King Saul. John C. Holbert

long arms were raised in ecstasy. Incredibly, dark clouds rushed into the sky, and the strong wind freshened with what felt like an augury of rain. The people instinctively lowered their heads in awe, as the new prophet of God went on.

      “O YHWH, the pagan enemy has captured your sacred box, your holy Ark. Show forth your power through it, O God. Bring to foolishness and emptiness their designs for its abuse. You alone, O YHWH, have power and strength! You alone, O YHWH, are creator and sustainer of the world! You, O YHWH, turn the plans of our foes to nothing. They are as nothing before you. We are your servants, the people of your pasture whom you chose for yourself, to be the fire of truth in your world, to become the hammer that breaks the rocks into pieces. Shatter your enemies, O God! Raise us up to be your agents of their destruction! We are yours, O God! We are yours! Give us your power. Give us your victory!”

      Samuel’s eyes were closed, but his mouth was twisted into a screaming hole from which poured prophetic language, urgent words that brewed those who heard into a frenzy of foaming fury. The tears for the dead Eli were gone from every face; the fear of the Philistines had drained away in the flood tide of Samuel’s oratory. The cries of the crowd drowned whatever further words the prophet spoke, but no further words were needed. On the day of Eli’s death and on the day that the Ark of God was captured in the defeat of battle, a new prophet had been born publicly in Israel. The temple student had disappeared and in his place there now stood an oracle of God.

      And Samuel knew it, knew it even as the words poured forth from his cracked lips. God had chosen him for this role. His mother, Hannah, had been right; he had a special destiny from YHWH. As the clamor of the people broke over him like the waves of the sea, he bathed in it, accepted it as his due. He was for now and always the prophet, Samuel, mouthpiece of the terrible God, YHWH of the Armies, and he did in fact speak for God on this earth. He fixed every eye he could see in the crowd with a stare as if to tell them that his face should accompany them wherever they went. He, Samuel, should guide their feet in the ways they should go. He, Samuel, should inhabit their dreams, as they searched for the future of their lives. Samuel was supreme; Samuel was the prophet of God!

      He had felt at least a cubit taller as he strode with absolute confidence from the burial place and back toward the temple. Those in front of him parted as quickly as they would in the presence of a king, and those behind surged to follow him wherever he was going. He thought it important to return to the temple for one last time in order to lead a worship of YHWH and then to gather his few things for a journey. Samuel knew he needed to leave Shiloh. It was the past now; its day had gone. He needed a new place of his own, a place identified as the new hope of Israel, a place known as the place of Samuel. What better place than his hometown of Ramah? Both of his parents were dead, as was the fertile Peninnah. Elkanah, Samuel’s father, had died as a victim of the Philistine attacks in the west. Samuel had respected his father, but had not loved him. After all, Elkanah had doted on Peninnah at the expense of his own mother; no young boy enjoyed watching his mother slighted by a father who had little time for still another son.

      Ramah was centrally located, well fortified, and well protected from the dangerous Philistines. He would return there and would create a center of power to rival any in the land. Israel and YHWH and Samuel were now ascendant!

      6

      His fame had grown quickly throughout the land. From his new base at Ramah, Samuel began to extend his influence. His startling return to Ramah after all his years in the temple at Shiloh became the stuff of an enlarging legend. Soon he was issuing proclamations from Ramah for the people to join him at various places for worship of YHWH. He held rallies for YHWH at Geba, Beth-aven, and Michmash, tiny villages only a few miles from Ramah. At each successive event the crowds grew. More and more Israelites were eager to hear the new prophet, to bathe in his confident words, to be moved by his puissant declamations. At every place, Samuel’s message was the same: YHWH was a God who demanded exclusive loyalty; worship of the gods of those who lived in the area, but who did not share Israel’s memory of YHWH’s deeds with the first families and Moses and the event at the Sea and the giving of the law at the mountain and the gift of this very land, was rejected completely. No matter how comforting it was for Israelite farmers to erect a sacred pole in their fields, a pole representative of the goddess of fertility, Astarte, in order to ensure a plentiful crop, those poles must be torn down and burned for fuel. No matter how often Israelite villagers found themselves worshipping with their Canaanite neighbors in the many shrines of Baal dotting the countryside, offering up prayers in their neighbor’s tongue to the storm god who in their belief brought the rains to the land, they must stop such behavior immediately.

      In increasingly large and colorful festivals, Samuel preached that it was YHWH alone who made their fields fertile; it was YHWH alone who was the bringer of the rain. There was no need at all for them to waste their breath on prayers to beings that, if they existed at all, which Samuel deeply questioned, had no power in a world that was owned completely by the mighty YHWH. He spoke often of the commandment that Moses had carried down from Sinai, on those tablets that rested silently in the Ark of YHWH, the one that said, “You must not have any other gods in my presence, nor must you worship them or bow down to them.” Even if the words implied that other deities might exist, they had no significance whatever in the presence of YHWH, who was creator of skies and earth.

      And every one of Samuel’s powerful and demanding sermons ended in the same way: rejection of these so-called gods, and exclusive devotion to YHWH, which would lead inevitably to the defeat of the threatening Philistines. Had they not already seen how the power of God had been made real in the very cities of the Philistines themselves, how the Ark had made a mockery of Dagon, who in the end was no different than Baal or Astarte, finally no god at all? Had their Dagon image not fallen on its face before the holy Ark, the throne seat of the unconquerable YHWH? Had not the very hands and feet of Dagon been cut off by the power of the Ark? “Put away your worship of these no-gods,” Samuel thundered, “and YHWH will be with you to the consternation of your enemies.” In all of the cities of the hill country, in the territories of Benjamin and Ephraim, Samuel spoke words like these. At last, after many years of such potent oratory, and after occasions of judicious listening to an increasing group of fervent followers, he felt himself ready to take the word of YHWH to the greatest place in the area, Mizpah.

      By this time, Samuel had amassed a large retinue of persons and things that had become the means by which he could proclaim his message to ever larger groups of Israelites. There were the provisions to feed those who came to listen. There was the large tent that was erected to shelter the crowds from the heat and the infrequent rain. There were the musicians, players of lute and harp and tambourine, along with the singers who energized the people in preparation for the words of the great prophet. When Samuel came to a place, all who lived there were eager to see and experience him and his words, as well as the music and dancing that delighted the eye and titillated the senses. In the remote and stolid villages of the hill country, Samuel’s visits were eagerly anticipated as occasions of excitement. But Mizpah was far from a remote village. It was the real center, at the very heart of an emerging Israel.

      Though Mizpah was only a brief journey north and west of Ramah, it was at the same time very important and darkly notorious. In the not too distant past, Israel had had a ruinous civil war centered at Gibeah, very close to Mizpah, a war that had threatened the future of the tribe of Benjamin and thus the common future of the entire land. The story was well known, and its point was remembered by all those who heard it. And the ending was always the same. The cruel Levite always was made to say, “Has anything like this ever happened in the land since we came here from Egypt? Think carefully, talk it over, and get ready to act!”

      At this point in the telling of the story, a good teller would pause and allow the listener to ponder about just what the “this” in the command of the Levite consisted of. Of course, it included the horrors of the marauding people of Gibeah and their destruction of the concubine. But was it not also the disgusting offer by the old man of his own daughter to those perverts? And was it not also the abandonment of his concubine by the Levite himself? Was not the whole sordid affair filled with the most appalling abuses of human against human?

      In response to the bloody message all the tribes assembled at Mizpah. They brought significant numbers of fighting men to root out the