[This is still part of our series from A Literary Guide to the Bible. Please note once again that the critic approaches the Hebrew Scriptures from purely non-theological point of view, and even if Samuel is a historical/prophetic book, the critic simply looks at form, structure, poetic language if any, figures of speech, etc. We have found this totally objective approach to be helpful to readers/students, since no doctrinal interpretation is infused, thereby distorting the plain meaning of the text. ]
1 and 2 Samuel
Joel Rosenberg
The worlds bridged by the Samuel books (which I shall call simply “Samuel” when stressing their unity) are reflected in the names they assumed in the two principal ancient versions of the biblical text.
- The Septuagint called the books “1 and 2 Kingdoms” (1 and 2 Kings, in turn, being known as “3 and 4 Kingdoms”),
- whereas the Masoretic text designated them, as do our English translations, “1 and 2 Samuel.”
The shift in Israel’s leadership—
- from prophet-judges
- to kings,
- and especially dynastic kings,
is indeed the subject of these books, and it seems no accident that the canon shaped under rabbinic aegis should, in its titling, give greater weight to the figure who embodied—-
- a decentralized,
- theocratic,
- avocational,
- and minimalist authority
—-rather than to the kings, the civil rulers, who replaced him.
The Samuel books might more appropriately be called—-
- “Saul”
- and “David,” respectively,
- or even “1 and 2 David”;
- yet Samuel’s direct or indirect dominance of 1 Samuel and his less obvious ideological dominance of 2 Samuel (where he is otherwise never mentioned) make the appellation “1 and 2 Samuel” not only apt but a meaningful challenge for literary interpretation.
Making sense of Samuel’s role in the books that bear his name will do much to define the special character of the books and their argument.
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- Are these, however, “books” in the same clear sense as, say, Genesis, Jonah, or Ruth?
- And are they two books or one?
The early chapters of 1 Samuel would plausibly fit into the Book of Judges, which, in the Masoretic text, immediately precedes it (indeed, its victorious seventh chapter would have given Judges a more ebullient and celebratory ending). And critics have long held that the momentous Davidic court history of 2 Samuel ends properly at 1 Kings 2.
- What, then, is gained, from a literary perspective, by isolating the Samuel books as they now stand?
- And what role do the books thus construed play in the larger narrative corpus extending from Genesis through 2 Kings?
The two most widely accepted results of source-criticism—
- Leonhard Rost’s notion of a tenth-century B.C.E. “Succession History” (2 Sam. 11-1 Kings 2)
- and Martin Noth’s notion of a sixth- or fifth-century “Deuteronomic History” (Deut.—2 Kings)
—–have tended to obscure the literary character of the Samuel books by depriving them both—-
- of their autonomy as books
- and of the commonality of texture and perspective
—-that unites them with most other books of the Hebrew Bible.
The same careful interplay of
- poetic fragment,
- folkloric tradition,
- archival notation,
- and elaborated narrative that inform biblical literature as a whole (including, somewhat differently, the chiefly poetic books)
—–can be found in Samuel, as can the political, cultural, and religious argument that gave rise to biblical tradition itself.
Samuel stands as a single “argument,” one we can variously view as
- prophetic,
- Deuteronomic,
- or sapiential in origin,
- but whose consistency transcends alleged sources and books.
At the same time, the Masoretic parceling of books gives Samuel a beginning and end that most fully accord with the shape of that larger argument.
The best explication of the work is —-
- not one that focuses on literary techniques as isolated phenomena,
- but one that follows out its line of thought and unfolding story and the gradual deployment and development of its manifold themes.
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Samuel and Pre-monarchical Israel
Samuel most resembles Genesis in —
1. its preoccupation with founding families
2. and in its positioning of these representative households at the fulcrum of historical change.
3. As in Genesis, the fate of the nation is read into the mutual dealings of—
- spouses,
- parents,
- and children,
- of sibling and sibling,
- and of householder and servant,
- favored and underclass.
4. And the Samuel author, like the Genesis author,
- weaves from these vicissitudes
- a complex scheme of historical causation and divine justice.
5. Thematic movements fall into place through a series of overlapping and interlinked codes—
- of household,
- priesthood,
- court, and so on—
—-in which shifts occur nonchalantly and elliptically, as if the premises of their alternation were already clear from a long tradition.
Three figures in particular form the narrative focus, and in an ascending order of elaboration:
- Samuel,
- Saul,
- and David.
Rather than viewing the three as subjects of separate story-cycles, or even of subtly interlocked story-cycles, we should understand the work as comprising three major clashes or struggles:
- between Samuel and Saul,
- between Saul and David,
- and between David and the combined legacy of Samuel and Saul.
(David’s clash with Absalom, the tragic marrow of 2 Samuel, is, institutionally speaking, an expression of this third conflict, made all the more poignant by its origin within David’s own household.)
The work, however, denies the historical originality of these conflicts, for they appear saturated with the resonances of similar clashes elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible.
- Rivalry and differential fortunes are the currency of divine plan from Genesis onward,
- and the opening of 1 Samuel formulates the problem with fabular elegance.
We are shown some moments in the household of Elkanah and Hannah, parents of Samuel, as the family pays a visit to the covenant shrine at Shiloh.
- It is an Abrahamic household—
- Elkanah has two wives:Here, however, it is not the husband who stands in the forefront of the narration but the distressed barren wife (Sarah’s perspective is, by contrast, quite muted in the Genesis account, while her rival, Hagar, is given two whole chapters of prominence; Hannah’s rival, Peninnah, for her part, if given almost to narrative elaboration).
- a barren wife who is cherished
- and a fertile wife who is obstreperous and haughty.
- Hannah’s sorrow over her childlessness and over the taunts of her rival is oddly misunderstood by Elkanah: “Why are you sad? Aren’t I more valuable to you than ten sons?” (v. 8). More literally, he asks: “Why is your mood bad? Am I not more good for you …? (This is the first of numerous comparative ratios by which the characters’ motivations are measured throughout the work—see 2 Sam. 1:26, 13:15-16—and the first of several motivic uses of the dyad “good/bad”; see 2 Sam. 13:22, 14:17, 17:14,19:35.)
- But Hannah is not consoled; a link to the future is apparently more valuable to her than the present devotions of a spouse, and her malaise leads her beyond the human arena to the recourse of prayer—indeed, of covenant: if YHWH will grant her request for offspring, she will dedicate her child to lifelong divine service.
Hannah’s prayer leads to a new misunderstanding: the shrine priest Eli mistakes her tearful murmuring as drunkenness and rebukes her. Even the professional man of God is unable to detect the channels of divine-human rapport being established. Eli quickly recants his error when Hannah explains her situation, but we are already alerted that this is a priesthood in decline—a matter made clearer by the later description of the corruption of Eli’s sons (2:12-17, 22-36).
Meanwhile, Elkanah and his household return home, and eventually Hannah’s prayer is answered:
- Samuel is born,
- and, at his weaning, he is brought to Shiloh to serve the shrine under Eli’s tutelage.
Upon this joyous occasion, Hannah pours forth a song of praise—
- one of numerous ways in which archaic and early monarchial poetry is woven into the Samuel narratives—
- and this exuberant psalm expresses the historical outlook both of biblical tradition in general and of Samuel in particular:
- YHWH is invoked asThe many turns of personal and familial fortune in the ensuing chapters are an elaboration of the compressed strophes of Hannah’s song.
- the God of surprise,
- bringing down the mighty,
- raising up the downtrodden;
- impoverishing the wealthy
- and enriching the pauper;
- bereaving the fertile
- and making barren the fruitful—
- always circumventing the trappings of human vanity and the complacency of the over-contented.
Indeed, the ensuing narration makes clear that Hannah’s triumph and Samuel’s entry into priestly service coincide with the house of Eli’s fall from divine favor. As the sins of Eli’s sons are detailed and Eli’s ineffectual disciplining is reported, Samuel’s reputation is said to grow. An anonymous prophet warns Eli of what lies in store for his own household.
The young Samuel then receives a prophetic call—a remarkable event in an era when the divine word was scarce (see 3:1).
- The episode is modeled on the lines of traditional accounts of prophetic call (see Exod. 3:1-4:17, Judg.6:11-24, Isa. 6:1-13, Jer. 1:1-4, Ezek. 1:1-3:15),
- but is it ripe with unique ironies:
- the boy twice thinks it is Eli calling him,
- and when, instructed by Eli, he responds properly to the divine summons, he must report to Eli the reiterated message of his household’s impending doom—
- a doom that will also mark the end of the shrine at Shiloh
- and a disastrous setback for Israel.
Eli, who is under no illusions about his sons’ merits, accepts Samuel’s prophecy without complaint: “It is YHWH; may he do what is just in his eyes” (3:18); but we sense in this simultaneous elevation and demotion the mercurial hand of divine providence.
The rise and fall of persons and families
is a microcosm of the shifting fortunes of the people at large,
whose attention to probity and justice has been similarly inconstant (see Judges 2:10b-23).
Thus far, however, the narrative’s scope has been small.
We view only the interaction of the two pivotal households,
- one priestly,
- the other laic.
Samuel is the bridge between the two, although he belongs, in effect, to neither.
- His public style as admonisher and doomsayer—unvarying in his career even past the grave—is established from his debut.
- Few subtleties of character are to shade Samuel’s figure.
- Almost nothing of his personal life is recounted.
- He will eventually show himself to be a thoroughly ideological presence.
- True to the folk etymology of his name (1:20, 2:20)—in reality an etymology of the name Saul—Samuel behaves from the start as one “sought from/lent to” YHWH.
Meanwhile the narrative turns to the situation—
- that brings down the house of Eli
- and that will eventually spell the end of even Samuel’s type of leadership:
- Israel’s chronic distress at the hands of the neighboring Philistines.
We are already familiar with this problem from the story of Samson (Judges 13-16), and it will persist late into the reign of David (see. 2 Sam. 21:15-22, 23:8-17).
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Chapters 4-6 remove the focus from Samuel and interpose a tale of the captivity of the Ark of the Covenant.
This interlude has numerous comic touches—an odd folkloric levity for a subject normally viewed in Israel with such sacral awe:
- the ark, expected to strike terror into Israel’s enemies,
- works so well that they rally to defeat Israel;
- the ark itself proves to be a troublesome prey,
- bringing plagues upon its captors
- and playing numerous pranks upon the Philistine shrines;
- finally, the chastened enemy sends it back in a wagon
- with a driverless ox team,
- accompanied by a curious token of Philistine appeasement (symbols of the plagues they have suffered):
- golden effigies of mice and hemorrhoids!
The ark motif is resumed in 2 Samuel 6,
- when David, as a symbol of his decisive victory over the Philistines,
- brings the ark to Jerusalem,where it will remain for the next four centuries.
- a city newly captured from the Jebusites,
Meanwhile, its return from Philistine captivity in Samuel’s time—-
- prompts an Israelite renaissance—
- a purification of worship,
- a renewed resistance against the Philistines,
- an extended period of peace
- and a consolidation of Samuel’s leadership (1 Sam. 7).
This idyllic condition is well positioned:
- it is a final demonstration of the harmony attainable without kingly institutions—
- a pure reflex of national morale and spiritual integrity.
- It is a standard against which the historical events that follow will be measured.
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The Founding of the Monarchy
The next five chapters (1 Sam. 8-12) recount the origin of the monarchy.
- The initial premise is familiar—the people complain that Samuel is old and that, as with the house of Eli, his sons do not walk in his ways (this is the book’s sole indication that Samuel has a domestic life)—
- but the logic is uncertain:A clue is suggested by the wording of the people’s request: “Appoint over us a king to judge us like all the other nations” (8:5).
- how, indeed, will a king rise above this problem?
- Won’t the integrity of his offspring be as much a source of concern for a king’s as it has been for a prophetic judge?
- What additional stability does kingship afford?
- We know, of course, that, in the light of Pentateuchal doctrine,
- being “like all the nations” is a path of folly (see Exod. 23:23-24; Lev. 18:1-4; Deut. 4:5-8, 18:9-14);
- yet with the advantage of historical hindsight the Samuel author recognized the inevitability of this turn in identity for national survival.
The ambivalence of the tradition on this point is suggested by the fact that—
- YHWH, consulted by Samuel,
- reluctantly concedes the people’s wish,
- threatening no direct divine retribution
- but warning of the natural human consequences of their choice (8:10-18—an echo of Deut. 17:14-20, as 8:6-7 carries an echo of Gen.21:11-12).
This exchange reveals two important things:
- that kingship is a project of the people as a whole—
- whatever is reported of a sovereign in books to come is indirectly their story—
- and that Israel’s bid for a king is a bid for equality in the international arena—
- a bid, indeed, for ordinariness.
Israel’s previous extraordinary status among nations,
- its reliance on the genius of prophetic inspiration,
- on the sporadic efflorescence of the might of YHWH in its midst,
- had, in a sense, become a tiresome burden.
The vertiginous swings of divine favor celebrated in Hannah’s song were now—although the tradition could not say so directly—not conducive to the stability and continuity of national life. Such an awareness could be registered only in the discourse of a nation long matured, reflecting back on a more primitive and volatile innocence.
Much the same loss of innocence,
- epitomized by the Garden story,
- by Abraham’s expulsion of Hagarby Jacob’s wrestle with an angel at the river Jabbok,
- and near-sacrifice of Isaac,
- by Israel’s sojourn in Egyptby the nation’s imperfect conquest of Canaan
- and its later folly with the Golden Calf,
- and by the unexpunged presence of the Canaanite in its midst,
—-is here expressed in the Israelite elders’ plea for a king.
Paradoxically, presiding over the ensuing process is the man who, alongside Moses and Joshua, most epitomizes Israel’s freedom from kings.
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Commentators have noted the multiplicity of sources and perspectives underlying these chapters. It has been customary to view here the interplay of pro-Saul and anti-Saul or, more generally, pro- and antimonarchical sentiments. (In fact, as we shall see, both interpretations are borne out in different ways by the story.)
Recently it has been suggested that the pro and con perspectives are arranged symmetrically:
(a) 8:1-22, a warning by Samuel against kingship;
(b) 9:1-10:16, a largely complimentary portrait of Saul and his anointing by Samuel;
(c) 10:17-27, a renewed warning by Samuel and a public selection of Saul, who is described pejoratively as “hiding in the baggage”;
(b’)11:1-15, an inspired victory by Saul over the Ammonites—again, a complimentary portrait;
(a’) 12:1-25, a final admonition by Samuel, in classic Deuteronomic style.
If this schematization is correct, it is all the more noteworthy that these chapters also trace the lineaments of the common Near Eastern enthronement myth:
- the threat from an external enemy,
- the clamor of the populace for a king,
- the secret anointing of a princely candidate (a nagid),
- his hesitation and reassurance,
- his public emergence,
- his routing of the enemy and victorious return,
- and the reconfirmation of his rule.
This pattern, which is essentially repeated (minus the hesitation motif) in the later elevation of David, is present in purer form in the poetic tradition—especially in Psalms—but in Samuel it is sharply qualified by the narrative context, where the tradition’s ambivalence about kingship is allowed free expression.
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“Is Saul Also among the Prophets?”
The personality of Saul is more fully developed in the remainder of 1 Samuel,
- which recounts the renewed incursions of the Philistines
- and the gradual deterioration of Saul’s mental state under external and internal pressures.
Saul’s condition, which bears the earmarks of both depression and paranoia, is said to stem from the “evil spirit” (16:14; cf. 18:10) sent by YHWH as a punishment for his defiance of Samuel’s authority.
There are two versions of Saul’s offense.
- In 13:9-14, he erroneously offers sacrifices preparatory to battle in Samuel’s absence, fearing that the people will scatter before the enemy is engaged; he thus usurps a ritual function belonging to the prophet.
- In 15:7-9, he captures and annihilates the Amalekite populace, as Samuel has commanded him to do, but spares Agag, their king, and the choicest of their flocks of sheep—thus violating both the prophet’s injunction and the norms of holy war.
Both incidents are reminiscent of the account of Aaron’s negligence in the Golden Calf episode in Exodus 32, and we are probably dealing with a type-scene—a traditional storytelling formula, unfolding events in a conventionally fixed sequence. Yet, perhaps for the same reason, Samuel’s denunciation of Saul seems predetermined and disproportionate, especially in the light of Saul’s repentant behavior in 15:24-31.
The moral offenses of kingship Samuel has warned against are nowhere in evidence at this point—
- only a ritual impropriety,
- and a breach of prophetic prerogative.
Despite the levels of tyranny Saul will eventually attain—especially in his treatment of David and his slaughter of the priests of Nob—the ensuing narrative retains a certain tacit sympathy for Saul that only deepens as his plight grows more tragic.
There is no biblical character quite like Saul, and, part from David’s feigned madness before Achish of Gath (21:13-15), mental illness occurs as a major motif only once more in the Hebrew Bible: in Nebuchadnezzar’s temporary madness in Daniel 4.
We should, however, keep in mind that Saul’s torments embody effectively the hybrid and transitional nature of his institutional role.
- From the start, Saul’s kingship is but an extension of the idioms of judgeship—including, most notably, his behavior as a battlefield ecstatic (11:6; see also Judges 6:34, 14:19, 15:14).
- Although he anticipates the kingly style of David in certain important ways (in his reliance on agents and informers, in his responsibility for orchestrating the instrument of war, in his fashioning the rudiments of court and dynasty), he never fully rises above the haphazard and ad hoc conditions of charismatic leadership.
- Saul’s desire to duplicate his earliest battlefield successes leads him to fight battles frenziedly on field after field, diluting his value as a strategist and squandering his failing energies.
- The obscure popular saying “Is Saul also among the prophets?” (used etiologically in 10:1-12 and 19:19-24) might be understood as a comment on the paradox of a prophet-king’s inability to control the conditions of his inspiration. (It is thus also a comment on the inadequacy of Israel’s reliance on charismatic leadership.)
- And as prophecy fails him, Saul is eventually forced into a final desperate involvement with necromancy—something his own edicts and Mosaic law proscribe—only to find the spirit of the departed Samuel informing him of his own imminent doom (28:3-25).
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The Young David
Against such a background should we understand the emergence of David in 1 Samuel 16-17.
- The youngest of the Bethlehemite Jesse’s eight sons,
- David, contrary to his father’s intentions quickly catches the eye of Samuel, who, bypassing David’s older brothers, settles on the youth as his choice for the leadership of Israel in place of Saul.
- Samuel’s secret anointing of David (who is completely silent during this phase of the narrative) does not, for the time being, unseat Saul,
- and David himself is to remain impeccably respectful of Saul’s legitimacy for years to come, long after Saul’s death.
- Famed as a musician,But from the moment David first speaks (17:26), he seems to manifest a distinctive spark of ambition that colors his actions throughout his long rise to power.
- David is even engaged as a healer of Saul for a period (16:14-23; cf. 18:10-12).
- His speech on the battlefield before his brilliant confrontation of the Philistine giant Goliath reveals more than a youthful religious zeal;
- it is sound political doctrine,
- flattering the people Israel as the inspired confederate army it would like itself to be (and, until that moment, most decidedly is not):
You come against me with sword and spear and javelin, but I come against you in the name of YHWH of the [celestial] armies, God of the [terrestrial] troops of Israel, whom you have insulted. This day YHWH will deliver you into my hand, and I will strike you down and remove your head from you, and give the corpses of the camp of Philistines this very day to the birds of the sky and the beasts of the field, and all the land [or world] will know there is a God for Israel; and all this community [literally, congregation] will know that not by sword or by spear does YHWH save, for the battle is YHWH’s and his has given you into our hands! (17:45-47)
Yet at no point, then or ever after in the narrative, does David manifest prophetic ecstasy (although Jewish tradition understood the Psalms of David as such; see 2 Sam. 23:2). He remains a rational and farsighted architect of kingly institutions long before his attainment of actual kingship. He manages to do this while being hunted down by Saul, who early on sees the popularly acclaimed youth as a rival for the throne—a suspicion that aggravates Saul’s depression and drives him to ever more desperate actions against the fugitive.
Curiously, David’s very forbearance toward Saul has an element of political calculation.
- On two occasions (1 Sam. 24 and 26) David chances upon an opportunity to kill Saul but refuses to stretch out his hand against “YHWH’s anointed” (messiah YHWH).
- David’s use of this expression (see also 2 Sam. 1:14, 16) is not as traditional as it sound.
- In fact Israelite custom had never accorded the anointed or charismatic leader a permanent and unconditional sacredness of person; the charismatic state ended with the cessation of battle or the death of the leader.
- David’s usage has more in common with Canaanite or other non-Israelite conceptions of kingship and suggests that David foresees a dynastic function of kingship that goes far beyond the minimalist conception envisaged by Samuel. David knows that if Saul can be killed by an aspiring rival, any Israelite king can.
- Whether or not David has designs on the throne (and it is important to remember that throughout Saul’s lifetime, neither David nor the narrator says so explicitly), his refusal to harm Saul is an investment in the stability of the future regime—any future regime.
This conservative attitude toward the person of Saul makes David’s own political aspirations clearer. To judge from the situation that first kindles David’s ambitions (see 17:26—as noted, David’s first words), namely, Saul’s offer in marriage of his daughter Michal to the slayer of Goliath, it seems possible that David might have been most comfortable not with the role of supplanter but with that of son-in-law to the king, with perhaps a secondary role in government—possibly as aide and chief protector to Saul, or to Saul’s logical heir and David’s dearest friend, Jonathan.
If David ever foresaw the kingship passing to himself, it would preferably have been by peaceful, orderly, and constitutional means. Otherwise, it would not be a throne worth having. Saul’s jealousy and suspicion of David, David’s flight into exile, the course of the Philistine wars, and the eventual disaffection of Michal all prevent this more idyllic situation from evolving, but the formative role of this fantasy on David’s political imagination is fundamental to our understanding of the Samuel books.
The paradox that Israel’s greatest king views himself as merely a kingmaker and throne-protector is an important key to much that happens in his life story. The narrator, however, never tips the balance in favor of one or the other view of David—it is only the reader’s hindsight (or that of one who knows the tradition) that makes David an aspirant to the throne. David’s reported behavior serves a very different self-image, even long after he attains the throne. (His apparent initial bid for kingship outside of Judah in 2 Sam. 2:4-7 seems curiously truncated and elliptical.) Moreover, even were we to assume that the premonarchic David saw himself as king, it is still fair to say that he viewed the kingly office from outside it. It is that curiously transcendent conception of royalty, as we shall see, that eventually wreaks so much harm on David’s personal and domestic life.
David as Domestic Being
How, then, do we evaluate what the text says of David as domestic being—
- as son
- and brother,
- as spouse
- and father?
The text’s genius for informing by omission—a quality not unique in biblical literature—is particularly telling on this matter, at least at first, and there is much that is congenial to the Freud-instructed sensibilities of the modern reader.
- Of David’s childhood environment we know little—but enough.
- His father views the lad either indifferently or overprotectively:
- David is presented to Samuel only as an afterthought.
- David’s older brother Eliab later belittles David’s efforts to get close to the action at the center of the battlefield, when Goliath issues his challenge to Israel (see 17:28).
- David’s reply is uncharacteristically defensive and childlike: “What have I done now? Isn’t it just talk?” (17:29).
- David’s chances for a meaningful life under the roof of his father’s home seem dim, and, like many a younger son in biblical history, he quickly learns that adoptive relations—of the battlefield, of the political arena, of the bed—can be the most formative and significant shapers of identity.
“He turned away from [Eliab] toward someone else” (17:30) is thus a fundamental gesture in David’s personal history—a departure from his father’s house in all but a geographic sense. In this light we may understand the genuine affection he feels toward Saul and Jonathan (long after running afoul of Saul, David addresses him as “my father,” 24:11). The homage David pays the house Saul, almost to the end of his own rule, a homage that, from our perspective, bears much of the aura of medieval chivalric romance, seems wholly sincere, and seems, even when it is refused, to provide him with something of the security, structure, and self-affirmation unavailable to him in his own father’s house.
Whereas Saul seems torn by the angry departure of his patron Samuel (manifested quite palpably in the garment-tearing scene of 1 Sam. 15:27-29), David, in a less debilitated way, always carries with him the loss of his patron’s Saul and Jonathan—a sense of loss that rises to a crescendo in David’s great poetic elegy at the beginning of 2 Sam.:
O, hills of Gilboa, on you let fall no dew,
nor rain, O fields of plenty,
for there lies loosed the shield of heroes,
the shield of Saul without its coat of oil,
the bow of Jonathan that shied not from the blood of its prey,
from the fat flesh of the mighty,
the sword of Saul that ne’er returned unused.
Saul and Jonathan, beloved, sweetly remembered,
never parted, in their lives and in their deaths, swifter than eagles,
mightier than lions.
O, daughters of Israel, weep for Saul,
who could clothed you in crimson and finery,
who decked your clothes with ornaments of gold … (1:21-24)
We know from 1 Samuel 14 and 31 that Saul and Jonathan were indeed parted in life and in death, but this grandiloquent blurring of reality befits the self-conscious, one could say Canaanitish, archaism that remains part of David’s public style. We sense, as well, a certain incongruity between the lavishness of David’s praise for his would-be adoptive family and the strange silence in the next about his relation to his own father’s house.
David, to be sure, retains ties with the latter (see 1 Sam. 20:6), and when he is forced into exile by the wrath of Saul he brings his parents with him and sends them into the protective custody of the king of Moab (22:6)—an ironic reversal of the dependent relation of David to Jesse conspicuously outlined in chapter 16. Beyond this scant details, nothing a patronymic.
The father who nearly succeeded in keeping his son shrouded in historical obscurity is rewarded with an obscurity of his own, and we cannot escape the feeling that a certain coldness or emotional remoteness governs David’s relations with his parents from the earliest days of his public career, or that an even more embarrassing situation governs the traditionary silence on the matter. Indeed, the next time we encounter the king of Moab, in 2 Samuel 8:2, he is David’s captive, and the victim of an inexplicably harsh vengeance.
Rabbinic and medieval Jewish commentary blame this king (who remains curiously anonymous) for the (unmentioned) death of David’s parents, but the text accomplishes more by omitting the exact circumstances from the narrative—as if anonymity and textual lacuna were, at these points, animate powers of their own. Were the commentators correct ( and their rather fanciful suspicions are, after all, based entirely on the textual silence), then David would be indirectly responsible for the deaths of his own parents—but the text stops short of confirming this matter. In any case, the contrast between David’s traditionally well-attested fervor for the house of Saul and his thoroughly unattested attitude toward his own parents’ household is quite curious and adds an important dimension to our understanding.
David as Political Being
This history of David’s rise and reign is political and historical as well as personal or domestic. What is interesting is the way in which David’s personal life is brought into the larger context, as well as the changes in the ratio of personal to political history.
Well into 2 Samuel, David, though he exerts a fascination and is central to the action, remains relatively undeveloped as a character—at least in relation to the development he is yet to undergo from 2 Samuel 11 onward. That development, however, must be understood on both the personal and political planes; to view either at the expense of the other is to misunderstand the work’s unique perspective.
Some of our misconceptions have stemmed from the tendency of otherwise responsible historians to see the story (and, in particular, the “Succession History,” begun in 2 Sam. 11) as straightforward reportage of historical events by an eyewitness. This view has fortunately been corrected by more recent literary study, which has shown that eyewitness reportage and narrative realism are not identical. But the literary interpreters, for their part, tend to overlook the degree to which an incisive political and historical judgment—one requiring considerable historical hindsight—is part of the literary delight the story fosters.
The stories of Israel’s and David’s maturation are essentially the same story. This fact, more than any other, attests the literary unity of Samuel, however diverse its raw materials. The author/editor presents an almost unfathomably complex political history through a relatively limited repertoire of traditions and themes—and, in the process, renders that history clear and comprehensible.
David’s political dimension should be understood on two textual planes:
- the report of his political actions,
- and the account of the deep structural changes in Israelite society that his career embodies.
What source critics call “The History of David’s Rise”—1 Samuel 16-2 Samuel 10—provides generous coverage at both levels, but it is only when David begins to recede to a defensive and relatively passive position as political actor, in 2 Samuel 11 onward, that the latter realm can be fully understood. Curiously, it is only here that David’s domestic life comes into full view. (To call this a separately composed, eyewitness “Succession History” misses the meaning of Samuel, but it does correctly suggest that the chief issue of these chapters is the succession to David—whose entire statecraft is founded on the principle of succession.)
How, then, are we to understand the politics of the premonarchical and early monarchial David?
In the political actions themselves, the dramatic interest is concentrated on David’s genius under adversity. After his exile from Saul’s court in 1 Samuel 21, David’s political situation is desperate, and we experience a certain inevitable thrill in witnessing the consummate self-confidence with which David engineers his own survival.
The great paradox of this phase of the story is that David manages to throw in his lot with Israel’s enemies, the Philistines, while retaining the affection of the Israelite populace (Judean and northern alike). His sojourn among the Philistines turns out to have one important benefit: it removes David from intra-Israelite politics while the reign of Saul deteriorates, thus preserving for David a neutrality toward intra-Israelite affairs that will later work in his favor. Meanwhile he must avoid fighting alongside the Philistines against his own people, while still retaining his credibility with the Philistine leaders whom he serves as a vassal.
Chapters 27-30 detail David’s brilliant maneuvers to accomplish these impossibly contradictory goals.
Not until the death of Saul, at the end of 1 Samuel, and the sudden reversal of David’s political fortunes does “Davidic policy” as such—the deeper structure of David’s politics—come into fuller view. We have a preliminary glimpse of this dimension in the epithet “YHWH’s anointed,” applied by David to Saul in 1 Samuel 24 and 26. In 2 Samuel 1-10 we get a more expanded view of the monarchical revolution David has set in motion.
Three episodes in particular convey with great selectivity and condensation the nature of the society now at hand.
(1) In chapter 3 David rebukes his chief aide, Joab, for a blood-feud slaying of Abner (Joab’s counterpart in the court of Saul’s survivor Ishbosheth), a slaying that forestalls the merger of the Judean and northern Israelite monarchy and brings political embarrassment to David. David’s censure of Joab establishes the role of the monarch as one who will stand above and restrain the volatile and chaotic motions of tribal conflict.
(2) In chapter 6, after David’s decisive defeat of the Philistines, he brings the ark to rest permanently in his newly created capital, Jerusalem (only recently a Jebusite city), amid great pomp and celebration—an echo, as noted, of the earlier return of the ark from Philistine captivity in 1 Samuel 6. David’s action here is the cause of a quarrel between himself and Saul’s daughter Michal, whose initial devotion to David (see 1 Sam.19:11-17, where she helps him escape from her father) has turned to anger. Michal’s forced remarriage to David (2 Sam. 3:13-16) can be seen as part of a complex scheme of political marriage, a kind of genealogical gerrymandering by which David consolidates his influence over the leading families of the realm. The breach between David and Michal and their consequent failure to produce offspring (6:23) prevent a union of the houses of David and Saul that might have guaranteed the stability of the realm and of the dynastic succession. Even David’s acts of largesse toward Michal’s family (chap. 9) cannot heal the rift that has developed.
(3) Chapter 7, the culmination of the idyllic phase of David’s career (as 1 Sam. 7 has been for Samuel’s, and 1 Sam. 11-12 for Saul’s), shows David to be the ideological architect of the Temple that his son Solomon will build. Divine permission for early enactment of the measure is denied, but the court prophet Nathan legitimates the notion of a permanent dwelling for the ark, as well as the principle of a Davidic dynasty. The old confederate religion is to be supplanted by the civil religion of a territorial state (one here recalls the slogan “like all the nations”), for consummate command of the idioms of civil religion is by now a chief component of David’s political power.
The Political within the Domestic
Thus far the stage is set for a test of David’s political ideals—and of Israel’s project of postconfederate nationhood. The story now proceeds to that test, but at this point two complimentary potentialities, moral and political manifest themselves in the narrative.
David’s establishment of permanent dynasty is overshadowed by the moral offense he commits with the eventual dynastic mother Bathsheba, who initially is the wife of another man, Uriah the Hettite. This immorality—and the various ensuing immoralities among David’s children—can, in turn, be shown to be uniquely rooted in the political conditions David has created. Thus, although Nathan’s rebuke of David at the beginning of 2 Samuel 12 establishes the narrative to come as a kind of morality fable (David, in an unguarded moment, cries that the offender in Nathan’s parable should repay his transgression “fourfold”—and so it comes to pass), the account of political factors in chapters 11-19 is precise and intricate.
For example, it is only David’s new role as noncombatant strategist of affairs of state in chapter 11 that permits his encounter and dalliance with Bathsheba. His manner of inquiring after her identity and sending “agents” to fetch her shows that he is now at the center of a vast network of anonymous gossipers, informers, and emissaries that assist him in love and war alike. This new court society, however, renders David all the more vulnerable to public scandal, and thus necessitates the complicated and still more damaging strategy of coverup that results in the death not only of Bathsheba’s husband Uriah but also of many soldiers with no connection to the scandal.
In the first stage of this coverup, when David summons Uriah home from the battlefield and tries to induce him to go home to his wife (and thus, David hopes, to resume sexual relations with Bathsheba, who is then early in her pregnancy with David’s child), he extends furlough from battle duties, as one assuming an essentially secular use of the instrument of war. He is thus caught by surprise when Uriah the Hittite responds as one bound by the ancient confederate Israelite institution of holy war (cf. 1 Sam. 21:2-6):
Uriah said to David: “The ark and Israel and Judah are dwelling in makeshift dwellings [or in Succoth], and my master Joab and the servants of milord are camping on the face of the field—and I should go to my house to eat and drink, and lie with my wife?! On your life, as your soul lives, I shall not do this thing!” (11:11)
We have no sharper expression of the clash of cultural codes. Later, when David sends Uriah back with a sealed letter instructing Joab to place Uriah in the thick of battle and to withdraw protection from him, and Joab, after carrying out the instructions, sends a courier to report the death of Uriah and other Israelites, the exchange of messages in effect displays the social structure of the nation that participates in the crime. The sedentary monarchy that the people have created (against which Samuel has warned) is the breeding ground for such outrages.
Similarly, when the events leading to Absalom’s rebellion and David’s second exile are set in motion (also part of the punishment foretold by Nathan), political factors supply the context.
David’s strategically motivated marriages have resulted in
- numerous offspring,
- initially symbols of his power,
- who become a gravely destabilizing force once they attain sexual maturity.
Absalom’s public career begins with an act of vengeance against his half brother Amnon for the latter’s rape of Absalom’s full sister Tamar (chap. 13)—an ironic comment on David’s earlier effort to rise above the politics of blood feud. David now finds that he has created a squabbling tribal motley within his own household. The murder of Amnon politicizes Absalom in a manner that makes his eventual rebellion against his father almost inevitable. His appropriation of his father’s concubines in 16:21-23 is not only a typological echo of a primordial immorality, recalling Reuben’s dalliance with Jacob’s concubine (Gen. 35:22), but also a calculated political act counseled by his aide Achitophel and designed to demonstrate publicly his assumption of control over Jerusalem and the kingdom.
These political considerations, however, are deepened in significance by the gradual reawakening of David’s emotional life, which seems curiously suppressed in the chapters preceding the rebellion. David’s capacity for a deeply expressive emotionally seems adequate to all areas of his existence but one: his interaction with his own household.
- Toward Saul and Jonathan, for example,
- toward the Judean landowner Nabal (1 Sam. 25),
- and toward Joab (who, however, is a kinsman, probably a nephew; see 2 Sam. 17:25and 1 Chron. 2:2-17),
- David shows himself capable of a rich range of feeling which, for the most part, does not compromise the proportion and restraint in his political behavior. Toward his parents, however, we have already noted the text’s silence on David’s feelings, and much the same narrative inhibition governs David’s relations with spouses in general, and with his children in 2 Samuel 13-14—leaving us with a sense of David’s coldness or inaccessibility to those closest to him.
Some of this reserve may stem from the trauma of loss David has already experienced in the death of his first child by Bathsheba, recounted in chapter 12. Once David is informed of this loss, he breaks the fast he has been observing during the infant’s illness. When his puzzled servants ask him why he now eats, David’s answer is quite revealing: “While the child yet lived, I fasted and wept, for I thought: who knows? maybe YHWH will be kind to me, and the child will live. Now that he is dead, why should I fast? Can I bring him back to life? I go to him; he doesn’t come to me” (vv.22-23).
These numb and dispirited words are our first indication that David’s energies as parent and ruler are beginning to flag and that he has a newly tangible sense of his own mortality. This awareness, however, has perhaps begun at the end of chapter 11, where David’s self-anesthetizing over the death of Uriah signals the extent to which the kingly office has truncated his humanity; significantly, there eating is also a motif: “Let not the matter be evil in your sight, for the sword eats this way and that. Strengthen your battle!” (v. 25).
Chapters 13 and 14 thus show David as newly passive—
- manipulated by his children and servants,
- remote from public events,
- ineffectual in his disciplining of both Amnon and Absalom,
- and conspicuously dry-eyed and reserved in his temporary reconciliation with the latter (14:33).
It is thus a highly weighted moment when David, driven from Jerusalem by Absalom, ascends the Mount of Olives, barefoot and with his head covered, and, together with his exiled entourage, weeps resoundingly, his lost humanity restored. Only at that point is his ruptured communication with YHWH likewise restored, and David utters the prayer that will become his salvation: “Please, YHWH, frustrate the counsel of Achitophel!” (15:31; the prayer is answered in 17:1-14). Later, when Absalom’s rebellion is suppressed, and Absalom, contrary to David’s instruction, is slain by Joab, David receives the news of his son’s death with an explosion of feeling he has never shown to the live Absalom, and here he manifests none of the measured eloquence he has shown for the slain Saul and Jonathan—only the wild, distraught grief of a bereaved parent: “My son, Absalom! O my son Absalom! If only I had died instead of you. O Absalom, my son, my son!” (18:33).
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The Function of Symmetries
I have already noted that a symmetrical arrangement, common to much biblical literature, characterizes 1 Sam. 8-12. In fact, Samuel as a whole can be shown to comprise roughly a chain of several internally symmetrical cycles. Although we cannot undertake an exhaustive analysis of this pattern here, two conspicuous symmetries in particular should be noted, because they reveal, among other things, something important about David’s relation to divine causality.
- The first symmetry is 1 Samuel 13-31. Chapters 13-15, which cover the period of Saul’s active kingship under Samuel’s patronage, have their parallel in chapters 28-31, which relate Samuel’s final denunciation of Saul (from the grave) and Saul’s military defeat and death. In the portion of 1 Samuel where David is present as a character, chapter 11 onward, Samuel enters the story only three times: as the anointer of David (chap. 16), as having died and been buried (25:1), and as being conjured up by the witch of Endor to address the desperate and doomed Saul (28:3-19)—thus, near the beginning, middle, and end of the cycle, respectively.
Chapter 25, the midpoint in the cycle, is framed by the traditionary doublets of chapter 24 and 26, both of which illustrate David’s refusal to kill Saul when has the chance. Chapter 25, by contrast, shows David manifesting a rare lack of restraint toward the hostile Judean landowner Nabal. He is rescued from the consequences of his precipitate near-vengeance by the intervention of Nabal’s astute wife, Abigail, who convinces David to abandon an action that might lead to a Judean civil war. Such a war David was not then equipped to win and might have jeopardized the political foothold he eventually acquires in his tribal homeland of Judah. As things turn out, Nabal soon dies, and David marries Abigail, thus gaining his foothold in Judah by peaceful rather than bellicose means. David, in his remarks to Abigail in 25:32-34, recognizes the providential hand that has brought her to his rescue. In whatever other ways David is vulnerable during this phase of his history, he is most vulnerable to the consequences of his otherwise uncharacteristic display of wrath toward Nabal. That he is rescued by a woman has interesting reverberations for his later involvement with Bathsheba, when a fateful encounter with woman has less benign consequences.
- The second symmetry, in 2 Samuel 15-20, covers Absalom’s revolt and, in its aftermath, the less costly revolt of Sheba ben Bichri. The two rebellions stand in parallel, as do 16:1-13 and 19:16-30, where David is confronted by several persons associated with the house of Saul: Ziba, servant of Saul’s grandson Mephibosheth, Mephibosheth himself (only in the second episode), and the Benjaminite Shimei ben Gera, who initially directs curses and insults at David (only to retract them humbly after David’s victory in the war). David’s interaction with the house of Saul at both the beginning and end of the civil war symbolizes, to some extent, his relation to the northern tribes as a whole, whose king Saul had been, and who have been seduced by Absalom into the rebellion against David (Absalom “stole the hearts of Israel,” 15:6).
The midpoint of this cycle would most likely be the moment, in 17:14, when the rebellion begins to turn in David’s favor. This is one of only two points in the story (see 11:27b) where YHWH’s intentions toward David are indicated by the narrator rather than by dialogue of ellipsis: “YHWH determined that Architophel’s good advice might be nullified, so that YHWH might bring evil upon Absalom” (a recurrence of the important motif of “good/evil”). Here, as in 1 Samuel 25, David’s fate is conspicuously beyond his control; it is divine intervention (through human agents) that saves him. However astutely David has handled his two exiles, the two critical turning points are not his doing by YHWH’s. The placement of these two moments of abject vulnerability before YHWH as the centerpiece of their respective narrative cycles preserves for us the prophetic (that is, Samuelite) perspective on kingly power.
The Closing Chapters of 2 Samuel
The so-called Succession History achieves completion outside the borders of the Samuel books, in the first two chapters of 1 Kings.
There we read of the death of the aged, infirm King David and the final tense events leading to the succession of Solomon—who appears as a functioning character for the first time in the court history. Still, it is perhaps appropriate to view those events, as the Masoretic editors did, as part of the story of Solomon, and so to see the end of 2 Samuel as a well-rounded conclusion to the career of David and to the subjects of the Samuel books. Scholars have generally viewed 2 Samuel 21-24 as a late addition, with no integral role in the form and message of the book. Such a view misreads Samuel. The change from elaborated narrative to folkloric, archival, and poetic fragment accords with shifts in discourse common to most biblical literature, and here is ties together the themes of the Samuel books in a particularly effective way. Far from being late additions, they may be the archaic traditionary remnants from which the narrative was spun in the first place.
Once again, the arrangement is symmetrical. Chapters 21 and 24 record natural disasters during the reign of David that are tied to YHWH’s displeasure. The causes of this displeasure are somewhat obscure, for they bear no direct relation to the preceding narratives; the connection of Saul’s “bloodguilt” in 21:1 with 1 Samuel 22:6-23 is disputed, and David’s apparently sinful census in chapter 24 was actually instigated by YHWH, in anger at the Land. But the measures of expiation in each case bear significant consequences for the history previously narrated.
In chapter 21 David has seven descendants of Saul publicly impaled, in atonement for Saul’s crimes, and later gives them a proper burial, as well as exhuming the bones of Saul and Jonathan in Jabesh-Gilead and returning them to their tribal homeland (21:10-14; cf. 2 Sam. 2:4-7). This strange mixture of barbarity and respect toward the house of Saul stands as a final reminder of David’s compromised position in relation to his predecessor—for all his efforts at propriety, he is hounded, far into his own reign, by the legacy of Saul.
In chapter 24 David’s expiation anticipates events in the reign to follow: David purchases a threshing floor from Araunah the Jebusite (Araunah’s name is, according to some commentators, actually Hittite, and the form of the scene recalls Abraham’s purchase of the Cave of Machpelah in Hebron from its Hittite owners, in Gen. 23). On this site he builds an altar, whose sacrifices stay the plague. Post-biblical tradition associates the site with the eventual Temple Mount, but the presence, in any case, of an altar is sufficient to establish the typological connection. The Ark of the Covenant is not mentioned, but the name Araunah echoes the word ‘aron (“ark”), and 2 Samuel thus ends where 1 Samuel began: with a stable and functioning shrine, albeit a troubled and haunted one.
Both 21:15-22 and 23:8-39 recount the exploits of David’s elite warriors and allude to Philistine battles apparently late in David’s reign.
- The first unit records an interesting detail: David’s rescue by Joab’s brother Abishai causes David’s men to demand that David “not go forth with us to battle any longer; you must never extinguish the lamp of Israel!” (21:17b). In addition to reinforcing the impression of a weary and aging king (see v. 15), the episode provides the etiological underpinning of the entire transition to sedentary and dynastic monarchy begun in 2 Samuel 11.
- The second unit presents similar quick sketches of the elite guard but culminates in a full list of the “thirty” who stood behind the chief commanders. The text is uncertain, and there may be a discrepancy between the number of names and the alleged total (23:39), counting the top men, of thirty-seven. Joab, notably, though peripherally mentioned (vv. 18 and 37), is absent from the list. (This omission is an appropriate emblem of David’s long and troubled association with Joab, who eventually dies by David’s deathbed command given in 1 Kings 2:5-6 and carried out in 2 Kings 2:28-34.) But the final name on the list (the thirty-first of the “thirty”) is unexpected: Uriah the Hittite. The mention confirms what has previously been only implicit in the designation “Hittite”: that Uriah is not an ordinary conscript but a member of the partly foreign professional military raised by and for the king. Uriah’s behavior as a devout Israelite, in the manner of a simple footsoldier, is again highlighted by this incongruity and becomes all the more moving in retrospect.
The central components, chapters 22 and 23, are two songs by David. The songs stand in meaningful contrast both to each other and to the other members of the traditionary sestet. Whereas the “warrior” units show David protected by a phalanx of professional guards, the songs show him acting alone in the shelter of YHWH. Whereas the “punishment/expiation” units show a guilty monarch atoning to an angry YHWH for the sins of his predecessor or his people, the songs show the blameless protégé of YHWH and hail the deity as unstintingly gracious and benevolent. There the similarity between the songs ends. The first song, essentially a duplicate of Psalm 18. appears under the headnote “David sang this song when YHWH saved him from the hand of all his enemies and from the hand of Saul” (23:1). It is a typical “distress” psalm, common to the Near Eastern mythology of kingship, and is itself symmetrical:
(a) recounting the singer’s trials of flight, exile, and persecution,
(b) describing the emergence of the avenging deity amid clouds, thunder, and lightning,
(c) affirming the fugitive’s innocence, purity, and steadfastness to YHWH’s ways,
(b’)reasserting the protective actions of the patron deity, and (a’) recounting the newly protected fugitive’s nimble and mighty defeat of his enemies.
Taken as a whole, the song epitomizes the first martial phase of David’s career: his early period of Philistine wars and his flight from Saul. (The song’s culmination in a rout of David’s enemies adds a dimension withheld from the story: that David’s battle with Saul was direct; cf., however, 2 Sam. 3:1.) Yet it is shadowed by the final martial phase of David’s career: his flight from Absalom, the civil war, and the latter-day Philistine wars. The second song, on the other hand, appearing under the headnote “These are the last words of David, / the utterance of David the son of Jesse, / the utterance of the man who was elevated on high, / anointed of the God of Jacob, / favorite [orpsalmist] of the songs of Israel” (23:1), shows David as the completed and sedentary monarch, serenely administering justice to the realm:
It is he who governs righteously,
it is he who governs in the fear of God,
and is like the morning of a shining sun,
a cloudless morning, a grassy land flourishing
from sunshine and from rain. (23:3b-4)
The language of this song is exceptionally difficult, but if, as a recent translation suggests, verse 5 should be taken as a rhetorical question (“Is not my house established before God? … Will he not cause all my success and [my] every desire to blossom?” [NJPS]), the idyllic harmony projected by royalist doctrine remains consistent throughout. We thus have, in chapters 22 and 23, visions of the premonarchical and monarchical David respectively—a shorthand for the more complex narrative movements we have witnessed from 1 Samuel 16 onward.
In sum, the closing chapters of 2 Samuel are an artistically wrought coda to the Samuel books as a whole, comprising most of the major themes and movements of the narrative corpus and, by ellipsis and innuendo, delicately alluding to the contradictions in the king’s person and in the nation’s kingly office.
The Argument of Samuel
The survey above shows that the Samuel books recount the origin of the monarchy in Israel, and that the ancient Israelite tradition perceived kingship and territorial sovereignty with great ambivalence. This ambivalence grew, in part, from the situation that surrounded the evolution and collection of biblical literature.
A Jerusalemite and Judean intelligentsia, closely tied to the Davidic ruling house, preserved the traditions of Israel for posterity. These sages were the narrow bottleneck through which the Hebrew Bible’s pre-Exilic tradition passed into Judaism (that is, Judah-ism) and the cultural traditions of the West. Yet it was the northern tribes (by then long disappeared) who made up the original “Israel.” When that Israel was destroyed and absorbed by Assyria in the late eight century B.C.E., its legacy haunted the Judean kingdom to the south, and an effort was made, during Judah’s own remaining century or so of sovereignty (before it, too, was exiled to Babylonia), to affirm the cultural unity of the two kingdoms. Yet any such affirmation, if it was to be honest and mature, had to register the inner contradictions of that unity. The court circles of David’s dynastic descendants were periodically influenced by an ethical prophetic movement (encompassing, but not limited to, the Deuteronomists) that called the king, priesthood, and people to task for injustice in the Land, and the prophetic standards of national integrity—essentially the standards of Samuel—left a permanent stamp on the character of biblical literature.
Samuel is thus a work of national self-criticism.
- It recognizes that Israel would not have survived, either politically or culturally, without the steadying presence of a dynastic royal house.
- But it makes both that house and its subjects answerable to firm standards of prophetic justice—not those of cult prophets or professional ecstatics, but of morally upright prophetic leaders in the tradition of Moses, Joshua, Deborah, Gideon, and Samuel.
- Kingship is shown as a project of the people and their tribal elders—one that represented a partial ceding of their autonomy, and so, in a sense, a loss of innocence, a fateful juncture in their history that could be represented only in the lineaments of high tragedy. (YHWH’s unspecified anger toward the Land in 2 Sam. 24 becomes clearer in this light, as does the census motif there, which is arguably a mark of Israel’s progress toward an organized and bureaucratized polity.) And although Saul and David are allowed to assume the forefront of the narration, the original collective protagonist is never forgotten.
- At the same time the complicated interaction of Israel’s first two kings, at first recounted alternately from both points of view, is allowed to stand for the troubled bond between the ancient tribal order of the north and its maverick brethren of Judah; or, on another level, between the Northern and Southern Kingdoms that emerged after Solomon’s death. (In this sense, 1 Sam.’s alternation between Saul and David anticipates the parallel history of north and south in 1 Kings 12-2 Kings 25.)
- Once the story becomes focused on King David, still more dimensions of the history open up. The finely realistic portrait of David’s household strife shows both the moral consequences of David’s sin with Bathsheba and the political consequences of David’s too-rapid establishment of a royal court. All these events, in turn, set the stage for the succession by Bathsheba’s second-born, Solomon, in 1 Kings 1-2.
The two prophecies delivered to David by his court prophet Nathan reflect some of the ideological ambivalence in Israelite tradition over kingship and centralization of power in David’s and Solomon’s time. (They also recall the slogan of Sheba ben Bichri’s abortive rebellion, which resurfaces when the kingdom divides once and for all: “We have no portion in David, / no share in the son of Jesse! / Everyone to his tent, O Israel!” [2 Sam. 20:1, to which 1 Kings 12:16 adds: ‘Now look to your own house, David!’].) In 2 Samuel 7, David proposes to build a permanent home for the ark, a “house of cedar” to replace the archaic tabernacle tent that has served since Moses’ day.
YHWH, Nathan reports, registers astonishment that Israel’s wandering sanctuary should come to rest in this way. Nevertheless, YHWH promises David an everlasting dynasty, and a son after him (not here identified by name) who will “build a house for my name.” The Davidic scion will be a “son” to YHWH: “When he does wrong, I will punish him with the rod of men and with human afflictions. But I will never remove my favor from him as I removed it from Saul” (7:14-15).
The language of the chapter is conspicuously Deuteronomic, and the prophecy suggests the conflicting trends that shaped this movement so influential to the collecting of pre-Exilic Israelite tradition. Nathan seems simultaneously to say yes and no to David’s proposal. He does encapsulates the many vicissitudes of Judean history from David’s time to the Exile:
- Israel’s tabernacle will become Judah’s Temple;
- the Temple will be built, but by a successor to David, not by David;
- the dynastic successors of David will have everlasting rule (the house indeed survived in exile and passed from there into Jewish messianism) but will also suffer punishments for their moral failings;
- the throne will be secure, but it will also be vulnerable;
- it will survive the onslaughts of other, but it will not be protected from itself.
The entire passage plays richly on the various senses of “house”:
- physical shelter,
- temple,
- court,
- dynasty.
When Nathan later (12:1-12) delivers to David a new prophecy, a stinging rebuke of David’s treachery to Uriah the Hittite, we encounter the first tangible demonstration that the kingly house will be both punished and preserved:
- David’s child by Bathsheba will die (as indeed happens later in the chapter);
- but when David consoles Bathsheba over this death they make love and she conceives again.
- “She bore a son and called him Solomon. YHWH favored him and sent a message by the prophet Nathan; and he was named Jedidiah [‘beloved of YHWH,’ a name cognate to ‘David’] at YHWH’s bidding” (vv. 24-25).
Nathan’s activism on behalf of Solomon/Jedidiah persists to the final hours of the succession story (1 Kings1:11-14), where he persuades Bathsheba to intercede with the dying King David to block the accession of Solomon’s half brother Adonijah.
These elaborate turns of destiny accomplish the extraordinary feat of embodying both the political complexity of the Davidic succession and the ideological ambivalence of the later tradition. Perhaps the messiness of history required that the retelling encompass so many paradoxes. But it is to the credit of the Samuel author that the story could unfold Israel’s transitions on so many planes at once, through the skillful interweaving of complementary codes:
- theological,
- characterological,
- geographic,
- sacerdotal,
- demographic,
- familial.
Many thematic lines thus converge:
- the ark,
- the priesthood,
- the prophetic movements,
- the Philistine wars,
- the rivalries of Israel and Judahthe establishment of Jerusalem as a capital,
- the chronic presence of blood feud,
- the role of kingly office,
- the service of the king’s officers and aides,
- the play of sexual intrigue,
- the ways of household strife,
- the conflict of sibling with sibling,
- the conflict of parent with child.
- In no other biblical books have these planes of narrative been orchestrated and sustained quite so satisfyingly and so consequentially.
Both structurally and artistically, Samuel is the centerpiece of the Hebrew Bible’s continuous historical account.
