the platform that formed nearly all of the room, and as Eli stumbled his way out of the place, Samuel did not move but lay quietly, impassively, rubbing the bear, gazing at the four clay walls, adjusting his eyes to the dim light. After a time, he slept and dreamt of Ramah and his mother. He felt very small, very alone, completely abandoned, and fear along with a knot of anger welled into his chest. One would expect fear from an abandoned child, but anger was unusual in one so young. Fear was understandable, but the origin of that anger was not at all clear.

      4

      The look on the old priest’s face those long years ago swam into Samuel’s mind once again, and he smiled a bitter smile as he moved toward the newcomer to Ramah. Eli was certainly not prepared to mentor anyone, the old fool! But, thought Samuel, I suppose he had done his best, given Hannah’s absolute certainty that YHWH wanted the boy to be a priest and a Nazirite. With all these thoughts in his mind, swirling around inside his head, he had awakened that morning fearing that YHWH would present to him the prince he was to anoint. He feared that he, like Eli before him, was about to be forced to mentor his own replacement! He had hoped to get to the sacrifice, perform the rite, eat the sacred meal, and return home in silence. But now he saw the man he did not want to see. He was enormous! He was inordinately good-looking, and he was young, his face unlined and open. Samuel was afraid that he was looking at the first king of Israel. There was no way that he could avoid the duty that YHWH had thrust on him, and he knew that with the thing he must now do, his own family of Israelite leaders would end with his death. When Samuel anointed this extraordinary boy, his sons’ futures were over, and his own memory as a faithful leader of the people was in the most serious jeopardy.

      As Samuel deviated from his path toward the high place to meet the boy, YHWH’s voice insinuated itself into his ears once again.

      “This is the man of whom I spoke to you yesterday; it is he who will rule over my people.”

      Samuel now knew there was no escape. His replacement stood before him; his ruin was walking toward him; the man who had the power to displace him in the hearts of the people he had loved and cherished and protected for fifty seasons of years loomed up like a mountain in his very own city. With all that was within him the mighty prophet of YHWH wanted to shout out for all to hear that he would have no part in anointing a ruler or prince or king over Israel, since only YHWH was king and only Samuel was YHWH’s prophet. But with YHWH’s unequivocal words ringing in the air, he saw no way out; he was going to have to anoint this man prince over Israel. But, he thought, I do not have to like it! Nor do I have to be quietly comfortable with the deed or the man. “Ruler?” “Prince?” “King?” We will see, thought Samuel. We will see what sort of ruler this huge boy may be. We will see.

      His reverie was broken by Saul’s first words to him.

      “Please tell me exactly where is the house of the seer?”

      Was this huge boy so thick as not to know whom he was addressing? Who in Israel did not know Samuel? Had he been born in a cave? Just what sort of fool had YHWH chosen to be prince over Israel? Could it be that YHWH had chosen just such a one to satisfy, on the surface at least, the demands of the people, but at the same time to demonstrate that rulers, kings, were finally no good, that they were incompetent, that they were dangerous? Samuel’s eyes brightened, his mood lightened. YHWH was ever mysterious! Could it be that the great God had chosen just such a fool as this to demonstrate to the people that only YHWH could be king, after all? He thought of all of those years of leading Israel, all of those years of doing the work of YHWH. Who better than he knew the mind of the God? Who better than Samuel, the one who had been uniquely called for leadership of the people, whose words had been God’s word for moons beyond counting? It had begun with that amazing call from his God. He stood mute in the square of Ramah, gazing at the uncomprehending man, and his aging mind wondered back again to a distant time when he was very young, back to that tiny room in Shiloh’s temple.

      He had whimpered quietly as he had watched his mother turn her back on him for the first time in his life and to leave him with the smelly old priest whom he had not liked the first time he saw him in the dimness of the temple. His smoky clothes, his straggled hair, dully yellowed by sacrificial fires and cheap lamps, hung in uneven strands down his face and into his eyes. And those eyes! They had once been a green of some sort, but now the cruel march of milky white clouds was invading both so that complete blindness was not far off. The young boy shuddered in terror to look into those eyes that seemed more dead than alive, ghostly, beastly, inhuman. The first few days of his time with Eli, Samuel could not get the look of those eyes out of his thoughts; they followed him as he explored the puny world he had been assigned—the barren, rocky ground around the temple, the temple itself, forever dark and dank and usually silent save the hum of prayers and the crackle of the sacrificial fires. Outside in the animal pits, there were the near constant screams of frightened creatures having their unwilling throats slit for offering to YHWH—birds for the poor and destitute, sheep for the less poor and especially desperate, and for the rich and the nearly hopeless even a cow, though cattle were rare and hard to keep alive in the lean years of bad pasturage.

      All these beasts shed their blood for the God, day after day and week after week, until the ground was red with it, and the pits for slaughter were full of rotting corpses with flesh-picked bones sticking out of the ashes. One of Samuel’s earliest tasks in the temple compound was to shoo away the multitudes of carrion birds that gathered thick as flies around that pit, all too ready to gorge on carcasses either before sacrifice or after. The birds were not picky. Their bloody beaks were not attuned to the technicalities of divine sacrifice; they swooped and cried and dove on the pit despite the five-year-old boy’s valiant attempts to scare them off into the sky. Some always managed to get through Samuel’s cries and screams, accompanied by wild wavings of a stick, said by Eli to have been the very rod of Moses that he used to part the waters of the Sea of Reeds. What would the great lawgiver have thought to see his wondrous rod reduced to a defense against birds, not to mention to witness its wooden sides marked increasingly with bird leavings and sacrificial ashes?

      As Samuel grew older, his work in the temple changed as his understanding of the workings of YHWH matured under the teaching of the priests assigned to the task. He learned primarily the stories of Israel’s past; how the world was created by the mighty YHWH; how humanity was made and given a garden, but how they had disobeyed the command against eating the fruit of a certain tree and had been expelled from the garden; how the first murder in history was committed by a brother against his own brother; how the flood had come to wash the evil away, but how that evil persisted even after the waters had dried up; how Abram became Abraham and Sarai, his wife, became Sarah; how they had given birth to a boy called “laughter” (Isaac) when they were far too old; how Laughter had had twin sons, one foolish and the other clever; how the clever one (Jacob) had had many children, one of whom (Joseph) had through marvelous adventures become a powerful man in Egypt and had led Israel there; how they had been enslaved by cruel pharaohs for a very long time; how the great Moses had led them forth from there with the power of YHWH, had given to them the law by which they would live, had led them to the very edge of the land of promise; how he had died before entering the land, after handing the leadership of the people to Joshua; how they had now lived in that land for many years, close to the former owners of the land in uneasy alliances and tentative neighborliness; how the sea-faring Philistines had appeared from the west to populate the coastlands and to threaten again and again those living in the central mountains of the promised land.

      The priests were an insulated group of men, little familiar with the world outside of the temple and its restricted compound, but they knew of the Philistines, of their iron chariots and swords, of their designs on the fertile pasturelands of the central highlands. The priests taught that vigilance was always needed to guard against Philistine raids and Philistine deceptions and especially Philistine religious beliefs in the god, Dagon, a god of grain who was of course no god at all in the eyes of the priests. Samuel heard daily that the only God was YHWH, the mountain monarch who had chosen and saved Israel time and again, and who would deal with these blasphemous heathen in YHWH’s good time. By the time of his adulthood, when he had seen fourteen summers, Samuel had no doubt that YHWH was the only God in the universe, and that other gods were useless, mute, powerless, and