Barbara Green How Are The Mighty Fallen A Dialogical Study of King Saul in 1 Samuel JSOT Supplement Series 2003 PDF

JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
SUPPLEMENT SERIES
365
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Philip R. Davies
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Richard J. Coggins, Alan Cooper, J. Cheryl Exum, John Goldingay,
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Sheffield Academic Press

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How Are the
Mighty Fallen?
A Dialogical Study of
King Saul in 1 Samuel
Barbara Green
Journal for the Study of the Old Testament

Supplement Series 365
Copyright 2003 Sheffield Academic Press

A Continuum imprint
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Typeset by Sheffield Academic Press
Printed on acid-free paper in Great Britain by Bookcraft Ltd, Midsomer Norton, Bath
ISBN 0-8264-6221-9
During her term as Dean of the Graduate Theological Union, Margaret R.

Miles encouraged her faculty to work more intensively with each other for
a variety of purposes, including to stimulate a richer interdisciplinarity
among us. One of the tangible means of promoting such a goal was her
inviting us to form study groups of'old and new' friends and colleagues to
entertain 'old and new' conversations. My thinking, teaching, writing and
even living has been deeply affected by my participation with such
colleagues, to whom this work is dedicated: Gina Hens-Piazza, Margaret
Miles, Sandra Schneiders, Martha Stortz.
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CONTENTS
Abbreviations
Introduction
1.
The Deuteronomistic History and Historian
2.
Introduction to Mikhail Bakhtin
3.
Biblical Spirituality: Situated and Transformative Reading
x
1
1
19
29
Chapter 1
'A DIFFERENT CLAY': GENRE CONSIDERATIONS AND 1 SAMUEL 1-3

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
Point of Entry
Bakhtin on Genre
Biblical Genre Considerations
Polzin on Genre
Bakhtin on Utterance
My Procedure
Exposition of Text: A Performance in Two Acts
Conclusions
55
55
56
64
72
75
79
83
113
Chapter 2
LOOKING LETHAL:
CHRONOTOPIC REPRESENTATION OF THE ARK (1 SAMUEL 4-7)
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Point of Entry
Bakhtin on Chronotope
Polzin's Contribution
My Procedure and Thesis
Exposition of Text
Conclusions
116
116
119
127
131
135
161
Chapter 3
SAUL'S SKIN: THE AUTHORING OF A KING

AND A HERO (1 SAMUEL 8-12)
1.
Point of Entry
163
163
viii
2.
3.
4.
5.
How Are the Mighty Fallen?

Bakhtin on Authoring
Authoring a King(ship)
Summary and Conclusions
165
176
178
217
Chapter 4
INCAPACITY FOR ANSWERABILITY:

THE FIRING OF KING SAUL (1 SAMUEL 13-15)
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Point of Entry
Bakhtin on Answerability
Setting Saul's Answerability
Exposition of Text
Conclusions
223
223
225
230
231
234
258
Chapter 5
AT THE EDGE: SAUL'S DISCOURSES OF DESIRE (1 SAMUEL 16-19)

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
Point of Entry
Bakhtin on Discourse
Bakhtin on Polyphony
My Plan
Exposition of Text
Conclusions
262
262
264
273
276
277
277
321
Chapter 6
'ONLY I AM LEFT TO TELL THE TALE' :

PURSUIT AND ESCAPE, SURPLUS AND SURVIVAL (1 SAMUEL 20-23)
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Point of Entry
Bakhtin on Surplus of Seeing
My Thesis
Exposition of Text
Conclusions
323
323
327
330
331
332
362
Chapter 7
SLUNG FROM THE HOLLOW OF A SLING:

LOOPHOLE LANGUAGE AND THE STALKING OF SAUL
(1 SAMUEL 24-26)
367
Contents
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Point of Entry
Bakhtin on Loophole
My Procedure and Thesis
Exposition of Text
Conclusions
ix
367
368
372
373
374
405
Chapter 8
How THE MIGHTY FELL: THE DEATH OF KING SAUL
AND THE ARCHITECTONICS OF HIS CHARACTERIZATION
(1 SAMUEL 27-2 SAMUEL 1)
1. Point of Entry
2. Bakhtin on Architectonics
3. Polzin's Contribution
4. My Procedure and Thesis
5. Exposition of Text
6.
Conclusions
411
411
412
416
418
422
444
A CONCLUSION
1. Preliminary Considerations
2.
God-Linked Discourse in 1 Samuel
3. How Are the Mighty Fallen?
4.
'How Can This Help Us?'
447
447
455
459
464
Bibliography
Index of References
Index of Authors
468
481
490
ABBREVIATIONS
ABD
BOB
Biblnt
CBQ
CSB
DH
HBT
JBL
JBQ
JNES
JSOT
JSOTSup
LXX
MT
OTE
RB
SJOT
ST
TS
TZ
VT
ZAW
David Noel Freedman (ed.), The Anchor Bible Dictionary

(New York: Doubleday, 1992)
Francis Brown, S.R. Driver and Charles A. Briggs,
A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1907)
Biblical Interpretation: A Journal of Contemporary
Approaches
Catholic Biblical Quarterly
Christian Spirituality Bulletin
Deuteronomistic History/ian
Horizons in Biblical Theology
Journal of Biblical Literature
Jewish Bible Quarterly
Journal of Near Eastern Studies
Journal for the Study of the Old Testament
Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, Supplement Series
Septuagint
Masoretic Text
Old Testament Essays
Revue biblique
Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament
Studio theologica
Theological Studies
Theologische Zeitschrift
Vetus Testamentum
Zeitschrift fur die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft
INTRODUCTION
The creative and innovative aspects of the deuteronomistic historian are
best understood when perceived as 'contextualizing' and 'legitimizing' the
pasts out of which the differing aspects of the community had emerged.
E.T. Mullen, Jr( 1993: 13)
For Saul's reign is simply a preview of David's, and of every King of Israel
and Judah after him. In fact, Saul's reign appears to be the Deuteronomist's
prefiguring image of kingship itself as described throughout the history.
Robert Polzin (1989: 213)
Prior to starting my constructive work on the figure of Saul, I must accomplish three preliminary goals or purposes: stipulate what is necessary about
the Deuteronomistic History and related matters for this present project;
introduce Mikhail Bakhtin adequately; and discuss briefly some particulars
of my situated interpretation. This triple-plied chapter will serve as the
base on which refinements will be made throughout the length of the discussion.
1. The Deuteronomistic History and Historian
It will come as news to no one picking up this book that the topic called
'Deuteronomistic History' is relevant. But it may come as good news that
a good deal of what typically absorbs participants in that discussion is moot
for the present purposes. Hence my goal is to say enough to situate my project but no more, to select what I need for my reading while leaving much
to the side. The topic of 'DH' (context will always make clear whether the
initials reference the writer or the written) is huge, interlocking, and the
consensus around it is loosening rather than gathering as issues of the late
modern and early postmodern period press against earlier domain assumptions. Useful and recent summaries of the hypothesis are available, though
of course they differ considerably, depending on the purpose to which they
are being put (Campbell and O'Brien 2000, Chapter 1; Knoppers 2000:118; Linville 1998:46-73; Romer and de Pury 2000: 24-121). What I count
on is that the books Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings were
edited together sufficiently so that they work as a coherent set in a way not
true for materials outside them.1 A study of the sort I am about to do could
be made from a translation (e.g. LXX) or from other extant manuscripts
(e.g. Qumran materials). But since I am not trying to get an original or best
reading but work within a single textual tradition (recognizing that as an
oversimplification), I will rarely work with the many variants that comprise 1 Samuel.
Matters which are of concern in my present project and which require
brief discussion can be split roughly among three levels: first, the largest
and most general questions (e.g. regarding historiography, operative backdrop sociocultural assumptions, and the nature of their linguistic representation); second, some mid-sized matters of compositional process (e.g. the
possibility of discerning an authorial purpose and audience access); and
third, certain smaller and more specific thematic matters (e.g. DH's view
of the monarchy, of the role of prophets, of the relationship between Israel
and God, of the significance of the ending of 2 Kings). I will locate my
sense of these matters, not to demonstrate them exhaustively or definitively
but rather to stipulate them in the sense that they can be admitted into the
conversation as my operative assumptions (derived and held in responsible
conversation with scholarship in the field). Whether they seem right or
wrong, and whether readers agree or disagree, these will be support beams
in my work and will (with few exceptions) get little subsequent exposition
or working over in the discussion as it unfolds.
a. Largest Issues
At the macro level come all the questions of historiography which have
become part of the DH conversation in the past 50 years or so. These
include, among others: What is the nature of history? How do writers, specifically ancient onesand DH in particularconceive and present historical information? How do contemporary scholars reconstruct realities
1. The most radical dismissal of the whole hypothesis of which I am aware is
Knauf 2000. For a fuller discussion of creeping Deuteronomism', consult Schearing
and McKenzie 1999, which on the whole takes a conservative position on the question
of DH presence (as distinct from influence) in various other biblical books. For a retrospective summary of the various positions represented in that work, refer to McKenzie
1999. A thorough review of recent scholarship on 1-2 Samuel, claiming to attend with
care to recent methodological knots and reviewing some theological as well as historical and literary studies, may be found in Dietrich and Naumann 2000 (itself part of a
larger work on the same topic).
Introduction
(large or small) behind and within the verbal texts we have inherited?
Does the operative mindset of the ancient writer matter, granted its great
variance from that of most later readers? For example, suppose it were not
the intent of the DH to present 'history' as any of us might conceive or
define that word; how would that situation constrain our reading? The
topics are obviously huge, somewhat intractable, and could take over all
the space I have for my project and still be unsatisfactorily presented.2
Without opening the general and philosophical topic of historiography,
my stipulation here is that the story of Saul, set by DH in an eleventhcentury context, offers virtually no access to events of that early Iron Age
moment, specifically to the origins of kingship or Israel. I declare 'off the
table', at least for present purposes, the topic of discerning or distilling
reliable information from 1 Samuel about the early days of Israel in its
presumed shift from a segmentary society toward more centralized leadership. The relevant historical and socio-cultural backdrop of 1 Samuel to be
presented briefly here is thus not late-second millennium but mid-first
millennium. The circumstances of the Judean exile are far betterthough
still not very wellknown to scholars than are events of 500 years earlier.
But some sense of what was involved as the Davidic monarchy and the
temple-centered priesthood collapsed, bringing down much of the life of
others with their own fall, is retrievableroughly imaginablein general
outline, I think. I will work with the assumption (to be developed below)
that the narrative of 1 Samuel addresses the questions of a community
deliberating over the question of whether to return from exile with Davidic
leadership (with royal dynastic presence) or without it. I will also mention
here, as particularly relevant and in need of serious ongoing discussion,
the challenges offered by scholars like Keith Whitelam (1996), Michael
Prior (1997), Gerald O. West (1998) and Philip Davies (1992) about the
opening given (once unwittingly) to imperialism and racism by myopic
biblical scholarship. A reading like mine which aims to distance us from
the positivistic and triumphalistic appropriation of biblical texts has at
2. See Linville 1998: Chapter 3 for some thoughts relatively new to the biblical
conversation. Linville is much more willing than many to see the construction of
'Israel' as a product of the storyteller's art (p. 20). He does not so much doubt that the
DH comprises at least partly 'history writing', but he cautions us to bring to critical
consciousness what we understand by the term and what we suppose the ancients to
have thought. He urges (pp. 16-17) that the time is ripe (for reasons he reviews that
will be familiar to biblical scholars) to rethink fundamentally all the questions involved
in the constructing of Israel's identity and history.
least a modest if indirect contribution to make in that sphere by insisting

upon reading the narrative as an artistic representation. A similar set of
huge questions swirls around the matter of how reality and the experience
of it take shape within language. Not unrelated to the previous set of
historiographical issues, there is nonetheless a distinction worth catching.
When narrative scenes are presented to us, as they are in 1 Samuel, vignettes which appear at first glance (and in much scholarship) as realistic
and natural, do their details provide reliable and generally clear windows
onto the events depicted?3
That is, when we are given a scene in Saul's palace, is it best to assume
that the description aims (directly or indirectly) or achieves to convey to
readers how things were, looked, functioned? Or is the scene more representational, aiming to highlight narrative process rather than its reference,
and hence unreliable for reconstructing an accurate past? My assumption
will consistently take the second of those choices. I will on a number of
occasions below make the artificiality of scenes prominent and try to make
clear the gain from that choice, appraising the language more as 'drawing'
than as 'photograph'. I will maintain that the viewing lens is more likely to
distort any presumed sociocultural backdrop for ideological purposes than
to show it clearly and uncomplicatedly. Granted, it is obvious that the
choice is not so stark as I have just made it. When Saul hurls a spear, when
David snips a garment, when Michal lets David through a window, it is
clear that were we viewing the visuals of the scene, the props would suit
the culture. But the physical realities are not ends in themselves and are
shifted, I will assume, for ideological purposes. To put it in Linville's
categories: surely not a map, perhaps not inevitably or only a mirror, most
likely some sort of mask.
Another large area concerns the many issues of reception, brought more
prominently to our attention in recent decades and under considerable
critical discussion currently. Since I will devote a section of this introduction to certain specifics of my own reading below, suffice it to say here
that I will limit myself to two receptions of the material I am working with.
The first will be an exilic audience whose situation is being 'originally'
addressed by DH and specifically by 1 Samuelthat is, plausibly with intentionality. It is perhaps more accurate to say that I am discerning and
hypothesizing such an audience, implied by my understanding of the genre
in which DH and 1 Samuel work and by my imaginative reconstruction of
3. Linville gets at something similar when he queries whether 'Imagined Israel' is
a map, a mask, or a house of mirrors (1998: 99-107).
Introduction
an exile community as struggling to decide the role of the Davidic monarch. That we (think we) can see, retrospectively, no prominent leadership
role for kings as the community reconstituted itself in Judah toward the
end of the sixth century does not at all mean that its elimination was
simple. To the contrary: an institution which functioned time out of mind
for the exilic audience (which has to have been the case, however biblical
scholars may be counting monarchic rule) will not readily have given way
to an alternative. Hence I am constructing a first (original) 'readership' in
need of wise and clear reflection upon the shortcomings of that royal
dynastic institution. I will build my case below but not invest heavily in
talking out the historical specifics of the question, on which the scholars I
cite disagree. Their conversation about possibilities, however, sustains my
effort adequately. And I will claim as a second audience my own situation
of reading, rising as it does from within both the academy and the church,
influenced by the reading strategies of theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, and advocating the possibility of transformative reading for those somewhat like
myself: well educated, deeply committed to religious belief, concerned for
the nexus of ethical issues that confront the human community at the present time. When I read the characters managing their various situations, it
is my construction of factors I will name, shaped from working with the
narrative of 1 Samuel closely for some time.
b. Mid-Sized Issues
A more circumscribed set of questions and assumptions follows next. The
genetic questions are familiar; in each case, I shift them somewhat toward
literary and readerly concerns. Precisely how the DH grew and in whose
hands is, as we all know, a fraught question. It is unlikely that any of the
hypotheses currently in circulation has got it exactly right, granted the
contribution each may make to helping us understand better what was
likely involved. I am counting on something like the following: Good stories circulate among people, whether they are literate or not, prosperous or
not, elite or not.4 Records are laboriously made and kept in archives, art
is commissioned by those who desire and can pay for it; but poems are
remembered and reused by many on diverse occasions, songs are sung as
well in many throats and for many purposes. Though it may be the case
that a set of stories around a figure like Saul might have an official and
preferred (so somewhat canonical) 'table of contents', I like the possibility
4. Crucial for any of our theorizing is the work being done on orality and literacy.
See, e.g.,Niditch 1996; Davies 1998.
of fair fluidity of performance as well. The story of Saul is, by Bible standards, a long narrative with many interlocking parts. At some point a brilliant storyteller brought a particular coherence and composed the recital of
the figure of King Saul available in the Hebrew Bible, and (thanks to the
care of many) we have a written version of it. At some point that version
was adapted for use in the longer DH narrative, into which it can be shown
to fit reasonably as well. Perhaps it is useful to think of a large work such
as DH as being like a medieval cathedral. There are many aspects of the
building, many specific types of skill, requiring resources from many diverse artists and workers, usually over some length of time. At key points,
there are likely to beor I count onefforts to make the elements interrelate to some extent, an effort which does not wipe out all traces of multiplicity that have shaped the art in its past. I like the working hypothesis of
Campbell and O'Brienthat we think of our extant materials as narratives
which contain 'switching points' where the stories can have gone (and no
doubt did go) off in alternate directions; assume a sketchbook rather than a
finished painting, they urge (2000: 7-9). I do not plan to exploit these possibilities explicitly in my reading, but they do make visible my sense of
the narrative and influence my reading in subtle ways.
Another highly contested matter in DH scholarship is the dating of the
materials, a question which involves scholarly suggestions ranging from
the tenth to the third centuries. I accept as a plausible, useable date (though
not the only conceivable or arguable date) the end point of the DH narrative: the release of the last surviving Davidic king (Jehoiachin) from some
sort of incarceration. As already suggested, the release of a surviving king,
and even more urgently the accession of Cyrus and the possibility of return
of some exiles to Judah, makes relevant at that moment the question of
leadership. That there are plausibly royal persons briefly involved in the
return, and then implication that life proceeds without them, makes imaginable the community's question about their involvement in the return.
The valence on the scene of Jehoiachin's release has been in discussion for
decades; the fact that it is susceptible of so many readings is cautionary.
The conversation seems to be shifting from what an author intended (such
was the discussion for much of the twentieth century) to how various reading communities (ancient and of course ourselves as well) will have construed such an event (whether literary or factually historical) and why.5
5. Linville 1997: 39-40, talks about a range of discourses for various groups
within and outside the main centers as we know them to be, with purposes and uses of
such discourses varying in ways we will not likely retrieve with much precision. The
Introduction
That is, scholarly discernments become more modest and provisional, aiming to show what is thinkable and to encourage development of proffered
ideas as well as alternatives. To place the thesis which will sweep the field
is no longer the goal of the most productive scholarship.
Given my presumption of an exilic (in fact a mid-sixth century) date for
the whole DH work,61 am not interested in the parsing of redactions.71 am
not thereby assuming a simple process of narrative and textual growth and
transmission; but I have no need to discuss the stages of its growth. The
methodological assumptions to be employed in this study value the existential utterance that a written text represents rather than seeking to discern
the earlier stages by which that 'final' came to be. As I have already hinted,
I consider the redaction question overly-impacted and am bypassing it
entirely. That the DH is composed from some traditional material seems
last several chapters of the work are simply too polyvalent for us to pronounce 'the
date' with confidence.
6. Linville 1998: Chapter 3, who discusses DH issues around his more specific
interest in the book of Kings, raises a number of interesting points about the dating of
Kings and DH. A general point from which he starts his reflections is the necessity to
rethink critically our assumptions about dates. That the release of Jehoiachin is the last
event narrated in Kings does not necessarily imply that the release just occurred; the
book may be much later. He cautions (1998: 56-57) that none of the main compositional histories on offer can claim to solve the problems involved in Kings (and, I
suspect, in DH as well). Critical scholarship is at a junction such that any limited set of
criteria by which scholars proceed will be inadequate, omitting something important;
yet it seems to have become now impossible to accommodate every variable that could
theoretically be considered. A change of tack seems called for.
7. Every critical work on DH summarizes the theories of others on the processes
of the growth of the text and suggests its own preferred sense of the matter. Most, in
my view, tend to work 'deductively', that is, to theorize carefully within the constraints
of what 'we' think is established to account for the elements in a coherent way, Linville represents an approach which is more inductiveor perhaps more agnostic; he
says re Kings (again relevant to DH as a whole): 'To my mind, it is not a question of
whether Kings was edited and re-edited in the post-monarchic period, but whether
these projects were on discernible, systematic lines, each stage centering on their own
unique, specific themes consistently handled with a great regularity in language. That
the book may be fragmented and categorized according to such themes is not a certain
indication of such a series of identifiable editions' (Linville 1998: 55). In other words,
our criteria for discerning may have little to do with what may have gone on. The project is far more uncertain than earlier scholars have thought it to be. The way forward
is not in continuing to generate hypotheses that account for the data. See also Linville
1997: 38-41, for his sense of how little we know about many of the things we theorize
about with such confidence.
obvious, even if it is not always clear what is borrowed from the past and
what composed for the present. That diverse materials incorporate earlier
elements does not strand them in their original viewpoints, though the
early contexts may continue to exert an influence if we attend to it. More
to the point, I assume that the DH is roughly and adequately coherent and
can be construed to be such, a point I will make more explicit in the next
section below when I mention specific topics.8 Of course, it is as possible
to argue for the incoherence of certain materials as well; I can do that
myself, but I cannot maintain both positions simultaneously when I read.
What is at stake seems to be the architectonics of reading, not of authoring.9
The question of the intention or purpose of the DH, and the contribution
of a component 'book' or section of narrative to such a plan, is important
here and, again, much-discussed in scholarship. But the possibility of discernment of purpose is snagged on some of the earlier questions and our
various assumptions and views on those points: When an ancient writer,
specifically here DH, is writing about what is past, is there an intent or
plan of which he can be shown to be conscious? Where is such evidence
best accessible, especially, or even if, we skip over here some of the problems of stages and head for the relative simplicity of the final form of the
work? Traditionally, the speeches of central characters, situated at key
moments, has been noted as a good place to discern a DH viewpoint and
purpose. But as we know, not every scholar discerns the same viewpoint
even in that clearest prose.10 It seems to me most straightforward to
8. All scholars struggling with issues like DH in our era have to decide with rigor
and clarity how to interrelate facets of scholarship. Though I recognize, more clearly
than I used to do, the dangers of dismissing all the genetic developments of the narrative from my considerations, I simply cannot fit any of the current theories in with the
reading I aim to do. As soon as I focus on hypothetical fissures and pre-texts instead of
what is before me, my project loses integrity.
9. When dealing with certain specifics, even very controversial pieces of narrative
like 1 Sam. 8-12, it is amazing how close to agreeing on specifics scholars from radically different ways of study can converge. For example, as I read McKenzie 2000,1
find myself in substantial agreement with his points, though he has worked with historical-critical and I with literary-critical assumptions and tools.
10. All the recent anthologies on DH consider the question of purpose from a
variety of angles. See, for example, Rose 2000: 443-44, who sees the work as selfcritical; Noll 1999:31-32, speculates on how little the appropriation of a text may have
to do with authorial intentionthough granted his reliance on Bakhtin, we may recall
that it ought to try for some! Noll's helpful examples include reference to the radically
Introduction
proceed in terms of my basic methodology of genre in particular, which

assumes that (contrary to certain literary theory of the past century) the
efforts of an author do not completely disappear from a work nor are they
wholly irrelevant, granted that they are visible only as reconstructed by a
reader. But neither do they determine meaning heavily. The theories of
other more genetically-interested scholars or more radical literary theorists
may be appraised over against my sense of matters. Following the supposition of Robert Polzin (and for reasons developed below) I prefer to think
of Saul not so much as the first historical king but rather as an epitome of
Israel's experience with kings.11 My reading of Saul, then, counts on the
sense that the text is not reporting accurately on an early figure but drawing a lone figure into which to distill communal experiencenot so easy a
thing to do artistically and successfully. I count on a practical purpose
behind the composing of DH. That is, it came into being not simply to
recite the past but to shape its historical and urgent present. Though it is
conceivable to have a long narrative whose raison d'etre was simply to
pull together a hopeless recollection of the past, it does not seem the likeliest impulse to me. If we have learned recently and afresh that readers and
researchers are constituted substantially in terms of their own circumstances and interests, the same is likely to be true for authors, even compilers. So I posit that the work has a purpose beyond the pondering of the
past and larger than simply to reflect upon failure; I see the work as aimed
toward an exilic situation in hopes of influencing it in one way and not
another.
Scholarship is broadening its previously simpler choice on the matter of
purpose. For example, E.T. Mullen has recently suggested, helpfully, that
one of the functions of DH can be described as the constructing of ethnic
boundaries. That is, the DH addresses circumstances of ethnic identity in
the face of exile and loss. Mullen writes:
The idea that ethnic groups are built upon shared memories of common
history that binds members together and separates them from others provides a basis for interpreting the deuteronomistic history as a creation whose
purpose was to provide a set of boundaries for the community for which it
socialist purpose for which Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol which is all but lost in
the nostalgic uses to which capitalist 'Christmas' buyers put and enjoy the tale.
11. Polzin says most clearly at the end of his book that Saul represents monarchy in
general (e.g. 1989: 213-15); it seems to me a sense that grew stronger as he proceeded
and hence emerges more clearly in his writing at the end rather than at the beginning of
his book on 1 Samuel.
10
How Are the Mighty Fallen ?

was produced. Within the context of the crisis produced by the destruction
of the Judahite state, the traditions of the past were assembled in a way that
would provide for the continued survival of the people who would constitute 'Israel' (1993: 14).
Mullen proceeds to demonstrate ways in which the DH can be seen to

function in such a way, a journey on which I do not need to accompany
him.12 The point is to acknowledge within scholarshipspecifically within
historical scholarshipi.e., the sense that the history is oriented toward its
exilic present rather than toward its monarchic past. The constructive work
of Mullen and the reconstructive efforts of scholars like Edelman (1991),
Eskenazi (1988), Japhet (2000) and Sacchi (2000) ground plausibly the
context I am constructing, and primarily from textual clues.13 The DH is,
to a large extent, a product of imagination in the best senses of that term: a
bringing from and to remembrance stories form the past in order to make
ethical and religious meaning possible in the present. I do not plan to
argue against alternative theories or to posit a variety of situations that the
DH or 1 Samuel within it might address but rather to see how effectively I
can make my case for one specific situation.
c. Smallest Issues
Finally here, and more specifically yet, the question of DH viewpoint rests
on and is embedded within some component factors, named variously by
scholars and appraised in a variety of ways. Even when commentators
agree that these factors signify, they diverge considerably in arranging
them. Here I will indicate seven prime elements for consideration and state
my operative assumption. First, what is the DH viewpoint on monarchy,
most fundamentally? Second, and obviously related, can the characterizations of certain kingsDavid, Solomon, Hezekiah, Josiahgive us good
access to the viewpoint? Though Josiah is a high point or climax, it is
obvious that the same intensity has not pertained throughout the long story
of kings, whether to valorize or vilify individual monarchs. Third, what is
12. His view is that monarchy represented a golden era, a point with which I
strongly disagree. Again, it seems important to recognize ways in which readers appropriate materials, circumstances being so very determinative of what looks golden (retrospectively) and what does not.
13. See also the work of Yair Hoffman, who distinguishes historiography oriented
to the past from that oriented to a present situation. He suggests that when present
purposes are uppermost, the historical considerations take second place and function to
serve the needs of the present (1995: 664).
Introduction
11
the contribution of the Deuteronomic legislation on the king,14 and how

does the actual 'moment' of acquiring a king seem to be set? Fourth, what
is the role DH sketches for prophets, specifically as they interact with
kings? Fifth, how importantand how constructedthroughout the book
of 1 Samuel is the variation in relationship between YHWH and the people
Israel? Sixth, what most foundationally does DH say about the land, Israel
or Canaan? And finally, seventh, how can the ending of 2 Kings give a
distinctive cast to the whole book? A narrative that ends distinctively as
Kings does constrains our understanding of the rest of the book. My choice
to set some markers for my discussion of 1 Samuel within certain factors
of the DH as a whole is surely not the only choice; but once made, it
channels thought in a particular direction and excludes others.
My stipulations and minimal critical base on those points are a corresponding seven. First, on monarchy in general: the question of whether
DH views it as positive or negative is too blunt. As Knoppers points out,
monarchy was normative in the neighborhood of Israel and operative in
Israel for many generations (1996: 329-37); that DH held it fundamentally
wrong seems most unlikely. But my sense of the DH assessment of royal
leadership from the exile is that it went fundamentally wrong and must not
be reconstituted. That is, in theory it could have gone well but in practice
it did not do so. Making that case will be one of the two main challenges
of my reading of Saul, so I will here anticipate my points and summarize
that the manner of asking for kings was wrong, insofar as the community
disregarded YHWH and the role God had played in saving them prior to the
moment of their requesting a king. To disregard an incumbent partner
while seeking to address a shared problem makes clear that the relationship is not functioning. For Israel to ask a prophet for a king over the head
of the deity registered with YHWH as a rejection. That monarchy might
nonetheless work was possible, though perhaps not the best bet in terms of
the past contentiousness between people and deity. But in any case, kingship was set up and the primary task of the king was to safeguardperhaps even deepenthe fundamental relationship between God and Israel.15
14. The more specific question is part of a much larger problem: How is the book
of Deuteronomy best seen in relation to the other books that follow it?
15. McKenzie 2000: 290-91, notes that DH regards the institution warily. Rose
takes the position that the monarchy is critiqued since there were not obvious others to
take the blame, but Rose finds that the view is self-critical, represents the monarchy's
meet culpa. He maintains that monarchy for DH remains central throughout and is in
fact idealized in various ways (2000: 443-47) as the DH struggles to give meaning to
12
In this single matter monarchy as a whole failed, hence the need for a
community seeking to reconstitute itself to envision and attempt another
form of leadership.
Second, on particular monarchs: most useful here is the dissertation of
Gerald Eddie Gerbrandt, who works with the longitudinal question of the
DH view of kingship. He also makes the point that the appraisal of kingship is negative not so much ontologically as over time (1986:18-23), and
he argues that the reigns of certain kings (notably Hezekiah and Josiah)
must be examined in order to map the DH view. Gerbrandt concludes that
those two kings are valorized, and for a basic fidelity to YHWH, with distinct vocabulary used in each case (pp. 89-102), true for David as well (pp.
170-73). Hence for kingship to work well was shown possible, not simply
in those three reigns but in greatest detail there. But for the most part, the
reality went otherwise. Linville, whose focus on Kings gives him a lot to
say about Josiah, offers: 'Rather than salvage something of a theocracy
within the monarchy, Josiah's story highlights the need for a theocracy
based in the Tor ah, while accepting that the monarchy is doomed to fail'
(1998: 237). Even that 'shining moment' of Josiah's reform does not signal a blunt approval of the institution for all time. Josiah may represent
Israel's transformation into its exilic self, the notion that the bond with
YHWH persists even in the failure of exile (Linville 1998: 251). On the
other hand, that some kings did well slows us from presuming that DH is
wholly negative to 'monarchy'.
Gerbrandt is also most helpful on the third point, the general setting of
kingship enunciated in the legislation of Deut. 17.14-20 and at the fateful
moments in 1 Samuel when kingship was requested and granted, places
where Gerbrandt sees no fundamental incoherence. The Deuteronomy text
specifies certain minimal requirements for a king, including that he be a
'brother' and chosen by YHWH; and the passage stipulates certain limits
that the king is not to transgress, which are also not difficult to understand.
experience. Gerbrandt writes:'.. .the Deuteronomist's view of kingship cannot be presented even tentatively totally apart from his understanding of Israel, of Yahweh, and
of their relationship to each other' (1986: 89). Key though it is, the DH is not primarily
about kingship, and so a DH viewpoint is not discernible from that factor in isolation
(let alone from juxtaposed chunks of material which have been diagnosed as pro- or
anti-monarchical). Linville writes (1998: 52) about the tremendous symbolic value of
monarchy, in the short run and beyond (as indeed the concept of the messiah testifies).
He says, 'The failure of former kings does not undermine the validity of a conception
of an ideal king; rather negative portrayals of some monarchs only affirm the validity
of the ideal'.
Introduction
13
The negative points do not fundamentally oppose the institution itself (Gerbrandt 1986: 103-13), but simply place edges around it. The king's single
positive charge, which involves his faithful relationship to the law, underlines the point made more particularly in the case of the kings evaluated
positively (and negatively in terms of others, notably Jeroboam and
Manasseh): the king is to study to do the law, is to 'keep' the law in the
fullest sense of that English word. There is no dereliction at the moment of
Israel's moving from law to life, from theory to practice. To have a king
was legitimate; and God made the selection as stipulated. There is nothing
fundamentally opposed to the institution per se in the material of 1 Sam.
8-12 (stipulated here and to be discussed in detail below in Chapter 3).
The danger, and the negative undertow, is the risk of forgettingdisregardingYHWH on the part of the human king, resulting in the deterioration of the basic covenantal relationship between deity and people so
richly described in Deuteronomy (Gerbrandt 1986: 145-54). Gerbrandt's
way of putting it is that Israel mistakes the human king as the savior,
overlooking the divine one.16 The monarchy was factored into the basic
relationality of YHWH and Israel, narratively speaking, and might have
gone well. That it did not, over time, was presaged in the manner of the
asking, which itself disregarded the deity and occasioned from him a recital
of other such occasions.
Fourth: the role of prophets. It is clear inDH that prophets make and
unmake kings, especially in the formative stages of monarchy and so in
1 Samuel.171 will be dealing with the literally unique representation of
Samuel and Saul, each of whom is to some extent anomalous. But the DH
maintains a situation where the prophet makes known to the king the viewpoint of God and, in a wider context, also makes known the king's failure
to strengthen the basic covenant bond between God and people. The kingprophet relation may be seen best in the details of the exemplary kings and
by contrast with those kings who either do not heed their prophets or who
lack them (for whatever reasons). To lack a prophet in the story of kings is
16. The first chapter of Gerbrandt's 1986 study reviews (up to 1985 or so) the scholarship on both DH and kingship and sets forth his basic trajectories, most of which I
will pick upfor example, that the viewpoint is relatively longitudinal and that it is
consistentmeaning, among other things, that a block of material added in or taken out
does not change it wholly.
17. Among recent efforts to bring together and sort various views on these DHlinked topics recently, see Campbell and O'Brien, who (in addition to, and separable
from their theory of prophetic sources) detail the prophet's task (2000: 215-16).
14
not good, as Saul conies to do, epitomizing the problem for the whole institution and experience. The Samuel-Saul experience hence encapsulates
first what was needed and then what failed.
Fifth: the question of the relationship between God and people that has
already been spoken of. Here, again, once a coherent position is assumed
or retrieved, the basic outlines are clear enough. If it is the case that God's
primary task in biblical narrative is to seek relationship with Israel, the DH
simply specifies that in its own way. In another context, I have named this
central matter 'the one thing needful', a phrase lifted from Lk. 10.42; I
will reassign the phrase to signal in my writing the notion that, all difficulties of specifying its exact relations notwithstanding, the 'one thing needful' refers to the mutual bond linking God and people, worked out in a
particular way in the Old Testament and in DH. The relationship is set
forth for the people as a whole in covenantal language, most prominently
in Deuteronomy. Though there is a great deal of nuance, it is not incorrect
to say that God (re)initiates with the community a relatedness based on
God's fundamental capacity to respond to Israel in travail. The Deuteronomy reflection on this trend starts with life in Egypt and reviews the
exodus and desert events a number of times; Deuteronomy also anticipates
the gift of the land to Israel, a gift in the truest sense of the word, in that it
is not an entitlement but a gratuity and cannot be abused without disturbing
the relationship between giver and receiver. The best analogue is perhaps
not the powerful ancient Near Eastern potentate enforcing sovereignty; or
perhaps that referent needs to be softened by consideration of other fundamental relationships as visible in the biblical text, notably between those
who love each other deeply if conflictedly. That this relationship goes bad
is the clear point made in DH. In fact, from the exodus generation to the
offspring of King Josiah, the trend is all too clear. The kings receive the
primary blame for the breach, and the persistent reason given is called
disobedience/refusal to heed and is characterized most typically in terms
of false worship, that is, non-Yahwistic worship which marks a particular
sort of violation of relationship. Whatever scholars are suggesting about
the likelihood of the YHWH-alone (or monotheistic) relationship, the DH
is again quite clear that it is the projected standard. So the DH representation of matters is that at least from the events of Mount Horeb onwards,
God's expectations were clear and consistentand possibleand that the
failures of the leaders and people to follow them were actionable.
Sixth: picking up from the previous point: The land of Canaan (named
variously over time) was the privileged place where Israel was to work out
Introduction
15
the relationship with God. Deuteronomy is clear that the land's other near
inhabitants represent a threat to the newcomers, weak and susceptible to
non-Yahwistic modes of worship; hence for the sake of the privileged newcomers, the near neighbors must be eliminated. Canaanites and Israelites
cannot co-exist in the small space of 'the land'. Whatever may, can and
even must be said about the centuries of harm done by those passages, it
must be acknowledged at base that DH is clear on that point. The near
nations are presented as a threat to Israel, a threat which, over time, becomes irresistible. The exile of 597-587 and afterwards resets the land
agenda in a radical way. Though the ideal of the land remains, and return
is envisioned in Deuteronomy and DH, it is clear as well that new vistas
are possible once there is a substantial diaspora community. Linville's
ruminations lead him in the direction of speculating that the Canaanites, so
prominent in DH, are arguably, symbolically rather than factually, a cipher
for outsiders in relation to whom Israel takes its identity (1998: 99).
Seventh: for all its oddness as a conclusion to the DH (or even simply to
Kings), the emergence of the figure of the last surviving king from his imprisonment to have a position of (dis)honor at his captor's table is architectonically crucial for DH and for its presentation of royalty, disabled if
not disappeared. The survival of the monarchical symbol is not the same
as the survival of a Davidic heir; that no heir is named past Jehoiachin
counters some of the pro-Davidic dynasty material elsewhere in DH (Linville 1998: 88-89). The main importance is that the king does not reassume
his leadership role, nor do his offspring in any permanent way. The king is
not killed; in fact he survives. But his effectiveness is long ended.
d. A Plausible Working Scenario
Let me now set the co-ordinates (though not the component details) for the
situation I have in mind as the first or intended audience or readership for
DH, the context in and by which I will hold the work is most urgently
addressed. There are four aspects here: the identity of Jehoiachin; the question of his heirs in genealogies; the narrative characterization of Sheshbazzar and Zerubbabel in the extant texts; and the possibility of Benjamin or
Saulide contenders for leadership in Yehud.
The historiographical work of Paolo Sacchi is provocative for situating
the exile community in Babylon. The young king Jehoiachin, on the Jerusalem throne only briefly before being taken captive by the Babylonians,
continues to serve as a legitimate Davidide even after his exile. As Sacchi
notes, biblical datings are made from his accession date rather than from
16
that of his successor and uncle Zedekiah. The Babylonians themselves,

according to 2 Kgs 25 but also to their own records, see and name Jehoiachin as legitimate heir, who did not resist and rebel against them as others
did. As Sacchi fleshes out the small extant bones of nomenclature and narrative (2000: 11-14,46-67), he hypothesizes factions: a major split develops and widens between the community in exile and that remaining in
Judah, which is not difficult to understand, given not only the past events
but what happens as the story goes on and the return becomes reality.
Keeping simply to the leadership question (which is a small factor in what
is actually a much broader discussion), Sacchi supposes that the royal
survivorJehoiachin and presumably also his heirsis approved by the
'remained' community rather than the exiles, a point I find difficult to
accept readily but am willing to entertain for its heuristic value.18 That is,
the exiled king becomes the emblem not for the Judeans who went into
exile with him and who will have seen him as capitulating to the Babylonians, but for the Judeans whose experience was not exile and whom Sacchi
supposes to have longed for a royal (Davidic) restoration. The practical
gain, for the present purposes, is to factor the figure of Jehoiachin in terms
of who supports and who does not, who builds hopes in terms of him and
who does not. The extant evidence does not seem decisive on the point,
but Sacchi's reading of it lends credence to the possibility of factions and
makes clear that several variations of players are possible. The release
of the 'pretender', however we may imagine it intended by its authoring
Babylonians, will have been read variously. That this royal son and father
disappears from the storyline after his release (in the year 561) does not
bring the line to an end, since he is survived by his son Shealtiel (and other
males as well).19
18. See Sacchi 2000: 14,46-49, 56. Sacchi's thinking is that the home community
considered the exiles to be under punishment from God, a viewpoint that group would
not share. For Sacchi, the exiles would blame the king for having acquiesced too readily to the Babylonians; hence he serves as a symbol of leadership for those in Judea
(pp. 53-54).
19. There is not space here to discuss the concluding verses of 2 Kings which
narrate the release of Jehoiachin. Useful for my argument is the work of Donald F.
Murray (2001: 260-63), who draws our attention to what is not part of the passage: no
reference to God's choice, to speech from Jehoiachin, no mention of royal progeny (cf.
1 Chron. 3.17-18). Murray opines, 'How feeble, then, in 2 Kgs 25.27-30 are those
dying glimmers of the dynastic promise...' (p. 262). He succinctly characterizes Jehoiachin as 'a modestly pensioned client in perpetual detention' (p. 263).
Introduction
17
The two figures who emerge from the various biblical texts, wearing if
not crowns, blazers with royal crests on the pockets, are Sheshbazzar and
Zerubbabel. There are some genealogical data and brief but complex
narrative references for each. Before asking how they emerge in narrative,
we must first observe the genealogical material. Japhet (1982: 68-80, 9596) sums up the information well. She suggests that for Sheshbazzar (Ezra
1.8-11; 5.14-16), called prince of Judah and governor but given no patronym when named outside the genealogy, we consider seeing Shenazzar
son of Jehoiachin (1 Chron. 3.17-19). The royal link, she holds, is indecisive but plausible. Zerubbabel, made son or nephew of Shealtielson of
Jehoiachin (1 Chron 3.17-24) but in any case within royal lineage)is
found in Ezra 2.2; 3.2, 8; 4.2-3; 5.2; 6.7 andinNeh. 7.7; 12.1,47, with and
without title and patronymicthat is, with one or the other upon occasion.
Though it is impossible to be certain, there seems to be adequate basis for
a royal link. What it is, how envisioned and by whom, with what purposeall those remain unclear and may indeed vary from one book to
another.
From these brief genealogical notes we turn to the narratives which fill
them out. After the vanished Jehoiachin comes first Sheshbazzar, who is
entrusted by the Persians with the task of returning the plundered vessels
to the temple site and to at least begin temple reconstruction (Ezra 1.8;
5.15). But then, with no further mention of Sheshbazzar, we meet Zerubbabel, who has a more substantial presence in the narrative worlds of Haggai and Zechariah, Ezra and Nehemiah. For the detail on their functioning
in the early decades of the return, we can draw on the work of Japhet and
Eskenazi, who work with the materials of the return and raise questions of
various kinds. Japhet's careful work on Haggai, Zechariah, Ezra-Nehemiah, and Chronicles contributes her sense of the bestor the most plausible identitiesof Sheshbazzar and Zerubbabel (1982 and 1983:218-28,
updated more generally in 2000:144-71). Though agreeing that there is no
conclusive way to demonstrate that they are scions of the Davidic house,
Japhet notes that these two appear at the start of the return but fall out of
the story without explanation before too long. Her latest sense seems to be
that Zerubbabel is, in the material we have (specifically 1 Esdras), constructed as a major player, partner to the priestly Joshuaeven a royal one,
given the language used by Hag. 2.20-23 and Zech. 4.6-10. But Japhet
concludes that his royal orientation is toward the past and not the present,
certainly not the future (2000:153-56). Eskenazi also works to reconstruct
plausible historical contexts in which we may understand the leadership
challenges and tensions of communities resettling in Yehud (1988: 48-51
18
and 154, 175 most helpfully) as she sketches the communities led by the
figures Ezra and Nehemiah. In each instance the case is arguedwith different particularsthat the leadership question was vital and contested,
with the Davidic line playing an enigmatic role, briefly.
This research is complemented by the recent suggestion of Diana Edelman (2001: 71-83), working with the genealogies of Chronicles (1 Chron.
8.29-40; 9.35-44; also Zech. 12.10-14), discerns the presence of Saulide
descendants as well as Davidic ones who have survived into post-exilic
Yehud. She posits a situation where there is a Benjamin faction in the
land (plausibly at Gibeon, she suggests, urging its candidate for leadership
against that of the gold community with its Davidic heir. She argues for
not simply an ancient memory of strife between the houses of David and
Saul but a very current sixth-century struggle between 'Davidic' Judah
and 'Saulide' Benjamin.
So the point on which I will build the minimal base I need is that the
house of David did not vanish with Jehoiachin, nor was it easily established that royal leadership would not be part of the return. There will
have been some support for a restoration of leadership, especially to the
extent that the Persians made use of it; of course, it may also be that the
Persians made use of whatever leadership had some demonstrable backing. However minimized may be the roles of the two figures of Sheshbazzar and Zerubbabel, and however brief their tenure, that they emerge at all
in the story of the return is significant. The actual king, Jehoiachin, though
unseated, is killed neither by his domestic opponents nor by his external
foes. His capitulation to the indignity of capture and deportation, his loss
of effective power, still leave him alive. His life is in his own hands. And
even though the house of David does vanish, the metaphor of kingship
survives and is transformed eventually into a longing for strong leadership.
As the community of return struggles over the question of leadership,
whether the struggle was between royal houses, between kings and priests,
or possibly admitting something more akin to a popular alternative to
dynasticity, a rising strength of the people (Japhet 1982: 86-89; Eskenazi
1988: 37-94, 175), what is made visible, or plausible, is the openness of
the question of royal leadership and its retrievability from extant sources.
There were perhaps two royal pretenders (one of Saul's line, one of
David's) and at least one priestly leader (representing the exilic experience
articulated by Ezekiel and associated with Aaron and Zadok). We may
even choose to piece in as well another more shadowy priestly personage
who took up or was givenperhaps long hadsome experience in Judah
Introduction
19
in the absence of those exiled early in the century. The question to be

propounded is: with what sort of leadership will the returning community
go forward? The epitomized story of Israel's experience with kings, unfolded in the human being Saul, makes clear that Davidic sons are less
reprehensible than Saulide ones. But royal sons at best are disastrous,
simply recapitulating the sins of their fathersor worsetheir promising
beginnings forgotten. If there is to be a choice between lines of priests, the
group who lost the ark is clearly unacceptable; the Zadokites, freshly made
holy for the new situation, are less unacceptable than the other dynastic
sons. But in any case, the key charge, the one thing needful, is leadership
that will safeguard the bond enclosing God and God's people. Can 'the
same' royal sons be entrusted with the precious and awesome task of maintaining the 'one thing needful'? I think DH says 'no' and will suggest
eventually the way out.
2. Introduction to Mikhail Bakhtin
Bakhtin needs some introductory attention, since his reading strategies
undergird this whole book. The insights of many biblical critics are prominent, to be sure; but the interlinked reading assumptions and methodology
are those of Bakhtin. Here I will identify him summarily, suggest his usefulness, provide an overview of his field of concepts, and then set forth in
more detail the base concept which hosts all other aspects of his thought.20
a. Bakhtin the Man
Bakhtin is accurately classified as a thinker, a philosopher, a language
theorist, and a brilliant reader. His capacious memory, multidisciplinary
genius, and perhaps insouciance in borrowing ideas from others also underlie his intellectual achievements. Bakhtin was born in Russia in 1895 to a
family which, in one way or another, provided him with opportunities for
education and the development of his intellectual and moral gifts. His
young adulthood coincided with the Russian Revolution, and indeed the
whole Soviet era overlies the years of his greatest productivity. The 'monologic' Soviet enterprise, locked in dreadful struggle with the vastly heterologic richness of Russian culture, provides a good backdrop for Bakhtin's
20. I have set forth Bakhtin's life at greater length in Green 2000 (Chapter 1) and
his ideas in that same book (Chapter 2). Most scholars who summarize the life draw on
the same basic set of information; an exception is Hirschkop (1999: Chapter 3), who
(from newer and untranslated sources) deconstructs a fair bit of what is standard fare.
20
life and scholarship. He was arrested between 1929 and 1930 for activities
related to his Orthodox religion and sentenced to ten (later commuted to
six) years of exile. That Bakhtin, with frail health (among other things, he
had only one leg) and uncongenial ideas survived not only a harsh exile
but the whole repressive regime (he died of emphysema in 1975) is remarkable and noteworthy. It is noteworthy, insofar as his ideasfrom the foundational dialogism to his more tensively developed notion of the 'third'
who understands our utterances perfectlyrun massively and thoroughly
counter to Soviet authoritarianism and the dogmas of its favored thinkers.
That Bakhtin was able to develop a whole alternate garden of riotous humanistic plants (summarized briefly below and amplified as required in the
chapters of this book) is a testament to the clarity of his vision as well as
to the courage of his convictions.
That Bakhtin died an old man in his bed, instead of being executed or
killed by the rigors of exile, is remarkable. Caryl Emerson, doyenne of
Bakhtin scholars, wrote about it on the centenary of his birth (1997). She
roots his survival in his character, the same source of his creativity. She
suggests it is his radical 'empathy'21 that allowed him both to hold to his
own positions and to respectfully and non-baitingly allow others to do the
same. Whether a cultivated virtue or simply an inborn tendency (perhaps
both), Bakhtin did not seem to need to foreground his own Tightness or to
adjust it much under the pressure of others' views incompatible with his
own. The development and survival of his lifework undoubtedly owes a
great debt to the fact that he could rarely find steady employment and was
supported by the meager earnings of his wife Elena. He had time to fill his
many notebooks. Whatever the case, he survived with at least adequate
integrity (see Emerson 1997: Chapter 1 for some discussion of it) to be discovered by students in the mid-1960s; from that moment, the publication
and translation of his writings became more likely and continues into the
present.
b. Bakhtin's Usefulness
Bakhtin's ideas, emerging in the USSR from the 1960s onwards and even
more slowly into the English-speaking world, are less extraordinary now
21. As I will develop at some length in Chapter 3 of this book, 'empathy' is not a
term Bakhtin liked. I use it as a shorthand for his 'sympathetic-Co-experiencing', his
description of the process by which one person is able to enter deeply, imaginatively,
and generously the experience of another subject, though without becoming swamped
by it. Another shorthand word for it is 'love'.
Introduction
21
than as we imagine them shaped in the first half of the twentieth century.
With relatively little access, apparently, to the vitality of general intellectual thought and conversation in the Anglo-North American and European
worlds, Bakhtin arrived at a worldview that is familiar to us today as the
language philosophy of the late-modern and even post modern worlds. For
me, it is not only the ideas themselves but their general coherence and
depth, even their elasticity, that prompts my use of them. Bakhtin bridges
some worlds that have seemed fractured in the field of biblical studies,
notably the realms of'historical' and 'literary' as well as the radically 'critical' and the deeply 'committed'. As I will hope to show below, he insisted upon the importance of the social context of all language, and he
insists for authoring and reading upon moral answerability. The digest of
the components of his thought are simply summarized here and will be
developed as needed in the chapters ahead.
c. Bakhtin's Thought Summarized
It is not easy to introduce Bakhtin clearly, concisely and competently,
even anticipating that a terse summary can later be unpacked and documented in a more adequate way. But if his thought is complex and evershifting, it is also roughly coherent and develops largely in relation to its
own past, as well now as in conversation with current critical discourse.
As have others, I choose to name the dialogical as the large tent under
which to position Bakhtin's thought (dialogism is the rather ugly English
word that catches all the implied intersections among partners). Throughout his life, Bakhtin maintained and grew his interest in human beings, in
the world we think of as biological-physical, in the great specificities of
culture, and in the workings of language (spoken and written). Exactly
how any and all of us live amid these worlds is what continued to intrigue
him and to comprise his work: how each of us becomes a unique selfnot
isolated in any sense but a self under constant construction, in profound,
constant, and multifaceted relationship with others. Each of us, Bakhtin
held, lives distinctive in our time and place (an ever-shifting concept he
labeled chronotope): We are non-repeatable and not quite coinciding even
with our earlier selves, able to escape via a loopholenamely, others' definition of us. And yetdialogicallywe constantly intersect with others.
To recognize our particular time/space prompts us to act creatively, enables
us to be answerable or take responsibility for such action that no other can
do; and it gives us the possibility of a broad tolerance for those not standing quite in our place, discourages us from blaming them or seeking in
22
their shadows an alibi for what we fail to be and do. We become who we
are dialogically, alternating constantly a sympathetic co-understanding of
others with our outsidedness to them, which gives us a dual position for
viewing and a surplus of seeing.
Exactly how each of us plots our architectonics and shapes our self in
constant interplay with many and diverse others (and how we contribute to
their being) is examined by Bakhtin in philosophy, aesthetics, ethics, and
especially in language. Primal and fruitful for him was his Orthodox Christian sense of how God creates, how Jesus emerges as both creature and cocreator with other human beings. That biblical pattern, with its attendant
motifs of alienation and grace, shaped Bakhtin's sense of how authors
create characters; and it allowed him, over time, to show that relation less
monologically uneven, more polyphonic, less confident of certainties or
beholden to Hoyle. In his best writing on literature (he was interested primarily in Russian novels) he credits Dostoevsky with being able to author
or draw literary 'heroes' whose primary role is to talk ideas, to ruminate
points of view, to extend such language dialogically into the character
zones of other literary figures, to readers, and even to the authoring process itself. Authors creating with particular consciousness and strategies
can generate polyphonic heroes who have the capacity to live almost
independently rather than to be moved around passively by authors, other
characterseven by readers, insofar as we commit and train ourselves to
read that way as well. Bakhtin's work on language and culture helped him
to flesh out the profoundly social and material dimension of all life, though
without excluding the individual and idisosyncratic. Once again, his sense
of the workings of language is dialogical, with diverse factors collaborating rather than eliminating each other in some reductively dichotomous
way. His interest was in the ramifying interconnectedness of the many
facets of life and language, not in their more tidy and formal organization,
for he saw the riotous heteronomy of language to generate meaning more
than does its chartable and transcribable order.
Bakhtin named the utterance as the fundamental unit of social intercourse. An utterance (from the monosyllabic to a novel) is what one of us
says to another of us, so what I say to you: It is grounded and specific to
our shared circumstances, framed in terms of what I want to communicate
to you, what I think you are needing and ready to hear, and what I anticipate as your likely response. Again, dialogically you already shape what
I say. My utterance (and yours back, of courseand so on) includes the
grammar and syntax of our particular language but also selects a helpful
Introduction
23
genre, borrows from expressions used by many other people at other times
(so I may quote a great classic or may pick up on some language you have
recently used with me, making that language a participant in our conversation); in my utterance there is intonation, and there is all that is unsaid
however it may be sensed. And of course my utterance comes and makes
sense in its contexts (the specific current one but also in the more general
context of our relationship, and so forth). All is mutually constituting. Intersubjectivity becomes more visibly vast, with possibilities for rich intersection almost infinite and yet far from random.
I find Bakhtin immensely challenging and helpful for the reading of a
good deal of biblical text, its remove from Russian novels notwithstanding.
Bakhtin's philosophical anthropology sets in creative tension (dialogically)
both the particular historical-social and the literary-creative aspects of
speech, two realms current biblical study is struggling to keep related. All
cultural contexts which can be known are relevant for the interpretation of
literature. The language bears traces of its social past and invites us as we
interpret to weigh its long reception by other readers over hundreds of
yearswith all of the diversity implied therein. Certain biblical texts
(notably Job, parts of the Pentateuch and former prophets, the tangled
thickets named after Isaiah and Jeremiah, and the Gospels) can bear our
polyphonic reading strategies to some extent. Such reading is potentially
profoundly transformational in its capacity to deepen consciousness. Such
reading activates, or shows already vital, the language that carefully constructs narratives and characters with whom the author, other characters,
and we may interact respectfully, dialogically. Reading which attends critically to genre choice, to the doubled-voiced language of so much of what
the characters speak, to the nuances of the particularall of this effort to
listen creatively distances biblical interpretation from the flatly literalistic
and abstractly universalistic in all its guises. It makes us responsible
surely in collaboration with many others but not thereby excused from our
partto read from where we find ourselves and to continue to live, cued by
what we find offered to us.
d. Bakhtin's Base Concept: Dialogism
Dialogism is identified as Bakhtin's signature concept (Nielsen 2000: 51),
his master optic (Clark and Holquist 1984:212), the master key which animates and controls all his work (Holquist 1990:15). Though it is not a term
he used, in some of his last writings Bakhtin alluded briefly and impressionistically to dialogical relations (1986b: 104-106, 117, 125). That the
dialogical is foundational to his work is evidenced by the fact that it is
24
difficult to write about it without immediately debouching into the components which ramify and explicate it: utterance, transgredience, authoring,
answerability, polyphony. Scholars have defined the basic term in several
ways useful for us. A formal definition is found in the glossary of The
Dialogic Imagination:
Dialogism is the characteristic epistemological mode of a world dominated
by heteroglossia. Everything means, is understood, as part of a greater
wholethere is constant interaction between meanings, all of which have
the potential of conditioning others. Which will affect the other, how it will
do so and in what degree is what is actually settled at the moment of
utterance. This dialogic imperative, mandated by the pre-existence of the
language world relative to any of its current inhabitants, insures that there
can be no actual monologue (Bakhtin 1981: 426).
Clark and Holquist offer two attempts to position the concept:

The key feature of Bakhtin's thought is its attempt to comprehend the complex factors that make dialogue possible... Dialogue is more comprehensively conceived as the extensive set of conditions that are immediately
modeled in any actual exchange between two persons but are not exhausted
in such an exchange. Ultimately, dialogue means communication between
simultaneous differences (1984: 9).
And,
Dialogism is not intended to be merely another theory of literature or even
another philosophy of language, but is an account of relations between
people and between persons and things that cuts across religious, political,
and aesthetic boundaries... And unlike other philosophies that oppose radical individuality in the name of the greater primacy of socially organized
groups, Bakhtin's philosophy never undercuts the dignity of persons (1984:
348).
The concept is specifically modern, arising in the twentieth century's

discovery of alterity, its turn to language, and its science. Again, commentators are helpful: 'The philosophy of dialogue is regarded as one of the
most important contributions of the twentieth century to philosophical
heritage of mankind [sic]. It makes us aware of the fact that any level of
mental life requires the presence of the other' (Koczanowicz 2000: 54).
Holquist further contributes, 'In dialogism, the very capacity to have a consciousness is based on otherness'1 (1990:18). Holquist explicates that dialogism is a pragmatically oriented theory of knowledge, an epistemology
that seeks to grasp human behavior by explaining the use humans make
of language: 'Dialogism, then, is part of a major tendency in European
Introduction
25
thought to reconceptualize epistemology the better to accord with the new

versions of mind and the revolutionary models of the world that began to
emerge in the natural sciences in the nineteenth century' (1990: 17-18).
Thus we can see that dialogism is actually a set of ostensibly diverse
concepts unified by the insight that encountering the other is crucial for the
construction of our consciousness and being, and of course for every
other's as well. Language and culture manifest the reality and are a good
place to watch it in action. Two Bakhtin scholars who occasionally publish
excerpts from what they call a heteroglossary offer the useful insight that
there are at least three levels of the dialogic, among which Bakhtin moves
without signaling, and so often confusingly for us.22 They clarify that
dialogism is not mere alternation of interlocutors in life or literature, is not
simple disagreement or contradiction. At the base (first) level, all utterances are dialogic, assuming two participants shaped foundationally by
their interaction; in another sense (second type), an utterance can be conceived as either monologic or dialogicin fact can be located along a
spectrum from one of those ideal points to the other. The utteranceto be
dialogic in this second sensemust make the two voices heard if both are
to register with hearer/readers. So if a utterance blends a 'straight' voice
and a parodic one, the contending presence of both of the voices must be
made clear. The third type of level of dialogism in Bakhtin is a way of
viewing and articulating the world and truth. Also visible along a spectrum, this third sense of the dialogic insists on the situated quality of truth,
the importance of the distinctive point of view which finds itself in relationship with other distinct viewpointsas over against the realm of impersonal and universal propositions. It is this third level that gives way to
the polyphony that Bakhtin found most clearly in Dostoevsky. The integrity of the two centers holds but is affected by the interaction. In the
dialogic, though the gaps and differences are crucial, the bridges and continuities are stressed as well, perhaps more.
Dialogism is also explained by reference to its avoiding two extremes:
authoritarian objectivism and individualist subjectivism, that is, between
the rigidly and abstractly dogmatic and the radically relativistic. Those
who discuss dialogism also tend to contrast it with an Hegelian dialectics
(Holquist 1990: Chapter 2), since in the dialogic, certain differences cannot be overcome; separateness and simultaneity are basic to existence
(Emerson 1999: 5-6). The genuinely dialogic requires two or more distinct
22. Morson and Emerson 1997: 264-66; for a fuller and more contextualized discussion of their contention, see also Morson and Emerson 1990:49-62,130-33,234-37.
26
speakers, each with a voice, a set of experiences, distinct placement, attitudes and outlooks on the world. Bakhtin's position is that there is no level
where communication is possible that allows the subject to be isolated,
able to proceed as if in isolation. 'For [Bakhtin] the relationship with the
other is not only the ontological foundation of the human being but also a
way of making up the contents of a self and developing a means of understanding' (Koczanowicz 2000: 61).
Perhaps the best realm, apart from language, to test and deepen insight
into this basic notion is the life sciences. It is commonly observed that
Bakhtin was keen on the science of his dayboth physics and biology.
Holquist explicates how a living system can offer access to the nature and
potential of Bakhtin's dialogism (Holquist 1997: 220-22). Holquist suggests that we should think in terms of three basic sets of properties: a living organism has, first, a high degree of complexity, a systemic, ramifying
interconnectedness. The whole is in a most pragmatic way more than a sum
of the parts. This corporate interaction transcends the merely mechanical
or contiguous; if the heart and kidneys are not functioning, neither will the
legs and eyes work. Second, a living system is not readily quantifiable.
Composed of finely discriminated relations which are determined at very
local levels, an organism is shaped and determined by a vast intersection
of these spheres of logic, value and creative activity; to presume to chart
such dynamics is foolish and pointless. And third, such vital entities
whether we are thinking of a gene, a cell, an organ, an individual or an
ecosystemare unconsummated or unfinished, indeterminate in any basic
sense. The elements shift constantly not only in relation to other components but in themselves as well. There is an interplay of infinite variability.
Holquist concludes his discussion:
When, then, I describe Bakhtin's dialogism as being pervaded by biological
thinking, I mean that such key concepts as 'heteroglossia', 'chronotope',
and, of course, 'dialogue' itself, as well as the crucial distinctions between
'finished' and 'unfinished', 'horizon' and 'environment', or 'given' versus
'created' relate to each other most meaningfully if they are conceived as
aspects of a single worldview... [SJuch a system has relevance not only in
explaining why consciousness is situated, but why perception located in this
way inevitably leads to a particular way of coming at the world. The
dialogue between organism and environment must take place in a constant
experimentation on the part of the situated subject.2
23. Holquist 1997:222. He goes on to address the point (my second) contested by
Hirschkop (1998), that dialogism is understood by Holquist as a system wholly
Introduction
27
Why is dialogism helpful, and what proceeds differently for us as a

consequence of attending to it and incorporating its wisdom among our
strategies? First, 'Dialogism is founded on the ineluctability of our
ignorance, the necessary presence of gaps in all our fondest schemes and
most elaborate systems. Bakhtin rejoices in the fatedness of uncertainty,
which he reads as the constant availability of a way out, with no dead end.
Dialogism is a "metaphysics of the loophole'" (Clark and Holquist 1984:
347). It is tremendously freeing while at the same time calling for great
discipline. Second, it challenges us to a revised concept of the self: though
we may look like tidy little units, bounded by our own skin and quite able
to tell where one of us ends and another begins, in fact dialogism shifts
'.. .the differential relation between a center and all that is not that center'
(Holquist 1990: 18). We need to be aware of the limits of our apparent
autonomy and of the importance of our own particularity and that of the
other. And Holquist clarifies that the center which we may call a self is not
an absolute or logocentric presence but a pole of relationality. To commit
consciously to construct meaning as pervasively as possible in relation to
others alters most things considerably. Third, voices in life but also in literature will need to undergo a repositioning. Characters and narrator alike
will achieve their positions and make their meaning while contending with
each other. The readerly task will involve not only discerning a way amid
the cacophony but of claiming her own path forward as she construes
speech in her particular way.24 The reliable and omniscient narrator is
displaced from an erstwhile natural authority, as are other voices long
accustomed to dominate. Fourth, dialogic elements are not confined to art
(literature) but pervade life. Nielsen claims that Bakhtin holds the dialogic
to be inherent in the whole sphere of human culture (2000: 46). Hence his
ethics are rooted in the dialogic rather than in any a priori synthesis of
knowledge or values; answerability comes not abstractly but in a direct
engagement with the other.
Bakhtin's definition of the dialogic provides a more complete response to
[Kant's] fourth postulate than any of his previous formulations. 'Only a dialogic and participatory orientation takes another person's discourse seriously
relativistic and to conclude that amid all the diversity and complexity there is enough
sameness, a 'relative universal' which avoids both uniformity and chaos.
24. In this book the practice will be to refer to the author and hero with masculine
adjectives and pronouns and to the reader with feminine ones, partly to avoid unclear
or awkward language and partly to reflect likely reality.
28

and is capable of approaching it both as a semantic position and as another
point of view' (Nielsen 2000: 51 quoting Bakhtin 1984: 64).
Nielsen adds, 'A dialogic understanding means that another is always axiologically positioned over and against an addressee. I recognize the other's
animatedness as I engage the utterance... Dialogue assumes no last word,
no finality' (Nielsen 2000: 51).
The developing discussion herethat is, the contesting or refining of
this understanding of dialogismhas three sets of issues which will manifest themselves indirectly throughout my discussion of Bakhtin's work.
The first involves whether or not Westerners (as distinct from Russians)
can appropriate Bakhtin's thinking appropriately, given the vast discrepancy in world views.25 Related is a question which has come up in relation
to the work of Ruth Coates, who seeks to show the consonance between
Bakhtin's fundamental anthropology and biblical (she calls them 'Christian') concepts; some query whether Western Christianity is a legitimate
backdrop against which to read the Orthodox Bakhtin (Coates 1998:2-9).
More specifically (and second), Hirschkop argues that scholars like Holquist, Emerson and Morson have gotten Bakhtin fundamentally wrong on
the nature of the dialogic. The charge is that they all render Bakhtin's
insight too relativistic and postmodern, too individualistic and classically
liberal (Hirschkop 1999: Chapter 1; see also Dop 2000). Hirschkop contributes a third basic cavil as well, in an earlier and briefer article. He
questions, radically, the whole concept of the dialogic. First he wonders if
Bakhtin is right that a single person can craft a polyphonic novel. He first
answers his question affirmatively at the easy surface but then critiques the
notion that a single person crafting a novel can actually manage two consciousnesses (Hirschkop 1998: 183-85). Hirschkop moves on to his later
(and related) point that conversation (whether it is what goes on by definition in long-used language or the chatter of the political process) is not
in itself inevitably genuinely democratic (Hirschkop 1998: 187-95). There
is too much unevenness present, which Bakhtin tends to overlook or
minimize in his somewhat abstract presentations of what happens between
interlocutors in literature (whether Hirschkop is quite fair to Bakhtin is
another question). Nor is dialogue simply a series of one-to-one encounters; instead, it is more thoroughly social and communal and often more
constrained and coercive. Hirschkop's recent book, which is many years in
25. See Emerson (1999: 1-5) and also Adlam (1997: 75-90 [79-84]) for a discussion of the differences between Western and Russian appropriations.
Introduction
29
the making, provides a serious and deep critique of Bakhtin, or perhaps

better, a substantial repositioning of his thought and works which challenges the appropriation of many other scholars, myself included.
3. Biblical Spirituality: Situated and Transformative Reading
The third foundational piece for this study, vast and complex like its two
fellows, brings into relationship what reception theory calls the 'situated
reader' with what biblical spirituality characterizes as transformative appropriation of a text. These two elements become related here, insofar as the
second reading situation I have chosen to construct explicitly is my own,
and it is best addressed under the academic discipline of biblical spirituality (a subset of both biblical studies and general spirituality, as well as
overlapping a number of other fields too). Just as I am reading Saul's story
in 1 Samuel both through the putative eyes of a sixth-century community,
so am I reading it through the experience and values of myself and those
with whom I actually read and work. And just as I am reading the narrative experience of Saul as a riddle of monarchy, so am I interested to
interpret and construct the portraiture of a literary character who is particularly well-rendered to make certain struggles of the human condition
specifically relationalitypoignantly and provocatively accessible. Biblical spirituality will ground both my own situation as a reader and my
appropriation of Saul's capacity to speak from the human condition, most
specifically the representation of his relationship with God.
There was a time when the topic of how a biblical text offers reader/
hearers access to the topic of the divine-human relationship would need
no introduction, so obvious would it have seemed. Pre-critical commentary on biblical texts did not flinch from the subject or worry about exactly
how the appropriation and transformation in and toward God and neighbor
worked. It was only when medieval scholasticism began to split apart the
intellectual from the spiritual and to systematize the former in philosophical categories and demote the latter to a subfield of theology that the fit
between spirituality and theology began to look less certain. Historicalcritical study of the Bible, so dominant during the last 200 years or so, and
focusing so extensively on the original referents of the text (particularly in
the Hebrew Bible) at the expense of other meanings, widened the split. Literary studies of the past three decades have opened ways of rapprochement
with existential levels, as has the whole discourse of ideology criticism. But
contemporary biblical spirituality does not call for a retreat to a prior era
30
or rely on assumptions that undergirded earlier worldviews. But neither

does biblical spirituality eschew the insights of the pre-critical, the historical-critical, the more recent literary-critical or the ideological investigations
of the text. On the contrary, it relies upon them foundationally though as
orchestrated by its own purposes and methods. Keeping in mind that the
pressing need here is simply to situate my appropriation of this particular
story of Saul (though the relevance of the topic is wider than that), let me
establish a minimal but adequate framework for my reading.
a. Locating Biblical Spirituality
One of the clearest theorists of this new (but also classic) field of spirituality is Sandra Schneiders. Her writing, informed and animated also by
her New Testament scholarship, has in the past couple of decades clarified
matters to a considerable extent. Parsing that spirituality comprises simultaneously a discourse, a vast field of practice, and an academic discipline,
she goes on to draw other helpful distinctions. Schneiders defines spirituality most generally as 'the experience of conscious involvement in the
project of life-integration through self-transcendence toward the ultimate
value one perceives' (1998:1,3).26 Michael Downey specifies some of the
factors more fully. Spirituality acknowledges the reality of realms beyond
the tangible and seeks integration in the face of fragmentation and alienation. Spirituality presumes a capacity for self-transcendence over against
that which is narrowly or exclusively self-centered while remaining rooted
in the communal. The word refers to an inner dimension of a person where
ultimate reality is experienced and which need notmust notbe privileged over the social. Downey concludes:' Spirituality... is used to describe
an element in human experience precisely as experience and precisely as
human... Spirituality refers to the authentic human quest for ultimate
value...'(1997: 14).
For many, though not in any sense all, the ultimate orientation of which
both Schneiders and Downey speak is God's presence and action, God's
self-disclosure within human experience. Schneiders names the subject
matter (material object) of spiritualitywhat it studiesas the life integration project itself. Since her interest is consistently rooted in Christian
spirituality and most of her writing discusses that subfield of spirituality,
she specifies it more precisely: the ultimate value for Christians is the
triune God as revealed in Jesus Christ which involves the living of the
26. See Frohlich 2001 for some refining, disputing, and developing of Schneiders
on these key points.
Introduction
31
paschal mystery of Jesus Christ, in the context of the Church community

through the gift of the Holy Spirit (Schneiders 1998: 3). She says, 'Living
within [the] horizon of ultimate value one relates in a particular way to all
reality and it is this relationship to the whole of reality and to reality as a
whole.. .which constitutes Christian spirituality' (1998: 3). The 'what' of
spirituality will include many and diverse genres: literary texts, ritual, art,
music, historical persons' lives. Schneiders assumes here the participation
of a committed believer, which is part of my reading self that I wish to
situate. The formal object of spirituality (the specific aspect under which
its matter is studied) is human experience, including that which is specifically religious and to a certain extent interior, broad and diffuse though
that category is.27 To name the formal object as experience suggests that
context will be key, and that abstract theological methods may be less
utilized than they would be in some other disciplines. The experiential
aspect of the field also implies that biblical spirituality will have some interests not shared by biblical studies. The subject of experience raises the
question of interiority, a difficult one. Mary Frohlich discusses the problematic of interiority:'.. .human interiority is fundamentally a capacity for
intimate, self-transcendent communion; ultimately, it is the capacity to
dwell in the personal and transcendent God, and to be a place-in-the-world
where this God dwells' denigrating neither 'inner' nor 'outer' life (2001:
74). Downey also urges that healthy or genuine spirituality does not incline toward isolation or self-absorption (1997: 15), nor does it eschew
anything genuinely human but presumes rather that experience is thoroughly embodied (pp. 43, 91).
The methods to be utilized for spirituality are necessarily eclectic and in
fact genuinely interdisciplinary, as suits a study of experience. Spirituality
will need to call upon historical researches, to be grounded in a suitable
hermeneutics and anthropology, to engage theology (which is systematic
reflection upon texts and experience). It will need to bring appropriate
literary theory to bear insofar as it works with texts, and to marshal other
27. Schneiders (1994: 10) writes '...the experience of the spiritual life includes
more, much more today, than religion, and religion includes much more than theology,
and theology includes more than specifically Christian content'. She goes on to specify
that the experience of the embodied human spirit will include investigations sociologically, psychologically, sexually grounded, and observes as well that many Christians
are deeply influenced in their experience of God by science and by 'non-Christian'
religious traditions.
32
bodies of theory (e.g. feminist) as useful. There is no formula for organizing how to proceed with the enterprise of biblical spirituality. It will vary
considerably, not only in relation to what is studied but also, as Schneiders
indicates, as a function of the interpreter's purpose and context (Schneiders
1994: 9). But insofar as human experience grounds spirituality substantially, the methods will need to serve that investigation. Since my purpose
here is not to discuss the whole field of spirituality but that which is specifically biblical, the question of appropriate methods joins the methodological
concerns of biblical studies.
Biblical spirituality is a subfield of general (and of religious) spirituality
in addition to playing a necessary role in the other sub-fields of Christian
spirituality. The question to sort here is not, happily, the way in which
Scripture functions in any study of lived Christian life, but how biblical
spirituality is related to the field of biblical studies. More specifically, how
does a practitioner of both fields proceed? To be more specific yet: How
will a reading of the character Saul emerge slightly differently if the interpreter is aiming to read transformatively (as biblical spirituality envisions)
and not simply acquire and share information about the text (as is more
typical of biblical studies)? In a word, much of the process of study and
interpretation will be the same. That a biblical scholar may also posit that
the text under negotiation is a classic, canonical and revealed does not subtract any challenges of biblical reading. To the contrary. In laying out the
historical factors behind the rupture between serious and scholarly biblical
study and the lives of Christians and celebrated ways in which it seems to
be healing in our time, Schneiders implies that critical analyses of the
Bible have not looked deeply enough (1985:19). She and others celebrate
' "the re-enchantment of the universe", a pervasive conviction that there is
more to reality than meets the eye and that the "more" might be more interesting and more important than what can be seen, manipulated, and controlled for human profit' (Schneiders 1997: 60, referring her readers to a
set of books on p. 75 n. 25). A biblical scholar with such a span of interest
is not excused from any of the biblical studies questions she must address
to the text. But in addition to (not in place of) knowledge, the reader trained
in spirituality is seeking also active engagement, insight, and transformation, and she counts on those processes being available when she reads.
Ideology criticism has shown as illusory the sense that any of us reads
objectively, works without presupposition or interests. Literary theory has
shown the many ways in which the specific eye of the reader constructs
the text, and social scientific criticism and cultural studies have capitalized
Introduction
33
on the many differences among readers. Even historically focused biblical

studies have begun to acknowledge the tremendous impact its agenda has
had on the politics of the contemporary Middle East (see West 1998).
So when biblical spirituality attends specifically to the experiential
aspect of the text and makes central the self-implicated nature of its own
study, it is not so startling a move as it might have seemed a generation
ago. Once the illusion of detached spectatorship is exposed as not only
impossible but undesirable, the critical analysis is seen as participative
(Schneiders 1998: 9). Schneiders writes, 'Hidden in the attraction to the
study of spirituality is probably, for many people, a deep yearning to see
God... Studying the human experience of God is not viewing through a
telescope a bush burning in a distant desert. It is taking a chance on hearing our name called at close range' (1998: 9). Frohlich says it as follows:
'We seem to be stranded on the shifting sands of lived experience, perhaps
enjoying the dynamism but with no sure ground on which to move toward
personal integration, let alone toward the more systematic thinking and
communicating appropriate to the academy' (2001:69). She distinguishes
certain practices which the academy finds uncongenial (appeals to dogmatic certitudes or to private mystical experiences) and suggests rather the
appeal to constructive work, the challenge to 'name, recount, and critically
reflect on all life-changing "transcendent" spiritual experiences, as well
as on the multiple contingent factors that have shaped how these experiences have been taken in.. .and articulated' (2001: 70). A hermeneutical
approach, focusing specifically upon the interpretation of the humanly
constructed expressions of meaning, may be distinguished from an appropriative approach, which focuses more upon how the expressions of experience and those who engage them are transformed (Frohlich 2001: 73). But
such differences are a matter of comparative emphasis. What is common
to both, and key to spirituality, is a reading that is hermeneutically responsible, self-aware and self-implicating, and open to the processes of transformation as it orients the reader toward God's self-disclosure from within
the biblical text. The distinction Schneiders begins to draw between the
two projects of technical biblical study and spirituality lies not so much in
methods but in the scholar's general aim or purpose.
To oversimplify for purposes of emphasis, we might say that biblical scholarship is concerned primarily with understanding the meaning of the text
itself and that biblical spirituality is concerned primarily with the self-understanding of the reader in the light of biblically mediated divine revelation
(Schneiders 1997: 67).
34
It is, I think, fair to say that biblical spirituality scholars are more interested in and reliant upon literary than historical methods of study, but that
is perhaps a temporary condition, arising from the huge overstress on
historical retrieval which is currently giving way to a more appropriate
balance of projects.28 But at least for me, now, the language dynamics of
the text and the imaginative space they open have provided the best access
to questions of transformative reading. It is here that Bakhtin's contribution has been so helpful to me. His broad theory integratesor at least
positions interactivelythe factors of answerable interpretation which are
highly attentive to literary artistry while remaining committed to the importance of the historical and social. Even his practice of stressing now one
feature (e.g. the language dynamics) and then another (e.g. the socio-historical contexts) serves to keep them all in relation, even if the particular
relations among them are not always right.
From that point Schneiders moves on to distinguish spiritualities within
the text, those generated by the text, and other post-biblical writings which
incorporate biblical texts. That issue may be further distinguished in terms
of whether the particular interest or quest is the experience behind the text
(which gave rise to the texte.g. the search for or retrieval of the experience of the Johannine community), within the text (and so discernible
within the language dynamics represented, e.g. ways in which Sophia can
be discerned to act in the Wisdom of Solomon), or in front of or before the
text (appropriated by a community or individual who wishes to make tangible a particular practice sensed from the text, e.g., a biblically based way
of life such as the Rule of St Benedict). That those distinctions are somewhat artificial and even misleading is clear upon reflection, but there is a
practical sense in which they are and have beenhelpful and clarifying.
But before examining more carefully those options, it is important to stress
that sinceinsofar asthe formal object of biblical spirituality is human
(religious/spiritual) experience, some form of appropriation that is oriented
toward transformation of the participants is central. In every case, the
readerly engagement with the experience behind, within, and before the
text is what is sought. The act of engaging the narrative changes the reader.
The appropriation of meaning is what is transformative. Interpretation of
the biblical text, specifically as Scripture, comprises a particular mode of
28. This is a point not agreed upon by Schneiders and West, but I think I come
down with Schneiders on this since I am not confident of the retrieval project West
endorses (see below).
Introduction
35
biblical spirituality. It is not a matter of applying messages but of acquiring insight. The dialogical engagement between a rich and classic text
which discourses deeply about the God-human relationship and a reader
who is attentive and attuned to its communication constructs an utterance,
as Bakhtin would say, where both the text is opened up and the interpreter
changed.
b. Two Engaged Practitioners and the Biblical Text
In order to move a bit further along the question of how a professional
biblical scholar engages the biblical text transformatively, I will draw from
the work of Schneiders and of Gerald O. West, each of whom is a proficient theorist, a skilled reader of biblical texts (she of New and he of Old
Testament). Each has also demonstrated, with what Bakhtin calls a signed
and answerable life, the value of such reading for the larger communities
in which they live. They both clarify how contemporary scholarship facilitates their appropriation of the text and pay some explicit attention to the
hermeneutics of interpretation. Part of the movement from interpreter to
text and theory and back to lifeor better, the constantly deepening integration of the readerly life toward what is of ultimate valueinvolves a
level of sophistication that comes from critical scholarship. The question
here is not whether or why such a move is key but how it can be managed,
legitimated, described. The project to which the lifework of Schneiders
and West has contributed and from which it has taken value can be factored as follows: How and why do scholar-believers read biblical texts?
With what effect does such reading go? And how, therefore, is such reading to be understood? I will extrapolate from the writing of each to position
the study of 1 Samuel, which has been the specific concern of neither.
Their aims and procedures, which may appear at first somewhat at odds
with each others', are actually quite complementary and helpful to my
purposes.
i. Sandra Schneiders. In her seminal book on the topic of hermeneutics,
The Revelatory Text, Schneiders begins her discussion about the appropriation of meaning (and the consequent process of transformation) from an
insight that the dimensions of the text that most interested her were not
accessible from the approaches to the Bible she was learning in graduate
school. From that anomaly she identifies as crucial the whole realm of
hermeneutics, which she later (1999:13) names as the theory and practice
of understanding. Her basic question is this:
36

What is involved in an integral, that is, a transformative, interpretation of
the biblical text? My answer, in a nutshell, is that integral transformative
interpretation is an interaction between a self-aware reader open to the truth
claims of the text and the text in its integrity, that is, an interaction that
adequately takes into account the complex nature and multiple dimensions
of text and reader (1999: 3).
For her, the biblical text mediates an encounter with God.

Readers of the biblical text approach from various perspectives, with
different objectives in mind, and with diverse understandings of what the
text offers them. Since truth is not the same as abstract knowledge or information, it is not something lying about to be gathered up by any walking
by. Since meaning is existential, it is negotiated dialogically.29 Methodological moves do not provide the starting point for the meaning quest, nor
does a consideration of the text, disconnected from reader or context.
Schneiders says, 'The aim is to understand what it means to understand the
New Testament, what it means to achieve meaning through interpretation
of this text, how this text can function...for contemporary readers...
believers' (1999: 25).
She moves on to develop in detail the metaphor of God's speaking which
commonly characterizes biblical revelation. Her point is that particular
metaphor must be approached as all metaphors are approached. Revelation
is symbolic (not exact or prepositional) and hence must be approached as
symbols are approached. The Bible is one of the placesfor many, a privileged placewhere many Christians (and Jews) seek God's self-disclosure or revelation. Schneiders distinguishes that it is better to speak of the
Bible as revelatory rather than as revelation (1999: 39).30 A corollary: A
community confers on certain of its classics the affirmation that they are
29. Schneiders relies on Hans Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur for her philosophical base. My choice to use Bakhtinwho names 'dialogical' what Schneiders calls
'dialectical'is not a problem here, since the three thinkers come out of the same general flow as regards the questions of hermeneutics, granted many differences of nuance
and detail. They are close enough for the purposes I have in mind.
30. Student of religions F.X. Clooney, lecturing in another context about sacred
Hindu texts, characterizes the language of revelation as not simply God's dictation but
more than just a human effort to talk of God. God cannot, Clooney suggests, speak perfectly in human language, which cannot quite contain all God could say. In another
sense, God needs human beings to do the language part of the transaction, which as
Schneiders notes, is used only metaphorically for God's capacity to disclose God's self.
There is a tensive quality in all theorizing about the divinehuman communication, a
topic which recurs in one way or another in the great world religions.
Introduction
37
inspired, a decision reached in a variety of ways, some of which are available to us from history. Though there is not a great deal of specific clarity
about how inspiration works, it is evident that for (most) Jews and Christians, it has little to do with verbatim dictation. The question more central
than the dynamics of inspiration is the matter of how its texts, accepted as
revealed and inspired, work transformatively for a reader. There is no
inevitability to it; the one engaging the text will need to be open to the
claims made by the text, offered from within it. A reader will stand in some
helpful relation to the long tradition of other interpreters of it. The theory
of interpretation and the text do not themselves alter as we move from
considering the text a classic to holding it as revelatory; the dispositions
and expectations of the interpreter are what shift. Insofar as one engages
a revelatory text, open to its claims regarding and capacity to mediate
the transcendent, he or she will be changed by the experience (1999: Chapter 2). How the Churchthe community of believershas understood the
textsagain not simply their information but their truth and wisdomwill
be germane, though not inevitably decisive in some formulaic way for a
contemporary reader. Schneiders reminds us of the citation closing the
Gospel of John which names the value of Scripture in general:'.. .written
that you may believe.. .and have life in [Jesus'] name' (20.30-31). Scripture functions for believers as 'norm and nurture of faith' (1999: 89-90).
Christians (among others) also privilege this particular set of texts, make
the Bible's basic truth claims formative and normative, central in their
lives, enter such texts from reflection upon their own (and others') experience, as a place of access to God, who is the ultimate value toward whom
they strive to orient.
When Schneiders moves on to discuss the three aspects of the text more
specifically (the worlds behind, within, and before it), she affirms unequivocally the historical nature of the Gospels, and of the experience that
gave rise to themhence the appropriateness and necessity of bring historical questions to bear on the texts. The historical questions for many
Old Testament texts are related to those of the New Testament but vastly
more complex and elusive. We might wish that such critical procedures
were not necessary, insofar as they appear sometimes to overwhelm the
text and to lead us along various false pathways. That there have been
many shifts in the way history and historical matters have been understood
by readers in past millennia is not so daunting. Indeed, in our day the question is shifting from a concern to verify facticity or reliability of assertion
toward an engagement with a concern to understand how the text is a
38
medium of meaning (in some cases, of revelation). What gave rise in

history to the text was, besides events, imagination, experience, relationality and interpretation. Our challenge continues to be how to take advantage of those factors as we read, not simply strip down a narrative to naked
facts (1999: Chapter 4).
When she discusses the world of or within the biblical text (1999: Chapter 5), Schneiders draws out the implications of the linguistic nature of the
medium in which the experience is expressed, echoing much of what
Bakhtin has elaborated using different terminology. The text, she stresses,
is a witness to historical experience; but it is a particularly linguistic witness, a written one, and an artistic one. It must be approached as suits each
of those characteristics, with whatever methods are most suitable. Finally
concluding with the world before the text (1999: Chapter 6), Schneiders
touches on the question with which she began and which is the touchstone
for biblical spirituality: how a reader engages, interprets, appropriates a
text and is transformed by it; how that reader, as Bakhtin would say, coauthors a text both critically (some say suspiciously) and sympathetically
so that it mediates to her its basic truth claim, which changes her or him.
For Schneiders, those factors include her position as a female scholar of
New Testament and biblical spirituality in the Roman Catholic Church,
her feminist commitment to several decades of graduate students, to other
religious professionals, and specifically to Roman Catholic women religious struggling to effect greater justice and wholeness in the concentric
circles of culture in which they live. It is not so difficult to assess the
impact of her life situation when she reads, nor of the many ways in which
her life of interpretation takes shape from the text.
ii. Gerald O. West. Gerald O. West self-identifies as a socially engaged
biblical scholar, a role to which he graciously invites other practitioners in
the guild (1999a: introduction). His position as a white South African and
his clear record of activism in the apartheid and post-apartheid struggles of
his country make his social agenda quite visible. Though he writes also as
an interpreter of texts, his contribution here is to make some theoretical
interpretive issues clear. He does not use quite the same language as
Schneiders, though he does engage her work approvingly (West 1995:
Chapter 6). His situation may seem far-removed from 'spirituality' as the
word is commonly understood. But in fact, explicitly situated, clearly committed reading is what interests him as it does Schneiders. Each of them is
deeply concerned about transformative reading, a vital and engaged pro-
Introduction
39
cess that shapes reader, community, society, and the biblical text itself.
That their own specific situations differ is germane, and, in fact, helpful.
Each, I think, could agree that their ultimate value includes God and God's
projects of fuller justice for all. Together their work clarifies a good deal
of what is needed.
As Schneiders began her work with the recollection of the discrepancy
between her own deepest questions and the important but incomplete methods she was being taught, West engages foundationally the question of
with whom, and for what purposes, weany of us, but Bible professionals
in particularare reading. He identifies the struggle for justice in South
Africa as liberative for reading and reading as liberative for life; the biblical text, in one way or another, signifies powerfully in the South African
context. There is no stable text or reader, West urges. Reading is contextual, existential, though of course interlinked with much other reality; it is
far from arbitrary. West (like Bakhtin) argues against all reading that is
formalist, instead urging reading that is engaged, committed, and useful.
The situatedness of reader and text are crucial to identify (1995, Chapter 1,
pp. 45-46 in particular). He lists the temptations by which some wish to
escape engaged reading: One can take a more narrowly scientific stance,
or an aesthetic one, and of course a strictly academic one. It is possible by
a choice of reading position to make the text legitimate or sanction oppression as if from some privileged, God's-eye view; or a reader's stance can
render the text irrelevant for larger issues. West's alternative to all of these
is to ground reading in the reader's historical and socio-political circumstances. All interpreters must name their specific commitment and scrutinize the methodology critically (1995: Chapter 2).
West moves on to talk about the modes of reading with which we have
been working: the choice to access what circumstances lie behind and give
basic shape to a text, those which root within it, and those which are generated in front of or before the text (though he works with those categories
a bit differently than do some). He is concerned not simply to criticize the
process of reading but to evaluate also the effect of the reading. That is,
West assumes that reading is powerful in one way or another, as it is drawn
toward and shaped by one ultimate reality or another, a God of justice or a
divine warrant for injustice. The faults of classic historical-critical study
are clear enough and have been reviewed in many places. But West brings
to supplement the historical-critical project the insights of social scientific
criticism, which aims and purports to recover or retrieve the fuller circumstances of textual production. West and those he cites most extensively
40
(Itumeleng Mosala is his most articulate and radical co-reader in the 1995
book) feel strongly that it is crucial to recover these originating factors,
which are themselves likely to be determinative and still dangerous
patterns of oppression. For example, the structuring of the monarchy,
which is the usual cultural referent of the text of 1 Samuel, presumably
articulates from its very DNA certain processes that polarized society into
the powerful and the powerless. To read the story of the first king without
making those power-laden dynamics explicit would, in the mind of West
et al., be naively flawed.31
The faults of new literary-critical interpretation are also clear, especially
its tendency to decontextualize and universalize (which are not inevitable
but surely common); but West suggests that attention to literary matters
can be somewhat balanced out or supplemented by attending to the reader's contextualized situation. He demonstrates how two South African
readers (Mosala and Alan Boesak)themselves clearly, undeniably, committed to the struggle for justiceread the Cain and Abel story, one from
behind and one from within the text. West makes no secret of preferring
the reading that makes clear the originating circumstances and their own
likely contribution to injustice; thus uneven power relations are both a
cause and an effect of biblical writing and reading. Suspicion is called for,
and readers must do a similar thing with their own reading circumstances,
lest they simply and mindlessly go along with the text's surface assertions
and incorporate them simplistically with the grain of the text. West concludes this chapter (1995: 76-82) by returning to his taproot question: Who
is reading, from where, and why? Who was writing from where, and why?
The hope of reading from a neutral position, or of appropriating the text
benignly simply because one wishes to do so, West maintains, is out of the
question. His next chapter (1995: Chapter 4) moves on to make clear why
there is no universally valid norm for interpretation, surely not, as ought to
be obvious by now, the Anglo-European one that has been so dominant.
The voices of readers from other situations have made audible that they
31. I do not disagree with the point in theory; my problem comes in the detail with
which West's critics of choice reconstruct the circumstances of the early days of the
monarchy. They could be right, but I have less confidence in their detailed reconstruction than do they. I think we know relatively little about the early days of monarchy
and cannot reconstruct its detail from the texts we have, as though they offered simple
access to it. Nor do I share the degree of Mosala's confidence in reconstruction from
social scientific analogy, helpful though it can be in many ways. I also privilege the
originating circumstances less than West does, in favor of the imaginative.
Introduction
41
read diversely. Multiple and diverse readers have also made clear that no
one's reading is without interest; the question is, what interests? Whose
interests? Issues in West's South Africa may make the choice seem starker
than the ones Schneiders works from, but that apparent difference may be
a product of how each of them writes or perhaps of the sensitivity with
which either of them approach their work. But in any case the question of
justice for whom, transformation toward and in relation to what ultimate
values, makes apparently clear the issues of reading that West is proposing.
His most useful chapter, perhaps, is Chapter 5 of his 1995 study, where
he develops the analogy of legal hermeneutics in order to make clearer the
dynamics of reading the biblical text. Relying on familiar philosophy
(Gadamer) and drawing on the work of Linell Cady and Ronald Dworkin,
West separates out three possibilities when interpreters consider issues of
the present with an older and normative text in hand. Jurists, West develops in his analogy, may be described first to act in terms of conventionalism, which describes them reading the present quite narrowly in terms of
past precedents. In the case of 'conventionalism', the text norms the present clearly and extensively. A second alternative is called 'naturalism',
which maintains the normative quality of the textual precedents from the
past but construes them as broadly and favorably as possible in relation to
the needs of the present day. The salient feature here is the wider angle
from which the norming texts are construed and a greater recognition of
their capacity and urgency to redress the past. The text is not disvalued or
disregarded, but the jurists acknowledge frankly the deficits of the past
perhaps in some cases produced by the normative text or its circumstances
of productionand aim to redress the present without eliding the authority
of the text. A third option is 'instrumentalism', which throws over the
notion that the past texts and decisions should affect the present, especially
if their effect has been shown harmful in the past.
West (also in Chapter 5) then develops the implications of his analogy
in terms of the biblical text, using feminist work as his example. He situates various voices along the conventionalist/naturalist/instrumentalist continuum (e.g. V. Mollenkott, R.R. Ruether, E. Schiissler Fiorenza, M. Daly,
C. Christ) to wrestle with the question of whether, to what extent and how,
the biblical text can be a partner with healthy reading. It seems clear that its
harmful past must not be denied, disregarded, or absolutized (so conventionalism is not a viable choice). But to what extent can the Bible's own
self-critique be made useful to deconstruct its own negativity? In other
words, is naturalism a possibility, or is instrumentalism inevitable, once
42
one is aware of the tremendous liability of the biblical norms? West instances the various contemporary readers in terms of his threefold split,
showing who seems to take up what position and why. Mosala, who is
West's most radical reader, asks (with I think what West sees as a growing
number of others in South Africa): Why privilege the Bible at all in terms
of being a revelatory text? Its justice record is not good, at least if we are
examining the whole story carefully and critically. That is, if one reads
honestly, it becomes impossible to maintain the case for God's siding with
the poor and marginalized; it fails too many times. Why risk extending the
damage? The typology does not, obviously, eliminate basic disagreements
but it does locate their roots, at least to some extent and makes clear the
contribution of interested reading.
West, returning to his fundamental point about the basic life choices of
the reader, moves to stress the importance of reading that is committed to
the struggle for justice. If, as he argues, we substitute for 'meaning' the
expression 'interpretive interests', it becomes a bit clearer what is at stake.
He asks how such decisions about competing interests will be made: By
majority vote? By assuming some universal position of judgment and
labelling it as God's? By choosing a particular cause (justice?) I think his
point is that we need to assess as critically as possible what circumstances
of production were, with all their inscribed problems, and how formative
they are. And we need to be as alert and self-conscious as possible to our
own gain from the various moves we make in regard to the text. Another
way to get at that issue is to ask from where the text proffers its significance: From its originating referents? From a language which has, in one
way or another, attempted to distanciate from those factors so that it imaginatively inhabitsprojectsa new situation? From the efforts of a honest
community of readers to come to grips directly with some of the fundamental problematics of the text? From the situated lives and basic lifeorientations of such readers? It seems none of these can be sealed off and
disregarded, hence again the urgent need for critical biblical studies.
West moves, finally, to the question of the ordinary reader, meaning the
one not trained as a professional, and specifically for him, the marginalized of South Africa.32 He gives and then analyzes briefly several diverse
examples of how such indigenous readers construe the text. He suggests
that what his various exemplary readers have in common is their tendency
32. An excellent and finely nuanced discussion of the various over- and underlaps
between professionally trained biblical scholars and vernacular readers is set forth by
West 1999b.
Introduction
43
to read uncritically, thematically, selectively in terms of what they already

think. To be politicized is not the same as to read critically. West's conclusion is that, if the Bible is to become liberative, ordinary readers need to
get some trainingwith all that is risked by laying the Bible's 'power trip'
on the indigenous once again. West envisions for us, from his experience,
what he thinks is a healthy circle. It will include indigenous readers, whom
he without any derogation characterizes descriptively as pre-critical; and it
will include trained and committed professionals. He offers several helpful
nuances of individuals who might occupy either of these circles and moves
on to discuss what the socially engaged biblical scholar does and does
notmust notdo when reading with indigenous people; similarly and as
usefully, he identifies a number of ways in which pre-critical readers do
not share the professional perspective of those formally trained, though
they may appear to do sometimes as they speak the language of the guild.
His most important insight, for the present purposes, is that the interpretation of indigenous readers must with full respect be allowed its say and
that the role to be played by trained scholars is liable to be ancillary rather
than determinative.33 It is not unimportant, but needs to avoid being selfimportant and needs to submit itself to its conversation partners, which
will sometimes be academic and sometimes pre-critical. He concludes
with the urgency of educationnot simply a trickle-down model where
the experts bring the ordinary readers up to speedbut a much more
mutual and respectful process where all learn from others. His discussion
makes patent that the Bible has had its influence on the life of its South
African interpreters, and the interests of those lives have also constructed
the biblical texts mightily. The reading effect may appear less dramatic but
will be no less the case for other readers.
c. Implications of Transformative Reading for the Study of Saul
Given the challenges of engaged and transformative reading, particularly
as articulated by Schneiders and West from their varied and yet compatible
positions, what can I say about the manner of my reading the character of
Saul in 1 Samuel? The problem is complicated by the nature of the particular text at hand. Most practitioners of Christian spirituality focus, as
33. West 1998: 630-40, writes soberly and directly about the resistances to be met
by such readers, making clear that their voices have not gone silent merely accidentally. He draws attention approvingly to the work of Whitelam (e.g. 1996) which
critiques the guild of biblical studies for its contribution to the situation of violence and
injustice which characterizes Israel and Palestine presently.
44
does Schneiders, upon New Testament texts. Undeveloped in her writing

and somewhat underaddressed in West's is the question of how Christian
biblical spirituality appropriates Old Testament texts. Of particular
relevance to me is how a committed practitioner of Christianity finds the
reading of Old Testament texts transformativethat is, giving access to
religious experience in a way that assists the integration of the reader or
reading community toward what is perceived to be of ultimate value. To
go reductionistically Christocentric, as the long tradition of Old Testament
studies has tended to do over time, is not respectful of the fulness of the
narratives we have, granted to read the Old Testament as a veiled sketch of
the messiah to come has been a prominent reading strategy over hundreds
of years of interpretation; in any case, Saul does not lend himself well to
that project. So how does a serious scholar, deeply engaged in the hermeneutics of reading fully and constructively, seeing such practices as foundational for the growth and stimulation of the religious imagination, work
out the dynamics with other committed readers? As Schneiders and West
have instructed, where do I start as I read Saul? What are my particular
interests, the cues to meaning in which I am most interested?
Bakhtin's broad theory, inclusive of language and culture, holding in
relation both the deeply and classically sacral and the prosaically secular,
offers useful footing. Bakhtin's lifework, especially as presented by Ruth
Coates, who is one of the relatively few Bakhtin scholars interested in the
specifically religious dimensions of his writing, makes a major contribution to the problem of Christians and the Old Testament. She summarizes
the whole trajectory of Bakhtin's work, in terms of this hermeneutical
issue. In fact, most of the diverse sets of people drawing on Bakhtin currently are disinterested in or uncomfortable with the religious aspects and
dispute, ignore or genuinely miss them; his theories of authoring are typically discussed with minimal reference to religious influence upon them. It
is the claim of Coates that biblical categories are not simply illustrative of
Bakhtin's ideas, not merely good places to 'apply' them; rather, it is biblical narrative that fundamentally structures Bakhtin's understanding of
the processes involved in authoring. She offers her material in consistent
categories and shows how Bakhtin's thought both developed over time,
ran into snags and shifted, and also how it also deepened and remained
consistent throughout his long career as a writer, reader and thinker. I will
summarize here in overview the key points, omitting the chronological
nuances that are well articulated in Coates. (Coates sums up Bakhtin's
early thought on these topics in Chapter 3 of her 1998 study, returning to
Introduction
45
them systematically in Chapter 8 to demonstrate the consistence of his

views; the intervening chapters offer the variations.)
Bakhtin posits a creator God, fundamentally transcendent (or exotopic)
to creatures, existing on a separate plane, but intensely involved with them.
God's creating or authoring involves a divine going forth to bring something to exist and then sustaining it in being. As Bakhtin describes this
moment, there is a sense of deliberation and effort, even struggle involved
as aesthetic significance is bestowed upon the creature. The creature, our
human selves in this case, is authored with a need for some aspect of self to
be given ('soul'a word used with particular technical valence by Bakhtin), since we are unable to provide for ourselves all that makes us existent; we inevitably interdepend. And, compatibly with the biblical narrative
of creation in the early chapters of Genesis (and rampant elsewhere), a
breach becomes evident, not simply between the creator and the creatures
but among creatures as well. Bakhtin prefers words like 'split', 'fragmentation', 'separation' to describe the experience that is sometimes referred
to as 'the fall' by Christian writers. At the heart of it and of the primordial
narrative of it in Gen. 2-3 is human pride and the futile arrogance of selfsufficiency.
In order to struggle against the effects or experience of this isolation, we
creatures need something bestowed from outside of ourselves, need value
given, aesthetic justification. Our thirst and capacity for this value never
dries up but orients us toward the future. Humans may strive toward meaning in our lives, but none of us can accomplish it totally on our own. It
comes to us unearned and at least partially from the outside. Bakhtin has a
string of words for this moment, borrowed from biblical language: 'redemption', 'atonement', 'salvation', 'grace'. For Bakhtin, the clearest moment to
see this moment in the authoring dynamic is in the life of Jesus. His selfunderstanding, his orientation toward God, his manner of relatedness to
others are all paradigmatic for Bakhtin. Also fundamental is the self-giving
and self-asserting character of this act, which is grounded in love.
But here is where I would stress carefullynot so much with Bakhtin or
Coatesthat though the 'Christie moment' is unique and key, it is not
wholly without precedent, at least biblically speaking.34 In my experience,
two Christian miscues with the Hebrew Bible are common. Either everything that can be made to anticipate Christian elements is pressed into that
service, with other values distorted or ignored; or else the particular mani-
34. Coates 1998: 98, makes a similar point.
46
festation of God's care for humans in the incarnation is made so unique

that all earlier efforts of God to interact with humansGod's carefully instructive torah, ubiquitous hokmah or resourceful sophia, and the comforting, abiding presence ofshekinahare disregarded or overlooked. So
what Christians celebrate as the incarnation of God's logos in Jesus is part
of a pattern of how God is described to deal with human beings in the
Bible. Let me be clear. For Christians, the incarnation of divine being into
a particular Jewish male of the first century is utterly privileged; but the
distinctive materializing and historicizing of 'the ultimate Other' in Jesus
is not so wholly unprecedented as Christians sometimes suppose. The feminist theology of Elizabeth Johnson on Sophia-spirit is an excellent antidote
to such myopia (Johnson 1996: Chapters 5, 7). This caveat also implies
that though the life of Jesus is a thoroughly historical event and needs to
be treated as such, the anthropological and theological processes under
consideration here are not best seen as happening in sequential, linear
time: so not first creation, then fall, then redemption, and so forth. Bakhtin
understands the processes and situations to be ongoing simultaneously.
In any case, the gift given, the kenotic authoring evidenced by the incarnated logos, Bakhtin stresses, is benign rather than heavily judgmental,
characterized by graciousness, respect, mercy, love. And it engenders in
ourselves, as recipients, both a turn from isolation and a move toward
God: faith, a joy in healthful interdependence with others, love, prayer,
repentanceall of which are transformative over time, that is, deepen our
ability to live interdependently. As Bakhtin's thought develops over the
decades, the relation of creator to (human) creature shifts and widens, with
the creation becoming less managed from the outside and more mutual and
respectful.35 The creature is less passive and the relationship between God
and humans more dialogical (polyphonic) and more socially conceived.
One can seeand Coates explicateshow these ideas contend for Bakhtin as he works with the tremendous problems of authorship that are entailed in his understanding. But though Coates talks about 'the fate' of the
religious bases for his theory, she also maintains that the writings from the
last decade of Bakhtin's life show the key insights to have survived and
deepened from his early working out of them. The incarnation, which
35. The need for better language about how God 'is' with creation is a topic with
which others besides Bakhtin have struggled in recent decades. His move toward
greater creaturely freedom and to allow a greater 'divine weakness' is compatible with
a good deal of recent theology and theological anthropology. See Haught 2000:
Chapter 5, for a good discussion.
Introduction
47
becomes Bakhtin's preferred mode of talking about authoring a hero as the

author (and Author) go more hidden and less discernible, more mutual and
less controlling, shows the possibility of authentic embodiment of what
otherwise remains 'given', offering an antidote to the split. That is, the
specificity of the incarnation of God's being in the human figure of Jesus
and his mode of dealing with his 'others' is easier to see than the analogous processes presumably going on with God and others. So with Bakhtin's categories sketched, and with their deep compatibility with biblical
language asserted, it is time to move to the biblical text.36
I suggest here, a guess I believe implicit in Coates's work, the likely
process: Bakhtin did not read the Bible and extract theology and then replicate it into theory. Rather, from his experience and reflection, his vast
erudition and familiarity with literature and the chronic problems of philosophywith all of that reverberating endlessly over time in his richly
creative lifehe saw that certain biblical texts discuss the most elemental
human concerns: authoring, alterity, polyphony, heteroglossiaall of which
can be subsumed as aspects of the dialogic. Coates lists these elements or
motifs (with slight variation) as creation, fall, incarnation, salvific deed,
response.37 They underpin what Bakhtin thinks about answerable human
living, which includes aesthetic and ethical doings. My phrasing, which is
selected to lay the groundwork for Bakhtin's theory of literary authoring
and to set up consideration of its various components, particularly for biblical texts, is a streamlined but I believe faithful version of Coates' longer
summary. The point I am after is the bridge that shows the two testaments
linked in ways not always appreciated. The summary also shows the
agenda common behind, within, and before the text, without minimizing
the differences of emphasis that clearly pertain. My basic assumptionthe
God in relation with whom I am most basically orienting my energies
has certain patterns of engagement which can be discerned usefully in
God's self-disclosure to human beings.
It remains, finally, to converge not only the points developed in this last
section on biblical spirituality but those offered in terms of Bakhtin's theory and in regard to the DH. In my reading of 1 Samuel I will take seriously
36. Coates 1998: 14, with many others observes that Bakhtin drew little on 'Holy
Writ' for the development and illustration of his theories and insights. She notes as
well, however, that he may have undervalued biblical narrative. See Green 2000:
Chapters 1-2 for a much fuller treatment of the topic.
37. Bakhtin also drew upon the story of the Tower of Babel, with its heterolanguage contending, some centripetally and some centrifugally (Coates 1998: 110).
48
a historical context, granted one that is hypothetical but not necessarily

unreal. The experience underlying the narrative of the first king is Israel's
bitter experience of all kings. The story of monarchy embeds power inequities of various sorts. These originating referents are powerful and will
ground fundamentally, if not always explicitly, the reading I do of Saul as
the primal king, the epitome of all kings. As already suggested and to be
developed, there is a strong negative ideological valence on the royal character, which opens the possibility of other leadership possibilities for the
post-exilic Israel. Bakhtin's work steadfastly if somewhat abstractly calls
attention to the general importance of the historical-cultural referents of its
narrative and to the theological patterning of the biblical text in particular,
though its primary contribution is at the level of language nuance. Bakhtin
will help with the laying bare of the literary brilliance which shapes the
drawing of Saul. What becomes clear in the features of the man is not simply a political cipher but a recognizable human being. The huge contribution of biblical studies to both of these interpretive facets will be made
clear as my interpretation project develops. But there is the value-added
dimension of biblical spirituality.
I will explore the character of Saul existentially, primarily his massive
failure of relationality: its institutional dimension, to be sure, but also its
very personal one. Those realms are thoroughly mixed, as are the aspects
of the human and divine where Saul's flaws become so visible. As I will
develop at the proper moment, as the king's job description begins to
coalesce and precipitate within this story, the primary responsibility for the
king is to guard the relationship between God and people. Saul fails at that
task, at each end of it, so to speakhe does poorly with people and worse
with God. Hence his failure is made congenital and chronic rather than
accidental and occasional. The monarchy is not a trustworthy guardian of
the relatedness between people and God, and the figure Saul shows the
problem clearly. This primal failure grounds many other problems: the
king(s) will not manage worship well, nor territorial security, nor the
socio-economic needs of a small people living surrounded by empires.
Whatever we may make of the DH view of centralized, YHWH-alone
worship, the monarchy does not guard it well. Under kings the territorial
integrity of the people, long in hock, eventually shrinks to a pocket-handkerchief of land for those not in exile. And the exigencies of royal rule
exacerbate, if we credit the words of the prophets, the rift between those
able to provide for their families and those who become increasingly
unable to do so. The rhetoric of ideal or desirable relationship aside
Introduction
49
beautifully though it is as articulated in Deuteronomythe picture of

monarchic Israel features massive breaches between God and people, tribe
and tribe, women and men, wealthy and poor, Israelite and foreign other.
These rifts are discernible in DH, and though I will not comment much
upon them when discussing Saul, it is not a matter of denying them but of
assuming them. Saul's lack of ability to 'do' relationships is represented,
construed, as the taproot of all of the sundered relationalities.
The more domestic side of Saul's character can be seen in his struggles
with Samuel and with David; on those the DH spends the greatest time and
energy. But the briefer moments are no less painful: Saul's failed relationship with his daughter Michal, the widening rift between himself and his
son Jonathan, the absence of subjectivity he grants his elder daughter
Merab, and the large mystery of his wife Ahinoam, mentioned only as a
name. Saul falls out of relationship with his men, with the people. In every
case, his 'others' are pushed away, fall aside. But the most foundational
relationship that goes awry is his capacity to deal withand be dealt
withby God. God is a special case in the study of Saul's struggle to be a
self. The Bible has many ways to talk about this aspect of humanity, and it
is of particular interest to me. My training and life work for some 25 years
has been in biblical studies. For more than twice that span, though, I have
been caught up in the mysterious dynamics of how human beings all
struggle to make tangible our relatedness with God. In the past five years
or so, I have widened my study, teaching and writing to include biblical
spirituality in my biblical studies, at a time when biblical studies is opening toward interdisciplinarity and interested readings. My social commitments have been less in feminism, socio-economic justice, and ecology
than in the huge field of nonviolence, with its intense interest in the many
ways in which we relate with others. Indeed, the story of Saul is perhaps
better suited to the questions of nonviolence than to issues of gender, economics, or ecology. So my reading of Saul's relationship with God is part
of my own larger quest for generous interactions with God and neighbor.
God, for Saul, is not so much absent as silent, non-relational, disconnected, aloof, permissive. At one point, in a moment of contention between
himself and Samuel, Saul will refer to the deity as 'your God', a revealing
'slip'. Saul resembles little the better-known biblical characters who painfully relate with God: Saul's way is not that of Job or Jeremiah, let alone
Moses, David, Elijah, or Isaiah. All of those characters have their moments
of difficulty, but none of them appears to fall out of relationship with God.
We may think of Ruth whose experience of God seems minimal at the
50
start but gains in confidence as the story proceeds. Esther may seem to live
much of her life without reference to God, but whether she speaks of help
from another quarter or addresses God more directly (in the LXX text),
there is something for her to draw upon. A character like Judah in the long
story of Jacob's sons (Gen. 37-50) speaks little of God, but under careful
scrutiny the narrative shows the possibility of Judah's developing sense of
God's working in the lives of the family. Saul is like none of these. It is no
surprise, perhaps, to see that someone whose capacity to relate with people
is as poor as is the king's has no resources for being with God.
It is this very picture that the text opens up for us to shape by our coauthorial reading. The story of Saul and God develops the other end of the
relationship spectrum from, for example, many psalm texts which show
intensive relatedness between human beings and God. At best, it is not
easy or simple to articulate a life shared between creator and creature, to
talk about how God is, in any tangible sense, 'with us'. For many, the God
of the Old Testament is cruel, hostile, violent, erraticor at least, unreliable and unresponsive, unfair. Saul's characterization becomes a site where
these perceptions can be explored and tested, faced, perhaps reworked.
The story holds out possibilities for many of our contemporaries who live
with a covert despair about God, who find the apparent inactivity of God
scandalous and shameful in some aspect; we might talk about a hermeneutics of hunger, scarcely acknowledged. Insofar as many yearn for a relationship with God that works believably, as I myself do, and as for many
(and for me) the Bible remains a privileged place to work at such a
relationship, that is part of my project here. As Bakhtin has pointed out,
utterances require two partners. The God of the Judeo-Christian Scriptures
does not send telegrams which can be unsealed by whoever picks one up.
The utterances of God, as is true of most communication that makes significant relationships, ask from us co-responsibility and co-shaping. There is
no 'the message'. If we bring to this narrative our own existential questions about God's ways of being part of our lives, the story of Saul offers
space for their negotiation. If the biblical text mediates, at least in the construction of certain readers, God's self-disclosure, and if Bakhtin's notion
of utterance is helpful herethat God cannot shape an utterance with
someone unable or unwilling to participatethen the question is: How
shall we come to the utterance-shaping project which is a lifework of
Christians? To what extentand howis our experience sufficiently condign with the text that we can pick up fruitfully on what is made available
there? If archeologists become intrigued with material problems, textual
Introduction
51
critics with another set, lovers of language and literature with yet a different group, what also (not rather) engages those for whom the religious
experience of divine self-disclosure and the struggles of others like us to
participate is a specialty? As West indicates shrewdly, the root of the crisis
of the biblical text is not so much that of authority. The symbolic order of
the narrative works only insofar as it has the capacity to orient life in a
way that strikes its participants as meaningful, truthful, and sustaining.
What I would like to draw from my reading of Saul is another portrait of
Old Testament Godin fact a wall in the gallery of the Bible's many
ways to envision or draw God with wordsthat explores the richness of
that silence a bit better.
If I, or you with me, read the story of Saul's self struggling with his
various others, and interpret it alert to our own issues of self and others
particularly those patterns which send us awry, it can disclose important
insight to us. It is not simply a matter of a negative contrast, Saul's depiction letting us see how vastly he differs from our own experience. As Saul
flails in the language we have in the text, we may recognize what is familiar if distasteful, see its relevance if ungladly. It is possible to co-author
Saul's weaknesses from such a stance, to approach him with Bakhtin's
sympathetic co-experience, to allow all of the 'Saul language' to disclose
what we know. But since it is an other we are reading and not simply our
self, we may, at least as Bakhtin sees it, appropriate what his character has
shown us within the space that is distinctively our own. We can take in
with honesty what Saul makes visible, appropriate it imaginatively but
with some outsidedness on Saul, hence rendering it useable by us for our
own insight. If, or insofar as, we know and acknowledge our neediness in
the area that Saul makes visible for us, have his experience, so to speak,
but receive it in our own lives, the possibility is present for an increase in
self-knowledge, the possibility of change and transformation over time.
Does Saul thirst for God? He does not register it directly, but is there
anyone who does not, whether such a yearning be conscious and acknowledged or not? As Saul, with others, gropes toward God, tries to know,
registers rebuff, there is opportunity for us to explore these dynamics,
drawn as they are with very fine pencils. Saul wants, eventually, to be king
so badly that he gives up everything elsedestroys his lifeto secure his
position, while of course losing it by the very process. Is there something
here for us to learn, particularly as we live surrounded and bombarded by
so many things that urge us to want them in just this way? How does God
respond, God who at least in the biblical worldview, is shown eager,
52
desperate, even frantic for us, who appears to long to be the other that satisfies our needs? How is God shown in these passages filled with rejection,
disappointment, longing? It is the relational interstices that I hope to make
visible in my reading of Saul. My appropriation of this text, my construction of the Saul I will find here, is good for my health, can bring me insight
into the nooks and crannies of all my relationshipssmall to large, important to insignificant, familiar to occasional, urgent to trivial. What I will
read is Saul's experiences: the complexities and contradictions of those
asking him to be king; the ambiguities and insecurities of his responses;
his incapacities to reflect and to be answerable; his tendency to blame and
to alibi; the persistence with which he shuts down relationships and options
which he needs desperately; his frantic Sailings as he approaches the end
of his reign and his life. And yet, as Elie Wiesel is wont to say, and yet...
Saul dies somewhat at odds with the way he lived.
All who teach biblical studies search intermittently, if not constantly, for
analogies that will be helpful to position for students the complexities
under consideration here and at some level every time the Bible is engaged.
It has for some time now been useful to talk about the factors behind,
within, and before the text, since in a clear way the long and complex story
of how the Bible has been read, can be made clear by means of these categories. But as most will have discoveredespecially clear when employing feminist methodologiesthe model breaks down. Feminist study is by
definition always readerly, interested, ideological, and it merges these interests with other projects which may be historical or literaryor both,
thus disarranging the neat model. Let me offer another analogy here.
Twice, in each case for some years at a stretch, I lived in a large old (institutional) house built in the late 1800s. I could describe it, but I suspect you
can imagine it well enough from your own such experiences, whatever
they are. When I was living there, I was never unaffected by the huge range
of historical aspects to the house: its electricity and plumbing (even if no
longer quite as installed in 1890 still not very modern!). That the house
was built to function both as a convent for religious sisters and as a boarding school continued to exert an effect, for example, when I lived in the
old student alcoves and brushed my teeth (with others) at a row of small
sinks. All, or many, of the facets of the history of the house could be studied. Part of the story is inspiringhow the women of the past triumphed
over daunting circumstances. But some of the past would be embarrassing,
retrospectively. For example, the cooking for the whole community was
done by a large extended family of Chinese; their living situationand
Introduction
53
working conditionswere far more primitive than that of the students and
the sisters. To investigate the whole socio-cultural realm of the building
where the Chinese family lived and workedand ruled in their own
waywould be to enter into the whole question of race relations, of class,
and of gender, and even of caste within the extended Asian family group
itself. I know you will recognize here the whole 'behind-the-texf realm.
But it was possible to live in a house without consciously, or continuously, adverting to all those matters. They continued to testify, but muted
if one was not specially attuned. The urgency and relevance of the factors
of the past was not always received at full pitch. Those who came new to
the house did not know as much of its past as those who had lived there
for many years. The past had its effect, but in complex and uneven ways. I
learned, with many others, how to cope with what was functional in 'my'
present; much of the past was lost on me. The plumbing could be induced
to work much of the time, with certain precautions. Old spaces no longer
needed for boarding students found many new uses. It was inconvenient or
perhaps time-consuming to have to negotiate three flights of stairs several
times a day, but some could count it as exercise; some, of course, could
not live there if they could not readily 'do stairs'. But my point is, one
could in fact live within the present of the house without constantly inquiring about the past. To know some of the past was great; to know about it
in too much detail was, perhaps, paralyzing. Since the house was located
in earthquake country it was important to know how to turn off the gas if
an earthquake struck; it was not necessary to know the detail on how and
why the gas mains had been positioned as they had. One other facet of this
part of my analogy deserves mention: I recall vividly standing one afternoon in front of the huge building, waiting to meet someone. A man
whizzed up the circular drive in a convertible sportscar, paused, craned his
neck at the house for a few minutes, and then addressed me disdainfully.
'What is this?', he asked. I began to explain briefly, but he interrupted: all
this space for a few people, a waste, a scandal, and so forth. I was stung by
the unfairness of his rapid assessment, cut off as it was from knowing
anything about the hundreds of people the building had sheltered over
time, ignorant as I assessed him to be about the sincere efforts of many to
come to grips honestly with the sustainable life the building might still
have. (It burned down a few years later.) You will, no doubt, recognize
here the world within the textbut see as well how scrambled it is with
the past, depending on who is reading.
But a major preoccupation for those of us of living in that big, old,
wonderful and constraining house was the question of how to 'have a life'
54
there, how a group of 40 no longer running a boarding school could in fact

make livable a space designed for 200. The past and present of the house
constrained the life 'in front of the text' in no small way. Manytoo
manydiscussions ensued about how to build cosy and welcoming community space in vast rooms with 20-foot ceilings, how to have relaxed
meals when the institutional kitchen was located at some remove from any
small dining space, how to provide some bathroom privacy into spaces
where several sinks or toilet cubicles were efficiently lined up. One could
claim that the past of the building ought not, need not, constrain the present or the future. But it did, in varied and sometimes subtle ways. But it
held simultaneously many more possibilities. So, it seems to me, that the
choices to be made by those of us living there rose primarily not from
the past or the immediate present but from our facing forward. What was
the ongoing situation of the inhabitants, our somewhat diverse but presumably compatible aims and goals, our needs and desires as articulated
and commonly condoned (or not), in fact, the basic ways in which we
were orienting our lives? Such a situation was, to some extent, and surely
can be an exercise in imagination in the most realistic sense of the term.
But it is not simply about three worlds; it is conjoined in the persons, the
subjects, currently participating in living in such a house, in reading such a
text. It was a matter of interests, not always compatible, of orientations,
not always explicit, but always jostling in one way or another.
Reading is, in a certain way, like living in a house, with more dimensions clamoring for our attention than we can ever respond to satisfactorily. We will choose, conscious or not, well or badly. If there is asbestos
in our dwelling, ignoring it will not mute its harm. On the other hand, if
the space is rich in possibilities, to move out because of some toxic elements is short-sighted. The aims, situation, orientation as well as skills and
professional interests of all of us will determine in large measure how we
spend our time. We may or may not like what each other choose to do.
The value of reading with diverse others, with appropriately critical others
is clear; but we also need to dwell with some who share our interests and
support them. I will do my reading as alert to all the dimensions as I can
be, while clearly privileging language over history and personal over
social. There is plenty of space for other choices.
Chapter 1
'A DIFFERENT CLAY': GENRE CONSIDERATIONS AND 1 SAMUEL 1-3
What does having children or not have to do with the enterprise that
concerns the entire book of 1 Samuel, the establishment of kingship in
Israel?... 'The having of sons' is the image chosen by the author to convey
the complicated story of how Israel comes to have kings...
Robert Polzin (1989: 24-25)
A masal elicits not just a 'message' (a nimshal, a thing analogized) but a
broader and more nuanced set of implications, connotations, socially
responsible conclusions, and encouragements to private speculationall
through the medium of words and verbal figures.
Joel Rosenberg (1986: 32-33)
1. Point of Entry
King Saul's is an odd story and he an anomalous hero in many ways, by
most criteria. As the likelihood decreases that he is a historical figure
whose narrative strews access to origins of Israel or to monarchy, and as
biblical scholarship entertains more readily than previously various suppositions about authorial intent and reading strategies, I propose Saul as a
riddle. That is, I will suggest a succinct and incomplete case for reading
the Saul narrative (1 Sam. 1-31, in fact into 2 Sam. 1) and specifically the
story of the king himself (starting more overtly at ch. 9) in terms of a
genre that is neither primarily historiographical nor fully disconnected
from such concerns. The genre I have in mind shares general features of
the category masal, and the particular 'hugged'1enigma to be told
1. I have coined a word for the particular concept I have in mind. It comes from
the Hebrew root ngd, which suggests most generally that which is conspicuous and
more particularly the verbal possibilities of telling, making known, expounding, from
which I have derived a hophal infinitive absolute to suggest something which is to be
made known (both causative and passive). The basic ngd root also includes the noun
nagid, usually translated as one designated for leadership, and hence coming into use
56
unfolds by its intricacies Saul's self as comprising the story of Israel's

experience with monarchy propounded for an exilic community. The case
for genre will be succinct, necessarily, since the abstraction of it is far
from my main interest; and it will be incomplete, since the topic of how
ancient biblical narrative works its meanings as we read is huge and
burgeoning. I am more interested in addressing my point throughout the
story than in arguing for it preliminarily and in concept only. But a start
must be made. Mikhail Bakhtin has offered some provocative though
rather abstract insights about genre, which can be supplemented by other
ancient and contemporary theory; and Robert Polzin (drawing in many
ways on Bakhtin's work) has made a specific proposal regarding the genre
of the first three chapters of 1 Samuel.2 This present chapter will therefore
undertake two tasks: first, after considering Bakhtin's notion of genre as
well as some biblical scholarship on masal, I will make my case for Saul's
story as a riddle of kingship, leaving room to show in due course that the
riddle genre does not diminish Saul's capacity to be a wonderfully drawn
human being as well. And then, second, drawing on Bakhtin's notion of
utterance, I will show how the discourse of characters in 1 Sam. 1-3 begins
to function as a specific type of masal, a hugged.
2. Bakhtin on Genre
Bakhtin is more explicit about genre than about dialogism, though concise
definitions still need to be cobbled from what he explains loosely. Bakhtin's most helpful work on genre comes in two essays, appearing now as
part of the Dialogic Imagination.3' His writing in these pieces is angled to
for both Saul and David. My coined word will remind us that the two heroes function
as riddles as well as king-designates. See BDB: 616-18.
2. Polzin 1989: 213-15, gathers together a point developed throughout his book
about the capacity of Saul to epitomize monarchy in general; his Chapters 1-2 (pp. 1879) develop ways in which the opening chapters of 1 Samuel function as parables of
monarchy.
3. Bakhtin (with Medvedev) seems to have reflected upon genre from the 1920s
(see 1978, III: 109-59), into the 1930s (as he wrote the essays included in The Dialogic
Imagination), surely as he worked with the Dostoevsky novels (so 1984: 101-80) and
most directly in his latest collected writings (1986a), an essay Holquist (introducing
that work, p. xv) dated to 1952-53. His material on a given topic is always tangled
with many other points, making efficient documentation impossible. The essays 198 la
('Epic and Novel)', 1981b ('From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse'), and 1981d
('Discourse in the Novel') explore intermittently certain features and functions of
1. 'A Different Clay'
57
assert the sharp and fundamental difference between the novel and
virtually all other genres which preceded it, hence his concluding remark
that the novel is of 'a different clay'.4 Genre is most fundamentally for
him a way of thinking or envisioning, a strategy for crafting an utterance,
including the social baggage an utterance bears.5 Genres organize our
thought and speech somewhat as grammar does, provide some stability for
utterances, whether those that inhabit speech or literature. Bakhtin observes, 'Each separate utterance is individual, of course, but each sphere in
which language is used develops its own relatively stable types of these
utterances. These we may call speech genres' (1986a: 60 [emphasis original]; see also 1978:130-31). A genre draws part of its orientation from the
specific circumstances of the one using it and responds specifically as well
to the situation of the hearer or reader. '[T]he genre constitutes the public
forum that an utterance must assume in order to be comprehensible',
summarizes Thomas Kent (1998: 41-42).
We may also understand what Bakhtin is suggesting by noting what he
says genres are not. Genre is not to be confused with form, or with a
language with examples from the modern novel. The 1986a essay ('Speech Genres')
shows basic continuity with earlier positions and in fact makes a good summary of the
topic. The reader will appreciate that the publication dates of Bakhtin's writings give
no hint as to the production of the works chronologically.
4. Bakhtin concludes (198la: 39): 'From the very beginning, then, the novel was
made of a different clay than the already completed genres; it is a different breed, and
with it and in it is born the future of all literature. Once it came into being, it could
never be merely one genre among others, and it could not erect rules for interrelating
with others in peaceful and harmonious co-existence. In the presence of the novel, all
other genres somehow have a different resonance.' Since he actually backs off a bit
from the notion that the novel is so utterly unlinked with other genres and works with
the concept of 'novelish' narratives, it seems legitimate to resist his own tendency to
dichotomize so absolutely between the novel and every other genre and rather to
inquire into how his main insights about novel-linked genres may be useful for literature that he does not discuss. It is a fundamental strategy of mine to allow Bakhtin's
most creative and seminal ideas to range boldly within literature where he never
dreamed of entering, notably biblical texts.
5. See Kent 1998:41 -42, for an extended explanation of how genres are strategies
for hermeneutic guessing. As we interact with other speakers, part of what we do
almost without thinking is to guess into what genre our interlocutors have cast their
communication. An example (mine, not Kent's or Bakhtin's): we can all understand
what happens when a child is not yet sufficiently adept to understand that some utterance is a joke. That is a genre error. Kent develops his points largely from Bakhtin's
1986a essay, developing more than did Bakhtin the extra-verbal contexts.
58
collection of devices. That is, scrutiny and classification of morphological

elements has little to do with genres and is a fundamentally misleading
way to approach the topic. Genres, unlike forms, are not usefully abstractable, transcribable, or listable; nor do they conform readily to the standard
classifications of linguistics (e.g. the sentence). They are not containers
into which artists pour what they have already figured out. Genre is not a
set of tenets but rather a form-shaping ideology '.. .a specific kind of creative activity embodying a specific sense of experience' (Bakhtin, 1986a:
61; Morson and Emerson 1990: 283-84). Bakhtin wrote about genre from
the 1920s at least into the 1950s, and his thought seems more shaped from
his consideration of his favorite genre of novel (and its antecedents) than
from more disembodied and decontextualized rumination about the concept. That is, Bakhtin talks a good deal about the specific genres of Western literature and casts other parts of his conversation polemically in
terms of Russian literary criticism rather than discussing the concept of
genre more generally. Morson maintains that genres are Bakhtin's response
to simplistic, reductive, prepackaged formalist thinking.
What else do genres do? They fixcrystallize or embedthe worldview
of a particular historical moment or epoch.6 They thus carry the social
experience of an era, some particular insight about what it is to be human.
Genres provide for the weaving together or layering in of some of the other
aspects of an utterance we may notice: its individual style, the speaker's/
writer's plan, the syntax required or chosen for expression, the thematic
interest. Genres also refract or help produce an era as well as reflecting it.
Bakhtin wrote, 'A speech genre is not a form of language, but a typical
form of utterance; as such the genre also includes a certain typical kind of
expression that inheres in it. In the genre the word acquires a particular
typical expression'; that is, epochs fix authoritative tone-setting utterances
into genres which become that era's masters of thought.7 Genres reflect
actual cultural factors. At least for Bakhtin, the polyphonic novel is literally unthinkable prior to the modern period, granted some of its genetic
material goes back to Plato's dialogues (1984: Chapter 4). Kent clarifies
another crucial aspect of genre when he notes that in Bakhtin's theory (and
in that of other contemporary practitioners), genre is not exclusively production-driven but calls for negotiation by receivers (1998: 43-45).
6. Clark and Holquist (1984: 275-77) show the 'Janus face' of genre and chronotope in their Chapter 13, asserting (p. 287) that chronotope is the most determining
factor of genre.
7. Bakhtin explores these several points in 1986a: 63-88 (87).
59
Bakhtin offers a prosaic explanation of this phenomenon on the more

individual level as well. As speakers of our own first language, we do not
first learn to talk and then adopt the most apt genres; rather, the process of
learning our language coincides with our struggling to negotiate genres
that are already functioning around us, while we learn by trial and error
how to speak in them. As we use genres, they enter our experience and
consciousness and reside there (Bakhtin 1986a: 78). It is not difficult for
us to recall genres that were once very uncomfortable and seemed unsuited
to us but in which we now live and move comfortably and even very
creatively. Don Bialostosky offers a montaged comment that may be helpful for understanding literary genre:
To account for how we do grasp the themes of utterances in life or in literature, Bakhtin posits speech genres and our capacity to invent and recreate
them... We come to any work of literature already in full possession of 'a
series of inner genres for seeing and conceptualizing reality', with a
repertoire of familiar themes. We as individuals may be 'richer or poorer in
genres, depending on [our] ideological environment'. But literature itself
'occupies an important place in this ideological environment' and its genres
can 'enrich our inner speech with new devices for the awareness and
conceptualization of reality', for the recreation and discovery of the themes
of utterances.8
Genres are not interchangeable; some thinking works well in one genre but
not in another. I think of the requirements for authoring a polyphonic hero
(who remains as free of authorial control as is possible) which would be at
odds with a genre like the contemporary mystery, which needs its plot to
work out and loose ends to be accounted for. So genres organize speech
and speakers (and for Bakhtin there is no fundamental difference between
spoken and written genres, though some speech is more suited to one of
those modes than to the other). Genres see and remember for us, Bakhtin
asserts, and they carry us to places in which we have little or no personal
recollection of having been before. For Bakhtin, the genre of the novel
was most ideally suited to accomplish consciousness. But perhaps that is
the task that all genres share, each in its own way. Bakhtin's own cryptic
utterance on the topic begins to make more sense: 'Genre appraises reality
and reality clarifies genre' (1978: 136).
8. Bialostosky 1997: 111, quoting from Bakhtin (with Medvedev) 1978: 134.
Bialostosky's article is useful in its capacity to interrelate dialogism, utterance, and
genre by convoking, convening, and participating in a symposium to read Wordsworth's sonnet 'Composed upon Westminster Bridge'.
60
A useful way for me to think about genres analogically is to recall the

opening of an old PBS (Public Broadcasting Service) program on Leonardo
daVinci, where the young apprentice artist was engaged in the task of casting a bronze horse in the workshop of his master. The program suggested,
or so I recall, that any serious Italian Renaissance artist needed to learn
how to 'think out', that is, to know well enough how to create successfully, a horse in molten metal. The Lascaux artists have done horses, as
did the Greeks, as do some moderns, for example, George Stubbs and
Deborah Butterfield. So the theme is the horse, but the way in which the
era and its artists 'do' a horse is particular in just about every way.9 How
is one to draw and color a horse on a dark and irregular cave wall, to bring
an equine forth partially from a block of marble to form a frieze, to solve
the many problems of casting a horse in metal, to produce paintings of
horses that would appeal to the landed gentry who loved to hunt seated
upon them; how to compose a recognizable horse from oddly shaped
blocks of wood? Certain problems are common but some are distinct.
Once our eye is even minimally trained, we, reading these horses, can
begin to get a sense of the set of issues with which Leonardo would have
to contend (e.g. the suggestion of muscle straining under hide or the sense
of movement so at odds with inert metal). Some would be new to the
epoch, for example, Stubbs' interest in portraying horses' fright, or Butterfield's constraint of dealing with shapes that are not really condign with
horseish contours. Bronze horse casting is a genre that characterizes and
also sets the time of Renaissance Florence distinctively. Any serious artist
needs now to know as much as possible about all the genres in which
horses can be imagined and rendered, and to draw from one or more of
them the insights which allow, assist, even remind him or her how to
proceed. An artist learns to see with the eyes of a genre (Morson and
Emerson 1990: 276).
How are Bakhtin's thoughts on genre helpful for us? There are three
groups of insights that offer a way forward out of some places where
biblical studies have tended to stumble. First, Bakhtin rejoiced to maintain
that there are countless genres and they are vastly heterogeneous. He made
a rough grouping of genres: primary (which are smallere.g. a command
barked in a military context) and secondary (e.g. a thick novel), which
9. I am indebted to my friend and colleague Leslie Ross, an art historian, for
substantial assistance in talking about genres of 'horse' as shaped and inhabited by
various artists. Her help on this and other projects over some 20 years has been
immensely stimulating.
61
embrace or utilize the smaller ones, perhaps changing them in the process
as they inosculate and shift themselves. There is no need to break out all
genres, no gain from mapping dehistoricized and atomized component
genres of a large work like 1 Samuel or the DH. In fact, such a move would
be counter-productive, since genre is not determined from the toes up but
from the finished product (Morson and Emerson 1990: 272). That is, one
does not disassemble the engines of a car, ship, or airplane and discuss the
shared screws and rotors; the 'genre' airplane is quite different from a car
or a ship, as we can readily see by looking at the macrolevel. This point
does not imply that there is no gain in talking about primary genres; there
is, and even Bakhtin does so on occasion (e.g. to mention the soliloquy
within a novel). But one does not parse all the primary genres in order to
classify the main one. The sense that 1 Samuel riddles, tightly in its early
chapters and more loosely throughout, is a hunch drawn from an intersecting assemblage of features.
Second, Bakhtin maintains that in addition to the brilliant insight of an
artist like Shakespeare, and to the fresh circumstances which later audiences will inevitably bring to one of his playsthus allowing it to remain
deep and relevantpart of the reason his art remains vital is because of
genre (Morson and Emerson 1990: 284-90). A great work is renewed, its
meaning grows, neither because the author controls all its implications nor
because a reader is free to carry away from it anything desired. It is the
genre of the work that carries the potential that later readers will bring to
explicit consciousness. Genre helps us visualize and utilize things into
which we may have limited insight. One of the responsibilities of the
reader is to read in such a way that some of the unrecognized potential can
be activated. So in regard to Dostoevsky (always Bakhtin's 'Greenwich
Mean Time'), the theorist asked how it was possible that the Russian's
novels bear some of the features of Menippean satire, given that Dostoevsky is unlikely to have consciously patterned his works in terms of them.
Bakhtin's sense is that the genre remembers what it needs to do and
carried Dostoevsky, so to speak, into that project and assisted him to work
with the pre-novelistic but dialogical character of those ancient satires.
Dostoevsky did not need to know in detail what he was doing; his selected
and inhabited genre carried the logic and memory for him. This feature, it
is important to stress, works with those artists most intuitive about their
art. If Polzin is correct to have sensed that 1 Samuel works as a masal
(specifically a parable), then its architecture can be relied upon to carry
and encode workings that seem at the surface little to resemble the
62
sapiential literature in which we are more prone to find small mesalim.

Similarly, we may now be more likely as readers to cue to those factors
than were scholars pondering the same pages 100 years ago. Kent's fleshing out the role of the reader to guessand constantly correctthe genres
involved in a work stress the role of the reader in this process (1998: 4345).
The third way in which Bakhtin's genre musings can help is to slow us
from assuming a clear window of ready historicity, which remains a primary default assumption (whether explicit or not) for work on 1 Samuel.
We need to posit a genre, which will affect how we construct the language
at hand. The genre road will not take us to the more familiar path of looking for contemporary propagandistic or apologetic works in the ancient
Near East which form the template or can stand as the comparison against
which we measure the DH. Rather, the way forward will be to consider the
genre masal, ubiquitous in the Hebrew Bible, and ask how the 1 Samuel
writer is thinking out the problems of how one thing is like another: a
desired infant like a king, an old man falling like the fate of a royal line, an
increasingly isolated man like the monarchy. The cultural factors of the
era of the work's production are important and relevant, insofar as they
can be ascertained; but they cannot be lifted simplistically from the narrative's own assertion about past events. Bakhtin's notion of genre addressivity instructs us to attend carefully to the ways in which the text
approaches particular readers, its own assumed original readers but later
ones as well (1986a: 95-100; Kent 1998: 40-41).
From this third point about guessing and naming genre two further
observations are useful, each of which comes with Bakhtin's distinguishing between the genres of epic and novel. It might seem that the story of
Israel's first king would likely resemble an epic rather than a novel, but
such is not the case. Bakhtin offers a rather vague articulation about 'temporal orientation' as he contrasts the way in which works belonging to the
genres novel and epic can be commenced. He assertsagain whether accurately or notthat it does not matter how an epic like Homer's Iliad starts.
Since the whole of it is already known, its dynamics already finished, its
edges sealed off from the present, one can choose any episode (e.g. the
anger and choice of Achilles) as entryway. The novel, of course, requires a
much more careful access to its still-developing theme (198la: 31).
Bakhtin notes the tendency of'high literature' (e.g. epic) to attract around
(not within) itself masks, interludes, trices, and routines which allow a
hero or a theme to step briefly out of character. Such episodes, 'inserted
63
genres' Bakhtin calls them, angled perpendicularly to the main track of a

piece, allow a sort of commentary on or reconsideration of the main narrative.10 He explains,
Thus we see that alongside the great and significant models of straightforward genres and direct discourses, discourses with no conditions attached,
there was created in ancient times a rich world of the most varied forms and
variations of parodic-travestying, indirect, conditional discourse. Of course
our term 'parodic-travestying discourse' far from expresses the full richness
of types, variants and nuances... (1981b: 59).
He adds (of Socratic dialogues in particular, which exemplify what he

has in mind here), 'Characteristic, even canonic, for the genre is the
spoken dialogue framed by a dialogized story' (198la: 25). Such pieces
'do refract, to one degree or another, authorial intentionsalthough separate aspects of them may in various ways not coincide with the semantic
operation of the work that immediately precedes their appearance' (1981 d:
321). My point in this discussionthe riddling discourse of 1 Samuel, for
example, the 'parables' of chs. 1-3, 4-6, and 25 will enfold dialogized
pieces within their flow, not seal them off outside itself.
A related topic Bakhtin raises is the relationship of a genre (novel and
epic are again his exemplars) to its own future, which is to say the
relationship of actual (or first) authors (and readers) to a literary work set
in the past. As usual, Bakhtin proceeds to develop the point by contrast: he
splits the novel as developing, the epic as finished, antiquated; for him the
novel emerged after writing and books, the epic (and all other genres)
previous to the production of written texts; the novel's contours are fluid,
the epic's fixed and clear; the novel makes a representation of the present
and portrays events contemporaneous in some way with itself, whereas the
epic is concerned about recollection of the absolute and walled-off past, in
fact the valorized past, the past as represented as formative though accessible to a writer only indirectly (remembered rather than experienced).11
As before, it is more useful for the text on hand to see the likelihood that
there is no such impenetrable boundary between the absolute past and the
writer's present, between national and personal concerns, between the
10. 1981a: 36, explored more fully in 1981b: 51-60. Bakhtin's interest in the carnivalesque inclines him to focus upon that feature of these interludes, but the different
register can be parabolic as well as more overtly parodic. For more detail on the
inserted genres, see 198Id: 321.
11. 1981 a: 3-7 lists some of these points, with the main contrasts developed on pp.
13-21 (for epic) and pp. 21-31 (for novel).
64
ideal time of valorized 'firsts and bests' and the messy present, between a
hero who coincides neatly with his destiny and one who overlaps it with a
surplus of humanness. In fact, Bakhtin's survey of ancient literature ends
up positing the simultaneous, juxtaposed, collaborative presence of both
'high' and 'low' styles where epic distance is breached, the concern is the
contemporary, and the mode delights in laughter, all of which abolish
distance and make objects able to be scrutinized without limit. But the
point he keeps returning to is the relation to the present: the novel is drawn
toward the uncompleted and contemporary in a way that (for Bakhtin)
cannot be true of epic. Under the influence of novel-like material, the
author depicts something of his own present and does so without distance.
Bakhtin writes, 'No matter how distant this object is from us in time, it is
connected to our incomplete, present-day, continuing temporal transitions,
it develops a relationship with our unpreparedness, with our present'
(1981 a: 30). And of not simply the novel but the novelization of literature,
he writes: 'Such, indeed, is the only possibility open to a genre that structures itself in a zone of direct contact with developing reality'.12 The point
to grasp here is the inevitability and fruitfulness of the link between the
'epic subject' of the origins of monarchy and the writers' and readers'
present which the genre makes, pace Bakhtin.
These gleanings from Bakhtin's more ample and rambling ruminations
on the novelization of literature (and implicitly on the general character of
literary language) allow us the space to consider for the text at hand a
genre with three distinctive structuring devices. First, there is a heightened
use of intersecting voices which destabilize clear ownership of utterance.
Second, we can see an initial trope set somewhat at odds to, or out of character from, the accompanying narrative but profoundly intertwined with it
as well. And third, we have been given a reminder that even subjects which
seem remote in time from the present can be structured and must be read
with awareness and exploitation of their intricate links with the present.
But first we need to sketch the likelihood that 1 Samuel will have made
use ofmasal and hugged.
3. Biblical Genre Considerations
Lest Bakhtin's points seem too distant from biblical literature, it is useful
now to review briefly some recent work on the general masal genre and
12. 1981a: 39; Bakhtin is referring to the novel's fluid, questing, self-reviewing
nature.
65
the Hebrew Bible texts. The case for the ubiquity of masal in the Hebrew
Bible is not difficult to make. Some preliminary considerations. The verbal
root msl suggests: 'to be like', 'to describe by comparison'; listed for the
noun are: 'proverbial say ing', 'parable', 'similitude', 'prophetic figurative
discourse' (BDB: 605). Joel Rosenberg argues that the masal has little to
do with the static and one-dimensional or the strictly mimetic and rather
everything in common with the reformulation of stock elements into 'endlessly ingenious new combinations' by a 'particular verbal and syntactical
musculature' (1986: 32). My more specific hugged comes from the root
ngd; that same lexicon generates the following: 'be conspicuous', 'declare',
'tell', 'recite', 'announce', 'report', 'inform'; its hophal conjugation shows
the infinitive absolute hugged, which 'suggests something to be reported
or announced' (BDB: 616-18). I will adopt the 'genrette' hugged for what
I am talking about, both to avoid subliminal confusion with words like 'riddle', 'parable', or 'allegory' and also to allow for the rich wordplay which
will develop around nagid. The hugged is a puzzle to be told and pondered, to be guessed at, teased out, and made useful.
The case for detecting and suggesting the presence of fundamentally
comparative language in all its variety is not a matter of working out a text
like an arithmetic problem, or of matching edges exactly as one does with
a jigsaw puzzle. Rather, the genre (whether large or small) teases the mind
into thought and insight by an ongoing tumbling of points that are by turns
similar and dissimilar. Says Rosenberg:
The masal is a kind of Chinese box: the structures that surround it are not
extraneous to it, however much its paint or inscribed designs may differ.
'It', therefore, is not the innermost box alone, but the totality of boxes. And
just as we reach the innermost with a sense that only the imperfect technology of miniaturization stands in the way of further reductions, so are we left
in doubt as to the outermost (1986: 43).
Some facets of the small form make their case by suggesting analogues
between one thing and another; others, disparate at first consideration, turn
out to have a provocative relevance which unfolds unexpectedly, even
counterintuitively. The genre masal and its component hugged conduce a
slow accumulation of insight to be savored, ventured, retested repeatedly.
Before bringing some necessary discipline and discretion to what is otherwise too riotous a jumble, let me first set forth the prominence of the basic
category in slightly more detail.
Hebrew prose (and poetry as well) is thoroughly masal-bound. Parallelism abounds, as does imagery, from pithy proverbs to sustained and wan-
66
dering images, for example that of the deity and people as a married
couple. Wordplay of many sorts, making unexpected bridges between and
among elements, undergirds virtually all biblical discourse. There are short
narratives which are clearly 'parable-like': Isa. 5.1-7 and 14.4-6 (and its
matrix), Dan. 5.24-28, Judg. 9.1-21,2 Sam. 12.1-12 (and its matrix of chs.
11-12), 14.1-20, 1 Kgs 3.16-28, even 2 Kgs 6. These passages have
frequently been read allegorically, though more recent studies suggest that
they work well with more polysemous strategies (see Pyper 1996: 84-110).
The prophets Jeremiah (e.g. chs. 18-19, regarding the potter's craft) and
Ezekiel (e.g. chs. 3-5, where the prophet struggles to make the crisis of the
early sixth century visible) offer reported deeds that function as riddles or
parables. Ezek. 16 and 17 are more extensive and more allegorical texts
which function to show that something is like something else, as is the
poem/song of Deut. 32. A trope can travel, as does the notion of the
community of Israel under a vine/figtree: Israel may have been given a
spot under the branches tended by another who is now gone, under those
plants the other has nurtured and whose fruits Israel can now enjoy (Deut.
6.11); Israel may enjoy its own fruit (2 Kgs 18.31-32), or someone may
take Israel's place under them and claim their fruit while he has been
exiled (Jer. 5.17). The image functions variously to suggest peaceful fruitfulness (or its absence). A motif like sibling rivalry, functioning in a narrative like the 'Joseph story' of Gen. 37-50, can as well function to suggest
intertribal tension and political factions.13 As Rosenberg suggests,
The reader's discovery that a scene is 'only' this or 'actually' that (but
always something else) is only the beginning of a deeper, more far-reaching
exploration of the story's meaning. With this often vertiginously dawning
realization, the reader gains a wider sense of what vistas of meaning are
13. Marc Brettler (1996: 71-76), with what seems unnecessary dichotomy, urges
that the factors which allow for the Tendenz of the narrative are political and not simply historical or literary, by which I think he wishes to claim that they have political
weight and are not simply mimetic or decorative. He suggests with the help of other
writers, that the piece in which he is interested, 1-2 Samuel, teaches particular values,
supports a specific regime over against another, and serves plausibly as the self-perception of the Davidic monarchy. For a good discussion of rabbinic and New Testament
mesalim see Stern, who says, among other things, that the most popular of that era are
parables where God is king (1991: 2), that context remains key for the understanding
of parables (p. 6), and that the fundamental root msl includes the sense of likeness that
attends all imagery (pp. 9-10). The work of Brad Young (1998) on rabbinic and New
Testament parables is informative as well, though not directly useful here.
67
possible, and thus of what interpretive faculties must be mobilized over

time (1986: 38).
Larry Lyke works with primarily with 2 Sam. 14 though quite extensively with some other passages as well (Judg. 9.8-15; 2 Sam. 12). He calls
his genre 'narrative mashal' and defines it as follows:
By narrative mashal I mean a pithy, fabricated story meant to provide perspective for the purpose of aiding interpretation of the events in the narrative in which it is embedded. Narrative meshalim are often ambiguous to
the degree that more than one interpretation of both the mashal and its surrounding narrative are possible. No text in the Hebrew Bible is explicitly
labeled a 'narrative mashal' and our use stretches the meaning of 'mashal'
(i.e., proverb) as is found therein... (1997: 11).
He develops his category to call on social as well as idiosyncratic literary

skill and urges the relevance of communal hermeneutical competence for
understanding of these tropes. There is more being said than individuals
can know or control; Lyke asserts as well that the mesalim are more likely
to understate or name their meaning insufficiently than to be complete. He
also discusses the matter of genetic dependence (or chronological precedence) and specific authorial (or redactional) intention, minimizing their
importance for what he is discussing (1997: 16-19). The factors of the
narrative masal, working variously, make demands on narrator, characters
and readers. Lyke's work develops characteristics of the narrative masal in
which he is interested: each is stitched well into its literary matrix but
works larger themes as well, in fact having what he calls an 'agglutinative
quality'.14
Rosenberg's work within the 'primary history' exposes yet another set
of possibilities and rehabilitates the general term 'allegory' by offering
some useful distinctions among its tasks. Characterizing the biblical strategy as 'purposeful indirection' and as 'constituting] carefully interlocking
codes whose cumulative argument is more than the sum of its parts', he
situates his study both within the classical family of midrash and in terms
of the younger deconstruction (1986: ix-xi). His summary of the tasks of
allegory is worth quoting in full, not because I plan to use either the term
or develop all the possibilities, but rather to show the breadth of the base
in which I plan to work. Rosenberg maintains
14. Lyke 1997: 16-17, and then explored throughout several chapters. In a piece
not so helpful for the present purposes he concludes that the form has three parts (not
always all explicit): the masal proper, the response, and the application (pp. 156-57).
68

.. .that allegory is a genre or convention; that it is a pictorial and narrative
means of representing abstractions; that it is a rhetorical strategy or
structural principle within works that include non-allegorical functions; that
it is often indistinguishably intertwined with other figurative modes; that it
is associated with irony and satire; that it is a false temporalization of
something simultaneous within the subject; that it is a gesture 'otherwards'
from its nominal subject; that it is an internal and verbal landscape; that it is
an art of polysemy; that it is an art of quotation; that it is a correlation of
political and psychological realities; that it is a form of esoterism; and that
it is a form of syllogistic argumentation, both systematic and indirect in its
exposition.. .that it is concerned with moral choice; that its proper focus is
the individual, intrapsychic sphere; that its apparent focus is cosmic and
mythic history, the clash of good and evil, of godly and ungodly, on a scale
larger than life (1986: 29-30).
A character can resemble another, so that a set of relationalities can be

worked out between them: Elijah and Jeremiah can be drawn to partake of
the characteristics of Moses; Joshua can be seen to resemble Josiah.15 An
odd character like Samson can take on the characteristics of Israel, or so
Edward Greenstein argues: 'Reading the narrative as a riddle, one comes
to a startling realization: Samson is Israel. The riddle can be solved: What
appears to be Samson is the people Israel; what appears as the Naziriteship
of Samson is the Israelite covenant' (Greenstein 1981: 247). The Samson
stories present yet another way in which the masal and hugged character
of a text works out: Samson himself tells a riddle in the midst of the story
which functions as a riddle, thus opening up the genre called mise-enabyme, where a small element of a set recapitulates or repositions the
entire set in a small piece.16
Though borrowing from other aspects of analogy, it is the character as
enigma that I will develop for my reading of Saul. That such a masal is
attested only lays a base for the suggestion that the story of Saul as an
epitome of a popular experience can function within that category. A
second layer of foundation can be set in place by reviewing some of the
ways in which scholars working with diverse mesalim detail the diverse
workings of masal. Greenstein's work on Samson is important for my
case. He works with the oddities of the narrative, bringing them into focus
15. How other figures resemble Moses is perhaps most extensively explored by
James Nohrnberg (1995:269-306, and elsewhere); for Joshua and Josiah, see Richard
D. Nelson 1981.
16. For this small genre, which will be explored as this study unfolds, see Dallenbach 1989.
69
rather than seeking to resolve them. In fact, he urges that the reading
process seek to integrate as much detail as possible into a meaningful
pattern, to compress a maximum of possible meaning into a select set of
symbols. The capacity of the diverse elements to signify on a variety of
levelswithin the immediate context but at a wider remove as wellis
important for his insights about Samson. Focusing specifically on the
'riddling' Samson's use of a particular verbal puzzle (Judg. 14.14), Greenstein notes that the conundrum posed is actually the answer to which the
participants must supply the question (1981: 237-42). Further, he demonstrates the ubiquity of the pattern of 'what was supposed to be X turns
outunexpectedlyto be Y' in the narrative of Judg. 13-16, making the
case as well for tenacity of dissimulation and the rearing up of the unexpected, for vocabulary of knowing and not knowing, telling and not telling,
and for the presence of questions. Greenstein specifies,
The story couples telling and discovering and then fuses them, forging a
motif of discovering-by-telling that informs each part of the narrated action.
The pattern crystallizes in the wonderfully efficient.. .use of the key verb
higgid. This verb combines within itself the two senses of 'to tell' and 'to
solve', going on to liken the use ofmaggid [sic], with its associations of
solving enigmatic problems (Joseph in Gen. 41) and of divulging as Samson
does (Judg. 14) (Greenstein 1981: 246).
Greenstein concludes, 'Through these two nuances the verb conveys at

once two perspectives: the teller discloses a secret, and the one told
discovers it' (1981:246). He also moves to develop ways in which the linguistic elements of the Samson story reintonate other narratives of Judges.
He concludes the article, which is very useful for my work, with the note
that such an interpretation is not immediately obvious but requires reflection (1981: 253); he calls the genre 'an epitomization' (not an allegory)
and doubts that there is an exact analogue for it (1981: 243-54).
Two additional points of Rosenberg's are worth remembering for positioning the genre socially. First:
We must attempt to understand the concrete work the biblical story poses as
its task: to see the story aimed in part toward a restricted readership (whatever other public functions this material may have served, or come to serve),
a readership concerned with Israel's politics and history, and one ready to
submit itself to a rigorous training in the art of reading (1981: 45).
Rosenberg's second observation concludes his work on the Abraham stories of Gen. 12-25:
70

In this manner, the Abraham cycle allows personal and national destiny to
mirror each other. But between them operates a third type of destiny, political in nature. Abraham's political destiny resembles that of the 'new man',
a type ubiquitous to world history from ancient times to the present...'
(1981:97).
As we converge Bakhtin and the more recent theorizing (which obviously draws on the work of the rabbis without wholly avoiding historicalcritical biblical exegesis), we have the following points to pursue. First,
insofar as genre is a way of seeing, a shape that thinking tends to take, we
are challenged to watch for authoring which sets up and begins to work
out a problem of analogy. In fact, I will suggest that, like Samson's riddle,
the Saul character poses an answer to which we, reading, must discern the
question. Second, the text will bear a social-historical imprint, arguably
from its own present, though without being restricted to that era. That is,
the thinking and crafting, the asking and answering, is not to an abstract
problem or a wholly universal one but to one politically urgent at a particular turning point in the life of the people. Though my sense of that
question is specificshall the return from the Babylonian exile be accomplished under the leadership of kings or not17it is also part of a wider
and more generically human question of leadership dynamics and all the
attendant intersubjectivties. Hence the link between a 'political' and 'personal' characterization is not difficult to achieve but, to the contrary, impossible to avoid: an insecure human leader allows for the exposure of all
the issues wanted. Third, the genre ofmasal, or more specifically hugged,
organizes the elements of the narrative somewhat the way a grammar does
'used' language, not restrictively but helpfully and almost invisibly (until
we begin to name its procedures and preferences): it marshals small verbal
elements like wordplays, larger pieces like quotations and allusive resonances; it will use chunky motifs which recur strategicallyfrom large
(the alienation of fathers and sons) to the smaller (the falling of the high)
to tiny (the recurrence of the plenteous word &#yz7/'house'). How a whole
character can partially recapitulate another or can position a set of circumstances common to a people draws on all of these factors and others as
well. The challenge is not to pre-establish a template or prescribe a cluster
of devices but to bring forth from a bricolage a coherent, discernible outline. That Saul can resemble in some ways Israel's experience with kings,
17. It is actually more rich than that: With Benjaminite leadership or Davidic? With
one line of priests or with another? Or it may be more abstract: With dynastic leadership or not? My detailing of the riddle will continue below.
71
can provide both the question and the answer (the posing and rumination)
to an urgent problem to be faced is a case to be made not preliminarily but
as his story is discussed. All I hope to have done here is to show that such
a project is not alien to the biblical narrative and, to the contrary, is compelling to attempt.
Apropos of the matter of organizing genre elements or struggling too
obsessively over issues of classification, let me bring into the conversation
the visual writing of Diane Ackerman, who can assist here from another
realm, in quite 'other clay', as she contributes three observations useful for
these genre questions of Bakhtin and the biblical scholars.18 First, when
talking about the classification of batsa genre questionshe notes the
huge number of species of that animal and lingers over the ways of organizing them. Some are fairly superficial, for example, one can group bats
with birds because they have wings and fly. But as she instances the many
other features that comprise bat anatomy and behavior, it is difficult to
avoid revisiting the question of criteria: what makes bats a 'genre'? One
can make a list of features, do research, and affix labels, but that procedure, though pragmatic, seems eventually pointless and wrongheaded,
given Ackerman's rich descriptions of bat diversity. To recognize that
some bats share brain waves with primates (like ourselves) may be more
significant in the long run than thinking about wings and arms. By the
brainwave line of thought, some bats are closer to humans than they are to
other bats, an insight not available if the point of comparison is the wing.
A similar reorganizing trajectory can be introduced into our classification
systems once we learn that birds, alligators and dinosaurs share a common
ancestor. In any case, the classification question is fluid rather than set. Our
reader's capacity to ask fresh questions continues to shape the recognition
and implications of genre.
In the same essay she devotes some attention to a second question of
how human beings tend to feel about bats and why an encounter between
us and them tends to touch a primal nerve. Without dismissing the more
particularly cultural, she offers a variety of ways to consider the (quasi-)
universal fear of the animal. But she also considers some human behaviors
from the alleged bat point of view, suggesting why certain things that we
18. Diane Ackerman's 1991 discussion of bats moves reflectively and tends to
circle back to the same topics repeatedly. She talks about classification on pp. 15-21
and on pp. 39-59; issues of perspective can be found on pp. 45, 57-58; and the description of echolocating is on pp. 8, 31-39.
72
may do can prompt bats into hostile-looking behaviors. The point, of

course, is that we cannot construct our viewpoints in the abstract or in
some neutral zone but must consider carefully where our feet are positioned as we look and speak. Both her genre insight and her sense of how
humans evaluate bats (and arguably, imaginatively, the inverse) reinforce
Bakhtin's perennial insistence that the relation to the present of the author
(and reader, who becomes an author of sorts when construing a text) is of
fundamental importance.
Her third very useful insight comes also from her bat writing and concerns what is called echolocatinghow bats figure out where they are and
where everything else relevant to them is. Bats send forth 'language' and
catch its rebound. The capacity of bats to discern minute distinctions of
sound is one of the factors that makes echolocating work so well for (most
of) them. Ackerman notes that bat mothers can find their own infants even
in a cave of thousands of other searching mothers and crying babies, and
that (again, some) bats can hear a beetle walking on sand or a moth flexing
its wings. That our human ears cannot pick up most of this cacophony
unaided by technology does not mean it is not going on around us (if we
live near bats). The point is that as we go to read, to construe meaning
whether as writers or readersa major part of our process is throwing out
language from where we are, locating what else is 'there' by the way our
'speech' encounters it, bounces off, and returns to us. Though perhaps not
the usual image for talking about our participation in the ongoing process
of revelation, I would suggest it is not a bad one at all; it both reduces our
sense of the 'objective there-ness' of narrative though without reducing
carefully constructed and canonically set language to a Rohrschak test and
also heightens the necessity for understanding our own situatedness and
taking responsibility for what it is and can be.
4. Polzin on Genre
To invite Robert Polzin to this conversation is to visit more familiar coordinates. First, the question of 'genre coding'. In his creative and controversial work on 1 Samuel, Polzin calls 1 Sam. 1-3 a parable:
I am suggesting, therefore, that these early stories about the fall of the
House of Eli and the rise of Samuel, in addition to having inherent interest
in themselves, form a kind of parabolic introduction to the Deuteronomistic
history of kingship. Both Eli's house and its successor, Samuel's house...
are stand-ins for royalty, especially David's (1989: 44).
73
It is a useful starting point, since it breaks up the (perhaps unconscious)

assumption that 1 Samuel's genre is fundamentally mimetic or closely realistic in terms of the story it relates. For Polzin, the narrative's monarchical
subtext emerges distinctively via the genre which highlights a multiplicity
of speaking parts, allegorically: 'A woman lacks what her rival has in
abundancechildrenand she desires greatly to receive what she does
not have. Her husband has some understanding of her plight, yet he cannot
help feeling to some degree slighted, even a bit rejected' (1989: 22). That
is, we can and even must look pastthrough and beyondthe ostensible
referents of character identity and be cued rather by the 'profound speech
diversity' and interlocking of character zones which give the story its primary genre identity as a parable rather than a more straightforward story
(Polzin 1989: 18-26). Polzin neglects to develop the lineaments of the
genre he calls parable (and which is actually more narrowly allegorical as
he works with it); but perhaps rather after the fashion of Bakhtin, he feels
that a sketch of formal features would mislead. Part of the shared speech
that Polzin stresses in his reading of the parable is the wordplay that consistently calls attention to the identity of the child 'Samuel' as 'Saul', that
is, as a 'quest' or a 'grant' (s'l), asked and received. The challenge Polzin
accepts is not so much to defend his genre claim in the abstract as to
attempt a parabolic reading of the story of the birth and boyhood of Samuel and see how it works. That is, the point is not whether or not 1 Sam. 13 is a parable in some way either verifiably intended by the author or morphologically discernible from the text, but a wager about the value of
reading it on such terms.
In addition to making genre decisive and by choosing to highlight the
intersecting and co-inhabited language of character and narrator, Polzin
also picks up on Bakhtin's temporal points. How better to start an 'old'
story of the roots of Israel's monarchic identity than with a parable which
tells in nuce and in mask, as it were, the rise and fall of the kings? Polzin
asserts that
... [the parable's] location at the start of 1 Samuel gives its meaning added
dimensions'(1989: 18).
That is, that the institution is discredited even at the outset (as well as
throughout the narrative which explicitly features the first king) is peculiar.19 Polzin also says that
19. David Jobling, whose carefully exposed assumptions are not particularly Bakhtinian, names the text genre as national historiographyin fact as national auto-
74

...the Deuteronomist introduces us to the central problem of the ensuing
history, kingship in Israel with all its messy and complicated details, and
does this by means of selection of stories that take place on the threshold of
kingship's appearancestories whose details prepare us for the main topic
by providing us with anticipatory perspectives on Israel under the monarchy. ..and afterward (1989: 44).
Polzin makes guarded use of the last point via Bakhtin, that the authoring voice remains profoundly concerned about questions contemporary
while retelling an old storyin this case a near-exilic reflecting back on
the shape of the disaster of monarchy: 'The implications of the LORD
thrice commanding Samuel to make Israel a king (8.7,9,22)and thereby
commanding him to cooperate with and enable their rejection of himfill
the first two chapters of 1 Samuel with ominous overtones concerning the
history to come' (1989: 49 [emphasis in original]). For reasons that make
considerable sense amid acrimonious and polarized conversations about
the circumstances of DH production when Polzin's book was written, he
remains generally agnostic about the who, what, when, where, how, and
why of the composition and reception of the larger work which includes 1
Samuel. More than ten years later, however, and with Bakhtin's insistence
on the importance of historical context ringing in my ear, it seems a point
that requires more attention. But Polzin's general sense of a link is clear
enough: 'The crashing death of Eli in 4.18 foreshadows and embodies the
Deuteronomist's graphic evaluation of the institution that Israel at first
thought would bring good news and glad tidings; the news results mostly
in death an destruction' (1989: 61). Polzin's fresh appraisal of the material
of 1 Sam. 1-3his creative rereading of it as a masal and his recognition
of the significance of its placementis fundamental for the use I will
make of the narrative.
biography, coming out of some ancient past and telling of a past, makes the following
helpful suggestion about genre and 1 Samuel (and the DH): 'I experience 1 Samuel as
a book that does not have its subject matter under control, that struggles with everything it has to say. I put this down to the relationship in which this text stands to the
past out of which it emerges, and for which it must account. 1 Samuel struggles with
contradictions in the tradition it receives because these are still contradictions within
the mindset that receives them. The community creating and living by this text was not
of a single mind about what the past had bequeathed them' (1998: 19, emphasis original, elaborated on pp. 16-19). See also Randall Bailey (1995: 219-31) for one way to
flesh out of the link between the start of 1 Samuel and the exilic situation.
75
5. Bakhtin on Utterance
A second theoretical piece needs mention prior to turning to the biblical
text, though it can be handled more briefly. The contribution comes, again,
via the work of Bakhtin, this time on his concept of utterance. 'Bakhtin
defines utterance as the simultaneity of what is actually said and what is
assumed but not spoken'.20 But of course more needs to be said to bring
out the complexity and spaciousness of the concept. 'Utterance [Russian
word] is the topic of analysis when language is conceived as dialogue, the
fundamental unit of investigation for anyone studying communication as
opposed to language alone', writes Holquist (1990: 59-60). Bakhtin says:
Thus each real-life utterance is an objectively social enthymeme. It is, as it
were, the 'password', which is known only by those who belong to that
same social purview. The peculiarity of real-life utterances is that they are
intertwined by a thousand threads into the non-verbal real-life context, and
when separated from it, almost entirely lose their meaning. Not to know
their immediate real-life context means not to understand them (Bakhtin
1983a: 12).
Clark and Holquist name utterance as the basic building block of Bakhtin's dialogism, and Hirschkop goes so far as to say it is co-pivotal with
dialogism in Bakhtin's language theory (Clark and Holquist 1984: 10;
Hirschkop 1999: 209).
Bakhtin develops the discussion about utterance somewhat polemically
in relation to formalist thinking about language.21 Hence we can usefully
see what utterance is not: it is not a syntactic, linguistically marked unit
like the sentence. An utterance can take sentence form, but not every
sentence is an utterance; a period is not the same as a pause. A good deal
of what Bakhtin develops in this particular vein is not useful for the present purposes, but the tenor of it can be seen as he provides three characteristics of utterance, which they may or may not share with the sentence.
20. Clark and Holquist 1984: 207. Their Chapters 9 and 10 (pp. 197-237) discuss
the concept intermittently as it assists and is clarified by other aspects of Bakhtin's
thought.
21. For more information consult Morson and Emerson 1990: Chapter 4, specifically pp. 123-39. Bakhtin's 1986a essay is also shaped in conversation with criticism
he holds to be inadequate; he mentions alternative ways of conceiving language on pp.
61-75 but sporadically elsewhere in the essay as well. Though he touches on the concept of utterance in earlier work as well (as indicated in this sketch) the 'Speech
Genres' essay is really quite complete in itself.
76
First, an utterance is identifiable by a pause, a relinquishing of the floor, a

change of speaker. Second, that the first speaker stops indicates that the
utterance is, temporarily, complete and awaits, invites, a response. And
third, an utterance is characterized by referentially semantic content for the
speaker and the hearer (author and reader).22
The kernels tucked inside these attempts at definition are ramified by
Bakhtin, some in the work he shares with Voloshinov (Bakhtin [with Voloshinov] 1983, Bakhtin 1981) and some in his later work on speech genres,
work which toggles back and forth to discuss the utterance which assumes
some particular genre and the genre which needs to be construed as an
utterance. One of the ways Bakhtin (with Medvedev) unpacks his concept
is to make some practical distinctions among the meaning, theme, significance, understanding and evaluation of an utterance. 'Meaning' is the
reproducible part of an utterance, the item we might search for in a dictionary.23 'Theme', on the other hand, is much more inclusive of the situation of both the speaker and listener (or author and reader), includes all of
the specific factors which produced it; the thematic aspects of the utterance
are unique and unreproducible. When we talk about the significance of an
utterance, it is the theme we are discussing, not simply the meaning. Clark
and Holquist, locating Bakhtin's thought in relation to hermeneutics of the
modern period, conclude that, for him, meaning (by which I assume they
intend theme) is neither owned by nor unavailable to the speakerbut
rented (1984: 12). To understand an utterance is to commit actively to
construe as many of the circumstances of its production as we are able to
do; passive decoding will fall short. Reading of utterances must also be
relational; understanding is an effect of interaction. And part of what must
be queried is the evaluative aspect of the utterance, which is inevitably
present and anticipates both the speaker's angle and that of the intended
hearer, who will re-evaluate it while construing it. Bakhtin also specifies
some of the aspects that an utterance rolls together: it will make use of
grammar and syntax, of certain compositional structures, of style (at vari22. These three aspects of Bakhtin (1986a: 71-76, 84-99), are discussed at some
length by Kent (1998: 34-42).
23. 1978:99-106; 1986a: 84-99. The criticisms Dop (2000:10-11,29-32) and others
level at certain understandings of Bakhtin's dialogics would seem, if I am understanding
him well, to root in the blended meaning and thematic aspects of the utterance. Dop's
examples of the objective or universal meaning of an utterance are simple (an abstract
concept like 'X', two red boxes, or a four-sided, four-cornered construct); the challenge
would seem to be to locate the objective aspect of an utterance like 'I am hungry' or
something even more complex than that rather simple assertion.
77
ous levels, including that of the language or dialect used, the genre, the
individual speaker's patterns), of intonation (1986a: 60-102).
Vital to understand in this concept of utterance is its thoroughly dialogical nature. As a speaker shapes an utterance, he or she is already taking
into account the responses of the listener; hence, the listener is also authoring the utterance and the speaker is simultaneously a listener. The dynamics
in written utterances are related, if proceeding by somewhat different cues.
Bakhtin's concept of'addressivity' names this phenomenon: an utterance
is shaped for someone, is addressed to a particular recipient (not necessarily a named individual but to a receiving and co-shaping party [1986a:
95-99]), As the elements compose the utterance, they bring with them
associations they have had previously, which are likely to be in contention
with each other. Utterances have their own internal politics, say Morson
and Emerson (1990: 130). These features of the utterance explain why
Bakhtin classifies it as a 'border phenomenon'; an utterance lives its life at
the crossroads of many users and usages, its 'fated in-betweenness' making it thoroughly social (Holquist 1990: 60-61). Hirschkop suggests that
the utterance is actually bifurcated between the given situation of author
and hearers, between its representational aspects and the claim it exerts on
its participants (1999: 213). And Bialostosky adds that even when an
author takes over the utterance of another, the original context is not
wholly dissolved; the units, in fact, maintain a relationship (1997: 115).
Finally, as is true of genres (and chronotopes), utterances come in all sizes
from the monosyllabic 'eh' or 'hmmm' to War and Peace.
Bakhtin himself stresses that the utterance is simply a small part of a
much broader flow of communication: 'The utterance proves to be a very
complex and multiplanar phenomenon if considered not in isolation and
with respect to its author (the speaker) only, but as a link in the chain of
speech communication and with respect to other, related utterances...'
(1986a: 93, commented upon by Hirschkop 1999:210). Utterances call for
active co-shaping, as has been suggested already. Their enthymemic character invites and even compels us to work out their logic creatively if we
are to begin to take advantage of all that is on offer. Hirschkop stresses
that the utterance moves beyond the representational to the ethical: it
implicates both speaker and hearer: 'The "yes or no position", which we
cannot avoid, is what makes the utterance unique and individually compelling for the speaker'.24
24. Hirschkop 1999: 211; Kent 1998: 35-36, roots the power of utterance to transform in this set of its features.
78
Bakhtin discusses several examples of utterances, not simply the most

famous 'Well' which signifies richly if enigmatically for its interlocutors
(1983a: 10-12, explained in Clark and Holquist 1984: 203-204). In that
same collection of essays Bakhtin (with Voloshinov) provides other brief
utterances, like 'I am hungry' and 'the sun has risen' in order to draw out
the complexity of their communication (1973b: 106-22; also 1986a: 83-86).
He invites us to think about who speaks and to whom, what circumstances
pertain, that is, where speakers are located both physically and socially. He
specifies facets which would pertain if the utterance is 'Russian': the status,
profession, caste, rank, how many servants, how much property the speaker
has. He reminds us that 'I am hungry' can be parodically related to a petition in the Lord's Prayer and was used in that way in a play by Gogol. As
Clark and Holquist note, the verbal aspect of an utterance is simply (though
crucially) a key to a larger room (1984: 209, commenting upon Bakhtin's
1973b: 106).
The value and challenge of the utterance concept is, so far as I can see,
not so much to dispute it but to unpack it as fully as possible when reading.
As suggested already, Bakhtin begins that task by his work on the generic
aspects of utterances. The utterance also develops in the direction of the
complex voicing of speech, polyphonic authoring, and 'the third' (a concept which Bakhtin develops to account for the expert and fully adequate
listener to an utterance). The gain for our challenge of reading 1 Samuel is
at once obvious and seems as yet underutilized. There has been considerable attention paid to the question of who composed the DH (or 1 Samuel)
and why; but that is not the same thing as asking how it can be seen to
work as an utterance. What can we hypothesize plausibly (since clear information is lacking) about all of the circumstances of reception which coshaped the DH and 1 Samuel in particular? If we take seriously Bakhtin's
warning that to lose the historical-social circumstances of an utterance is
to risk losing a prime key to its significance (Bakhtin [with Voloshinov]
1983a: 18-19), we cannot ignore the community for whom and with whom
the reflection on Israel in the land or the monarchic experiment take shape.
Similarly, the rich interrelationships among utterances will need to take
over from the tendency (so richly indulged by so many) to extract and abstract quotes and think one has thereby made a free-standing statement or
buttressed a point. And as characters interact within the book and at a more
microlevel, the utterance-nature of their speech will also call for examination, particularly when the genre is clearly distanced from the mimetic;
such exchanges among characters need to be not decoded but contextualized as richly and fully as possible.
79
6. My Procedure
Given the points raised as significant by Bakhtin and their fruitful
appropriation by Polzin for the early chapters of 1 Samuel, how can we
now approach the text of 1 Sam. 1-3 in a way that is plausible, adequate
and relevant (Jobling 1998:29)? First, I will take the genetic coding of the
genre seriously and read the chapters primarily as a hugged which is
shaped as an utterance (whether question and answer, comment and rejoinder) in its various contexts. The story of the young Samuel about to unfold
now is one of Rosenberg's series of Chinese boxes, unable to be fully
appraised outside the whole set (whatever that may include in the universes of intertextuality). Certain smaller formal units (Bakhtin would say
'primary genres') that are commonly attributed (e.g. the birth-of-a-hero
narrative, the barren wife motif set, a priestly oracle of salvation, an
individual's psalm of praise, a Deuteronomic prophetic oracle, a divine
revelation at a sanctuary) may be its components, but they are taken over
by the more fundamental genre of riddle.25 The basic metaphoric relation
asserted is sons to kings; the narrative then draws evaluatively on the wide
space of its canvas several scenes of thoroughly-shared responsibility for
wanting sons and moves on to the inevitability and irretrievability of their
demise. The hugged does not offer its assertion plainly or unequivocally.
One need not ask whether 1 Sam. 1-3 is classifiable as the birth story of
the last judge-turned-kingmaker, or, alternatively, if its operative genetic
codes allow us to see a much deeper story; the second assists the first. If
current biblical studies invite us to consider that the text is far more 'constructed' than 'natural', then to read a surface narrative as parabolic for
something else is not so wide a shot as it may once have seemed. Signs of
a more suggestive than realistic genre may be discerned in the 'denaturalizing' of certain narrative elements, such as the mother's choice to hand
the child over to the shrine, the detail of his mother bringing him successive cloaks, and the slowness of the boy to respond to his night audition.
Second, I will develop the implications of the narrative of 1 Sam. 1-3 as
composed of 'micro'-utterances as well as being and mutually shaped at
the more 'macro'-level of abstraction. That the characters interact verbally
25. Consult the classic but thorough and hence useful work of John T. Willis (1970,
1972, 1979) which gathers the multiplicity of scholarly questions put to these early
chapters, examines methodologies, and queries assumptions. Much of his work is moot
for my purposes but valuable to review.
80
is obvious; what I will force into explicitness is the deeper planes of the
intersections, the facets of their engagement that are below the surface, the
thematic points they rehearse, triangulating the narrator, the characters,
and myself as reader. There is no conventional way to do it, so my move
will be to press each character into a 'soliloquizing dialogue' with narrator
and other characteral language. That is, I will reintonate character discourse to show that it intersects other speech without always wholly interacting with it. I will pay special attention to direct discourse, highlighting
it repetitively so that its presence and power can be clear to the attentive
reader (Polzin 1989:18-54 and Willis 1970:293-94). By developing some
of the unstated implications ofor inferences fromdirect discourse into
ruminations, I can make more obvious the riddling aspect of the voices. I
need to mark clearly here that this rendering of my own sense of the characters' language and attributing it to my sense of their subjectivities is not
a move I will make again. My aim is to take the language of the text and
supplement it with my reading which I develop in their heads. I am not, in
this move, pronouncing on the authorial intention or diagnosing the psychology of the characters but creating from my own reader's position a set
of fuller characterizations of the persons from whose lips or hearts the language proceeds. Another reader will draw the subjectivities in a very different way.26 My intention is to jolt the three chapters out of their more
mimetic familiarity into the path I will take with them as I read 1 Samuel.
My own reading choices will come out in the characterizations I do; obviously others are possible, but mine, I believe, are justifiable.27 Since there
is no organized linear progressionthat is, the characters are presented
26. My sense of character zones will differ from Polzin's, particularly in the case of
God. Polzin holds that the Elqanah speech is a cipher for God (1989:22-26), whereas I
will allow God to be a character rather than a second-order referent.
27. Context is an amazing and provocative thing. One evening, after I had been
working on these first several chapters of 1 Samuel for some months, I was speaking
on the phone with my sister, who had recently given birth to a new daughter, Hannah.
My sister related to me that, though the young Hannah was doing fine, she did have a
peculiar pattern of crying each evening around 7 o'clock. There was no apparent
reason for sorrow, and so Hannah's mother and father and sister would try to understand what was the source of the tears. Whether or not they were successful in that
quest, Hannah would for her own reasons simply cease weeping for the evening. What
caught my attention besides the 'plot' and characterization was the reading process.
There are causes for tears, and we all weep as it strikes us. But how do we understand
each others' expressions of feeling? Why does biblical Hannah weep? What motives
do we readers, biblical and otherwise, ascribe to her?
81
interacting kaleidoscopically, I will separate them out somewhat artificially, once in each half of a narrative section.
One outcome of my strategy is to assert that there is no single privileged
narration of this request for a son. The rich interplay of language rather
than the realism of characters or plot will demand and receive primary
attention. The utterances of the key players cross and contest with each
other, ceding the floor while awaiting each others' response (and then
rejoining further in soliloquy), each asking in a distinctive way for something not fully understood simply at the 'meaning' level. Simultaneously,
collaboration of their voices accomplishes the quest, and characters will all
witness and testify to the ambiguity of what was granted. The language
reused among narrator and characters underlines the common responsibility: one utterance cannot be easily disentangled from the other but all
intertwine in chorus. But the different locations from which their mouths
speak simultaneously sharpen the fact that they differ in what they are
asking. In the middle of this lengthy masal, the blunt certainty of language
condemning the priestly dynasty bumps up against a strange inarticulateness of the 'new' son, which gives way at the end to his obvious inability
to prevent the fall of the mighty. What I hope to show is that the fact that
the language of asking passes repeatedly through various zones to reduce
any absolute clarity or authority with which we may be tempted to invest
it. One of Bakhtin's best points is that the voices are not simply personal
or stylistic but need to be seen as richly social. That point can seem shriveled or lost in a parable, and so the contentiousness of the viewpoints as I
represent them needs stress.
Since what I am attempting here is unconventional, perhaps unfamiliar,
and potentially confusing, let me offer a final analogy. Dame Ngaio Marsh,
crime fiction writer whose well-wrought mysteries appeared steadily between the 1930s and 1980s, tended to reuse a particular composition device
which I eventually came to appreciate. Typically in one of these novels a
rehearsal was underway for a production of a Shakespeare play, perhaps
Macbeth. Marsh assumed an extensive familiarity with the drama on the
part of her readers, so that she never had to explain the whole of the play
but could utilize scenes or lines as needed. She knew we would all understand adequately what Macbeth was about. Her plan was to show us more.
A major part of the first half of such a Marsh mystery would be the efforts
of the actors to get into their roles. Again, though Marsh anticipated that
we knew the Macbeth couple, I cannot be the only one to have understood
those roles afresh as Marsh showed her own mystery novel characters
82
working into them. So personality aspects of Marsh's fictional British people become both exposed and constrained to us through the spaciousness
of the classic Shakespearean roles. Eventually in each mystery book the
plotting or enactment of a crime was put into motion by Marsh, a task
ostensibly done by characters in her novel but of course in actuality contrived by the author herselfthe crime being a cognate or 'cousin version'
of the drama. That is, the fictional crime resembled in some clever way the
Shakespearean plot, refracted it as did the actors' personalities the play's
roles: for example, the unequally determined and committed struggle of an
actor couple to eliminate a political threat to one or both of them. And, of
course, the whole project assumed readers able to delight in manifold
ways to diagnose and interpret the entire performancethe play within the
playits concentricities and loops. To pass 'the same' events through several points of view is to decenter the default angle and to remind us again
that there is no 'rock of Tightness' from which to echolocate and to allow
the language diversity a bit more exposure. In the biblical text, the local
characters will intonate the larger lines of the monarchic drama.
Third, I will simply reinforce the point to which Polzin has already
spoken well: the peculiar architecture, the placement of the parable of the
requested child as prologue to the story of the request for the king but to
become blended with it as well. The small drama offers an 'answer' to
which we must struggle to construct the question. The first three chapters,
to be reprised shortly (and repeatedly thereafter) with the collapse of the
heavy old father (4.11-18), will revisit that dynamic repeatedly, offering a
negative critique of monarchy; that gnomic narrative begins, rather than
closes off, the fraught question of'the viewpoint of the text' on monarchy.
I will build on Polzin's contention that the parable offers an unmistakably
severe critique of the royal institution. But why it went wrong, and particularly the complex paths of how it failed and what options remain are
topics opened up for sustained reflection. Why a return from exile with
these same dynastic sons is a bankrupt project is the urgency of the hugged.
Again, the genre does not make those aspects of its communication
transparent. They must be discerned, repeatedly and with effort, from the
enthymemic utterance and from the analogical genre.
So the question of 'a different clay' is before us. To read the early chapters as a different genre from what will pertain once we meet the character
Saul generates some substantially different emphases than if our choice
falls otherwise. But perhaps distinctive is better than different, since the
clay of these early chapters shares a substantial base identity with the
83
material to follow. It will help us to see these rich beginning chapters as

both distinct from and kin to the other material of the narrative.
7. Exposition of Text: A Performance in Two Acts
Each act focuses clearly on one project: first, the requesting/bequesting of
the child; second, the promotion and demotion, rising and falling of the
Elides in relation to the new 'quested' son, whose role remains uncertain.
What joins the parts is the theme of dynastic sons, the mysterious presence
of YHWH, and the enigmatic character of the young boy Samuel. The roles
can also be abstracted and named. A man (Elqanah), two women (wives to
himone first barren [Hannah], one already bearing [Peninnah]), a priest
(Eli), his renegade sons (Hophni and Phinehas), a little boy (Samuel), and
the deity and surrogates (including an unnamed man of God).
a. Act One: The Requesting and Requesting of a Son (1 Sam. 1.12.11)
(1) Elqanah (1 Sam. 1.1-8,19-28; 2.11). I am off to a pretty good start, the
whole thing opening with my family tree on the wall of our home. I, one
Elqanah, man of Ramah, a Suphite from the hill country of Ephraimmy
lineage: Jeroham, Elihu, Tohu, Suph. In the past it has been ours to care
for the arkwe Kohathite men; so Shiloh is the place I still come.28 And,
yes, my two wives, Hannah and PeninnahPeninnah with children though
Hannah with none. I am proud of my ancestors and my descendants. A
man needs sons, and sons I have acquired. We are quite substantial, really,
have been and will be.
Our custom, all of us, has been to go to Shiloh for worship and sacrifice
to YHWH, where Eli's Hophni and Phinehas preside. When I distribute
portions around, Peninnah has her share as the mother of children, but two
is the best I can give Hannah, my first wife whom I love, but whom
YHWH has apparently seen fit to deprive of children.29 This situation
28. First, a general comment about tenses. I have struggled for some consistency in
the matter as the characters ruminate; the difficulty is that they are recounting the past
but also revisiting it afreshand so they tend to break into the historical present as
typically happens when storytellers make the past vivid for themselves and their
hearers. Specifically here: the names given here occur as well in 1 Chron. 6.11-13,1820 and in Num. 3.27-31, according to Klein 1983: 5-6, andMcCarter 1980:58-59. The
Elides have care of the ark. Klein's comparative chart makes clear the confusion over
whether the lineage is Levitical or Ephraimite.
29. There are three issues in this verse for comment, two of which I will mention
here and again when the passage is rediscussed: first is a textual difficulty in construing
84
occasions Peninnah's taunting her about YHWH'S depriving Hannah of

children, and then of Hannah's weeping and refusing to eat. Why does she
persist in ending up in tears? Frustrated myself and feeling impotent,
intending to console but scarcely able to hold back my own vexation, what
can I say? What I finally blurt out: 'Am I not more to you than ten sons?'
Think of it for once from my point of view, I advise, my words running
ahead of my thinking as sometimes seems to happen when she makes me
feel helpless.30 What am I suggesting to her: Cannot an actual one stand in
for a theoretical ten? Cannot a husband replace a son, as a son replaces a
father? It seems a pretty good point. Whom am I consoling, whom chiding?
How many sons are enough sons? Two, or three, four? I have several. She
makes no response to this query of mine, may not be brooding on it quite
as I am (it probably came a little fast for her), and we go on with the feast
for which we have come; she disappears for the moment. It is probably
just as well; she needs to take control of herself.
the expression for Elqanah's apportionment to Hannah: McCarter (1980: 51-52, 60)
concludes that there is no way to make sense from the Ml expression; it seems to reference something which we do not know. It seems clear that quantity is involved, with
Peninnah having more and Hannah less. The second involves the question of angle of
the viewpoint on YHWH and Hannah's barrenness. By some reading conventions it is a
clearly omniscient narrator assertion (e.g. Fokkelman 1993: 23-25). But once we note
that this supposition about the cause of barrenness floats among several characters,
with none owning the phrasing unambiguously and all concerned in the equation in
some aspect, space opens up. It is a narrator comment made amidst transactions of the
married man and women. Bakhtin's category of concealed reported speech and hybridized speech shared by characters and narrator, which Polzin exploits (1989: 20-21),
allows for the possibility that it is neither just a narrator comment nor cleanly classifiable as a character viewpoint. To see ambiguity at this juncture of the discourse is key.
The characters' eventual common reference to narrator concerns gives us, at least in
Bakhtin's thought (to be laid forth in more detail in Chapter 5), the possibility of
construing those narrator assertions as character viewpoints. See Alice Bach 1997:1333, for an alternate but compatible way of talking about the narrator's lack of evenness.
A third point concerns another issue of viewpoint but also one of translation: what
noun is appropriate for characterizing Peninnah and whose angle is revealed by that
choice: BDB: 865, lists the noun under the root srr, indicating a hostile relationship.
30. Polzin has teased out the viewpoint of Elqanah well here (1989:22-26) and has
shown how the text itself, not simply some new-fangled and oddly-fitting methodology, invites the sort of cross-referencing I am attempting here. Though I do not agree
with Polzin that Elqanah speaks the YHWH role (since YHWH is a character just as the
human beings are) still I found these insights of Polzin on the 'parable characters'
wonderfully stimulating.
85
When I see her again a little later that evening, she is more cheerful,
takes some food and drink, looks better. I guess she took my words to
heart more than it seemed at the moment. I had a word on the quiet to
Peninnah as well, no point in vexing the other pointlessly. We all rise early
next morning, finish our worship and return home. We go on as before
but for whatever reason, YHWH now remembers. After some time Hannah
bears a son and names him Samuel (semu 'el), saying that she asked (s'l)
him of YHWH. That was part of it, no doubt. I was not so bothered as she
supposed about her failure and had tried to express that, but I seem to have
acquiesced to the alternative.31 How did that happen?
I was looking forward to our next trip to Shilohless tension at the
distribution of portions, thanks to my begetting another sonbut Hannah
surprises me by saying she will not be going this year. And then she really
astonishes me: after all her desperation for this child, she announces that
when he is weaned she will bring the boy to appear before YHWH and he
will dwell there forever: a short timeuntil weaning timeand a long
timefor ever. What is this requesting that she did, this bequesting that
she has evidently done? I don't know what to say to her. Earlier when I
suggested that I might be more satisfactory for her than ten sons, she made
no answer. I thought she might not see it my way, but perhaps she has now
come to it after all. Maybe it is true! I just advise that she do what seems
best in her own viewstay until he is weanedonly may YHWH raise up
his deed/word. Hannah makes no response that time eitherjust as well,
since I am not quite sure what I meant. If she thinks the child is from
YHWH, then let YHWH carry on. I hope I don't blurt that aloud. It might
sound like inadequacy on my part, which is clearly far from the case.
When we finally do go to Shiloh together to take the child, I am flabbergasted anew. It is the old priest Eli whom we find, not those sons of his;
and Hannah reminds himsimultaneously and incidentally informing
methat they had recent dealings; this I did not know. She had prayed for
the boy in the old man's presence. Since YHWH has granted her what she
asked, she explains that she is granting him back to YHWH for all his life!
31. Miscall 1986:14-15, notes the potential confusion in the expression combining
qwm ('raise up') and dbr ('word or deed'); McCarter also thinks the comment confusing either in the present textual tradition or else by reference (1980: 55-56). Again
to point out how variously we read: Miscall 1986: 15-16, thinks Hannah speaks platitudinously in the canticle of ch. 2; I find Elqanah and Eli's phraseology to share that
same characteristic. Polzin 1989: 28-29, tracks the shared expression farther out into
the narrative of Saul's rule.
86
Sometimes I feel as though I understand this woman little. She is confusing, contradictory. And so we leave, but not before praying additionally,
words that seem to make little impression on the old priest, who just stares
at her retreating back as she sings her way homeward. I feel a bit confused
myself, but I catch up with her once she has finished and we go home
together.
(2) Eli (1 Sam. 1.3, 9-18, 25-27; 2.11). I also am introduced genealogically, first as reference for my two sons who are priests of Yahweh at
Shiloh, the place Elqanah the Ephraimite comes for worship and sacrifice.
It seems a derivative start, my sons named to introduce meor is it the
opposite: I named to introduce them? Is this a succession story? But my
next mention is more central, for I am a priest too, sitting, positioned as a
woman enters down at the end.321 can see her emotion and her posture of
intercessory prayer, and I watch her for some time, briefly wondering what
has caused her upset but mostly revolving my own thoughts in my mind,
running them along a well-worn path, since I have been in place here long
enough to know how things are where my sons are in charge. The eating
and drinking is going on outside, and here comes a participant straggling
or staggering in here. Though I can see well enough from my enthroned
position high upcan certainly watch her mouth and lips, I can't really
hear her voice. It must be that she is drunkhave I caught traces of her
words after all: 'drink.. .wine...strong drink... '?33 Or is my suspicion of
her condition a reading of her lips or rather rooted in what I know about
the Shiloh festal liturgies?34 A lot of worthlessnessbeliyya 'alityand it
disturbs me. It can't be any waning capacities of mine, has to be her incoherent condition. I, drawing myself up on my chair, decide to speak to her
about it, ask her how long she plans to go on like thisdrink and wine?
This sort of thing needs to be nipped in the bud, need not be tolerated. A
word of censure is what is called forand that I can do. 'How long will
you make a drunken spectacle of yourself? Put away your wine...' Oh,
32. McCarter 1980: 60-61, helpfully sketches a plausible scene for us: Hannah
enters the 'ulam or porch of the shrine from and then returns to the liskd where the
sacrifices are eaten; Eli is seated in the nave, where he can look either toward the 'ulam
or toward the debir.
33. I am actually following the LXX here, MT 1.11 does not have reference to wine
or strong drink until Eli mentions it.
34. Klein 1983: 8-9, provides some apt references for Eli's biblical viewpoint on
the matter.
87
well, she says it is not drinking in of wine at all, rather grief and vexation
pouring out. I can only look on the outside (the moving lips)can't judge
what is going on inside (vexed and grieving heart). Why is she carrying on
so? She implies I had it exactly backwards. She does not go into detail
about what has vexed her, but I can do what I am here to do; so I give her
a favorable word, send her off in peace, and pray that God will give the
request she has asked. That's part of my job: pronouncing and assisting
God to give what people ask, encouraging them to ask for what God will
give. Whatever her item is I never got quite straight, still am not sure what
she wanted, nothing to do with me. She responds nicely, asks to find favor
in my sight. I see now, better than I did a minute ago. I watch her go off
back where she came. She seems betterless grief and vexation. I can see
that much, can claim that much, that she goes less distressed than she
came. That is good in my view, no reason why not. I have helped her. God
bless her!
Well, days pass for me, I suppose lots of them, difficult to keep track
somehow. Can it be as long as she claims it has been? For suddenly she
looms up again, is here with a young bull, an ephah of flour, a skin of wine
and a...oh, now it is coming back: I thought she had a skinful herself,
was a skinful herself...and a young child. She is bringing him up to me,
talking about that evening. She says it is the child she was interceding for.
God gave her request (s 7), what she asked (s 7) of him, she says. And she
is granting him back (sa 'ul), he is sa 'ul'requested', 'bequested', I hear
her say.35 And I do remember that, nowall that asking in various configurations. I did not know what she had asked when I said my regular
priestly words of intercession to God and dismissal to her. Well, we did
well. And I see the boy. Sons are a fine thing. Continuity. We count on it
here at Shiloh. Did I ask for more sons? I don't remember asking, but here
stands another one. Welcome, my son.
But she is not finished her jabbering yet! I do heartoo clearly this
timeher words of intercession, no mumbling for these erupting cadences,
35. The wordplay for these names is complex and ubiquitous and can be laid out,
though scarcely resolved. It occurs in 1 Sam. 1.12, 17, 20, 27, 28 (three times). The
root for Samuel's name is popularly sm', while Saul's name is closer to the root s 7 and
so can be played on as here and picked up in English cognates too. For more detail
on the etymologies and wordplays consult Fokkelman 1993: 56-59; Klein 1983: 9;
McCarter 1980: 62-64; Polzin 1989: 24-25. McCarter, for reasons wholly other than
the ones proposed by Polzin and picked up here, suggests a rich intercalation of the
identities of Samuel and Saul. Fox 1999: 9, translates 'lent on request'.
88
high and low, barren and bearing, up and down, death and life, judges and
kings. Well, I am not sure I quite get it all, but her cries leave me uncomfortable, briefly unsettled, as she disappears down the road, trailing these
penetrating words behind her, the child already humming them in her
absence. Nothing to do with me, so far as I can see from my stable position
here. Women's genre, this triumphal poetry. Well, there goes the man as
well, and I see the boy stays, a little minister to YHWH before me the
priest.
(3) Peninnah (1 Sam. 1.2-7). Well, these cameo roles are not my favorite;
at least this one comes early. Not only a bit part but not considered a very
sympathetic one either, though I plan to stretch it as best I can. Poor
Hannah, no children. Bad enough for her at Ramah, worse at Shiloh, my
portions according to fruitfulness drawing attention to her dearth. She
finds more reproach in me than I intend, hears more than I say.36 But on
this one particular occasion, I do sort of let loose some remarks, not so
much to taunt as to goad her into something other than self-pity. Why she
is childless is not mine to figure; if it has to do with Elqanah, she needs to
take care of it with him, not blame me. If it is YHWH who has withheld
her from bearing, well, I wouldn't know what to say about that, hers to
sort out as best she can.37 But she needs to do something^. I wonder if she
36. Peninnah, of course, says nothing in the biblical story; the narrator summarizes a
pattern of behavior, using two verbs (k 's and r 'm) and the highly ambiguous syntax that
can be read as either purpose or resultbig difference. BDB: 494-95, suggests that the
qal of k's is to be vexed and the piel and hiphil (used by the narrator in vv. 6-7 here)
connote the causing of vexation. And to add to the ambiguity, there are neither proper
names nor freestanding pronouns to indicate who is subject and who object of the transaction. Traditional commentary indicates that Peninnah vexed Hannah, who then did not
eat. But the Hebrew can be read to suggest that Hannah riles Peninnah and refuses to
eat. The net result of the vexing, which I would tend to read traditionally, results in
thunderous reaction (same as for YHWH shortly below). Hannah will refer to her vexation below in 1.16. It is a highly diagnostic place in the text for any reader, an examen
for ourselves and for translators and commentators. Note the blend of typical behavior
and one particular instance of it which is said to set off the event under description here.
It is possible to view the scene as two squabbling rivals setting off a long-suffering
husband, but that is not the only possibility. McCarter 1980: 60, uses the language of
co-wife and rival, perhaps inferring or implying that the terms are synonymouswhich
need not be the case though may have been the default cultural assumption.
37. Again, Hannah does not blame Peninnah explicitly. My point here is to raise
the question of whose assessment is YHWH'S responsibility for Hannah's barrenness
by showing that none of the characters actually claim it. It is usually construed as a
89
knows fully why she is weeping, what she builds up to year after year as
we go through this ritual. She waits for this moment to come and then
wades into it too fatalistically, too determinedly. My suggestion to Elqanah
to skip the double portion falls without effect as usual.38 He has no idea
that it only makes it worse. Maybe my tossing some vexatious snapping
will help her move; at least it removes her gloominess and tears and
refusal of food from what is supposed to be a celebration. That's not so
bad an achievement for a few words. I wonder where she's gone? But I'm
off now myself, my deed done.
(4) Hannah (1 Sam. 1.1-2.11). I enter silent this story of sons, of succession, of priestly lines, begin as a failure; the genealogy of a productive
man ends at mea man with a lineage and two wives, one of whom is
childrenedmakes my lack of bearing, my empty womb, most prominent.
For all I seem able to manage, Elqanah's line will come to an end at me
and who knows what will become of me, with no son to care for me.
My condition is on my mind a lot and of course it upsets me. It can only
be, or seem, my faultunless it is YHWH who has closed my womb as
some assert, but who is to know the difference?39 YHWH says no to me,
has not said yes to me about sons. Why should such a thing be? I am a
beloved wife but not a mother of sons. Peninnah becomes as though first
wife with her children; while I, though first, become like a secondary one.
Sarah and Hagar, Hagar and Sarah; Rachel and Leah, Leah and Rachel;
maybe I need a Bilhah or Zilpah. I stand between Peninnah, my adversarywho takes the pilgrimage feasting as an opportunity to vex me over
my sonlessness, and Elqanahwho gives me a double portion nonetheless
as well as some words about my conditionor lack of it.40 The apportionnarrator omniscient remarkhence, reliably true; but I am handling it differently, with
a Bakhtinian and feminist methodology.
38. Peninnah is a character with no subjectivity at all; in order to bring her out as
an 'utterance partner' I needed to be more venturesome than was required in the case
of those who have direct discourse in the narrative itself. My entry was the word
shared by Elqanah (implicitly) and Hannah and the narrator (explicitly)'goad' or
'vex'which I now slip into the rumination of the character charged with it.
39. ' She' calls attention to the social undertow when values are ascribed to YHWH;
when God is an invisible but interpreted actor on the human stage, in the human realm,
then when things do not go according to the putative divine will, blame will tend to be
apportioned.
40. The double portion is an utterance, which may be exchanged from vastly
different perspectives. That is, 'Elqanah' intends to be generous and palliative, but
90
ment, if not the sonlessness and the vexing, gets to me on these occasions.
I build up my dread the moment of hisgranted, unintendedemphasis
of my deficiency, lose my joy in worship of the God who has, they say
or thinkclosed my womb; I find, as usual, my desire for the feast's eating and drinking vanished.
Elqanah's self-centering words finally penetrate my isolation and selfabsorption: his voice asking me why I weep, why I do not eat, why I am
sad; he lists well the externals: my weeping, fasting, mourning! Does he
really want to know why I act as I do, wish me to explain once again my
situation to him? Who will feel better as a result of that exercise? His
solution, a substitution pushed too readily, is himself. He is, in his scanning view, starting from his position as a father, worth more than ten sons.
But that cannot be so from where my eyes start. One half-husband cannot
possibly be better than ten sons. Sons I must haveas the others have
them. How can I not have sons? Why do I not have children? There is no
answer I can make to his questionhis solipsistic assertion, his self-satisfied reproach, his smug though well-intentioned critique of my griefnor
will I accept the truth or finality of it. I must ask for sons, for something. I
turn silently from Elqanah in search of one who can be more helpful. I
have to get someone to answer the questions that I have.
So, rising while the others are eating and drinking, I approach the darkened shrine, glimpsing at its threshold portal and at the edge of my vision
the old priest Eli, seated on his thronechair; but I have not much interest in
his elderly presence. It is not he who has prevented me from bearing sons,
nor him with whom I must intercede about what I am lacking. His two are
no help to my lack. Distressed, barren, hungry, mouthing, weeping, I vow
my vow, my tears and distress wrapping around my repeating intercession:
YHWH Sebaoth, see, pleasetake sight of the distress of your maidservant, remember me and do not forget your maidservant and give your
maidservant seed of men; then I will give him to YHWH all the days of
his life, and a razor will not go up on his head.41 That petition seems to
cover the basics: who God is, who I am, what I want, what I will do when
I get what I want, who my child will be and until when, and in what condition. I was going on, interceding in that same vein, just beginning to hear
more clearly the source of my sorrow, when a voice came wafting out
'Hannah' reads the gesture as patronizing and making prominent the basis of her nondeservingness.
41. As already suggested, Hannah's prayer in the MT does not have the nazirite
details. They rise in the discussion, explainable in one way or another.
1. 'A Different
Clay'
91
from the priest's chairasking how long I would go drunken.. .urging that
I should put away my wine... The accusation caught me quite by surprise,
since I had eaten and drunk nothing, not to say that I was praying and
whispering and vowing to YHWH, surely not even audibly enough for the
old man seated at a distance to hear. And he clearly did not hearwhatever he saw that made him think me drunken. I answered politely, mentioning to my lord that I was a woman straitened of spirit, not drinking in
wine but pouring out my whole self before YHWH. I asked, hoping to
seem courteous but needing also to counter his obvious inference, that he
not consider me a daughter beliyya 'al, for out of an abundance of anxiety
and vexation had I been speaking.42 Well, he surely did not ask to hear any
detail about my distress or vexation but quickly assured me that I could go
in peace, sent me off with the usual formulaic word that the God of Israel
might grant my asking (s'l) which I had asked (s'l). Not knowing what
else to say, and feeling there was no point in staying longer, I asked, also
formulaic but sincere, to find favor in his eyesand left; oddly, I did feel
better and ate and drank some festal portion with Elqanah that night.
It was an odd experience of intercession, strangely interrupted, but the
old priest's wordsfirst correcting but then reassuring me from his secure
and distanced perchcheered me more than Elqanah's similar ones,
whether he knew what he was saying or not. Or was it my own words that
I have taken comfort in? I think perhaps that comes closer to it. They all
think it is sonlessness that makes me mope, and I thought so too, think so
still. But when I was in that place of intercession, I asked God to see me,
to look on my distress, to remember, not to forget. Bruised from being
passed among a Job's trio who think they understand my tears but have
mostly seen themselves and their own reflected surfaces, I hear myself
asking to be seen.43 In the asking, I get something at once, some insight
into what I have been lacking even more than a baby. The participation in
something reciprocal is what I want, feel I have been given already. We finished our worship early next morning and went home again, and Elqanah
knew and YHWH remembered and I conceived and bore a son and I called
his name Samuel (sem semu'el), since from YHWH I asked (s'l) him. That
occasioned a bit of commentary from the experts; let them keep it in mind
and see what they make of it in time! Note that it is not my choice to name
42. Hannah's use of the word in 1.16 allows her a share in the narrator angle of
1.6-7.
43. Polzin' s manner of watching shared language reminds us about the looking at
appearances/discerning the heart distinction that emerges later in DH (1989: 27, 49).
92
him Zechariah ('YHWH remembers') though that would be apt in its way.
What I asked I immediately recycled, and as it came back I returned it
again. And again.
It was too soon time to journey to Shiloh again, so I simply told Elqanah
that I would not be going this year. When the child is weaned I will bring
him up so that he may appear before the face of YHWH and dwell there
forever. He can't be brought at two or three months, or at a year and same,
even. I admitted only then to Elqanah what I had vowed to YHWH under
the feeble watch of Eli: given to God at Shiloh forever, to appear there.
Elqanah seemed surprised but said I should do what seemed best to me:
stay home until he is weaned? take him up later? leave him in service
forever? (a bit incoherent he seemed); only may YHWH raise up his word.
I am not quite sure I understood what he meant by that, not having heard
any particular words of YHWH to rise or fall. Elqanah and Eli talk alike,
poor dears, sort of pious boilerplate that hangs in the air, pointless, generic
and vapid.44 In both cases one wonders if they know what they are pronouncing about. They throw around these expressions, leaving them for
others who can be bothered to unravel and reweave later. But in any case
my intervention was effective, and I remained apart from Shiloh, its priests
and sacred spaces until the boy was weaned; and then we brought him up
and offered the sacrifice as required (Hophni and Phinehas did not show
up). I reminded the old priest who I was, tried to inflate a bit the role he
played in the getting of the child, but he gazed wordlessly at me, perhaps
not hearing or perceiving what I was saying to him. It did not matter. I said
in his presence what I needed to say: For this child I asked; and YHWH
has granted the boy I requested (7); I am now bequesting to (s'l) YHWH
he is bequestea7&7 'ul. I think my formula, so carefully rehearsed, was
intended to go over his head in any case. And so it did.
But I suddenly had more to say; words rushed through me, and I sang
them out loud and clear enough for the deaf to hear as I left the boy in the
shrine. Whose words these also are I do not know. Given me from the
past, they became mine briefly, and I cast them forth for others to claim as
well.45 My song's main motion is reversal. My heart that was grieving
44. McCarter finds Hannah's language suspiciously stockish (1980: 60-61), perhaps implying a formula, as makes sense with a vow. One of the language systems in
play here is the liturgical. For a feminist consideration of Hannah's centrality to the
narrative and to the likely context of her liturgical role, see the work of Carol Meyers
1994 and 1995.
45. Hannah's song of2.1-10 does not so much repeat the prose texture of its matrix
93
now leaps up, raised by YHWH the rock (swr) who gives me speech against
opponents (srr) who talk and think for me; my words address those high
up: no need to multiply arrogance and windy ignorance from lofty perches
[those who sit up high, take note!] God knows, distinguishes deeds. [God
reverses, subverts, averts.] Warrior's bow breaks weak, feeble gird on
strength; the stuffed hire themselves out to eat, but the hungry fatten, batten; the barren has seven, the mother becomes forlorn. Extinguishing,
enlivening is YHWH'S to do, lowering to sheol (se '61) and lifting out, disinheriting some and enriching others, leveling some down, levering others
up, raising the poor from the dust, lifting the needy from the refuse heap
so they can sit on thrones, honored with princes. [A surprise in store for
those who have sat on such thrones for ages, gathering in more than they
have given out? How can I claim these powerful shifts as YHWH'S, or God
manage them?] YHWH owns the pillars on which earth's edges are set
[more high place prone to wracking!]. God will guard faithful feet but
silence into darkness the wickedhuman strength alone is no match.
YHWH'S foes will be shattered like the warrior's bow, God's voice will
thunder (rym) in the heavens; YHWH will judge the ends of the earth
[perched on its pillars]; may God give strength to his king, raise the horn
of his anointed [as he has exalted mine].
Where does such a song well up from, where does it head? It is my
experience and my hope come to the boil, pushed until I thundered forth
like God. Some phrases are familiarso I borrowed them from the common stock, I suppose; but the song was freshly born of what I have been
through: the barrenness, the denigration, the rivalry, the asking, the rescue,
the bearing, the weaning, the bringing, the explaining, the sacrificing and
the leaving Samuel are where the song came from. No one made any
response to it! Elqanah, rooted while I went out singing, finally ran after
me, catching up with me about the time the song quit; but the boy remains
at Shiloh, with YHWH and with Eli, seated on his special chair. I know he
heard me clearly this time and sense why he risks no benedictory colophon
to these words of mine.
verbatim but in fact uses synonyms and vivid expressions to render the same themes:
the reversal of heart and self, the change from silence to wide-angled speech, joy for
bitterness, and so forth. The most key points re the high/low exchanges, the reversals
of eating and drinking and mourning, the subjects and targets of the reversalsbased
on God's assessment of deeds, and the thundering of the deity which is shared with the
'provoked' woman. Also vital, the reinforcement of the notion that the sons provided
are from YHWH. Cf. Bailey 1995: 214, who finds little fit between the story and the
song. See also Polzin 1989: 30-35.
94
(5) YHWH and surrogates (1 Sam. 1.1-2.12). Cultic ritual goes on at

Shiloh, where Hophni and Phinehas, of Eli's line, are priests, purportedly
to me, though I doubt the thought often crosses their minds. Elqanah sacrifices there as well and distributes portions around to his family, as appropriate; he routinely makes it two for the childless Hannah, whose womb
has yet to bear the son she so desires; for I have closed her womb, or so
'they' say. Elqanah's well-meant condescension to spare two portions for
Hannah and Peninnah's understandable inability to restrain her satisfaction
in offspring both reach for the explanation that Hannah's not bearing is to
be laid at my door. So do they all come up to my place regularly, and there
do they re-enact this family drama of fertility and infertility, of satiety and
dearth, as they perform the sacrifice under the eyes of the inattentive or
too-attentive priests. One year gives way to the next. I, too, am attentive if
not apparently too responsive; responsive to what? I have not been asked
yet. No one has thought to ask me, to ask me.
But one evening when Eli is seated and dozing in the place that has long
been his and where his fathers have sat before him (and his sons envision
sitting after he is gone) a needy woman enters the shrine as well; behind
her the sacrifice has been performed and portions are being consumed; all
are content except the one who is weeping, fasting, sad in heart. Why is
she approaching me, her hands extending empty between herself and the
ark which makes tangible my presence with my people? She now intercedes to me, bitter and weeping all the while, vowing me a vow and asking
me to look, to see, to remember and not to forget (requests I am easy to hit
up for) and to give her conception; she in turn promises her child to me all
his days (with head unshaven). A prayer offered out of regular sequence,
sent forth from empty hands, spoken by the woman with no assistance
asked from the priest, said directly and in her own phrasing. They all think
this is about sons, sons they all want desperately and from me. But there is
more; the tears of this woman are also about lacking, about asking, asking
and receiving, receiving and giving back, giving back and asking again. So
it is about the economy of relationship underlying the bartered particularities.46 A lack, intensified by what she thinks is a triple miscuing of those
who read it, begins to be unraveled by the one who feels it. Her words
make more visible, strip down and show more clearly what she lacks
46. Like Peninnah, YHWH has no direct discourse in this section of narrative; but
unlike her, God obviously has much more scope in the Hebrew Bible. That God wants
more than routine or external observance is a support beam of the divine character, and
on it I draw here.
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besides a child as she brings that neediness before me. Hannah's inadequacy is not simply an empty womb, and the need she feels has been
already remedied is something deeper than that, a richness enclosing her
womb which will soon contain what she has asked. If there were not more
remedied than a son, why does she feel better as she leaves? She is not
pregnant yet, nor does she likely place too much confidence in Eli's word,
nor have I reacted in any clear way. But she has started something with me
that gratifies her. Brought in by one need, she goes out with a transaction
that will take some filling. I think that is what she wants: a relationship;
me too.
Once they are home, I do 'remember' and she does conceive. I had not
really forgotten. It is a matter of careful timing, this joint venture we share
responsibility for. When the child is born she states now publicly that she
asked him of me, that I was part of his getting ('el qand as well as sa 'ul), a
response, no doubt, to those persistent in assigning me the other role of
withholding him. The decision for life or no life is in some aspect mine, in
partnership with others, of course. And Elqanah, again on his way to worship and pay his vow, comes without her, though of course not alone.
Hannah says that she will bring the child to appear and be seen before me
when he is weaned/when it has been recompensed. Does she know what
she is saying? Elqanah, like Eliindeed like me!agrees to her words,
bends to her will, and asks me to establish my word. Which I will do: her
words and mine, whether prompted or not by these two with their sacerdotal links. But I will always choose my times with care. I am patient, up
to a point. Attentive and eventually responsive. But I like to collaborate. I
like being asked by those who acknowledge a need, who see their own
efforts in need of supplement.
When eventually she brings him up to Shiloh, this time with an offering
as prescribed, she then tells Eli what had passed between us and how/had
done what she asked, and how she is now doing to me what she vowed she
would do. We share the requesting and donating of the child, Hannah and
I. The child is and will remain our common project, however it may appear
to any attending, and whether it turns out to have been a good plan or
not.47 Elqanah and Eli simply stare at her, the child as well. I, as asked, see
her and the child, who now appears before me. And then borrowing words
from me she sings for him, for any with ears. Whose words? She pours me
into her language, my powerful works into her provocative poetry, my old
47. This little snippet is derived from Hannah's words in 1.11 and 22, rendered
more visible from the anomalous presence of Saul long past the choosing of David.
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word-deeds into her fresh experience. Hannah is able to get me to do what

she wants, and she is reciprocally responsive to me. Her empty self
closed womb, as some would put itreaches to me again from the cultic
site. She opens her mouth, mine as well, speaking of me and of my projects what is true, discerning in her own experiences a rhythm that is
intentional, designed. In my response she feels her heart leap up, her
strength to rise, in my holiness and in my rockabilityunique. I AM God
who knows, assesses. What I know best she expresses in reversals of position: warriors with weapons destroyed, the feeble girt with new-loaned
strength; the sated hiring themselves for sale, the starving now fattening
up; women who have borne ceasing to bear, the barren conceiving at last.
She also sketches ancient vectors: mine to bring death and life, to thwart
and supplement, lower and raise, to disinherit and endow, to raise up the
dejected and suppliant: the poor from the dust, the needy from the dump,
settling them with princesan honored throne their heritage. For the pillars of earth are mine, mine to balance the earth upon them. I guard attentively the journeys of my loyal oneswhile the wicked will slip and slide
their own way into darkness. It is not a matter of human strength, she
sayswell, not wholly, to be sure. I will destroy those who set themselves
and their projects against me and mine, will rumble from the sky, judge
the ends of the earth, share my strength with whomever I anointlift up
his horn, which is where the song started: with the exalting of Hannah's
strength! And the boy stays to serve me. She asks these things while praising their accomplishment, demonstrates my deeds with her mouth, her
womb, her hands, her steps: such is the intercession which surrounds this
child she has asked and gives back now to me.
b. Reader's Reflection
It remains here simply to distill briefly, even suggestively, what has been
intended by reading this portion of utterances from within the genre
hugged, whose verbalized surface planes intersect analogically, metaphorically, with referential concerns lying below the surface. I will underline the
'fuzzy' ring I as a reader have made around the zone of each character
again reminding us that they are social ciphers as well as individualand
then make three larger points.
The dynastic amplitude surrounding Elqanah insensitizes him to the
need for the request. He is co-opted into it, cluelessly but not incidentally.
What he isson and fathermakes him shortsighted. His words show
that he quickly loses control over the part in the asking process that he did
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have. Eli, similarly attended by forebears and heirs, also miscues, as his
speech makes plain. But his ailment will not develop simply as myopia but
into a more willful blindness. His language shows him project onto others
what he does not face in himself and censures the innocent rather than
those more needy of it. Though he pronounces on the request, and thus
becomes part of it, he is never shown to have understood it. Peninnah, a
third character with sons, provokes, but the motive is shown potentially
multiple and hence undecidable. I aim with her to counter the familiar
trope of women fighting over men and babies, but the role in which Peninnah is cast here underlines the factions prominent in the requesting process
and the distinctively benign if complicit role played by the co-wife urging
Hannah to act. What these three share, besides sons, is their own sense of
a lack of need for more, granted that they accede to that concern on
Hannah's part.
Hannah's words show her as wanting something, the precise nature of
which is not so easily pinpointed. The misunderstandings accompanying
her whole transaction are key, notwithstanding that her three peers acquiesce, each distinctively, to what she asks. That she wants a child does not
say all of what she asks, nor must the oddity of turning him over before he
even arrives elude us. She seems too quick, perhaps, to promise that the
request will not disarrange the status quo. Her request sails out clearly,
though it is helped by a mediator it may not really have required. The
prompt for it is at least multi-stranded: she lacks what another has, in fact
what everyone else has. Some sons seem neutral, though Eli's are lethal.
Hannah's son comes late and will go early, will fall out of prophetic ministry for some length of time before his demise. The silence of YHWH
makes the divine zone much more opaque. That God is spoken about,
referred to, invoked formulaically by the 'dynasts' (Elqanah and Eli) need
not add up to reliable speech about him. How Hannah talks to and of
Godcomes needy and borrows old words of Godis somewhat at crosspurposes to what others say. God is constructed by the various approaches
made, and these do not add together so coherently. What seems clearest is
that Hannah's words get through and are reciprocated not only by the
request granted but by the gift of prophecy as well. The narrator directs
traffic but only makes a snarl. The greatest confusion comes over allegations about God's role in the presence and absence of the child. What God
does can be rumored and alleged but loses crisp certainty when the characters handle it. The narrator's collusion with the characters diminishes
any confidence in omniscience.
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Three larger and interlocking points. First, the key question of having
and lacking sons is set up oddly. Though it is clear that to lack sons is a
problemfor somethere is a hint that to have them may be as dire
a possibility not apparently perceived by those with them. The absence of
a son of her own is a problem for Hannah at the shrine, the yearly encounter with Peninnah's fruitfulness and with the Elide sons exacerbating,
specifying, rendering urgent the habitual problem sketched in the quick
introductory scene. The sonless problem intensifies, rises to a climax, and
seems resolved satisfactorily. Opposition gives way, the situation seemingly resolved by YHWH and the petitioner's confidence in YHWH; the
solution is verbalized and evidenced by physicalities. But the certainty,
celebrated by Hannah, unravels as soon as she raises her voice to speak of
it. She hands her son over, and then sings that those with children face
bereavement. That Hannah herself will shortly remedy the loss of one with
five other offspring and appear to take comfort in the making of the
garments she brings him distracts us, perhaps too easily, from noting that
she loses him. Her urgency in demanding a son and complacency in having
himeven giving him overdo not penetrate the central problem of sons
adequately. If sons is a problem solved here, it is also a solution problematized. So this odd narrative begins to generate and consume its own
thematic tail.
On this same first point: the kaleidoscope of interpreting voices renders
central the question of whose doing is the sonlessness and the sons. The
narrator launches the opinion, while standing with the husband and wives,
that YHWH is the responsible agent. The viewpoint slides among narrator,
characters and readers, since all pronounce on that topic for God. And the
narrator credits God with the remediation, a favor also greased by human
collaboration. But underneath the surface, having shown that both the
father and the blessing priest are consistently in short-sighted error with
their inferring, I thereby discredit them as experts on YHWH and sons.
Peninnah develops the matter differently, moved by me into a space the
text left open. Her view is that the issue is not fault but responsibility;
Hannah must thunder forth about it. So as Hannah's barrenness is caught
amid the hybridized speech of the tartly vexatious words of Peninnah, the
loving exasperation of Elqanah, and the pompous and platitudinous priestly
speech of Eli, we can begin to assess its centrality to the narrative it composes. Triply plied by character speech, the imputing of divine responsibility does its job with most readers pretty well, who for their own reasons
take it on themselves. The finger of blame points, but we may look back
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toward its source rather than forward to the referent of the gesture. Like
other readings going on here, it may be projection, mirror reading rather
than clear-sighted. Whose fault is the no-son? For that matter, whose
responsibility is the sons? As this one particular son is requested and
bequested with such collaborative emphasis, what significance does he
bear? If Polzin is correct to stress that asking for sons is asking for kings,
both the desirable and destructive character is being stressed and the complicity of the whole community in the demand for sons. Part of the subtlety
of the hugged is that all ask for something which is granted without necessarily being what they understood it to be. All are complicit, though each
is ignorant as well, and all will need to bear the burden they share.
Second is the question of Hannah's weepinga result of her sorrow and
her sonless condition, and in fact, eventually of her joy and her role as the
mother of a son. She weeps when she has no son and will risk bereavement when she has many. That point is explored, tumbled smooth among
the verbal ruminations of other characters, their discrepancies in caste,
gender and age sharpened in my heteroglossic reading. Hannah's initial
sense of her sorrow is opaque, since she acts but does not verbalize. Her
silence opens up space for the loquacity of others. Clearest are the words
of the two males, Hannah's tears caught in their cross-reading. Elqanah
thinks they bear inappropriate reproach to him, Eli that they bring drunken
disorder to his shrine. Elqanah, with wives and children, offers himself to
compensate for her lack. Eli, father of greedy and disorderly sons, moves
to correct in her what goes unchecked in his own household. The two men,
with sons, see poorly. Each reads his own situation almost exclusively,
while purporting to read hers. Having sons is linked to blindness for those
fathers. The woman's words suggest that a greater need underlies her
obvious lack: her desperation drives her across the formal liturgical lawn
to voice her own prayer directly to the one she begs to look at her. Peninnah, refused direct discourse in the biblical telling, is typically cast as a
classic rival wife, seeming to charge the other with failure in what she herself does well. But my particular Peninnah argues that she intends to play
it more sympathetically. Her take is that the tears are from impotence, not
only barrenness, and that she pushes Hannah past the sticking place and
into the shrine not empty but with something to recycle. Hannah's silence
suits Peninnah's strategy, since Hannah, unlike the two males, does not
here project her own issues onto Peninnah; whether Hannah can notice
that 'her rival' has in fact assisted her to act, has started her along the path
that will fill out the Hannah side of Elqanah's family tree, remains unclear
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in this construction (and will vanish shortly). Peninnah reads Hannah more
sagely than Hannah reads her. Sons (present or absent) do not blind Peninnah, though the obsession for them blinds Hannah, at least at the moment.48
Hannah and Peninnah remain foils, though not necessarily rivals, since
Peninnah goads Hannah to do something she does not know she can and
must do.
Hannah offers us more, however. When we hear only from others and
not from her, we cannot say what she learns but can see what she teaches.
She may hear in her own words something which she has not recognized
before, or she may not. But the casting here is to give us something new.
Unlike the others, who tend to mistake, ignore or cover over their inadequacies, she makes hers focal. The fact of her distress is beyond question:
fasting and weeping at a sacrifice/shared meal, her gestures in the shrine,
such that even Eli notices. But before she rises from the sacrifice her
actions have been more passive, going along with the others until she
refuses. Rising goes beyond refusal. The reason for her tears, and her solution, we must reconsider now that she breaks silence, for her doing so contradicts the views under consideration. Opening her mouth, her first request
is that someone see her. Hannah, clearly lacking a relationship with anyone who reads her well, seeks that very thing. She asks by the end of her
petition for a child, to be sure. There is no discussion from her about God
closing her womb, no blame from her, though she asks God for conception.
But those superficial equivalencies are not at all the same thing. On her
way to asking for a child, she begs that her affliction be seen, that she be
remembered, not forgotten; and she wants seed of men to give back. Asking for a male child, she also cedes him back in perpetuity, under some set
of conditions. Hannah's most persistent desire is to have a childbut to
leave him with YHWH. If we are to do better than the characters whom
we have seen observe poorly, we will need, as she says, to look and see
her distress, which otherwise will remain largely between herself and God.
What is the 'quest' she has initiated? She wants a child of hers in the presence of YHWH all his days, serving. An access? A relationality? An intercessor? A mediator of the relationship? She asks for something which she
gives back as part of the asking, and in perpetuity. A son, but more than a
son. But again, once Hannah leaves the shrine, she will seem to shrink
back to the one-dimensional maternal figure, bearing children, caring for
48. In Polzin's reading (1989: 26), Peninnah is cast in the role of the nations, who
have kings already, a status envied by the kingless Israel. Perhaps to have kings is to
lose the sense that they are such a solution as those without perceive them to be.
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them. There will be little residue of the matrix which generated the son in
the first place, either the demeanor in the shrine or the hymn celebrating
God's deeds. The son and his identifying garment becomes her single
focus. It is, again, an ominously early development in this long story.
Third is some hatching of the notion of God's preferences, complicity.
God seems to want sons, to preside almost sovereignly over their begetting
and disposition. As suggested already, the rumor floats in the air that God
gives and withholds sons. That the son follows after the intercession, the
blessing, the knowing, the remembering does not quite add up to the clear
assertion that the deity has been active when the woman wants sons, when
she has none, when she donates one, when she gets more. Again, the contesting voices help us read more critically here. Elqanah's ignorance
appears as counterpoint to Hannah's plans, Eli's as bemusement at her
words. Thus I cue our attentive selves to scrutinize our own interpretations. Elqanah is three times caught by surprise at what is going on with
Hannah. One of his ploys is to speak an exit line that removes power from
her. He tells her to do what she already told him she was going to do
clearly outside his plan prior to her saying it. Elqanah here resembles Eli,
pronouncing pompously on top of what he does not understand, folding
into future language words he has picked up from others. Eli is given
information but there is no indication that he perceives its significance;
somewhat blind, he is also deafening. Platitudes are not the path to insight.
Silence lets Eli cover up again for his poor perceptions.
Is Hannah a more reliable witness to the preferences and wishes of
God? She makes the handing back of the firstborn a condition of his being
handed to her. Is she correct in her assessment of what God wants? Does
God want sons? The asked-for child is indeed given back to be before
God. Does the divine acquiescence imply divine enthusiasm for this return
of firstborn sons? Or is God once again, as is the divine wont in biblical
narrative, falling in with a 'Plan B' when early moves do not go well? The
explicit silence of God on this topic, though yoked with a certain passivity,
may be a lure of sorts. Is it ominous that Hannah, vowing, evokes Jephthah and his child, Samson and his mother? (Polzin 1989: 23-24). In any
case, Hannah and God seem to accomplish three things. First, their words
and deeds appear in synchronicity: Hannah seeks out God who sees her;
she responds to a deity who seems to abet her. Hannah and God produce
the childexchange 'the saul', make the kingwith the priest and husband-father running along behind. The timing is crucial, and Hannah controls it, choosing herself the moment when she and the child rejoin afresh
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and anew the liturgy at the Shiloh shrinelate, and early. And by bringing
gifts which she offers as she hands the child over, she underlines his status
as an exchange, a pattern which will be replicated with the ark and the son
of Kish. As an offering, he is before God, to serve in perpetuity. But the
curtain rises again.
c. Act Two: The Repudiation of a Dynasty and the Formation of a New
Son (1 Sam. 2.12-3.21)
(1) Elqanah (1 Sam. 2.11, 18-21). Back to normal at last. And thanks to
the benison of the priest, frosting added to my genealogical cake, I produce
more children, by Hannah, three fine boys and two girls.49 It pleases her to
bring little garments to the older ladfine by me. I feel gratified when I'm
at Shiloh, the boy doing well! Did I give you one of my business cards?
(2) Hannah (1 Sam. 2.11, 18-21). We now see the boy only yearly, when I
replace the little robe (me'il) he has outgrown with a new one, gentle
supplement to the white linen ephod he also wears. Eli seems grateful for
the boy's presencehis own sons being a disappointment, to say the least;
he blesses us, asking that YHWH raise up human seed (my very expression
when he was unable to hear it!) in place of the one requested/bequested to
YHWH. And we go along back home. And his wordsmy wordsare
effective, as we have three more sons and two daughters. The priest feels
great power in his words, and Elqanah takes no little pride in his potency;
but perhaps my words and intercession are a help as well! A duet we sing,
YHWH and I, a collaborative venture; interceding poet, performing artist.
Should I worry that I seem in closer agreement with Elqanah and Eli? Or
is it they who have finally come closer to me?
(3)Hophni and Phinehas (1 Sam. 2.12-17, 22-25, 27-36). Yes, Shiloh's
shrine is our living(we 're in charge of the good life and of slaughter
here), the place where we manage to get pretty good portions. Fortunately
the old man does not see very well. Our sight, however, is keen, and we
can spot the choicest cuts among the sacrifices arriving, can see the very
moment when the portions are best forked out of the pot or speared off the
fire. Our boys can be trained to do it too, even this new one his parents left
49. The narrator suggests that Eli blesses 'the man and his wife' but Eli's direct
speech is clearly addressed to Elqanah only, using a second masculine singular pronoun and referring to Hannah in the third person, though acknowledging her giving as
the source of the recompense.
1. 'A Different
Clay'
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here recentlythe mother sobbing like a drunk on one occasion and

howling and dancing like a bat beliyya 'al as she turned away from the
shrine. Probably glad to get rid of the boy. The old one seems to be
watching him carefully. He does not like it when 'his' new boy is sent on
an errand by us! Well, whether he likes it or does not, the boy in his white
linen ephod and robe can learn how to help us get what is coming to us
and get it at the timely moment. Timing is all. The people coming for sacrifice have also buckled under pretty well to let us have what we want
when we want it, with a minimum of backtalk. The women serving at the
shrine seem to need no instruction, glad enough to lie with us when we
demand it of them, whether they admit it or not.50 Someone must have just
complained to the old man again, and he averted his watch from the new
boy long enough to eye us sorrowfully: 'No my sons.. .not a good report I
hear...' If someone did not tell him, he'd never have seen it for himself.
So feeble and ethereal he can't even land a good reproach, just another
round of those arcane priestly quibbles about jurisdiction of intercession:
If this, then that? But if who, then which? We blink back impatiently at
him stewing over such matters and nod that we'll give it some thought. He
seems satisfied, or at least sinks back into his chair, the little Samuel all
ears but silent behind him.
Every now and againlike todaythe old man looks really grim when
we cross his path, but he has less and less to say, at least to us. No grief
from us over that! We've heard it all before. Let him replace us with the
boy: hem, he calls himmy son! We are his sons, heirs to the priestly
lineand no Ephraimite interloping foundling freeloader is going to crash
in on or cash out our privileged place.
(4) Eli (1 Sam. 2.12-3.21). So the bequested son remains to serve, the
small sa 'ul.
But speaking of sons and priests, sons and service, my Hophni and
Phinehas are a scandalizing beliyya 'ality of what they should be, with
their vast ignorance of YHWH, their greed about eating, their sending their
boysdo they send wee Samuel?to grab at sacrificial shares, to remove
them from divine service before the prescribed time.
It is a relief to look away from their contempt to the boy Samuel,
dressed by his mother still as the years go by. I bless Elqanah and Hannah
each year as they come and bring the new robe (me 7/), pronouncing that
50. Jobling stresses (1998: 134) that the situation described at the Shiloh shrine is
endemic, not occasional.
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God give him seed from his wife in place of Samuel. Do I know what I am
saying this time? I learn frequently that they and God and I are doing well
at this business of their sons. And daughters, yes. They come now too, as
the boy Samuel gets bigger here. Seeing the increasing family of Elqanah
and Hannah, watching the boy Samuel outgrow his little robes, one after
another, all mark the passing of time, the shaping of his identity.
Well, I don't see as much as I used to, but I hear too muchthis time
about my sons lying with women serving at the door of the tent of meeting. I talk to them, try to set them straight, ask them why they are doing
these things. 'No, my sons, it is not a good report that I hear the people of
the LORD spreading abroad' And I pose to themam I repeating myself?
the thing that worries me most: interceding for sinnersthe case when a
man sins against a manis part of our job here; but if a mannot to say
a priestsins against God's cult, who is there to intercede for him? It is a
question that does not leave me, that I cannot get rid of. What makes me
think of Samuel now, for whom his mother says she interceded? Who is
she to intercede? Who is he to be interceded for? Or maybe the interceded
one can intercede, as the asked one is granted. Maybe she can intercede for
my two, or maybe he will. But maybe not. Should I intercede? This is
confusing and worrying. Surely they don't listen to me.
And so I return my gaze to the boy Samuel who is doing well with
YHWH and with the people. I have to overlook my own sons, whatever I
am forced to continue to hear.
And then suddenly one day, there it is, harsh in my earno warning, I
did not see him approaching, just heard the voice. 'Thus the LORD has
said...' it starts, and then rehearses the heritage in which we have been so
rooted: chosen priests back from the time of Pharaoh's slavery, chosen
from all the rest of the tribes to ascend the altar, to burn offerings, to bear
the ephod...no doubt who is speaking, even if I can't seeI hear the
words this time, never mind the mouth...given the oblations of all
Israel... I anticipate now with dread what is coming, since I know the
difference, whatever my constant efforts in my own mind to try to reweigh
or diminish the distance between given and grabbed for. 'Why then [kick]
at my sacrifices and my offerings that I commanded, and honor your sons
more than me by fattening yourselves...'the man and voice of God
accuses me'...on the choicest parts of every offering of my people
Israel?' Excessive honor (kbd)/weight misplaced? Abusing, making light
of/(q 11)7 The well-fed, the hungiy... I concede it is what my sons are
doing, but I had not seen myself do it, had not intended them honor.
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Watching them, blind to their own condition, seeing too little of my own
situation? Noting what they overtly do while refusing to consider my inner
promptings? And now the worst possible: the solemn word of God, given
in Egypt, that we would go as priests forever, is cast far from God, who
claims to honor those who honor him (kbd) but promises diminishment for
God-scorners. Is that allcan there be more? Words of cutting off in old
age human seed from our ancestral househuman seed is the very word
of fertile blessing I speak yearly to Elqanah and Hannah: is their replacement seed linked to my seed cut off? The word still drones on at me:
'Then in distress you will look with greedy eye on all the prosperity that
shall be bestowed upon Israel; and no one in your family shall ever live to
old age... The only one of you whom I shall not cut off from my altar
shall be spared to weep out his eyes and grieve his heart...' And the men
of my house will die. Sign of it? I have not the strength to ask a sign but
the voice in my ear insists. My Hophni and Phinehas will die on the same
day, though God will raise up a faithful priest from whom my survivors
will beg connection, a bit of food or a scrap of silver. I can make no
response. Is Samuel the faithful priest who will replace my two? Maybe it
will all be right. I will shut out of my vision the other two and focus on
him. There is little point in mentioning this oracle to my sons, who have
not listened for a good long time. It is unlikely they will start now.
And there was worse to come. I seem to doze earlier each evening and
have turned over to Samuel the tending of the lamp in the shrine. One
night not too long ago he woke me a couple or three times, thinking I had
called him; I don't hear so well. I had not called him, or could not recall
that I had, so I sent him back to sleep, dropped off again myself. The third
time he came back I directed him differently and then waited to see what
would come of it; a longshot, since there is little revelation by God here
these days.51 He did not return a fourth time, which left me tossing restlessly instead of able finally to sleep undisturbed. He looked tired and
worried the next morning too, avoided my gaze. Since the word can
scarcely be worse than what I have already heard, I told him not to hide it
from me, enjoined him by oath to tell me. And so he did. Optionless and
beleaguered, what can I say? 'It is the LORD; let him do what seems good
to him' That's my final word.
51. For a wealth of detail on this chapter, consult Gnuse 1984: 130-77. It is possible to see a difference of opinion between Eli's and Samuel's experience here, as
summed up by the narrator who stands near each by turns: for Eli, little revelationhe
after all is blind and deaf; for Samuel, more hearing and seeing.
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(5) YHWH (1 Sam. 2.11-3.21 passim). Yes, more children for Hannah and
Elqanah, while the oldest grows up here before me, ministering before me
in his vestment, wearing as well the series of little cloaks brought by his
mother when the parents come to sacrifice. Eli continues to bless them, to
beg me to set for them other seed for the one she asked from and for me;
and so I do visit themspacious word, that.
The others serving at Shiloh, Eli's two sons, know me not at all, and
their distortion of the sacrifice testifies to it continually.52 The people
offering worship know the custom better than the priests, care for it more
faithfully. This is a great sin of Eli's sons before me, this distorting and
deflecting of what flows between me and my people. Portions forked over
and too soon forked out of the fire, offerings grabbed greedily from those
who did not envision or intend them ending up on the plates of the priests.
Any demur is silenced with threats. Served instead of serving, fattening
and flirting, these two with their contemptuous reversals which I only
seem to tolerate will themselves be forked over out of the time they plan.
And the voices of Israel, bringing their gifts for transformation before me,
will be raised again.
Eli, having heard from my people the deeds of his sons, chidingly poses
for them a key question: Who intercedes for a man who sins against me?
His question, pale and abstract, scarcely catches the fullness of what might
be asked, since Eli chooses to watch with his eyes mostly covered. What
redress for the hierarch, the father who so violates his position of intercessor as to prevent the communication he is there to effect? To take the
sacrifices, to abuse the women who work at the shrine. The sons pay him
no heed; their scornful incorrigibility is the answer to his question. Does it
please me to kill them? Would I not rather it suited them to return to me
and to live (so Ezek. 18.32).
And the problem is not simply these sons: I sent a man (a prophet) to
Eli. His commission: to underline my commitment to a just priesthood and
cult, to detail the benefits that have come to Eli's priestly line because of
my commitment to it. So he recalled not their priestly service but the benefits they have received in its pursuance, their fattening on my sacrifices to
the detriment of others. In that context comes the outrage against sacrifice
and offering, the complacent greediness that binds sons and father. Eli
must understand that he has honored/let them grow heavy (kbd) in preference to me. Their gross scorning of me and his authoritative complicity in
52. We can note the impact of God's knowing (evil) deedsso Hannah singsand
of these two priests who know not God.
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it will result in their diminishment. The outrages of the sons, piled high in
the sight of all, have now resulted in a major revision of the word that I
gave. What was once their heritage to go in and out before me as priests
forever is shrunk now. I will cut off their strength so that no one survives
to old age; or the one who does survive will be reduced to begging a pittance from those who have Eli's former place. The eye will remain greedy
and jealous, but the taking will be less, since the position will now be
frustratingly powerless. The sign (indeed, the symbol) of this for Eli is the
death of his two sons on the same dayhimself with them, the keening for
all the dead supplemented by, blending with the cry of a newborn. And I
will raise up a faithful one who will inherit this abandoned heritage (as
Hannah suggested). Will I find one? Those who honor me will participate
in that same honor, but those diminishing my project will be cut off from
it. The weakness she turned over to me they glory in; hence the outcome.
Only one thing needful.
Well, still no action, even as I turn up the pressure on Eli. He misses a
good deal of what I say, sees little of what is pretty blatant. Deciding to try
the young Samuel, it takes me a couple or three calls to get him tuning the
right frequency. I move in closer as he begins to attend. The word is not so
different, but this time it is not just a parishioner complaining, not even a
man of God; I AM the communicator of this word: I am about to do.. .an
ear-tingling deed.. .fulfill...punish...because his sons were blaspheming
God and he did not restrain them...iniquity of Eli's house shall not be
expiated forever. But even that ukase, shared hesitatingly with Eli by the
listening Samuel, produces nothing. But I will continue to reveal myself to
the boy. He will get more accustomed to my ways, perhaps.
(6) Samuel (1 Sam. 1-3). They say it impossible that I should remember
that day which ended as they disappeared down the road without me, but
there are more ways than one to remember an event. I know I was young,
but I recall very well being pushed before the old priest who gaped and
gawped as my mother spoke and my father looked on silently too. The
sacrificewell, I remember it perhaps since it was the first I participated
in, the first of many; I am used to the ritual now but it was frightening
then, the slaughter of the three-year-old bull, the pouring of flour and the
wine. I was, after all, only a little boy. My lineage began the story, being
of course that my father Elqanah also, Ephraimites from Rama(thaim), five
deep. My parents are Elqanah and Hannah, but I have another father too,
later: Eli. In this story about sons, I may as well acknowledge all my
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fathers, since you never know who will be important. I have siblings, some
already on the scene before I arrive: the children of Peninnah, unnamed,
unsexed, unnumbered; and the two sons of Eli; I eventually also have three
full brothers and two sisters. I feel unlinked to them, as though they were
not my near kin. I don't remember when they were not around but they
seem peripheral all the same. All this concern about children!
I have listened many times to the story of my asking and being granted,
and it becomes difficult for me to make it my own, having heard it as
Hannah's, as Eli's, as Elqanah's, or as mentioned glancingly, sneeringly
by Hophni and Phinehas, even now as the old's king's story or that of the
people. As I reflect on it, my circumstances of origin seem conflicted. My
mother obviously wanted mewanted a meand someone else did not.
I can say that my father did not want me or see the point of having me, if
he already had other sons and daughters; nor did he see the point of my
mother having me, since she had him. Why is a son necessary to a woman
who has a devoted and capable husband? God deferred getting me for
them, or letting me be gotten, for reasons that remain opaque to me so far,
though I may have more to discern here. Perhaps I had not been sufficiently asked until Hannah asked, or adequately invited until the priest had
affirmed it with God. Asking of God always requires timing that remains
hidden. Eli, the other one who calls me 'my son', may also be said not to
have particularly wanted me; he wanted my mother to shape up, to put
away her wine; she had just indicated that I would live in just that grapeless condition! He did not know what she had asked but he went ahead and
pronounced for it anyway. All this stress on asking, on as-king!
So, I think I was asked and not asked. Wanted desperately by a mother
and much less so by my two fathers. Asked insufficiently but finally sufficiently. Why God said no and then yes, if that was the way of it, seems
important but unclear. How was God's agenda part of the agendas of the
woman and the two men? DiddoesGod collude and collaborate with
my mother, out of range of my fathers? Why my two fathers were in someway out of the loop seems also important but unclear. One gave me up
rather easily and the other received me as unenthusiastically. The one who
wanted me eagerly relinquished me; the one who was less concerned
received me. My mother is a wholly different matter in other ways as well.
Her words about me were the decisive ones. She, lacking, asked and
vowed, and she decided the timeline and conferred me when the moment
came. She asked for me, conceived me, nursed and weaned me, gave me
and continued to clothe me. All of her words centered on me. I became
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what she chose.. .what she continues to direct. How does everyone ask a
son? How does the asked son ask?
After her wonderful song, then she went.. .and he went.. .and I remained,
a minister to YHWH in the presence of the priest Eli. No wonder I remember it! There was a lot to begin to notice, and a lot of it involved Eli's sons
Hophni and Phinehas. Their priesthood was not at all what I was learning
from Eli, and I cringed at what I was sometimes sent by them to do, so
they could have their meat the way they wanted it. Eli did not like it but
could not seem to stop them. He talks, they act. I did the best I could,
wearing with satisfaction my white linen garment and the robe my mother
brought yearly. She made the robe itself a ritual, as though 1 were more a
robe-wearer than her son. What is a son? Am I more than an ephod-bearer,
a robe-wearer?
But what I remember most vividlynot just generally like the doings of
Hophni and Phinehas, the ramblings of Eli, and the visits of my parents
was two visitations which upset Eli considerably. The first he told me later,
with reluctance; the second, /told him afterwards, with a corresponding
hesitation. His occurred at the shrine, but out of the normal flow of things.
The man loomed up suddenly, pushed past Hophni and Phinehas who
were arguing with some who had come to sacrifice and baiting the serving
women, as they habitually did. The man looked fiercely at them but did
not address them, went rather right for Eli; he spoke at him for not longer
than a couple of minutes and then walked back through the little knot of
people at the sacrifice with the same unengaging scrutiny. Eli did not
move for some time from where he had been sitting when accosted by the
man of God. He was still grey-faced when 1 asked him later what the man
had said. He did not tell me the exact words but summarized that his
priestly heritage, promised to his line so long ago and filled by most of
them with such pride, had been, or was about to be, ripped from the hands
of his family. It was like being fired, he said: Elides would be present but
not in the position of priest, would become beggars from others, would not
live into old age. Can dynastic sons be fired? When I asked him why such
a word can have come, he said it was because of what his sons did, things
which he failed to stop them from doing: their wickedness and his complicity. After so long a service, Eli is shocked to hear of contempt and despising, to be accused of greed and abuse of his position, to hear of the sword
and grief and weeping. I am reminded of Hannah's song of reversals. I am
also startled that he is shocked, but I suppose his inability to influence his
sons' priestly ministry almost inevitably shrinks his appraisal of what they
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are doing. The man of God mentioned a faithful priest to be raised up, and
I know Eli thinks it is myself. I hope it is me, want it to be me. There was
not much sign of it yet, except that Hophni and Phinehas repel me and find
me repulsive, while the people seem to approve me.
Oh, the other night that stands out as different. I was sleeping in the
shrine as is usual now, tending the lamp in front of the ark, when I heard
my name called out. Not unusual, so I ran to see what Eli wanted. He
seemed to have forgotten he called and sent me away, only to call again
also not so rare! Finally after three trips into his room, he told me to
address God if I was called again. And so I did when I was: Speak, Lord,
your servant is Samuel/listening. The word I heard was pretty fierce, worse
than when summarized by someone else. I just lay there when the voice
stopped, dreading to see Eli. But he seemed already to know it was the
same bad news about him and his sons. He is resigned to it, calls it God's
will. What is God's will for me? I hear more words now, experience more
seeings of God. And people approve me as a prophet. Am I the faithful
prophet? How am I to be a faithful prophet? When to listen, ask, tell, heed?
When to initiate, wait?
d. Reader's Reflection
Again, some quick lines emphasized around the voice zones prior to gathering from them some summary points. The parents Elqanah and Hannah
recede here, the father wholly and the mother substantially. The only link
they maintain to this son of theirs is a yearly visit and the dressing of him
in a garment that will later come to be characteristic of contested kingship,
will clothe the struggle between prophet and king. Hannah most visibly
fades, her prophetic voice going silent, as she directs her energies simply
to the reinforcing of the vested role, with no other attention directed to the
deity. What Hannah had asked and Elqanah participated in getting now
stands free of them. That other offspring come to them without the drama
that produced their first child simply sets him off as a different creature.
The Elides can also be grouped together as a dynastic line, characterized
by their seeing and hearing and lack of same. As before, Eli's refusal to
see is prominent and he is made fully culpable for it in this section. His
weakness is highlighted by his language when addressing his sons: 'not
good' is so inadequate to the reality we are shown by the narrator. Hophni
and Phinehasgranted without subjectivityare also marked by their
refusal to hear, by their greedy eyes and hands, by their rebellious feet,
and by the total lack of any description of them that is directed toward
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God. In fact, they are sketched only as those accustomed to take, to demand service; the lack of any other character to land a critique with them
(not simply at or about them) is telling. They are incorrigible, these sons.
The final Elide scion spoken of by the man of God is also given a greedy
and jealous eye, not able to be satisfied from what is available to him,
demanding more from what his lineage once held. It seems an utterly grim
portrayal of inherited power.
YHWH^S reproach is as strong as Eli's is weak, as scathing as the sins of
the Elides require. Clearest is the consistent denunciation of the dynasty,
with no distinction made between the more passive evil of the father and
the so-active malice of the sons. The consequence of it all is that the deity
revokes an ancient covenantal agreementa forever pactin face of its
persistent trashing by the human partner. YHWH, over time, has had
enough. Noteworthy as well is the stress on divine communication to the
dynasty via prophets; first a man of God to speak and then the child to hear
and recount. God warns sons through prophets, but the sons are heedless.
Finally the grant, as we might call him here, asked and given: Samuel
travels like a judge, serves like a priest, is given speech like a prophet, is
clothed as a king (will be; absent now is any nazirite note). He is several
times a son (and will become a father of [renegade] sons too) and lives
surrounded by other dynasts. His focal moment comes when, attentive to
the ark, he receives a word from God. Whether he is too slow to recognize
it is not so clear to me, since the ensuing drama serves to stress the unusual moment as well as the hearer's hesitation. What strikes me as more
noteworthy is his slowness to deliver the word; that he does so only when
prompted by Eli himself, and even then, the word does not emerge in
direct discourse. What will be the case when the intended recipient of
God's word does not insist to hear it? How will royal sons be effectively
addressed by prophets? So the son here is ambivalent and undecided, inarticulate and almost silent. The sought-after son is surrounded, swamped,
and all but stilled by other dynastic sons.
Three larger pointsagain interlockingare again suggested by the
second act in this prefacing piece to Israel's story of kingship. First is the
utter condemnation of the dynastic line of Elides. If the first scene (1.12.11) moved kaleidoscopically, this second part moves both in layers
with five successive condemnations of the Elide dynasty (by the narrator,
by a bodiless voice from the Shiloh shrine, by Eli, by a man of God, and
by God's own voice). The impact is achieved by piling on (and by comparison) rather than by a less regular shifting of the angle of reflection.
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Though the viewing angle might seem to belong uncomplicatedly to an

omniscient narrator, I would argue here that the appraisal is spread more
widely among humans and divine. As undifferentiated people and God
watch the goings on at Shiloh, they appraise the Elides wholly corrupt in
their ministry. The clearest malefactors are the sons, condemned repeatedly and from several mouths for vicious abuses of the power of their
position. Whether to misuse the offerings or the cultic personnel, to fatten
on what was not theirs to commandeer, to make themselves focally honored instead of YHWHthese practices are unequivocally condemned
and the line diminished to one feeble, grieving, survivor, petitioning his
bread. Contemptuously incorrigible, they become unsalvageable. From the
ineffectual Eli, a sitting judge as well as a priest,53 through the lethal sons,
to the mewling and begging orphan, the dynasty is hopeless for the big
picture. The fall of the Elides will be thorough if not quite complete; indeed, the presence of a frustrated scion underlines the failure of the enterprise.
Second is the apparent contrast of old sons with the 'new son', the
'grant', well-vested in cloak and ephod more receptive to God's words.
The narrating voice toggles between the corrupt Elides sons and the young
and more promising Samuel. Having started with such a stress on the
requesting and bequesting of a son, can it be the case that 'the sa 'ul\ is a
false start? As the scene ends, he appears to be doing well with God and
with the people. But is another son able to provide a fresh start, a son
reared at Shiloh amid Elides? Can anything good come from Shiloh?
Though the only remotely hopeful words from the man of God in 2.35
hold out the possibility that a priestly son, inevitably dynastic, may do
better, his identity is far from clear. Is the status of the new sonfathered
by various characters and mothered as he has been, turned over to YHWH
and brought up as a minister at the shrineable to be faithful? Of what
will such faithfulness consist? I think the best we see is the possibility of
reform, ending in uncertainty; it may work. As the section concludes, the
most we can say is maybe. But as Polzin has argued, if sons are kings,
kings are made redundant before ever one appears.
53. Jobling, who is reading the Samuel story from within the book of Judges,
reminds us that we have been advised that Eli's judgeship goes back into the events of
the catastrophe ending the book of Judges (1998: 43-76, Chapter 3). J. Ackerman
(1991: 2-4), Exum (1992: 16-42, Chapter 2) and Greenstein (as noted already) are
among those who see many links between Samson and the present narrative.
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Third is the composite nature of the Samuel-Saul figure at the shrine. It

seems clear both in his clothing and in roles assigned that the child has
elements of judge, priest, king and prophet. Are these roles compatible in
one character? Does one role interfere with another? Is the 'new boy'
suspiciously slow to hear? Or to speak? What will happen if the priest is
also a prophet, the judge a king? Granted, the roles of priest, king, judge
and prophet are not precisely specified in biblical narrative, such that one
can draw up tidy and airtight job descriptions for them. But the assemblage of priestly service, judicial responsibility, royal power and prophetic
challenge that come the way of the asked son to comprise his filial role is
ominousa point that will develop in the 'straighter' narratives of Saul
(and the other kings)the other Chinese boxes. The narrator, summing up
for the people and even for God, affirms him; but Samuel himself is
almost mute.
8. Conclusions
The imaginative exercise has had, as its purpose, to make explicit my

specific reading of the riddle genre and my engagement with character
utterances. How does the unit work as a masal, the asking of a son analogous to a request for kings? Can a human character be a cipher for a more
institutional problem? The ubiquity of the wordplay on the name of the
first king whom we shall meet shortly seems almost too obvious at this
point, even as it slides into puns on Samuel's name as well. That Samuel is
implied as Saul seems well-established by verbal artifice. The context for
the request is the dominating presence of other dynasties, with a given
father not able to restrain evil sons (a scene to recur often in DH). The
solution clamored for is part of the problem; a son is simultaneously an
amelioration and intensification of what is wrong with dynastic leadership.
That a(nother) son is given is cause for rejoicing but is soon enough also
cause for grief as well. That the son is granted by YHWH does not guarantee the project success. God's participation is not a panacea; the community must continue to cope with the son it requested. Asked by several,
and repeatedly, we might say the implications have not been worked out
well enough by those collaborating to request him-^a point we will be
able to see more plainly when we watch 'this scene' again in 1 Sam. 8.
The sons' sins are most telling. The condemnation of the dynastyfather
and sonsis for abuse of their office. The one thing they are at the Shiloh
shrine to dopreside at sacrificesthey thwart. Their blatant and thoroughly vitiating practice is not amenable to prophetic or even divine
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rebuke, since as a composite the dynasty is blind and deaf, eyes set and
ears stopped. Their practice, custom, their crooked custom, is to take what
was peoples' and God's and reroute it merely for themselves. Their sins
are also 'sized': deeds too heavy and too light, and these verbal roots will
recur again in the story stretching ahead. The punishment and sign of
effective speech is that the rotted out father and sons will die on the same
day, with only a weak survivor able to assert his former right ineffectually,
until he vanishes as well. The condemnation is not simply personal, as
though the young Ichabod (Ishbosheth, Solomon, Hezekiah, even Josiah)
might do better than his malicious father and uncle; dynastic sons turn out
ultimately to be dead wood.
If, as I propose, this is a particular type ofmasal, a huggedriddle to be
propounded and explored, an enigma to be teased out and recognized
then what is the question to which it gives answer, or what is the answer to
which it raises a query? The receiving community I hypothesize is faced
with a leadership problem for its resettlement in the land of Judah. Is more
sons the answer? To what question? Can new sons do better than old sons?
How so? Is there something better than ten sons? Something worse? What
will make one son better than another? What does God want, and how is it
to be effected? Is God clearer about what is wrong, irremediably wrong,
than what may go right, be better? Can God speak other than to condemn?
Can, will, God work effectively with new sons? Will early promise bear
fruit? The parable's prefacing placement is crucial. I think there can be
little doubt, by the middle of 1 Sam. 4, that the solution of sons is again
(and not for the last time) shown disastrous. Noticeable and peculiar is that
before 'the' king appears on the scenea question that will occupy the
whole book of 1 Samuel as Saul struggles to be and stay king and the
whole book of 2 Samuel as David consolidates his power distinctively and
against all comers (including his sons)the riddle has already shown the
institution crashed, out of the running before it leaves the gate. In the
parable of chs. 1-3, in our next chapter with a smaller radius, and upon
occasion thereafter, the action will make a full circle. The bereft woman
bears a son, gives him up; the last newborn son relinquishes his mother
and takes his position amid ruins, stillborn, for all practical purposes. The
assertion then serves up with it the challenge to probe the nature of, the
reasons for the failure of the institution of kingship. The factors of the
parable will make voluble some of the vectors in the story of Saul's choice
and reign, and those longer narratives will tease out additionally some of
the factors in the parable. This initial parable, looped as it is into the next
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story of the ark (1 Sam. 4-6), also sets up the key question there: What
was the definitive sin of the Elide that crashed their rule as sons? It is that
question, reflected upon in the next chapter of the present study, that makes
clearer the precise responsibilities of the 'new' son. The rest of the DH will
rewind the parable, as it were, or continue to unpack nested boxes, will
consider in four books how and why such a catastrophe can have occurred.
How can people have asked, how can prophets have abetted, how can the
royal sons have abused, and especially how can God have granted such
power to 'sons'?
Chapter 2
LOOKING LETHAL:
CHRONOTOPIC REPRESENTATION OF THE ARK (1 SAMUEL 4-7)
In short, the story of the Books of Samuel revolves around the ark, focusing
also on the major figures, those that failed and the one that succeeded in
establishing God's permanent house.
Yehoshua Gitay (1992: 225)
The ark is uniquely endowed to raise the primary question pervading the
entire ark story: who is to be Israel's/the Lord's proper caretaker?... How to
get the people Israel and the lost ark back to the land of Israel after the
disaster of the exile is central to the story's subject matter.
Robert Polzin( 1989: 66)
1. Point of Entry
With a case suggested for reading 1 Sam. 1-3 as a masal, where to ask for
a son is to request a king, we seem now suddenly bidden to enter a wholly
other narrative scene in which the asked son plays no part. If, as has been
argued, the stories of the boy Samuel have functioned to discuss subtextually Israel's request for a king, to show that request as urgent and illconsidered, conceded if conflictually, and to the extent that the eagerness
for sons is analogous for kings, the sins of the sons have been shown as
fundamentally abusive of the office held, thwarting rather than facilitating
the relationality between God and people, then we are left with an urgent
riddle, a hugged. What, we must ask, is the situation that makes the recital
of sinful sons necessary in such complex detail, and to what urgent query
is the narrative a response? That is, if the story of the seeking of sons is an
utterance, who and what are its conversation partners and how are we cued
to imagine them? I have sketched the possibility that part of the riddling
story's character nests in the timing of the child's gettingdelayed and
urgentand in the enigmatic response of God to the track record of
2. Looking Lethal
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dynastic sons in their local ministryservice of the ark of the covenant at

Shilohthen these particular facets of time and space may provide our
next key clues and absorb our next reading effort.
The journey and adventures of the ark, itself named and qualified variously (e.g. 4.4, 5, 6, 11), have received a fair amount of attention from
biblical scholars in recent decades. In fact, the material is, in its own way,
a showcase for methodology in biblical studies at the end of the twentieth
century. Among studies whose primary interest is historically reconstructive: there have been source-critical efforts, redaction-critical studies,
tradition-historical investigations, form-critical approaches, comparative
religion researches. All of these studies, proceeding in one way or another
with a variety of assumptions and procedures made explicit or left implicit, work to uncover, reassemble or posit likely historical information
about the ark. Among scholars whose bent is more literary than historical,
more inclined to attend to language dynamics than to reconstructive
matters, the reading strategies vary in terms of several criteria: prominence
and complexity of philosophical assumptions, reliability of the narrator, or
degree of latitude conceived for the reader. To a considerable extent I consider these issues moot, given my methods and questions. The key insights
that have surfaced during the last century or so of study will be incorporated as is suitable for my purposes.
But all scholars writing on this portion of 1 Samuel, regardless of historiographical and linguistic assumptions and chosen methods, must account,
if briefly, for certain key facets of the narrative: the ark's identity and
function, the historicity of the Philistines, and, most crucially, the relation
of the narrative to the origins of the people Israel and their leadership
shifts, whether in the monarchic phase or later.1 Another way to shake out
1. Trude and Moshe Dothan review in a very readable format the story of the
Philistines in terms of broad ancient Near Eastern culture. Their book examines and
presents not only a great deal of evidence but also the 200 years of historical processes
by which scholars have dealt with it. They tell the story inductively, which makes dramatic the way in which assumptions and procedures shift; what lacks, for at least this
'lay' reader, is a tight and comprehensive summary of the current state of the evidence.
What they establish at a minimum (see the summary in 1992: 81-86, 257-59) is the
need to set the Philistines as a part of a complex 'international' nexus of peoples, moving eastward from the Aegean toward the end of the Middle Bronze Age, making their
impact felt upon Egypt and Canaan in a period stretching perhaps for a couple of hundred years (from the thirteenth to the eleventh centuries BCE). Philistine culture, though
diverse at the various sites examinedof which there are nearly 50 mappedevidences farming, trading, high technology, production of clay and metal items (though
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the topic is to ask how cultic and worship institutions and groups and
particularly governance functioned within Israel's history and historiography, ideology and theology. Germane as well is the whole issue of how
and why the materials were likely to have been assembled into the long
narrative scholars conveniently call DH. Indeed, the topics embedded in
1 Sam. 4-6 (and 7) are so large and trail off of their edges so many complexities that no single effort or approach seems likely to be adequate.
Insights arise from most of the efforts to discuss the ark materials, and it
seems best for any scholar wishing to write about it to identify as explicitly
as possible his or her own aims, presuppositions, strategic moves, and interpretive insights and proceed accordingly, with little thought of being
complete, definitive, or even 'right'.
This particular treatment will restrict itself almost exclusively to issues
of representation, that is, will minimize attention paid to what the ark may
have been as it actually functioned within the lives of the people at some
particular time and place. However, I will try to situate the narrative within generally accurate historical-social contexts (but with a greater interest
in mid-millennium matters than in earlier centuries), and even these will
be at the macro- rather than the micro-level. What is significant in terms of
historical setting (including factors of economics, religion and society) is
the supposition that the story under examination reflects in some way a
transition of a people from one mode of governance to another, with all
the complex processes implied by such a shift. That is, I will sketch exilic
leadership issues as those driving the recital of the story being told here,
the hugged being propounded. More specifically, I will privilege Mikhail
Bakhtin's concept of chronotopemaking focal the time/space representanot iron specifically), and a sophisticated mercantile capacity. The most valuable general point is that the biblical information, if taken as given, reflects inadequately or perhaps imprecisely the 'facts on the ground'. Carl Ehrlich( 1996: 1-21, 51-56,103-104)
summarizes well (especially for non-specialist readers) the pertinent discussion points
among those exploring the Philistines in the centuries after their settling into their
coastal headquarters. Gitin (1996: 273-79) also reports on the evidence for their presence and vitality from Iron II, so from the tenth to the seventh centuries, and provides
evidence for their power in trade under the neo-Assyrian empire and the likelihood that
they would be feared still by Judeans. Jobling gathers the post-biblical views of the
group as their name becomes a pejorative tag (1998: part iv). The 'quest for the historical Philistines' is obviously a large topic, one which I am not qualified (or much interested) to work out in detail. My point is that they are a plausible opponent in the period
in which they are set in 1 Samuel and as well in the period in and for which the text is
produced. They also, of course, plausibly represent diverse menacing 'others'.
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119
tion of the arkrather than organizing in some other aspect. As before,

the work of Polzin, who is utilizing Bakhtin to read the materials of 1 Samuel (though not specifically the chronotopic angle), will be singled out for
some special attention. It may be helpful as well to indicate what (besides
some of the historical questions referred to above) will be 'off limits' in
this particular inquiry. The key literary feature I wish to avoid is character
motivation; that is, a good deal of literary commentary, besides being attentive to the language, decides what the characters intended, or precisely
what the narrator (or DH) aimed to demonstrate. Though in order to bring
out the potential of utterances to work their contexts I worked imaginatively with character discourse in the last chapter, I will from now on avoid
or minimize such ruminations in favor of taking direct readerly responsibility for intentionality of character, narrator or author. That is, the intentionality attributed is my own, not some presumed discernment of someone
else's. It may seem a small difference but is actually key: I will pick up
carefully on what is said and cue from such discourse but attribute motives
as little as possible, rather claiming my own insight. In any case, the characters function so differently in this stretch of narrative that the temptation
to work with motive diminishes. Though, as Polzin suggests and I will
develop, we are still working prominently with parable or masal, the particular construction is quite different in 1 Sam. 4-7 than in 1-3. The scene
before us is about to shift dramatically from Shiloh into exile and back
home again, although not to Shiloh. In order to negotiate the journey productively, we need the Bakhtinian concept of chronotope.
2. Bakhtin on Chronotope
Bakhtin wrote, 'We will give the name chronotope (literally "time space")
to the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are
artistically expressed in literature' (1981c: 84). His other famous saying,
added later to that same essay, is more metaphorical but perhaps more
suggestive:
What is the significance of all these chronotopes? What is most obvious is
their meaning for narrative. They are the organizing centers for the fundamental narrative events of the novel. The chronotope is the place where the
knots of narrative are tied and untied. It can be said without qualification
that to them belongs the meaning that shapes narrative. (1981c: 250)
In his very sophisticated and useful consideration of the topic, Jay Ladin
puts it like this: 'Bakhtin coined the term "chronotope" to refer to "care-
120
fully thought-out" fusions of "spatial and temporal indicators" in literature, which render "[t]ime.. .artistically visible" and "space.. .charged and
responsive to the movements of time, plot and history"' (Ladin 1999:212,
quoting Bakhtin 1981 c: 84). Commentators agree that Bakhtin derived the
concept from Einsteinian physics (and from neo-Kantian philosophy),
though utilized it metaphorically rather than with scientific precision.2 As
is the case with genres, chronotopes are multiple, various-sized, overlap
and mingle with each other messily, interactively, kaleidoscopically.
As before, it can be useful to think briefly about what the chronotope is
not. Correcting an impression we may pick up from Bakhtin's quickly
reprised sampling of key chronotopes at the end of his long essay (the
castle, the salon, the town, the threshold), Ladin stresses that the concept is
not simply another name for setting or topos; more is involved, as we shall
see shortly.3 Bakhtin himself warns against two errors likely to be made
with respect to chronotope: the first is to mistake the chronotope for time
as though time/space was a single type, natural or real; rather, it is a
representation. The second (and opposite) miscue is to assume that the
chronotope has no link at all with the historically pertinent setting; that
relation, though complex, is crucial (1981c: 253-54). Far from simply
providing background or texture, the chronotope prompts us to ponder
how to assimilate real historical time and space to literature, and presumably how to consider in what ways literary reference suggests 'the real'.
That is, Bakhtin here makes visible the question of how to represent 'the
real time and space' in literature and how to talk about doing it, whether in
the history of literature or in a particular work.4 Ladin goes so far as to say
that it is chronotopes which mark off straight representation from literature
(1999: 212). It is my impression that the default assumption with a good
deal of Old Testament criticism that the journey from real to verbal representation is natural or non-problematic; the chronotope slows us to see the
two realms as distinct, though obviously related. The question thus raised
is how the representation is managed.
2. Morson and Emerson discuss this concept (1990:367-69) and at greater length
throughout their Chapter 9 (pp. 366-432).
3. Bakhtin's examples are found in 1981c: 243-45. Farrell 1997: 67, making the
same point, says the chronotope is to milieu as the forest floor is to an earthtone carpet.
4. 1981 c: 84; it is in this essay, at its end (pp. 254-57), that he talks also about the
'real' or historical author and the way in which artistic intentionality is represented in a
work.
2. Looking Lethal
121
So what precisely does the chronotope do, how does it manage its tasks?
Part of what is provocative of insight is Bakhtin's reminding us that what
is often seen as fundamentally discretespace, timeis in fact always
and already constituted in relationship. He has some nice language here:
time thickens and becomes visible, fleshly; space becomes charged, responsive. Bakhtin says that chronotope sets genre (as he said, regarding genre,
that genres have their particular chronotopes [1981c: 85]).5 Chronotope
also helps establish and reflect historical time. Particular epochs have their
distinctive chronotopes ('town' being an obvious example, but also a reference to a concept like gravity) which then persist into later eras. As suggested above, chronotope sets narrative plot, which Bakhtin illustrates and
analyzes amply when discussing 'the road' chronotope at length in a long
essay (1981c: 85-103). Indeed, when reading Bakhtin's rambling descriptions of chronotope in ancient literature, it seems that he subsumes just
about everything under that rubric. Clark and Holquist, perhaps sensing
that same possibility, locate their discussion of the topic in Bakhtin's study
of the self, the history of the novel, as well as in the science of the time
(Clark and Holquist 1984: 278). Ladin's contribution to this point: 'The
major chronotopes Bakhtin discusses all relate to the portrayal of human
character' (1999: 223). The chronotope, Clark and Holquist say, bridges
the spheres of the world as a source of representation and the world as
represented (1984: 73 and more generally in 275-94, Chapter 13). Authors,
characters, and of course works, have their own favored chronotopes as
well.6
Morson and Emerson, who discuss all these points at length, suggest
that some of the richest discoveries about the relation of events and people
to space and time have been made in literature (as distinct from being
worked out in more abstract categories and genres [1990: 366]). John
Farrell organizes the accomplishments of chronotope into four: a chronotope like the crossroads can thematize time/space elements; the chronotope
(especially its temporal factors) unites story and discourse elements;
5. 1981c: 84; we can look for 'regional' differences, for class, caste, gender, and
so forth. As has often been noted by Bakhtin scholars (or at least by Bakhtin students),
his points in one sphere crop up unexpectedly in another realm. My image for this
phenomenon is that the whole of his thinking can be drawn up from almost any of the
conceptual or labeled openings.
6. Clark and Holquist 1984: 280-87. Rachel Falconer opines (1997: 261-63) that
Homer's Odyssey is characterized by the dominant chronotope of the labyrinth (e.g.
Odysseus' sea and Penelope's tapestry), while the Iliad uses the river.
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chronotope is the place where the individual human time and space intersect dialogically with historical realities; and more intertextually, various
works intersect chronotopically with each other (e.g. he suggests the layers
of literary inhabitation which saturate Wessex: Arthurian, Gothic, Victorian
[1997: 67]). Ladin suggests: '...Bakhtin offers the chronotope as both a
powerful tool for analyzing literature and a source of insight into some of
the most powerful and difficult questions regarding language, literature,
and human experience' (1999: 212). Ladin also remarks that chronotopes
are better thought of as how things move actively and comparatively than
as nouns (1999: 212-13).
Specific examples bring a certain clarity that additional theoretical explanation may not accomplish. Bakhtin's own study of the chronotopicity of
the road is useful for ramifying what he thinks that intersection of time and
space can allow and indeed generate. His welter of illustrative questions
includes: Does a hero undergo biological change? Do his or her adventures
reflect any known historical events? How are time words used? What role
do chance and contingency play, or the simultaneity or disjunction of
events? How do chance events intersect with the more regular ones? How
is the future known? What use is made of partings, discoveries, distance,
nearness, speed, obstacles? (1981c: 85-97,243-45; Morson and Emerson
1990: 369-72). What can happen in a castle and how it will be narrated
differs clearly from what happens on the road; certain conversations will
take place in a French salon that would have been impossible, inconceivable, at an earlier time/place. If one were to set a narrative in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district in the Vietnam War era, the time/space
workings would be highly distinctive and powerful. My love of British
mysteries immediately suggests to me the chronotopic particularities of
plot and character that one can anticipate when a murder takes place on a
winter holiday weekend in an English stately home: that the suspects,
typically the detective, and always the corpse are confined together for several (but not too many) days makes those narratives work in a particular
way.
Falconer illustrates the many ways in which the river works as a major
chronotope in Milton's epic Paradise Lost: Milton's rivers are a topos, but
they also offer access to other narrative waters (e.g. the Red Sea, the
Xanthos) and thereby to floods, baptisms, partings, metamorphoses and
the like. The more cosmic waters can connect to historical and 'prelapsarian' eras and to local waters as well. Milton's phraseology can imitate the
dominant riverine chronotope; the intersections or dialogues between the
2. Looking Lethal
123
story's past and the readers' present make possible a critical scrutiny of
the past from the present (pace Bakhtin) and render improbable the notion
that even in epic the past is wholly and inevitably valorized or idealized.
Past time, even epic past time, is not a closed circle, not complete in itself;
it exists in fragments and offers ways for the past and present to enter into
dialogical relations via author/narrator and readers (Falconer 1997: 25766). Farrell makes good use of Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, with its
chronotopic decay of nature suggesting as well the dissolved self amid
social structures which leave characters alone, exposed to fate, and gnawed
by dissolution. Hardy's Wessex, Farrell develops, is saturated with all that
has gone on there, historically and in other literature; what could remain
abstract takes on flesh and lets art work visually. Crossing is part of what
happens: figures meet and make decisions at crossroads, sometimes ending
in cul-de-sacs of dogma or alibi, claiming falsely refuge in others' speech;
the very structure of the book is a quadrille. The names of the Wessex sites
as well as the names of the characters are locally and biblically chronotopic
(Farrell 1997: 66-69). Ladin suggests, also helpfully, that we think about
the functioning of chronotopes in genres that are more-than-verbal (he instances music, art, cartoons and film). Film makes a particularly good
case, since its genre insists that the time/space fusion be made visible and
readable without making it over-prominent and distracting. So how does
the camera nuance the tension of a narrative moment? (often by zooming
in close); how can a hero's entry to a house include the reader? (by positioning the camera with the hero rather than behind him or her [Ladin
1999:227-30]).
Ladin's essay is particularly useful for its effort to conduce precision
from (to 'flesh out', as he titles it) Bakhtin's essay, which as Ladin points
out, was generated somewhat in the service of genre and so left some
aspects of chronotope underdeveloped (1999: 212-13). Ladin critiques
Bakhtin for not making sufficiently clear the relationship between chronotope and human consciousness, which rises from the inevitability of any
subject's making utterances specific in time and space.7 Chronotopes, or
subchronotopes, are dialogically related, jostle and intermingle with one
another in a given work. We might say that a hierarchy of chronotopes can
be identified at various levels of abstraction, where the point is not to
produce a schema but to look carefully enough to get the insight available.
Ladin comments at some length on the way in which chronotopes interact,
7. Ladin 1999:213. So consciousness and memory are chronotopes, just as much
as is the Parisian salon or the Gothic castle, but they function differently.
124
a complexity which renders impossible any orderly or precise 'application'

of the concept. Nonetheless, he insists that the many chronotopes which
inhabit a work cannot simply be left as a muddle but need some sorting.
He urges that we need to consider chronotopes from the ground up, not so
much so we can be complete in an analysis, but so that we can approach
something like and adequate awareness and appreciation of how timelinked are so many words: tense markers, syllables, time words, syntax
cues, and so forth. The task of the critic (or reader) is not to map all of this
detail but to sift it knowledgeably for what is most significant. A section of
his essay is given over to the identification of microchronotopes (instanced
by a seven-word line from an Emily Dickinson poem), incidental chronotopes (which are transitory and almost without effect), and local ones
(Ladin 1999: 224-27).
Ladin offers four ways in which local chronotopes may intersect. First,
as distinct from merely recounting, chronotope lets narrative organize and
enact scenes by its way of representing spatial and temporal aspects; second, the vivid and intense representation of such markers varies and may
be quite thick. A third point includes ways in which chronotope calls attention to the particular time/space fusion; and fourth is how a chronotope
employs metaphor (Ladin instances the common literary trope of the
intersection of sex and thunderstorms). He lists the four jobs that major
chronotopes accomplish (they control local ones, dialogue with them, can
go trans-subjective8 to include author and readers, and provide ground
images conjoining them); and he offers a schema of nine ways in which
they may be seen related, ranging from the more simply sequential through
the dialogical to the nested ones (1999: 224-27).
Ladin's final example, which serves both to enlighten and add gravity to
his theory, conies as a brief consideration of chronotopes in Poe's The TettTale Heart. Ladin comments helpfully on its heightened sensory detail that
thickens time and space so eerily, its use of a single image like the minute
hand of a watch, its choice of retrospective but present tense narration to
an apparently incredulous interlocutor, the effect of the implied prison cell
from which the tale unfolds. His pointthat a work's major chronotope
cannot simply be asserted or guessed at but built up from many elements
is well substantiated (Ladin 1999:231-33). There is no single right way to
8. Ladin offers some other terminology as well to distinguish intrasubj ective, intersubjective, extradiegetic, trans-subjective chronotopic relations (1999:224). Again, his
point is not to account for everything but to classify coherently what we select for
discussion.
2. Looking Lethal
125
complete the challenge of sorting possible chronotopes; in fact, the more

different attempts, the better. In the material ahead we will be watching for
what might be called 'story' chronotopes: time spent on the road, the crisis
of encounter on a battlefield, activities during the night in a temple, months
spent in foreign land; others are of a smaller caliber: the greeting of the
escorted ark, the offering of a sacrifice, the falling of a body, the posing or
failure to pose key questions, heaviness and lightness, remembering, forgetting. We will also aim to notice 'discourse' chronotopes: flashbacks and
flashforwards, the minimizing of certain detail (e.g. on the battlefield) or
repetitive narration (the Philistine itinerary), choice of seeing and speaking
position of characters. The point is not to catalogue these exhaustively
an obsession I am determined to avoidbut to harvest from the peculiarity
of the chronotope some fresh insight. Ladin concludes:
The chronotope represents the meeting point of tremendous forces. It is the
nexus of the disparate worlds of reader and work, writer and language, society and individual, and the forge in which diverse subjective experiences
are smelted into intersubjective 'reality'. When we explore 'the sphere of
meaning', the existential and ontological flux that surrounds it, and the
mysterious transactions by which meaning and existence interpenetrate each
other, we too pass through the gates of the chronotope; we can find much of
what we seek, if we learn to linger there (Ladin 1999: 231).
The growing edge of this discussion is probably to clarify and extend

even to correctBakhtin's flowing but rather undisciplined insights. As
already suggested, Ladin presses from Bakhtin's essay more implications
of how the vast network of chronotopes works. Falconer, whose work has
been with epics, challenges Bakhtin's dismissal of the epic in contrast to
the novel and argues that his walling off of epic past from both the authorial and readerly present does a great disservice to epics (as well as being
untenable). Morson's recent writings on the working of time are important
to mention (though not develop) here.9 His question about the openness of
time and consequent choice (or the opposite: closed time, no choice) is
related to both genre and chronotope but also to ethics and answerability.
Ladin's suggestion that the careful study of genres which are not so reliant
upon the written word will help us be more precise about chronotope is
undoubtedly correct.
What is the gain from chronotope for a study of the representation
Saul?10 Though there may not be opportunity to take full advantage of all
9. Morson 1999, which is a digest of his 1994 book on the topic of time.
10. In an earlier version of this chapter, I worked to show how Bakhtin's chrono-
126
of Ladin's nuances, the major chronotopes of rising and falling and of

exile and return can be highlighted and explored. How the fall of the king
comes aboutand how his prior riseis made prominent in the many
ways chronotope can do; the rehearsal of exile and return becomes also
freshly obvious. Equally revealing are ways each chronotope is presented
to characters and readers. How the many smaller sub-chronotopes can help
generate and nuance the dominant journey in and out is rehearsed in the
passage of the ark of God to Philistia and then back again, and how
exile/return issues prompt the retrospective story of Saul can get some
exposure. Morson assumes that for the sort of moral, answerable, creative
living that Bakhtin is interested to explore and portray, the future must be
open rather than closed. If matters are pre-set and foreclosed, then there is
no eventness, no answerability, not in life and not in literature (mutatis
mutandis). Morson's suggestion is a concept he calls sideshadowing: a
quality of open time and the devices required to convey it (Morson 1994:
5-8, developed in Chapters 4-7). The alternative against which Morson
develops his insight, is foreshadowing (by which an author can finalize a
hero), to prophecy and prediction, to causality and the given future, to
omens, fatalism, destiny and determinism. These facets of time are not
without nuance, but Morson's understanding of some of their implications
does not coincide quite with my own. He develops the image of multiple
clocks, reminding us that God's way of experiencing time (which I infer is
an ontological category of some kind for him, not to be confused with the
representation of it in biblical narrative), the creating author's control of
temporality, the time experienced by characters, and that brought to bear
by a layered readership all vary and must be both each and all considered
(Morson 1994: Chapters 2-3).
tope of adventure time (which he discusses at great length and with many examples
from Greek romance in 1981 c: 87-110) and the ancestor of his carnivalistic chronotope
(pp. 206-24) can be seen to operate in 1 Sam. 4-7. The ark is acted upon rather than
being a subject, but it also activates everything around it and manages to be present
even when absent. Its adventures are of one general deadly sort, though with creative
variation, to be sure. There is little natural realism, and the assumption is that divine
causality governs actions. The narration proceeds rather jerkily by key moments of
crisis and consultation, arrival and departure of the ark. The Philistines are a clear
'other', sketched with little sympathetic interest, despite the fiction of their own point of
view and colloquy; in fact, it is the discussion of their religion that seems to give rise to
the 'proto-carnivalesque', if we may call it that. Perhaps most singular, there is little
change in any consciousness.
2. Looking Lethal
127
To name the issue for the present task: Does the chronotopic inevitability
of the fall of the monarch(y), its gravitational effect, so to speak, and the
completed journey of the ark into and back from a foreign land indicate a
foreclosure of genuine choice for those involved with this narrative? The
clarity of the chronotopes shows how the narrative jumps ahead and then
back in time/space, helps establish the plausibility of an exilic referent.
The DH knows the outcome of the story being recounted. Does the placement of this 'foreshadowing' imply that the future is foreclosed and that
any openness or sense of choice is illusory? Or does the riddling genre
provide a genuine moment for creative choice for a readership? Does the
restrospective position of the narrationits reflection on a past experienceswamp completely the openness of some of its questions? To the
extent that I am correct to see the narrative as a puzzle to be propounded
within an exilic community, the choice is for readers rather than characters;
but even the characters may actually have more choice than they are often
given by commentators. Are mises-en-abyme (like the crashing of the old
Eli [1 Sam. 4] or Saul's arming of the young David with his own royal accoutrements [1 Sam. 17]), occurring early in the narrative, determinative?
My aim is to argue that the pathways to the fall, the reasons for it, the
alternatives not selected, all allow for significant freedom and eventness,
perhaps for characters, certainly for readers.
As will be the case for each section of 1 Samuel, the Bakhtin-rooted work
of Polzin, here specifically on chs. 4-7, will provide a valuable set of coordinates largely within which I will conduct my investigation; as is true
also with Bakhtin, I will use Polzin as provocative rather than as definitive, push off from his insights to go in other directions. His work on these
ark-related chapters may be condensed also to seven focusing points. First,
he continues to refer to the material as parabolic, as he claimed for the
three preceding chapters.11 In fact, the second half of 1 Sam. 4 shows the
artificiality of separating the ark from the Elides or the Elides from the ark,
whether in terms of genre or theme. I will summarize what I think is Polzin's viewpoint here, though I will take responsibility for the reprise: the
narrative itself is a parable, in that it is a story 'about something' where the
11. Readers need to read Polzin in full, since his detail brings forth many excellent
points which are suppressed in my summaries.
128
ostensible referent is pointing to or evokingchavellingsomething deeper than its surface self. Thus, the unit of 1 Sam. 1-7 continues the process
of a communal or many-voiced asking for a king, a request which is
granted and will need to be managed in the era ahead by all those whose
voices participated in the original quest (the deity included). The association of asking 'for sons' and the request for a king is neither arbitrary nor
crudely allegorical, since kingship is inherently (though not consistently)
dynastic. The assertion that sons 'are' kings is built in a variety of ways,
sustained over these initial chapters by imagery and language, by characterization and plot. The masal sketches as it develops longitudinally the
fate of the sons: sons take over from fathers; the line becomes emblematic
for the dynastic sons whose presence was longed for so collaboratively
and so complicitly by all actants, God included, in a leisurely way throughout chs. 1-3 and then punctiliarly in ch. 4. Polzin says, 'If chapters 1-7
form an overture to the entire monarchic history, the picture in 4.18 of Eli
falling backward off his throne to his death is this overture's central event,
the Deuteronomist's view of kingship in a nutshell. Eli represents all the
burden and doom that kingship brought Israel' (Polzin 1989:64). The ubiquity of sons in these chaptersincluding the infant Elide and the shadowy
Eleazarreinforces the evocation.
The ark functions analogically as well, contributing a second major
image within its extended matrix. To anticipate my sense of it: the ark is
more than its most obvious self, a container for the law tablets; it is not not
that, not less than that container, but has some additional identity as well
as it moves in time and space. As will be argued in more detail below, how
to conceive its identity is a major part of the problem, not simply for
characters but for commentators and readers as well. Polzin suggests, not
too precisely, that the ark represents both God's presence in Israel and
Israel itself. I see the ark as representing specifically the relationality of
YHWH and Israel, that is the bond holding them both together and in
tension. The ark is not simply a surrogate for the deity, a sort of stand-in
tremendum; nor is it simply the valued palladium of a people. Like the cult
at Shiloh, the ark is a chronotopic intersection, a tangible meeting place of
God and people, a site where their mutual fidelity will be put to the test. At
the more tangible surface (the symbolic or vehicular level if we were
speaking of a metaphor) the ark is the container in (or at) which the Horeb
tablets and the Mosaic words spoken at the East Jordan edge of the land
were to be placed (Deut. 10; 17; 31). In Josh. 3-4 the ark first led and then
followed the community across the Jordan River into the land, and it was
2. Looking Lethal
129
carried ceremoniously in the defeat of Jericho (ch. 6) but then not again;
that is, the ark is not described as involved in the taking of the land in
Joshua.
Neither does it feature explicitly in the episodes related in Judges, except
at 20.27, when it, presided over at Bethel by Aaronic Phinehas, is consulted in the midst of the debacle that concludes that book while overlapping, via Eli's judgship, with the narrative of 1 Samuel. The ark masal is
constructed in terms of how that containerthe material marker of the
YHWH-Israel relationshipis handled: abusively, ignorantly, reverently,
cultically, and so forth. That dynastic sons are to a great extent inadequate
is clear enough, but the alternative to them is not so obvious. Raised is the
question of the ark's (the YHWH-Israel relationship's) proper caretaker,
also the matter of where is its place, when its proper time. The consistent
presence of dynastic sons and Philistines with the ark as it journeys through
DH needs explication, as does the ark's eventual journey up to Jerusalem
by David (2 Sam. 6), its later incorporation into the temple (by Solomon in
1 Kgs 8), and its conspicuous non-mention at the end of Kings (chs. 2224). In the long run, the parable maintains that the kings shepherd their
charge poorly and in fact viciously, and hence they are doomed to fall,
taking others down with them. Having kings becomes tantamount to serving other gods (Polzin 1989: 66,13-11, passim in Chapter 2); that the ark
survivesif barelyboth its domestic life and a trip into the land of foreigners is part of its communication. Notably it does not return in its new
time to its old place, nor does it seek out its former managers. So when we
read the parable, we must be alert, as before, to genre constraints and not
treat the narrative like a precocious video of an ancient event.
The next six points are briefer. Polzin (second for us) accumulates the
startling and sustained stress on the similarity between Israel and the Philistines, for example, their fates in contiguity with the ark, their pervasive
blindness to its character; the narrator uses similar language when commenting on both groups and when embedding their discourse, which also
tends to be the same (Polzin 1989: 55-56). He says, third, that though on
one level the Philistines make a number of obvious errors when they 'talk
theological', by the end of ch. 7 and at levels deeper than the simplistic,
they are on target in a number of surprising ways. Again, these points will
be developed as appropriate; the point from Polzin is that we need very
carefully to refract some of the viewpoint expressed, constantly checking
our assumptions and conclusions and those of commentators (Polzin 1989:
58-60). Polzin also remarks, fourth, somewhat across the grain of certain
130
historical-critical views, that the figure of Samuel is present in chs. 4-7

implicitly or in negative space, as it were, in contrast with the Elides,
whose presence is constantly shouted. The assertion makes evident that
how theorists understand characters to be 'in' narrative differs; but Polzin's
instruction is that we not hastily or subconsciously assume that Samuel is
'absent' or that the ark material does not evoke him simply because his
name does not occur for most of chs. 4-6 (Polzin 1989: 56-57, 60).
He continues, fifth, to remind us of the rich ambiguity of certain words
that are key to the narrative: to ask, to hear or heed, to be faithful, to bring
'good' news are all susceptible of tremendous interpretive range, depending on the angle of the utterer and the context. Part of the narrative's capacity to communicate so deeply comes by prompting, even forcing the reader
to consider the range of connotation and functioning of a word as versatile
as the occurrence of the Hebrew s 7 ('ask'), kbd ('honor'/'be heavy, fatten'), the angle from which the defeat and flight of Israel, the death of two
sons, the capture of the ark can conceivably be called good news, as the
root bsr typically implies (Polzin 1989: 61-64). His sixth point, raised but
not developed, is the possibly carnivalesque overtones of some of the liturgical fracas around the ark when it is in Philistia. Again, the chronotopic
point will be to ascertain whether our time is best spent investigating
actual Philistine tumors and threshold ritual or to appreciate rather the
conventions involved as one group lampoons (intentionally or not) the cult
of another (Polzin 1989: 64). Finally, seventh, and surely not disputed, is
the consistent association of the ark with destruction for Israel and for Philistines, but also the constant toggling of its associations with joy, dread,
joy, and the like (Polzin 1989: 64). The pervasive value I discern in Polzin's comments is that we cannot make simplistic equivalences about how
it is regarded but must rather watch carefully and constantly.
Finally, before shifting these contributions to the narrative at hand, let
me open an imaginative window into another realm, one that may provide
a useful analogy when we need to think about the ark in a fresh way.
Diane Ackerman's writing is helpful here, in its broad and intertextual
way, entering as it does from a wholly other universe of discourse. Writing
about whales, she offers two likely pathways toward the topic of the ark
(1991: 131-32, 145). Her first insight highlights the angle of inquiry into
the vast power of the brains of whales. Ackerman quotes Roger Payne, a
whale expert, as saying that perhaps the most interesting question in science today is why whale brains are so large and complexgiven the difficulty of keeping such a mechanism operating. That is, why should whales
2. Looking Lethal
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have successfully developed a mechanism so costly to maintain when it

appears to be so underutilized? The sense of the scientist she quotes is that
whales' (dolphins specifically) brains are possibly more complex than
those of humans, and he raises the possibility that whales use their brains
for tasks of which we have no idea. In other words, we base our assumption of 'waste' and size on partial and anthropocentric reasoning. Her second provocative point, also assayed in conversation with Payne, is related:
we humans may think of ourselves and our intelligence as having accomplished a good deal; but in fact, from another angle of viewing, our path is
strewn with disaster all over the earth. Our large and complex brains are
not quite the boon to the universe we may suppose. Payne goes on to suggest that our challenge of the next thousands of years may be to clean up
the messes we have made to date. The pointers she has given us for mining
below are size and power, power and productivityor destructionwho
is assessing and with what substructure of suppositions. We will return to
this analogy when the thesis has been set forth.
The main point I wish to offer, test and demonstrate is that the representation of the ark in 1 Sam. 4-7, its narrative circling from Ebenezer (4.1) to
Ebenezer (7.12), makes a map of misuse, demonstrates in a series of assays
the incapacity of dynastic leadership to shepherd well the relationship
between God and Israel that the ark embodies. This primary picture is
shaped in several ways. There is persistent use made of a few stock scenarios: arrival of the ark to rejoicing, ensuing disaster, crisis colloquy,
departure of the ark. The rerunning of'the same' responses five times, distributed among the two ostensibly opposed sides, underlines the point: the
expectations both sides have of the ark, their handling of it, their dismay at
it, their efforts to placate it. And the narrator comments deftly, sprinkling
enough difference in a long story where 'the same' motifs recur so that we
stay with it, without obscuring the repeating patterns. All this texture
emerges more clearly when the narrative is viewed in terms of time and
space rather than its ostensible facticiry decoded. This series of constructions of the ark by all involved, characters but perhaps readers included,
are substantially inadequate in one way or another. What is raised but not
so clearly resolved is the relationship between the hand of YHWH and the
ark itself; but what seems clear is that the divine hand reacts on behalf of
the ark when it is mistreated. The contention that the ark carries primarily
the relationship between YHWH and people shows the problem of Israel's
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How A re the Mighty Fallen ?
fundamental misconstrual of that bond, specified by the inability of any of

those discoursing to ask questions about their own involvement. Even
when the ark goes finally into seclusion, under the guard of one man
freshly dedicated to that purpose, we may wonder if its purpose is being
well understood and served. The repetition composing the journeying of
the ark makes prominent the perennial nature of the leadership vacuum.
The inadequacies of all the leadersparticularly the Elide, Samuelide,
Philistine, but also the enthusiastic but ill-fated effort at Beth Shemesh
brings us again face to face with the question of leadership. Shall Israel
live with dynastic sons or without them? With royal sons or sacerdotal
ones? With one particular set of royal leaders or another? The hugged
genre utilized here reaches from the past to engage the present and then
the future.
To put this thesis now in 'whale terms': Diane Ackerman describes
huge and heavy creatures, moving slowly through the water, their vast
water weight and tremendous capacity to generate heat strangely buoyant
as they perform their 'slow motion ballets', trailing behind them temporary
bubble sculptures. How they find their way is not known to us, whyeven
howthey sing as they interact with each other remains largely off limits
to our scrutiny as well. Though whales can be dangerous, due to their
'teeth' and their vast weight, we humans have been far more deadly to
them over time than they to us. Fearing their power, we attack them. And
yet, their curving jaws, 'felicity of [their] anatomy' can also suggest to us
that they are smiling at us; humans love to approach friendly whales to pat
them and enjoy their seemingly affectionate responsethese creatures
who even pass the trace of the learning on to their calves. Thus our interpretations of whales are substantially about our own species; the mammal
we are mapping is primarily ourselves. Most of what scientists know
comes from the examination of dead whales. It is not likely to be very
complete, though we may assume it to be soour loss (1991: 112, 177).
The ark journeys, little understood by those participating in its road adventures, the presumptuous ignorance itself generating a good deal of what
goes awry.
I will take up the narrative as it moves, chronotopically, from moment
to moment, space to space. As I suggested above, there is no single way to
isolate or organize the distillations of time into space or the reverberations
of space within time. Often several chronotopes can be sensed and at different levels of abstraction. My aim is to isolate them simply enough to
mine the chronotopic character rather than to be complete or definitive in
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133
any way. By limiting myself almost arbitrarily to the European alphabet

and its 27 letters, I will aim to avoid both easy generalization and overcomplexification. By adopting the fiction of being a firmer of this section
of text, charged with the task of making explicit the temporal/spatial
dimensions of what narratologists call both story and discourse, I hope to
render explicit certain details comprising the representation of the ark and
those around it. To liken a reading self to a camera operator is artificial,
since there are significant differences in the two operations, notably that
one works primarily with words while the other need not. But it will force
a certain care with the material, which is the point. To aim for clarity here:
in each case I will letter the segment, indicate its chapter and verse edges,
give it an apt chronotopic designation, offer relevant bits of information,
distill particular insight. At the end of the exercise, I will add the column.
So that they can be scrutinized while I substantiate them, let me list
eight specific conclusions from reading this section with a view to chronotope. First, there is a circularity to the narrative that is practical. What
begins as a crisis for Israel at Ebenezer (4.1), a defeat at the hands of the
Philistines, is completed, reversed, or rerun as Israel's victory at Ebenezer
over Philistines (7.12). The errors of the first scene regarding the ark are
not repeated at the second one, thanks to Samuel's directions. But, more
ominously, that scene also segues into the replacement of the Elide Hophni
and Phinehas with the Samuelide Joel and Abijah. Second, there is a surprisingly small number of chronotopic scenarios; rather, a few are used
repetitively throughout the events of 4.3-7.2: six rounds of arrival of the
ark, ensuing disaster, crisis colloquy, departure of the arkfrom Ebenezer
to Ashdod to Gath to Ekron to Beth Shemesh (so [below] from c-u). The
only variation in the set is the messenger piece (f: 4.12-20) which is its
own version of disaster, and the three narrative notes at 6.1 (m), 6.17-18
(r), and 7.2a (u), which coalesce the action in quantitative terms. Third, a
primary chronotope is away and back (spatial), proleptically and analeptically (temporal). That is, the action leaves the land and returns, and the
time shoots ahead to account for 20 years in the future, and bounces back
from there to resume 'ordinary time'. The exilic flavor is difficult to miss,
especially with the narrator's reference to plagues (chs. 5-6) and the foreigners' chatter about the ark-deity's reputation (4.7; 6.6). This is a story
about Egypt and also about Babylon, born out of normal geographical
accuracy and chronological sequence for some reason. Fourth, the ark itself is the central chronotope in a richly chronotopic narrative. It makes
spatial and temporal the bond of YHWH and Israel, presumably carrying in itself (or at its side) a written copy of the contract which seems
134
neglected, becomes lost in all the confusion. The ark, a container, draws
our attention to its content as well, words binding God and people in
mutual obligations to be faithfully managed. Though not exactly given
subjectivity, the ark is reactive to what it seems to judge as invasive
whether being taken, looked at, or placed wrongly (a sensitivity it will continue to manifest into 2 Sam. 6). The parabolic cast of the narrative genre
prompts us to focus upon a double referent for actants and actions. The ark
(i.e. the relationship's) power is appreciated, to be sure, but inappropriately. The result, in each case, is death for those who miscue and misuse.
Motives aside, the moves of all who manipulate the ark are shown
harmful, and the ark of God looks lethal. Moving it does not ameliorate
anything, nor is stuffing it with compensatory gifts visibly helpful either.
The ark itself is not the problem; what is wrong is the constructions made
of it by all who handle it, a point never articulated by any character
directly. The mishandling of the container implies a terrible estrangement
of covenant parties, such that the ark is endangered, taken captive and
returned, to rest uneasily and in isolation. The analogical genre implies as
well a current concern about the divine-human relationship, not simply a
recital of its past character.
Additionally (fifth), how the ark goes is the central interest, including
three aspects: what it carries, who leads or enables its movement, where it
lands. These are all matters of leadershipmostly wrong but perhaps the
clearer for that. It is not always so obvious precisely what is done wrong,
why some action is wrong; but it is always easy to see when the ark is
negatively reactive. How the ark goes is also the main topic of character
conversation. The direct discourse, and especially the intersections of the
voices of characters and narrator, assume particular coloration if we are
reading a masal. The utterances are, in a sense, more important than the
identity of the speakers. For example, only unnamed, generic speakers fill
these roles, and their common role is to mischaracterize the ark when it is
in their hands. That such mis-speaking is almost all the direct discourse
there is (except when Samuel speaks in ch. 7) helps us see that offbase
dialogue is more important than who said what and why. Sixth, the ark is
viewed from multiple angles. That is, part of the chronotopic repetition
allows us to see a series of characters appraising the ark, rarely well, often
lethally. Nowhere in any of the dialogues do characters talk in terms of
their own wrong choices; knowledge is always one-sided, shallow. Samuel's speech at the end of the section (7.3) is the first to accuse the people
of their part in the disasters they have experienced. The 'rogues' gallery'
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helps us see the problem: How is the ark to be healthily dealt with, experienced? When we finally get to something that seems to workor not to
misfirewe are shut out of the detail and so still have to ponder the matter. Seventh, falling is a key chronotope: men fall in battle, Eli falls, Ichabod's mother squats, Dagon falls.
Finally, eighth, leadership struggles to get the arkthe YHWH-Israel
relationshipgoing well. The Elides fail in about equal measure with the
Philistines though with different detail. It is not to be presumed that Samuel does so very well, though his prophetic voice marks an improvement
over the words of some. However, the ark does not end up in Samuel's care
but in that of a man with priestly hints about him. Samuel, in fact, recapitulates the sins of the Elides by having and appointing to leadership
position two ne'er-do-well sons. He does not get, is not given, the prime
responsibility for shepherding the relationship between God and people. It
is also noteworthy that Samuel is not the character who ends up caring
well for the ark. If, as Polzin has suggested, Samuel is a parabolic standin
for Saul, the requested/bequested figure is not the one who will be able to
effectively shepherd the relationship between YHWH and people. A shadowy figure, off the scene entirely except for a single reference to him (7.1),
is the one who will guard the covenant, at least in the near future. Eli has
been told that a faithful priest will be raised up (2.35), a figure who has not
yet been clearly identified. With Eleazar there is another contender for
understanding his role, suitable, perhaps, for post-exilic circumstances.
a. Chronotopic Segment a (1 Sam. 3.21-4.1): The Charge Given through
Samuel
The unit makes an ambiguous start or transition, its seam impossible to
isolate definitively. The tantalizing piece is 4.1 and the relation of the
verse halves: does the word of Samuel to all Israelespecially when we
are reading with MTprompt the going forth for battle? (consult McCarter
1980: 97,103). The timing and physicalities of revelation, communication
between God and a particular human being, is a major chronotope in the
Bible, and never detailed very fully. I will for the moment suppose, simply
to choose a less well-traveled road, that key here is that God's word,
through Samuel, at Shiloh, in the Elide sunset, orders the muster. The previous unit ended with the note that Samuel was receiving God's communication with some regularity at Shiloh; hence in my interpretation there is a
particular ordering of Israel to meet the Philistines for battle, with their
136
respective camps at Ebenezer and Aphek;12 the initiative of the actual encounter is not clearwhich side begins hostilities. Though it is regularly
presumed by commentators, not without justification, that Samuel is not
on site here, is that conclusion inevitable? If he is not present, especially if
his revelation-receiving and communicating self has occasioned the encounter, is his absence not likely to be a deficiency? Though this narrative
is going to meander for some months in Philistia and then move to Beth
Shemesh before pointing off to Kiriath-jearim, it will leave the Israelite
community coping with a defeat at Ebenezer out of Shiloh (where, in fact,
we will rejoin Samuel and the people after an extensive lateral narrative
move). Is Samuel to be conceived of as remaining rather with 'the people'
at Ebenezer, where we rejoin him at 7.1 -3? That there is also going to be a
long narrator prolepsisa 20 year referencedoes not mean that the story
does a big jump as well. To make this scene a bit clearer: Samuel orders a
battle, which will go badly in several ways and create a string of catastrophic events; the camera will leave him after he has given the word that
starts the military doings and not pick him up again until some months
later, when he will be at the same spot, on hand, as it were, to do cleanup.13 That there is no ostensible trigger for this particular encounter except
Samuel's word is part of its distinctive narration: Why go to war for no
(expressed) reason? Why does Samuel, and/or why does YHWH send Israel
and the Philistines to war at this moment? There is something inexplicable
about the battle situation.
b. Chronotopic Segment b (1 Sam. 4.2): Battle (#1) Breaks out Disastrously
The start of hostilities intensifies the previous moment. The narrator notes
the drawing up by the Philistines, the approach of battle, and the subsequent defeat of Israel with 4000 men killed. The chronotope of war is
12. Polzin develops in the chapters ahead (1989: 80-125, Chapter 3 and following)
the notion of Samuel as a somewhat unreliable spokesman for YHWH. Though I am
not sure I can go along with that reading, it does open the crucial question of whether
we are to understand that every assertion announced to be arriving from God inevitably
implies accurate communication by a prophet. The question opened up here is whose
responsibility is the military encounter between Israel and Philistia between Ebenezer
and Aphek. Fokkelman 1993: 198, notes a link to Saul'send, 1 Sam. 29.1, which also
sees the Philistines at Aphek.
13. At the risk of being over-simplistic, that Samuel is not 'in' the ark narrative is a
product of the fact that he does not go with it to Philistia and hence does not trail it out
to Beth Shemesh and Kiriath-jearim. His non-mention is a plot effect, not a matter for
discerning a redactional seam.
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huge, with many possibilities in it. War with the Philistines is a specification of the more general type, and it is worth noting that these hostilities
have been going on intermittently for some time, with little apparent
progress.14 What does such a protracted situation signify, and what does a
fresh chapter in it imply for a 'new' leader like Samuel, given the ongoing
failure of Samson and Eli (and later Saul) to cope effectively with a
perennial foe? I take it to suggest a time of assaying a leader, and if the
initiative here was Samuel's (via God), the catastrophe which will evolve
tells against current leadership in some way. The manner of narrating this
moment concerns only the Israelite casualties. Israel's loss, not any Philistine gain (or loss), is the point stressed. And, unlike Homeric narrative
which is eloquent about the particularities of battle process, there is no
interest here in describing how the 4000 die; the body count specifies the
defeat. The narrator's use of a passive verb minimizes to a certain extent
the agency of the Philistines, linking perhaps back to the divine initiative
referred to in 3.21. Death is also a chronotope, death in battle or as a result
of it.
c. Chronotopic Segment c (1 Sam. 4.3): Crisis Colloquy (#1)
We get next some direct discourse, a one-sided colloquy posed by the
elders when those people surviving the battle return to camp at Ebenezer.
They pose a question, offer an explanation, and urge a solution. Their question needs unpacking, for it already blends two things and omits others:
'Why has the LORD put us to rout today before the Philistines?' The
assumption is that it is YHWH who has done it; that is, a defeat implies
something about God's intent, big chronotope in biblical wars. The elders
14. War with the Philistines runs regularly from Judg. 13 (from Samson) until
David defeats them conclusively (that is said and they stop being mentioned [their
presence in Genesis seems not quite the same sort of narrative]); that long active presence makes them part of the representation of the enemy as the era of judges gives way
to kings. Philistines are the intermittent external foe for that time, taking land from
Israel but never losing their own cities (at least not the key five), when internal troubles
between the tribes are absorbing as well; however, we need also to note that they are
said to be vanquished at 1 Sam. 7.14 and at 2 Sam. 5.17-25. Who are the textual Philistines? Klein summarizes them in DH (1983: 40-41): Judg. 3.31; 13-16; 1 Sam. 4-6;
13-14, within Saul's tenure, chs. 21-29. Jobling 1998:222-23, will assert that Samuel
gets clear credit for defeating definitively 'the' enemy of the period; it seems to me that
he risks here failing to do so, and that he starts with the two defeats and the other catastrophes of this section of the story brings his leadership under critique, until it will be
reversed in 1 Sam. 7.
138
read the divine hand behind the Philistine slaughter, a point which the
narrator may reinforce by choice of passive verbs. Missing in the question
is any query about the human plane. The question which hangs in the air is
why the defeat, who the agents. I think whether, why, and how humans
have contributed are central questions for unraveling by readers, whatever
else happens in the story itself. But here there is no discussion of these
questions, no consultation of anyoneprominently Samuel. Rather, at
once the solution: 'Let us get for ourselves from Shiloh the ark-of-thecovenant-of-YHWH15 and bring it into our midst...' they continue, 'so
that it may come among us and save us from the hand of our enemy (my
translation)'.16 Key in the phraseology: let us getfor ourselves... so that it
may... The blend is again to be critiqued: Is the ark to be laid claim to in
this way, and is such a presumption of effectiveness justified or not?
Basic here is the question of what the ark 'is' in the view of at least
these characters: Is the ark identified with YHWH?17 Or, alternatively, is
YHWH implicitly the enemy whose malevolence the ark may counter?
How is the ark visualized in terms of the deity? If indeed YHWH has
struck, what is the ark supposed to do? Commentators tend to see this
rather imprecise attribution as a key moment, one way and another. The
equation of God and ark goes too fast, and relates too many things too
impressionistically. The ark itself is chronotopic. And as indicated above,
15. See Seow 1992: 386-89, for some indication of terminology; his general point
seems to be that though there are some patterns (e.g. in the [presumed] Deuteronomist
source, or in the Priestly strand), some of the variation here (and the apparatus in MT
indicates a lot of textual variation) may be stylistic, or at least not rigidly ideological
down to the last word.
16. James Ackerman 1991: 7, is one who argues that this move is not so clearly
portrayed as bad; the people have been protesting the practice of Hophni and Phinehas;
he says that only we, reading, know that the two Elide sons are the target here, not the
others who die to get them dead. Eslinger 1985: 164-66, says we need to accept the
narrator's view of the peoples' view that God has done it, God who must have forgotten his part of the deal; they do not mention to option of fault in the other partysin on
their part. Eslinger also observes (pp. 168-69) that no character registers anxiety when
the ark and its escorts appear, though he can also say (p. 169) that the sound that greets
the ark is indeterminate and disputable. Like J. Ackerman, Eslinger sees the prime suspects as Hophni and Phinehas rather than a wider set of people. McCarter 1980: 109,
sees it as a disorderly move. Miscall reminds us (1986: 28) that it is words and determination, not the ark, which help the Philistines.
17. For Fokkelman 1993:201, the ark is taken by characters as metonymic for God;
I think even that nuance is too one-sided a statement. Klein says it is a sign of God's
presence (1983: 42).
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my choice is to restrict its general character so far in DH to the carrier of

the copies of the law pact between God and people; the ark bears both
the Horeb tablets (Deut. 10.2-5) and the peoples' copy (Deut. 31.26).18 In
1 Sam. 1.1-3 the ark, present at Shiloh, has also had the role of witness to
the deeds of the Elides and to the condemnation of those deeds by the man
of God and then by YHWH directly, a promise waiting for its time and
space to ripen. So what the ark brings forward in time and space is not
simply 'God' but the words linking God and Israel in a particular way,
where (to summarize roughly) God will deliver if Israel obeys. A better
though vaguer way to say it, perhaps, is that insofar as Israel remains
faithful, God will do the same. Does the ark, envisioned here as a military
bromide, actually make tangible the obligation to obey God's law?19 My
suggestion is that we contemplate the possibility, rather than too quickly
see the inevitable and more popular war palladium present so far only at
Josh. 3-6, not to mention the near-idolatrous identity it gets as a divine
stand-in. That Samuel's voice is not raised here marks him as silent: perhaps not asked, perhaps not answering, perhaps condoning, perhaps disapproving, maybe even sitting on the fence.
d. Chronotopic Segment d (1 Sam. 4.4-9): Arrival of the Ark to Camp(s),
Crisis Colloquy (#2)
This 'thickened moment' marks the embassy to fetch and then the bringing
of the ark to camp: the people (singular) send to Shiloh (send whom is not
clear) and they (plural) lift up from there the ark-of-the-covenant-ofYHWH-of-hosts-seated-upon-the-cherubim.20 The narrative spends no
18. The processional character of the ark in the early chapter of Joshua is also noteworthy in another way. It had to travel, if it was to be part of the new community. So
its Jericho behavior, stipulated in any case by clear directives, ought not to be presumed
normative. Here there are no directions nor any consultation. Rainer Albert/ identifies
it as abattle standard (1994: 57), an old (pre-state) war symbol (p. 88), and atribal cult
symbol (p. 128), though also calls it a container (p. 57) among many other things he
says.
19. Are we to presume the ark comes to Philistia with its own verbal contents? The
non-mention of them is provocative.
20. When God is denoted as seated upon the cherubim, is the primary referent
earthly, or are the earthly pair a suggestion that God sits with the angels wherever God
sits? Yehe/kel Landau suggested, in a private communication, that the earthly designations typically in Jewish tradition refer as well to something heavenly. Thus it is reductive to say that the reference here is simply to the tabernacle furniture. Similarly, one
can say that the holiest spot on earth is not made so because the holy of holies is set up
140
detail on the Shiloh moment but becomes visual about the Ebenezer scene,
pictured from the eyes of those waiting at the battle site: There with the
ark-of-the-covenant-of-God are the two sons of Eli, Hophni and Phinehas;
whether they went and got it, whether they are among the people at battle,
or included as elders, is not clear. If it has been reasonable to hypothesize
that the ark works well as a reminder about fidelity to the stipulations of
the relationship with God, that equation has to be shattered at the moment
of its arrival at the camp. Hophni and Phinehas are unmitigated representatives of the opposite stance. That they are ominous escorts casts the whole
procedure into a negative light, whatever else may have been theorized
about motives or theology. The moment the ark arrives with these dynastic
sons is wholly unredeemed in this narrative, utterly damning, at least to
my way of thinking. Their leadership again underlines the absence of alternative from Samuel. But in any case their coming occasions an enigmatic
if great roar from Israel and an answering and equally inarticulate reverberation of some sort from earth.21 The Israelites' roar trips off the Philistines, whose charge now is to offer their interpretation of'current events':
The Philistines say, 'What does the great shouting in the camp of the
Hebrews mean?'22 Here we have, as it were, the same moment of arrival
but a different placea near simultaneity. Another way to put that depiction is that, though the physical ark arrives simply in one camp, its presence registers at once in the other camp as well. Einsteinian physics,
underlying Bakhtin's chronotope, reminds us that, though standing close
enough to hear and see, these two sets of characters inhabit different
there, but that the spot is designated for the temple because it is already the holiest
place.
21. The verb use is the niphal imperfect third feminine singular ofhwm. Agency of
God, Eslinger stresses, even if the Philistines follow up with their own action (1985:
164).
22. How to construe the Philistines' words is not a simple thing. Eslinger 1985:
170-71, says they misconstrue it as a presence of God and that what we are signaled is
their fear; their theology reminds us, he says, of God's Exodus commitment. But, to a
certain extent, they are wrong. And for Eslinger (pp. 172-74) this is the pleasure of
God (2.25), to snuff the Elides. The narrator guides us to a better conclusion, and Eli's
tardy reaction confirms it. Other readers are bothered by the notion of God killing so
many just to get Hophni and Phinehas. Note in particular Eslinger's chart (p. 176)
showing the verbal ties between chs. 3 and 4. Eslinger's best insight, I think, is his
question (p. 181): Does the ark topple the Elides or do they topple it? Shrine pollution,
he recalls (Deut. 23.9-14) will drive YHWH out (p. 183); but that is not quite what
happens here, when the ark tends to be passive, or at least not a subject.
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time/space (set off, as is often noted, by the foreign way of designating the
group that has the ark).23 Like the 'Hebrews', the Philistines also envision
the ark aloud. Their conversation is not necessarily realisticconveying
what early Iron Age Philistines may have understood about the arkbut
prompts the storyline along the trajectory it needs to be traveling.24 Like
their opponents, these Philistines are quick thinkers, converging their
knowing that the ark had arrived with remarks about its significance for
their safetythe very same topic we overheard in chronotopic moment c.
They say,
Gods have come into the camp! Woe to us! For nothing like this has happened before! Woe to us! Who can deliver us from the hand of these mighty
gods? These are the gods who struck Egypt with every sort of plague in the
wilderness? Take courage, and be men, O Philistines, in order not to become
slaves to the Hebrews as they have been slaves to you; be men and fight.
The simultaneous reactions to the arrival of the ark both equate and contrast the actors. Each group rushes precipitously from question to conclusion to corollary; each registers a regard for the power of the ark's presence
on site. But Israel's prior dismay gives way to premature and presumptuousif wordlessconfidence; while the Philistines, whom we did not
watch rejoice at their first battle victory, evince fear and trepidation but
then firm resolution.23 Both assume that the ark's presence will be effective, and both anticipate that benefit to Israel. The Philistines resemble not
so much Rahab, making a deal, but Gibeonites, hoping to duck under the
barrier (Josh. 2 and 9). The Philistines' fearful reflection on lore known to
them energizes thema response we do not get wind of from the Israel
23. The Philistines and Egyptians call the 'Israelites' 'Hebrews', supposedly an ethnic or more likely class-linked tag (Jobling 1998:215). Jobling reminds us that Israelites
often (though not here) characterize the Philistines negatively by the epithet 'uncircumcised', which is probably both an ethnic and sexual slur. To state the obvious: what we
have here is a 'Hebrew' narrator giving speech to 'Philistine' characters who are discussing 'Hebrews'; it may well reflect practicemay even be presumed to do sothough
we must remember that it is a matter of literary representation, not an audio tape found
at a dig, which would signify in quite another way.
24. In fact, DH says of the Philistines in 2 Sam. 5.21 that they bring their gods to
battle; hence the Philistines here construe the Israelites to act as they themselves do,
and DH suggests that the Philistines do the same (flawed) thing that the Israelites do.
Miller and Roberts suggest that comparative data implies that there may be a form
underlying episodes where gods are captured and returned (1977: 16).
25. As Polzin points out (1989: 59-60), we may discern some errors of fact here,
which may or may not be the point.
142
camp.26 What the Philistines do is decide to resist the ark-deity's reputation with their strength, maintaining in effect that the ark is not so powerful as supposed. So, picking up on the 'Helen of Troy' chronotope, where
an object is assessed by measuring the reaction it generates, we see the ark
evoke presumptuous complacence on one side and initiate helpful determination on the other. Are the Israelites conceiving their ark in a way different from the Philistines, or does the startling overlap between opponents
render a critique of Israel? Is the ark powerful? How does the ark exercise
its power? We now have two hypotheses to test: Israel's and Philistia's.
e. Chronotopic Segment e (1 Sam. 4.10-11): Battle (#2) is Even More Disastrous
In the consequent battle the Philistines, having just encouraged each other
that all is at stake, fight; Israel is struck (niphal verb) and flees, each man
to his own tenta familiar chronotope in biblical narrative, suggesting a
complete rout and a resulting breakdown of solidarity. The striking is very
big: from Israel 30,000 infantry fallchronotope again of the tumbling
down of the arrogant (granted, to talk about 'falling' in battle is a sort of
cliche but also a metaphor); as before, the battle is specified not by descriptive detail but by counting corpses. The death of the two Elides is part of
the battle, and given singular attention within the general 30,000 casualties. The last detail given is that the ark-of-God is taken (same verb as
used in direct discourse by the people at Ebenezer) and the two sons of Eli
die, named as always, Hophni and Phinehas. The passive verb for the ark's
capture may imply an act of God, in any case a minimizing of the Philistine achievement;27 the Elides seem, by that reasoning, to have fuller
responsibility for their own end. Both camps turn out to have been partly
correct in their theological reasoning, with which the narrator goes along
in summary. But the Philistines' energizing is more justified than the Israelites' entitlement. This may be the place to point out that agency is never
given to God by the narrator, unless we construe the passive to imply it.
Note, I am not claiming that a narrator did not assume it, simply that God's
26. Here is a place where some 'real' information may be useful; what sort of contact between these two neighboring groups, long at war but perhaps not so perennially
hostile that they do not know something about each other? Or are we moving toward
the convention of misrepresentation of the others' religion? The question of how early
Iron Age foes (and their descendants) interacted is an extremely important historical
question, which this moment of blurted information may referenceor it may not.
27. Eslinger 1985: 162, is of a similar mind: 1 Sam. 4 is about the destruction of
the Elides.
2. Looking Lethal
143
role is named explicitly only by the characters. Death comes in proximity

to the ark, at least for some; the ark misused brings death. But for others, it
brings victory. The defeat is Israel's, not necessarily God's; rather, their
'togetherness' sustains a blow.28 The battle outcome is more important
than the battle process, the fate of the few more significant than that of the
many in this particular recital. The ark is constructed, so far, by both sides,
in word and in deed. Its character so far is passive, or reflexive: it is spoken
of, linked with God and people in some vague way, lifted up, gotten, taken.
It continues on now, with new escorts, into new places it has not been
before. Adventure time/place continues, but perhaps from the ark's viewpoint, the adventures have a strange sameness to them.
f. Chronotopic Segment f(l Sam. 4.12-22): Report of Battle (#2)
In a segment brilliantly discussed by Polzin, the news of the disastrous
battlethe exile-inducing defeatis run back to the place from which the
ark and the sons had set out, a task performed on the same day, thus linking the events of Ebenezer-Aphek to Shiloh once again.29 The description
of the arrival of the unnamed man of Benjaminwitness to the death and
devastation and also a survivor of itindicates realities visually and verbally, even audially, as an outcry attends his coming onto the scene. He
comes embodying the experience he has had, his torn clothing making
visible to those with sight what his communication has to be. His task is
made explicit by the narrator in 4.13-14: he is to announce (lehaggid), to
make known a communication to Eli, which he does (vayyagged). In some
biblical narrative scenes, the messenger chronotope allows us to compare
reports with events (and sometimes with directions); here the effect is to
bring experience to a people who did not undergo it, to link the events of
one time/space to another.30 Both sets of characters are united in death. In
28. In one of a number of helpful comments made to me by Knud Jeppeson while I
was working on the manuscript, he stressed the idolatrous quality of any assumptions
making the ark a representation of the deity. What we may note here as anomalous at
the level of realism is that no people go off to Philistia with the ark; they are either
dead or return home, leaving 'it', which is in some sense themselves, to go into exile. I
remember my conversations with Knud with warmth and appreciation.
29. Fokkelman thinks this a segment filled with slow time, delays (1993: 211). He
provides a chart showing how the two halves of ch. 4 are linked in various ways (p. 217).
30. Bar-Efrat 1989:65-66, well notes the stammering (gasping?) inarticulateness of
the messenger who can scarcely present succinctly what he has to say. See Spina
(1994) for a discussion about the significance of Eli's throne, which combines priestly
and royal 'zones' and ought not be collapsed into one of those or the other.
144
this case, it is the reactions of those receiving fresh news that are most
stressed. In fact, the responses of the Shiloh characters underline for us
that we did not witness in the previous scene any reaction at all to the
defeat and capture of Israel and ark and the demise of the dynastic sons.
So in Shiloh we get what we did not get on the battlefield: some measure
of the catastrophe as news of the ark kills two non-combatants.
Though commentators differ a bit, there is some agreement that the
reaction of both Eli and the unnamed wife of Phinehas/mother of Ichabod
is to the news of the taking of the ark, rather than to anything else. She uses
passives for itavoiding to credit either the Philistines or God directly.
Her word suggests that the recent taking of the ark is shocking; was the
earlier 'taking' of it (4.3) shocking too? Eli, in separate scenic moment,
falls over at the moment the ark's capture is related. In both chronotopes
the ark is linked afresh with the word kbd (a heavy man tumbles, a pregnant woman speaks of it while squatting to give birth); and in both instances the ark is linked to life/death of sons of the Elide family. Losing
the ark is their most egregious, most definitive violation of their office. If
the glory of Israelthe arkis best characterized as the bond relating God
and people, the question of Ichabod's mother comments or inquires as to
its location. Has the glory gone? Where is the glory? Fokkelman agrees
that her question is a deep one: Will the glory depart from Israel (1993:
247)? Where is the glory? To where has it gone, for how long? Will it
return and how? To where? When? There is an odd time angle to their
reactions: too late does Eli react, too early does the mother of Ichabod give
birth and die.
As Polzin has well-described though without using the term, the toppling
of the old father is a mise-en-abyme,31 a brief but complete recapitulation
31. The most-quoted source for this small and wonderful genre is L. Dallenbach
(1989). To summarize a topic that needs, in his view, both precision and some scope
for its occurrences: Dallenbach links the expression first to heraldry, where the design
of a whole shield is found emblazoned in the middle of the shield (in the 'abyss/
abyme'), and then to the sort of refractions possible with mirrors. The mise-en-abyme
is a structure or process by which the whole of a narrative is refracted in a moment of
it, where some key moment is represented to a character (and reader) that is crucial for
transformation. It is a refraction, recognizable but repositioned, a replica in smaller
scale and from a different perspective, compressed but identifiable. His examples help:
a character receiving a message to read refracts the process by which a text is authored
for (and by) a reader; or a character recapitulates a deed that the narrator is reciting
foundationally in the story. Here the sense is that Eli's collapse mirrors the whole
dynamic of his 'reign', possibly the whole self-destructiveness of monarchy. See Pyper
2. Looking Lethal
145
of the larger storyline which is testifying in a more leisurely and complex

way to the inadequacy of the royal incumbents. In a certain sense, it adds
little to the themes already raised and analyzed in 1 Sam. 1-3 but decides
any of their uncertainties and moves them all to a place of rest. To sum up
these actors one final time will precede the final summary of the larger
parable. Eli's struggle to cling to, stay rooted in, manage events from his
sacerdotal post, fails as his own waning vision, weight, and the gross
behaviors of his sons overbalance him. Given the critique of his line for
greed with cultic offerings and for misappropriating honor, his weight is a
sin. His blindness is further advanced and forces him to rely on his
hearing, which also he would make deceiving in his capacity to deny the
inevitable. And, most telling, he is abandoned by all his sons: the two are
dead, Samuel seems inexplicably missing, Ichabod emerges too late for his
awareness; only the Benjamin runner, whom Eli calls 'son', attends him,
bringing him down. The mother is a fast-forwarded and very mortal version of the earlier, vital Hannah. Like Eli, the birthing woman is heavy,
and like Eli she is brought down to perish once her last deed is done. The
last son is noted as being on site, but that is all that can be said for him; his
dynastic purpose and heritage seem vanished. He does not speak, of course,
but bears enigmatic speech in his name. The unnamed man of Benjamin is
the more crucial survivor of the piece, and his character will be developed
later, from a different genre. In addition to his tribal status, which suggests
him as the survivor and royal successor to the Elides, he is fled from the
battlealone among those not slaughtered, his clothes (neither cloak nor
ephod here) disordered, his head marked by the disaster he announces. He
is looked for by a blind man and greeted as a son; his news brings death to
the mother and outcry from the people. The analogue for the defeat of
Judah and leaders detailed at the end of 2 Kings, the shocking deportation
of citizenry into foreign captivity, is difficult to miss.
g. Chronotopic Segment g(l Sam. 5.1-2): The Arrival of the Ark to Ashdod
(site #2)
The ark, having 'crossed', arrives in a foreign city and is placed in the
rival temple, the first place the Philistines take and bring it (each verb used
1996:28-51, Chapter 2 for additional helpful discussion of the concept. Polzin uses the
expression 'story within a story' (e.g. of 1 Sam. 17) to point to the same general thing
(1989: 170; 1993: 38). See Berlin 1983: 68-70, for excellent observations regarding
viewpoint, particularly how we are given blind Eli's angle here.
146
twice) to stand it near Dagon.32 The chronotope can be named as the home
shrine or special place of a deity, to which spoils are brought after a
victory in battle. Though it seems plausible that the Philistines bring the
ark as a captive, as booty, it is not beyond imagining that its presence in
Dagon's temple honors it as well as gives him credit, at least in the eyes of
the Philistines. That is, by being placed in so prestigious a spot, the ark
gains honor as well.
h. Chronotopic Segment h (1 Sam. 5.3-5): The Catastrophic Fallings and
Risings of Dagon
This next moment, which is doubled, comes to us pinpointed as the Philistines arrive at the temple the next morning, to find something unexpected.
Whatever they may have anticipated, it is unlikely to have been the sight
with which they are greeted. The narrator describes, through their eyes as
it were, the sight of Dagon fallen on his face, to the ground, before the arkof-YHWH. As is true of the ark, Dagon never gets any subjectivity; various Philistines react in his stead. The posture described for Dagon can be
construed as his falling before the ark in reverence or his being felled
ignominiously by its power. We get no overt clue as to which the Philistines construe, nor is it clear that one is to be preferred to the other. Our
witnessing Hannah's language (2.7) and Eli's collapse (4.18) again suggests a strange similarity between Israel and Philistia. In any case, his people take Dagon and return him to his place (language we shall hear shortly
for the ark); they get up early the next morning only to find Dagon again
fallen on his face to the ground before the ark-of-YHWH. This time the
head of Dagon and the two palms of his hands are cut, and positioned
somehow onto the threshold, with some confusion as to the condition of
the divine trunk.33 This second posture seems less open to a respectful
interpretation, and the narrator proleptically asserts that the condition of
the deity is improvised into a liturgical rubric, almost as if to contain the
damage of the god's felling by making the pitiful site part of special obser32. Klein 1983: 49-50, is helpful on Dagon: Is Dagon seeking asylum at the ark?
Klein raises the question of whether to place the ark in Dagon's shrine might not be an
honor for the arkor need not unfailingly be a dishonor. Dothan and Dothan seem
clear (1992: 156-57) that the preponderance of cult distinctive to the Philistines centered around the Great Goddess and that the presence here of Dagon, a Canaanite deity,
implies a stage of Philistine assimilation to local practices. Again, the representation
may signify more powerfully than the genetic referent.
33. It is not possible to sort the details of his affliction exactlybut the general
sense is clear enough.
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147
vance. From that day, the narrator indicates, Dagon's priests and pilgrims
to his house do not walk on the threshold at Ashdod, site of the god's
severed hands. The ark, taken (twice), is given a place of (dis)honor;34 but
it activates a gesture of worship, or of sacrilege, brings Dagon down and in
fact slices him up. I sense here no sign of intentional disrespect of the ark
but the continued pattern of clumsy cluelessness that makes mistakes (taking and bringing the ark) and then tries to repair them, often simply compounding the original blunder. Once again Israelites and Philistines resemble each other oddly. I am suspicious of parody (moving toward Bakhtin's
carnivalesque) on the part of DH, who portrays Dagon under attack and the
priests nervous to save face (theirs as well as his), though that must also
stand as my construction rather than be attributed to the authoring voice.
i. Chronotopic Segment i (1 Sam. 5.6): Lateral Disaster Compounds in
Ashdod
A narrative comment intervenes to carry the story of devastation out
beyond the realm of the god and the priests and into the city and its
environs. The heavy (kbd) hand of YHWH, the narrator says for the first
time, lays waste and strikes the inhabitants with tumors.35 The chronotope
implies a sort of contest of the gods, with YHWH'S hand powerful while
poor Dagon's lie in ritualized isolation from his felled trunk. Another way
to describe the scene is that poor leadership has once again endangered the
health of the general population; we hear of popular, not seren (whatever
the particular insider name for Philistine lords means) or priestly tumors.
Note that in all three of these Ashdod time/space snippets we get action
rather than discussion, results rather than process. In fact, we receive only
a few discrete moments at Ashdod, with reactions rather than causes themselves described. The similarities with Egyptians are roughly clear as well,
as the Philistines themselves had originally sensed when they first contemplated the significance of the ark, suggesting that an operative chronotope
(or genre) may be Israel as a threat (again, with no sense of subjectivity) to
foreign hosts.36 The question is, for whom is all this information supplied?
34. See Fokkelman 1993: 250, for a chart of the verbs involved here for the treatment of Dagon (kbd/qll).
35. Dothan and Dothan 1992: 103-105, treat the Philistine site of Afula, named
apparently in relation to its citadel or hilltop regions, that is, 'opel. The wordplay suggests an efficient striking of bodies, city centers and their environs.
36. The story of the ark's adventures bears as well a resemblance to the Genesis
stories of the ancestors' risky visits to southern climes and to the story of Jonah.
Jeppeson (private communication) noted the similarity to the Trojan horse motif.
14 8
No one except Philistines is narratively affected or informed. Are they to

see that YHWH is stronger than Dagon?37 The priests may attempt a coverup, gloss the ignominy of the falls. The Philistine citizens do not long persist in their error here, nor seem hesitant about its cause, granted a certain
degree of indirectness of YHWH'S part.
j. Chronotopic Segment] (1 Sam. 5.7-8): Crisis Colloquy (#3)
Direct discourse of those afflicted Ashdodites places before us the same
blend of question as before, resolution and explanation, granted in new
order. When the people (the men, it says, as distinct from the leaders) of
Ashdod saw that it was thus (presumably they have seen the tumors and
have been cued liturgically to the Dagon debacle), they say, 'The ark of
the God of Israel may not remain with us, for his hand is heavy on us and
on our god Dagon'; so they send and gather all the leaders of the Philistines to them and say, 'What shall we do with the ark of the God of Israel?'
We hear the equation of Israel's deity with Israel's ark, its presence linked
with YHWH'S anger. The narrator and the characters share this linkage for
the first time. Are the Ashdodites to be believed here? That they are suffering is patent; is the God of the ark the cause of it? That we need to slow
down from taking their word too quickly will be signaled to us shortly, by
themselves. Even here, we are given pause. For the inhabitants of Gath
clearly make no such link, urging rather, 'Let the ark of God be moved on
to us', and so it is. The ambivalence of the ark's representation continues.
One group wants to be rid of it, but another, with clearly a different angle,
welcomes it. Who speaks well of the ark? How can the ark look lethal to
some and remain attractive to others? One group relinquishes the ark as
another takes it up; we do not stay with the relinquishing group, to know
their fate, but with the new 'handlers', to see what happens to them. Relief
is not something we witness or learn of; that is, it is not mapped here.
k. Chronotopic Segment k (1 Sam. 5.9): Rerun (Departure, Arrival,
Devastation) and Colloquy (#4)
This brief chronotope is rather akin to several of the segments already
delineated, compressing the arrival of the ark to a new site, Gath, the heavy
hand of YHWH, the panic (hwm), the striking of all citizenry (great to
37. A lot of discussion in secondary material concerns the significance of the ark's
or God's power; if the ark is not 'God' but instances something else, much of that problem disappears. Miller and Roberts (1977: 60) are among those (few) who distinguish
carefully that the story is about YHWH'S power, not simply about the ark.
2. Looking Lethal
149
small) with tumors, resulting in an implied colloquy. The pace of recital is

accelerated, the same eventssave the one in the templecluster, reactions may be inferred to accrue quickly. The devastation and the ark coincide in time and place.
1. Chronotopic Segment I (1 Sam. 5.10-12): Rerun and Colloquy (#5)
This segment of time/space resembles and reprises chronotopic segments
g-k, reusing language and motifs with enough variation to suggest now not
simply repetition or even intensification but progress towards a climax.
They (people of Gath) send the ark-of-God to Ekron, but when the ark of
god comes to Ekron the Ekronites cried outimmediately, it seems
saying,38 'Why have they brought around to us the ark of the God of
Israelto kill us and our people?' The consensus of Philistines is clear
after (only) three cities. So they send and gather all the leaders of the
Philistines and saying, 'Send away the ark of the God of Israel and let it
return to its place, that it will not kill us and our people'for the panic of
death was on every city, and heavy was the hand of God there.39 The patterns are clear: the Philistine cities have, seriatim, run the gamut from
eagerness to have the ark, to willingness to host it, to having no choice
when it comes, to the active desire to be rid of it. The Philistine leaders, all
of them, consult and decide it must go. The language is noteworthy, since
they say the inverse of what the Israelites said in 4.3: Let it come and save
us/Let it go home lest it kill us. The ark continues acted upon and continues wordlessly, at least in the eyes of characters and in the speech of the
narrator, to activate God who reacts in the ark's environment. The people
(who do not die) are struck with tumors and a shout of the city ascended
heavenward, another echo of their Israelite neighbors.40 The telling of this
3 8. There appears need either for an indignant question here, or the assumption that
an interrogative particle or word may have slipped out of the text, as the apparatus
suggests.
39. Here in 5.1 Ib is a nice example of speech that can be direct discourse, narrative
comment, or the in-between category that Bakhtin likes so well; the point is that it is
not so clear whose insight is being shared out here. Another way to put this construction is that the character and narrator speech merge and meld.
40. It is not a bad response. McCarter 1980: 124, cites Exod. 2.23; 3.7, 9, and so
forth. Miscall 1986: 30, suggests the Philistines are even improving in their efforts to
theologize. His summary indicates that we know whose hand but not why (p. 34) and
that Israel and Philistia know different information. The Philistines sense their opponent is the ark; the Israelites (so far) lack (expressed) insight as to why they fared badly
at Ebenezer.
150
moment is elliptical, abbreviated. Jobling's lengthy consideration on the

Philistines helps us render explicit our readers' assumptions about them:
Are they boorish and dumb? Or are they doing their best under difficult
and uninvited circumstances? Or... ? Except for the narrator, they are unobserved here, so we cannot stand behind 'the Hebrews' and blame our
constructions on them. My initial take is that the Philistines do no worse
than Hophni and Phinehas, and with considerable less information; in fact,
Hophni and Phinehas are incorrigible, which is not the case with these
'tyrants'. Jobling says they are less wrong than they tend to get credit for
(1998:218).
m. Chronotopic Segment m (1 Sam. 6.1): Chronological/Geographical Note
A single sentence of time and place, that the ark-of-YHWH was in the
territory of the Philistines for seven months, suggests that despite the
pileup of disaster, the ark is not so easy to let go of, or perhaps to get rid of
(raising concomitant questions about 'release' from exile in the late sixth
century). Given the detail of what happened starting in Ashdod and then
spreading elsewhere, with relief presumably (though not narrated) only
experienced as the ark departs, why seven months? Contrastively, the narration catches only a few quick scenes from the seven months, though
undoubtedly more might have been recounted. If we ask the evaluative
valence of the ark's exile or captivity from the view of its 'losers' rather
than the 'finders', one might say not too short but not too long. Long
enough for its absence to be a shocking event, short enough in comparison
to the next period of time the ark languishes. The events familiar to us
from the end of 2 Kings are activated by analogy but without any reflection by those exiles experiencing them. That is, this is a story of exile told,
such as the recital goes, by the Babylonians.
n. Chronotopic Segmentn (1 Sam. 6.2-9): Crisis Colloquy (#6) and Directions
A consultation follows again (filled with subchronotopes) about how to be
rid of the ark, not just locally but more widely, the decision having been
taken by the leaders that it needs to return to its place, wherever that may
be now. The question 'How?' unfolds a set of factors. This group of consultants includes Philistines (in general), who call to their priests and diviners and ask, 'What shall we do with the ark of the LORD? Tell us what we
should send with it to its place.' The language recalls the early morning
replacement of Dagon to his place, after his first tumble. And they (presumably those consulted) say, 'If you send away the ark of the God of
2. Looking Lethal
151
Israel, do not send it empty,41 but by all means you must return [it] a guilt
offering.42 Then you will be healed [and it will be known to you why his
hand has not turned away from you]' (my translation). There are three
main points to note in this section of discourse. First, the strong admonition that the ark must not be returned empty most likely implies a new
offering, and that is surely the direction the narrative takes, as the scenes
ahead show. And, as has been well pointed out, the motif of 'plundering'
one's captives appears three times in the story of the exodus, as well as in
legal material covering the release of a slave. The sense of including a sort
of recompense is also stressed in the words of those consulted.
But without taking away from that whole trajectory, there is a second
possibility. Is 'empty' perhaps a reference to the fact that it has been
relieved of what it came with? To restate that point: the use of the word
'empty' reminds us to think about the fact that presumably the ark did not
arrive empty but carried the tablets and the law copy, those reminders of
mutually binding words that the ark bears. Have those been neglected?
Overlooked? Misappropriated in fact as well as in language? The third
point to comment on is the purpose of the gift to be included: besides
being compensatory, it is to be diagnostic, to generate knowledge about
whether or why 'the hand' has not turned away from those afflicted. The
recompense sounds, in this aspect, as a sort of assay, perhaps similar to the
diagnosis able to be made from the cows' performance, soon to be detailed.
Though the equation is not specific, wording seems to allow the inference
that if the gift works and the hand lightens, then the presence of the ark
will indeed have been the aggravating factor and will be released gladly. If
this supposition is correct, the reasoning is once again quite similar
mutatis mutandisto what the Israelites said when about to summon the
41. The commentary on 'not empty' tends to pick up on the exodus despoliation
theme; but not emptyrather with new itemsmay also lead us to ask what happened
to what was in the ark to start with: the tablets and the copy. Not empty? Klein 1983:
57, refers us to Deut. 31.26 where 'these words' are supposed to be put (beside it) there.
So Deuteronomy has linked the ark with the tablets, the Mosaic words, and the king's
copy of itpresumably, ideally, and diagnostically, when there is a king to do a copy.
42. Fokkelman 1993:265, says the expression means give back as damages, apoint
McCarter makes too (1980:132) later, noting that the golden items are both recompense
and valuable as tribute (pp. 133-34). Then the question is, to whom? Fokkelman reminds
us of the importance of distinguishing the ark and the deity, seeing them as metonymically linked, apoint he thinks not sufficiently appreciated by all interpreters (1993:26567). I think that is correct.
152
ark: 'Let us get it for ourselves... so it can save us.' But if the ark is not the
problem, why return it?
But in any case, the colloquy moves on, prompted by the question of
what sort of gift to return with the ark. The question uses new terminology:
'What is the guilt offering that we shall return to [it]?' And thenthe
answer comes dictated by the number of leaders of the Philistines: five
golden tumors and five golden micefor a single plague was upon all
together, leaders and people.43 Directions for making images (selamirri) of
the tumors and mice ravaging the land ensue, '.. .and give glory (kbd) to
the God of Israel; perhaps he will lighten his hand on you and your gods
and your land. Why should you harden (kbd) your hearts as the Egyptians
and Pharaoh hardened (kbd) their hearts? After he made fools of them ('II),
did they not let the people go, and they departed?' Commentary tends,
understandably, to bog down on the production and significance of the
items, overlooking the possibility that they are irrelevant or worse, an
additional indignity suffered by the arkto be stuffed now with images of
gold mice and tumors.44 What the items might be presumed to signify to
the Philistines seems a moot question, or at least only part of what we need
to be pondering. Directions about the transportation process come next:
one new cart, two nursing ('olof) cows who have not borne on them a yoke
('aid <alehem 'ol), bind the cows to the cart and remove their calves
('sons', it says) home away from them.45 The subchronotope of new and
unused items, the wordplay around the ascent of non-yoked and nursing
holocausts (as the cows are about to be), the repetition of the theme of
mothers and sons all may be more meaning-bearing at the level of language than at that of ritual. Further: The ark-of-YHWH is to be taken and
placed on the cart, the gold items as a guilt offering placed in the pouch at
its side.
43. The illustrations and sketches throughout Dothan and Dothan (1992) underline
the popularity of animals and birds, which are depicted in a variety of ways. The mice
seem less exceptional to me than before I looked at the artifacts.
44. Jeppeson (private communication), citing Lev. 11.29 and Deut. 14.3-8 reminds
us that mice are unclean. He suggests that the Philistines return the ark as a Trojan
Horse; I see no sign of that in the narrative.
45. Fokkelman 1993:282, links Ichabod's mother and Ichabod to Hannah and Samuel. He refers to the 'cultic demise' of the cows (p. 285). He thinks the question here is
key: who can stand and serve (p. 290). Israel learns the same lesson the Philistines did
(p. 293; see also the chart of similarities p. 294).
2. Looking Lethal
153
How the ark goes when sent is set up as suggestive, indicative.46 '...
And watch; if it goes up on the way to its own land, to Beth Shemesh, then
[it] has done us this great harm; but if not, then we shall know that it is not
his hand that struck us; it happened to us by chance' ,47 How to pick up on
the significance of Beth Shemesh is not utterly clear. Is Beth Shemesh a
destination, equivalent to 'its own land', or merely a point along the way,
so simply indicative of direction? If we limit the Philistines to their most
famous five cities, then the choice is stark; but if Philistine presence is
acknowledged in many more citiesBeth Shemesh includedthen the
Philistine plan works a bit differently.48 There seems a distinction between
Beth Shemesh and the named Philistine cities, but the destination is clearly
not Shiloh, most recently the ark's dwelling place. As we listen to the
language, the effort seems to go towards the constructing of some sort of
process that will generate insight about why the catastrophe occurred in
the first place, or to eliminate the default assumptionthat harm is linked
to the deity of the ark. That is, the Philistines hark back to their own original and successful insight at the battle that gained them the ark in the first
place: human effort may have generated the victory, and some other explanation than a divine one may lie at the root of recent events. We see,
layered in here, a testing of the ark with a number of phases built in for
scrutiny. The DH sees the ark going to its place by stages, which will not
be reached until 2 Sam. 6 (if then). Beth Shemesh, though indicating a
trajectory, may also allow for the possibility of Philistine retrieval of the
ark, if nothing happens to discourage it.
o. Chronotopic Segment o (1 Sam. 6.10-11): Obedience to the Directions
This section, though abbreviated, shows compliance by using much the
same language: the Philistines take two nursing cows, bind them to the
cart, shut up their calves at home, and set the ark-of-YHWH onto the cart as
46. The same description as YHWH and Israel at Egypt in 6.6.
47. Eslinger 1985: 204-205, suggests the form here is priestly consultation and
instruction. He says the Philistines are uncertain as to how to proceed; the people may
be, but the priests evince no hesitation as to details. Though they may be grasping at
straws to do so, they pull with little hesitation. A carnivalesque spoofof both Philistines groping for a way to send the ark liturgically and for Bible commentators, who
consecrate the tumors and mice in ways as creative. Similar to the Dagon threshold
rubric. Miscall thinks the Philistines to do not know why they were struck, nor to do
we, really (1986: 34). The narrative leaves it a very open question.
48. Dothan and Dothan 1992: 36,79, list it as characterized by Philistine remains.
Jeppeson (private communication) notes it as a cultic place of the sun deity.
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well as the pouch of items. The compliance seems exact; whether it is

fruitful is another question.
p. Chronotopic Segment p (1 Sam. 6.12-13a): Return Journey of the Ark
The narrator marks succinctly but carefully the journey of the ark homeward to its arrival at Beth Shemesh; direct go the cowsturning neither
right nor leftalong the road to Beth Shemesh on a single slope, lowing
as they go, with Philistines behind them as far as Beth Shemesh, where
men are reaping wheat in the valley. With the Philistines monitoring the
experiment closely, the cows are shown to select one of the options, apparently with no hesitation, and counterintuitively, if the point of the selection
criteria is to make an orderly retreat somewhat unlikelythat is, to increase the cows' disincentive to leave home and increase the handicap of
the ark's return to its home. The ark, escorted attentively but discreetly by
Philistines, arrives into a group of Beth Shemeshites as before, traveling
more safely with the cows than when accompanied by Elides.
q. Chronotopic Segment q (1 Sam. 6.13b-16): Reception of the Ark
This next moment slides right out of the return journey but deserves its
own moment as well. It is narrated in several steps: When those harvesting
raise their eyes, they see the ark49 and rejoice.50 The cow-drawn cart
comes to the field of Joshua, a Beth Shemeshite, and stands there, at a big
stone. The reapers split the wood of the cart and make a holocaust of the
cows.51 And the Levites bring down the ark-of-YHWH and the pouch
which is with it, in which are the gold items, and set them on the big rock;
and the men of Beth Shemesh offer holocausts and sacrifices that day to
YHWH.52 The episode and the reception chronotope closes with the
departure of the five lords of the Philistines, who (also) see but return to
Ekron on that day. Their departure closes the ark's Philistine adventures,
49. One of the rare times it is referred to simply by a single, unqualified noun.
50. Eslinger 1985:212-17, develops the sense that the people are glad only, bear no
grudge against God, do everything right, and so are shocked at God's fresh outburst;
that approach seems the wrong path to me. What I notice in the verse is three references to seeingsignificant in view of what is about to happen.
51. How the people are called is interesting: after the name of their town; the usual
assumption is that they are Israelites, but the conclusion need not be inevitable. Levitesfrom Beth Shemesh?do a job, but it seems a bit odd to have Beth Shemeshites
do the rest of the sacrificing, if they are unequivocal Israelites. In 2 Chron. 28.18 the
city is given to the Philistines, though later.
52. Klein 1983: 59, says that these are not unblemished males.
2. Looking Lethal
155
as those former hosts see that it is received and looked at apparently

without disaster, which is to say, they turn back presumably with their
own conclusion before the next 'lethal looking' incident breaks out. What
the Philistines conclude is not told to us, but they stop gathering data
prematurely, it seems. Or perhaps they go, content that the ark stops
successfully short of Shiloh. Again, I think we can see a parallel between
the privacy with which each group copes with its own ark-linked devastations, the effect of which is to shut them of from comparisons. Only we
know that 'the ark' strikes both sides indiscriminately, reacts at home and
away, and that 'it' is about to 'strike' again. The episode at first seems a
contrast with other receptions of the ark, but in fact the blend of initial joy
turning to dismay which characterizes the ark's trajectory is about to drop
into place once again.
r. Chronotopic Segment r (1 Sam. 6.17-18): Narrative Pointing Summary
The narrator simply recounts the items, carefully specifying the numerical
rationale. What is not quite clear is the chronotope of the specification:
How are 'these' situated in time and space? Possibilities include: these are,
or those were, are here or elsewhere, the golden uncleannesses which the
Philistines returned as a guilt offering to YHWH, one per Philistine city
(named) and the mice according to the number of fortified cities and unwalled spaces. Is the narrator to be understood as pointing to some preserved objects, or as recollecting for self and hearers a picture of what has
just been related? If so, is their presence reassuring? Ominous? Or is the
number the significant thing, and the geographical summary of Philistine
presence in the land? It is impossible to decide. The great meadow/stone
where they are shown to have stood the ark of YHWH is to this day witness
in the field of Joshua the Beth Shemeshite. What has the stone witnessed?
How is the stone made now to witness? Does the summary imply disapproval? It strikes me that it should do so, and that the care for these items
(images) is ultimately misplaced. There is a negative evaluative charge on
this retrospect, but it seems impossible to pin down definitively, important
though that is to do. Though Joshua may have seemed a likely caretaker
for the ark, it does not turn out to be the case.
s. Chronotopic Segment s (1 Sam. 6.19-21): Crisis Colloquy (#7)
A fresh and apparently unmotivated action comes next, separated from the
actions of the Beth Shemeshites by the heavily intrusive narrative comment we have just heard. 'And [it] killed seventy men of Beth Shemesh
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[for they looked in/on the ark of YHWH and it struck 5070 men], and the
people mourned because the LORD had made a great slaughter among the
people'.53 The resemblance between Beth Shemeshites and those at Ebenezer, Ashdod, Gath and Ekron is obvious. And if the identity of Beth
Shemesh as a Philistine city is tenable, then the ark reacts once again to its
treatment by them. One group of Philistines stops its scrutiny, but another
set of human beings is critiqued for looking. If the people of Beth
Shemesh are Israelite, then the problem at Ebenezer is made present again.
How to construe the ark? The ark reacts to human liturgies in some way,
to some invasion of itself. Whatever keeps going wrong is not purposeful
and seems always to catch the targets by surprise. Part of the problem
being described is ignorance, whether local or foreign. And the people of
Beth Shemesh pose a key question, a more specified version of Ashdodite
reaction when they decide they and their Dagon have had enough: 'Who is
able to stand before the LORD, this holy God? And to whom will [it] go so
that we may be rid of [it]?'54 Their question seems in both parts to bear an
implication of priestly leadership vacuum: Who can 'stand before' YHWH
Elohim, this holy one?55 And if not ourselves here, who and where? Their
question may once again require careful refocus: Not just who, but how?
Where? Even when?
t. Chronotopic Segment t (1 Sam. 6.21-7.1): Departure/Arrival of the Ark
(#6)
So the people of Beth Shemesh send messengers to the inhabitants of
Kiriath Jearim saying, 'The Philistines have returned the ark of the LORD.
Come down and take it up to you'. And the people of Kiriath-jearim move
up the Ark of YHWH and bring it to the house of one Abinadab56 in
53. McCarter's careful textual work summarizes the variants (1980: 131): LXX is
fuller herehaving reference to the sons of Jeconiah, which is a nice royal and postexilic hint.
54. J. Ackerman 1991: 8, sees that the parallel with the exodus breaks down, as the
Israelites are now like the Canaanites, those into whose land the ark returns from captivity, the result being slaughter. The strange resemblance shared by the story's insiders
and outsiders and the slippage in those terms made inevitable by shifting narrative
viewpoints is a point explored at length by Polzin (1989: 55-79, Chapter 2) when he
discusses Israelites and Canaanites. The people wronged by Godjust like the Philistines (Eslinger 1985: 219-25, intermittently); who will standsee Judg. 20.27-28.
55. Polzin 1989:68-71, argues that the expression is exclusively priestly and royal.
56. Klein 1983: 60: the name appears in priestly circles but also in Saul's and
David's families (1 Sam. 16.8; 17.13; 31.2).
2. Looking Lethal
157
Gibeah/on a hill and Eleazar, his son, they sanctify to guard the ark of
YHWH. The answer to the questions raised drives the ark's sixth journey
now, to Kiriath Jearim, to the house of a man whose son is rendered fit,
sanctified (qds) to watch over (smr) the ark.57 New verbs are used here, or
used in a new context. The ark, it is discerned, needs to be cared for by a
qualified person, a destiny it has not had in 1 Samuel and perhaps not in
DH since Joshua. None violate its space, take it for themselves, or set it in
a temple or on a rock; it is not plundered or made the receptacle for anything. No one investigates its doings. No one asks it to save them or not to
slay them. The terminology used for the task at hand reinforces my sense
that the ark is primarily the locus for the relationship between God and
people and must be guardedtended, as is the commitment between God
and people. Beth Shemesh turns out to be no more suited for the ark than
other cities of the Philistines. Is the ark's 'own place' an address (Kiriathjearim) or a manner of reception and treatment (at the hands of Eleazar)?
u. Chronotopic Segment u (I Sam. 7.2a): A Geographical/Chronological
Note
A narratorial note states the length of time the ark was dwelling at Kiriath
Jearim: 20 years (to what end point is not named, so I read it as a prolepsis: it stays there until... David [who, however, at 2 Sam. 6.2 fetches it
from Baale-Judah]). This note is similar to the observation that the ark was
in Philistine territory for seven months, though of course different in quantity. The point underlines again the similarity of the two sides who move
the ark around. But the difference is also made clear: a 20-year sojourn
with no further adventures (yetuntil David moves it) signals an end to
something, or at least a stasis that was not visible while the ark was in
Philistine territory.
v. Chronotopic Segment v (7.2b-4): Report of Change of Direction by Israel
The story now picks up the thread of the community without an ark, without Elides. Having been sent back, Israel now needs to decide to return.
All Israel was lamenting [word uncertain: vayyinnahu5^] after YHWH, and
Samuel said to all the house of Israel, 'If you are returning to the LORD
with all your heart, then put away the foreign gods and the Astartes from
among you. Direct your heart to the LORD, and serve him only, and he will
57. Jeppeson (private communication): same language used for Deuteronomy's
sabbath law, another chronotopic marker of the vital YHWH-Israel relationship
58. See McCarter 1980: 141, for textual notes.
158
deliver you out of the hands of the Philistines.' Difficulties of reading notwithstanding, I see this moment placed as a narrative return to the people
whose arkshared with their Godhas been the occasion (maybe the
cause) of a series of vicissitudes; the narrator has just indicated that the ark
will remain in care at Kiriath-jearim for some 20 years ahead. The narratorial implicationor my inferencefrom the direct discourse of Samuel
seems to equate the prophet's words with repentance or return to God, a
move not uncalled for, given the story that has unfolded from 4.1. That is,
Samuel too implies, or may be interpreted to hold, that illegal religious
behavior has been a problemhaving false gods, having 'sons', acting so
as to lose the arkeventuating in defeats in battle, deaths of leaders, and
the loss of the ark. The moment has come to change tack. And there is a
narratorial summary of compliance to Samuel's words. Samuel himself
has not spoken directly in all this long section, but if his words have set off
the Philistine encounters, he here picks up the problem anew.59 That is,
what now, with the ark ignominiously managed and in recovery, Philistine
defeats still smarting, and no Elide leadership? A fundamental shift is
called for, and that is what Samuel now emerges to to do; unspeaking, unspoken to during these recent problems, his crucial moment for leadership
comes now. In parable terms, the presence of Samuel does not prevent the
loss of the ark and all it represents; nor is he asked to guard its future.
59. I am dating this moment not to the end of the 20-year period but to the near
time of this latest catastrophe at Beth Shemesh, where we rejoin Israel after being away
seven months. The narrative is filled with analepsesso why not here? (Miscall concedes it a possibility [1986:36-37]). Granted, David will retrieve the ark from another
spot; but why should we assume we know its whole itinerary? So this is a fresh
moment, a return, as it were, to an earlier opportunity. In a distinct but related topic,
Jobling makes a case for seeing the continuity here if we consider the unit to start in
Judges; he suggests that the sin is the refusal to rout the Philistines as required at Judg.
2.11-19; Eli, foil for Samuel, has failed utterly, and here Samuel does it (Jobling 1998:
30-31,43,51 -53,57). Miscall adds some nuance about whether the Philistines are like
Canaanites and need to be expelled; his sense seems to be that they are not the same
exactly and that their continued presence is not the problem needing to be coped with
in 1 Samuel (see 1986: 35-36). For Klein, the Samuel 'success' shows that kings are
unnecessary (1983: 70). He raises some interesting questions without following up
much on them. McCarter calls the language 'Deuteronomic cliche' (1980: 142) and
singles out the elements of that sort of talk; see Jobling (1998:43-76, Chapter 3) for a
list of how the Judges patterns is found here. Last time (in Judges) the foe was internal
(McCarter 1980: 145).
2. Looking Lethal
159
w. Chronotopic Segment w (I Sam. 7.5-12): Gatherings at Mizpah

With no response from those he just addressed, only a narrator summary
of their obedience, we hear Samuel (having construed compliance?) say,
'Gather all Israel at Mizpah and I will pray to the LORD for you'. And his
words are obeyed, the narrator reports. The chronotope seems to suggest
the place and time of a liturgical response, marking a shift in Israel's
demeanor and behavior.60 The ceremony includes the drawing of water
and fasting all day, an acknowledgment of having sinned against God (the
particular way is not named directly), and Samuel's judging (exact referent
of that role also not specified) the people. A chain of time/space reactions
trips off, as at Ebenezer. Some news or other of this Mizpah gathering
comes to Philistine ears, and their erstwhile opponents implore Samuel,
'Do not cease to cry out to the LORD our God for us; and pray that he may
save us from the hand of the Philistines.' And Samuel takes a single nursing lamb and immolates to YHWH, crying out to YHWH on behalf of
Israel; and YHWH answers (content not specified). When Samuel is doing
the holocaust the Philistines approach for battle against Israel, and YHWH
roars with a loud sound on that day against the Philistines, discomfits them
and strikes them before Israel. And the Israelites emerge from Mizpah and
pursue the Philistines, striking them to just below Beth Car. Taking a stone
which he sets between Mizpah and the crag, he names it Ebenezer, saying,
'Thus far the LORD has helped us'.
It is a long string of events, which could perhaps be split smaller; the
moment comprises the reliance of Israel on YHWH and Samuel, and Samuel's intercession to YHWH, even in the face of Philistine propinquity and
threat. The scene evokes the (first) Ebenezer (4.1), as Philistines threaten.
The behavior of these three partiesSamuel the judge, priest and intercessor; YHWH as object of appeal and subject of response; and the people,
who earlier in similar circumstances placed their reliance differently
makes a clear contrast with the first Ebenezer situation. This time Samuel is
clear, God seems unambiguous, and the people seem consistent in their
commitment. The Philistines have the opposite experience from their first
two Ebenezer encounters; the ark, of course, is absentpossibly not missed
and not missing this scene. That is, appropriately, the ark is not summoned.
Samuel's leadershipeven in absence of the arkis sufficient, at least for
the moment.
60. Garsiel 1985:42-43, traces similarities in the phraseology shared between 4.111 and 7.5-13, while maintaining that the contrasts are sharp as well.
160
x. Chronotopic Segment x (1 Sam. 7.13-14): Narratorial Windup (#1)

The narrator notesprolepticallythe outcome: the Philistines are subdued (niphal verbwith agent first not specified). God's hand is against
them all Samuel's days, and lost territory is recovered; peace also results
with Amorites. It is an odd summary given other information about Philistine troubles in the reigns of Saul and David. It gives every appearance of
being a commendation of Samuel's leadership in this particular place,
perhaps itself typical of his way of governance.
y. Chronotopic Segment y (I Sam. 7.15-17): Narratorial Windup (#2)
Another narratorial note specifies Samuel as a judge, using a formula
typical of other (minor) judges for his chronological and geographical, his
staying at Ramah, his building an altar at Ramah.61 Like the previous note,
I think the comment is approving of him and contrasts him with Eli, at
least, who as a judge manages none of these feats.
z. Chronotopic Segment z (1 Sam. 8.1-3): Narratorial Windup (#3): An
Old Man and his Two Corrupt Sons
But, in a note which manages both to conclude the whole first section
(Polzin's two parables of chs. 1-7) and to introduce the slightly more
straightforward (and in any case freshly commencing) narrative of Saul, to
anticipate the stretch ahead and also to sink back, we are placed again as at
numerous previous moments and situations: the sons are not adequate as
leaders. Samuel's two are greedy and perverse, turning away from whatever may be good about their father to pursue gain. More sons, more duds!
The problem of governance has not been solved by dynastic sons, no matter who the father is, no matter how much enthusiasm shown towards him
and the success of his ministry.
61. Jobling usefully reminds us that the narrator uses some language about the
tasks of judge, priest, even prophet; the point is that Samuel folds these things together,
not that they are clear-cut discrete jobs and roles which he manages (1998: 57). For
example, prophets are needed to make and advise kings. Miscall says: 'Eli's death is a
capstone on the displacement of the priests from the central positions and functions
they occupied and performed in Exodus through Deuteronomy... Many of these
functions and much of their authority pass to others, e.g., Joshua and the judges' (1986:
40). For priests read 'dynastic sons' but the passing is not done yet.
2. Looking Lethal
161
6. Conclusions
Like chs. 1-3, chs. 4-7 function as a masal. There is both continuity and
development from the first parable to the second. The analogy between
sons and leaders continues. Asking sons, having sons, is linked to dynastic
leadershippriestly here but royal shortly. The narrative continues to sort
the rejected Elides from the more freshly asked Samuel, from orphaned
Ichabod, from the impromptu Eleazar. Indeed, the rejection of the Elides,
already announced, is carried out in this present passage. The idea of
replacement of the dominant dynasty is suggested if not developed. The
point seems to be that there is need for a change in leadership; the
characteristics of the replacement are not developed.
What is developed at some length is the reason for the repudiation of the
Elides, root and branch, father and sons; their long pedigree and their
experienceEgypt to Shilohdoes not testify compellingly to refute
abuses alleged, narrated, shown; perhaps their ancient status has made
them more guilty. If in chs. 1-3 the dynastic sons perverted their charge by
fattening upon the gifts that ought to have cycled more directly between
YHWH and people, in chs. 4-6 they mismanage their charge to the point
of losing the ark into captivity, destroying themselves in the process.
Shiloh's priests are no better than Philistines in guarding the ark or in
understanding its nature; arguably they are worse. It is thanks to them that
the ark goes into captivity; and none of the Elide line is charged with the
return of it. Foreigners make the plan for repatriation, and a new line of
caretakers receives the responsibility to tend the ark. As Polzin contends, a
whiff of idolatry hovers around the having of, demanding of sons, compounded as images are stuffed into the ark as it makes its journey from
exile. The request for sons is shown to be not simply undesirable or foolish, but their mismanaging the ark marks them as foundationally thwarting
of the relationality of God and people, YHWH and Israel. Though a case
may be made that Samuel does better with the ark, I do not read it so. If, as
I urge, it is from Samuel's prophetic ministry that Israel engages the Philistines in 1 Sam. 4 and with his silence that the ark goes to the battle from
which it is lost, then he is not its appropriate or designated caretaker. That
the piece ends with his appointing his two sons to positions of judge which
they, like Hophni and Phinehas, fundamentally pervert, disqualifies Samuel
from being adequate shepherd of the bonds shared between YHWH and
people. Samuel will have a role, but it will not be related any longer to
dynastic leadership.
162
Insofar as genre considerations helped suggest and design chs. 1-3 as a

parable and an utterance, both of those challenges persist as the scrutiny
and analysis of chronotopic factors bring forth the exilic 'then and thereness' of chs. 4-7. The journey of the ark into a land not its home, where it
suffers ignominy and misunderstanding, nonetheless gives way to a return.
The old leadership does not prevent its going, to the contrary; nor are they
able to manage its return. The Joshua who welcomes it back does not
retain his role. The hugged of dynastic and devastating sons propounds its
discourse in a setting in which it makes sense. A sixth-century community
of Judah's elite, forced into captivity but then freed for a return, must face
the question of how it shall healthily return to its homeland. If near the end
of the sixth century in which one generation was taken east, another must
decide how to re-enter the land from the east. As sketched already in the
introduction to this book, it is impossible to be confident of any detailed
reconstruction of the situation. But the case for contending leadership
lines, some royal and some priestly, seems plausible. A riddle which disqualifies the royal pretenders and excoriates in no uncertain terms the
reigning priestly house opens the way for an alternative choice. That the
royal names persist, and that we can trace some early post-exilic responsibilities for those bearing them, suggests the matter of royal restoration was
not moot. That they vanish, ultimately, suggests that the hugged did at
least part of its job well. The question of the priestly line is more complex,
since in retrospect it seems clear that Aaronid priests will take up the
vacuum. But what families, specifically, remains hidden beneath the neatness of the genealogical lines.
But in any case, the language of masalhaving made its 'no' to more royal
sons clear, the narrative now moves on to another of Rosenberg's Chinese
boxes. Though we have been shown dramatically that the requested sons
are inadequate, we will now approach that experience in the guise of one
man in particular, Saul. The genre will remain analogical, as Saul will stand
in for the whole line of kings. The chronotope continues to be complex, in
that though the story has, in one sense, already ended, it will now be told
again; in fact, even as it ends with the death of Saul, the story of catastrophic sons will pick up afresh with the story of David and sonsanother
Chinese box. But they too, as we know, will crash, and the question of how
to return from exile will press in 'real time'. But as we move on to meet the
figure of Saul, we will be attending to the questions of how he is asked,
how rejected; of why he goes so awry; and with the dilemma of the manner
in which his inviolable self can be eliminated and what must not occur.
Chapter 3
SAUL'S SKIN: THE AUTHORING OF A KING
AND A HERO (1 SAMUEL 8-12)
Our skin is what stands between us and the world... It imprisons us, but it
also gives us individual shape, protects us from invaders, cools us down or
heats us up as needs be, produces vitamin D, holds in our body fluids...
Although it may cascade or roam as we grow older, it lasts surprisingly
well'.
Diane Ackerman (1990: 68)
In contrast [to New Critics], the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin, eager to
diversify the strengths of discourse from which any text is made up like a
patchwork or collage, finds limitless textual diversity, arguably because he is
looking for diversity rather than singularity. Language for Bakhtin is at any
given moment of its historical existence heteroglot from top to bottom...
Alice Bach (1997: 16)
The artist's struggle to achieve a determinate and stable image of the hero is
to a large degree his struggle with himself.
Mikhail Bakhtin (1990b: 6)
1. Point of Entry
Who made King Saul, Saul king? Who iswho areresponsible for (his)
kingship in Israel? How is the story represented? Why is it told in such, in
this particular detail? It seems that the king appears tardily on the scene, if,
as suggested, his name has been prominent for some time already. That the
problem of leadership, of flawed sons, has been thoroughly exposed in the
early chapters of the narrative of 1 Samuel does not mean that an alternative, a solution, has been well-envisioned. And yet the moment for setting
up kingship and a king is at hand.
Since the reading of kingmaking I am about to offer comes directly
from my arrangement of the relevant scenes, let me offer an analogy to
make clear my project. Consider a room in which a subject is to sit for
painters. He takes his place in the center and is adjusted variously by the
164
several who will be drawing him. They all contribute suggestions and
position him as each likes, though since there are several artists, no one
has full sway in this matter; in fact, the master of the painters does the
definitive adjusting. The artists arrange themselves as well, with the most
important of them choosing the best places, assisted also in this selection
by the master. I myself plan to draw the room of artists drawing, so that
their constructions are part of mine. I am positioned so that I can see all of
them: not all aspects of them, but some angle on them and their work. Two
other things are important about my placement: first, there is a mirror
beside me, so I can also watch myself drawing and can advert to my own
process as well; and second, I am particularly interested in the master
painter (the narrator) who is seated diagonally from my excellent place,
who can also see the subject and other artists optimally.
As is no doubt manifest, I have sketched the drawing or authoring process that brings to visibility, to an early reality, Saul the king and the institution of kingship. The minor 'artists' include elders and people (which I
will take as a set), Saul's father Kish, Saul's uncle, the young man who
accompanies Saul on his quest for donkeys, the young women who direct
the two searchers to the high place, and the people of Jabesh Gilead. (The
two sons of Samuel, those involved in verifying the signs Samuel spoke
of, and the Ammonites are scenery, not artists.) The major artists are
Samuel and God (including God's spirit). Saul himself and the narrator are
each in a different category, as I have implied in my analogy and will amplify below. What I am after here is my construction of the interaction
between each character-artist and the central figure of Saul-the-king, the
relations among them all, with appropriate comment about the orchestrating narrator.
As I do my sketch, I will try to bring out the multiple authorings and
interactions with the central figure. Consequently, what we will have is not
one complete and seamless work but several suggestive takes on the king,
sharing a good deal but each also distinctive due to the angle and other
factors of composition. My canvas will show this unevenness. Each artist
will see his or her own horizon (the view from his or her eyes) and will
consider the environment that includes the main 'model'. Each character
will have considerable space he or she does not see (typically epitomized
as the area behind him- or herself) and a surplus of insight on all others
that they lack of themselves. The master-artist/narrator, orchestrating to
some extent all the others, must be considered both in self and as directing
their work. And the central figure himself reacts to, interacts with, all those
3. Saul's Skin
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drawing him, though variously. My 'finished' productwhich is by definition very provisionalwill highlight the diversity, or rather the lack of
clarifiable essence that might tempt us to say: he is Saul, or he is Saul. A
last feature of the narrative from which I plan to work is the 20 or so questions which streak the chapters.1
This chosen angle of discoursed questions will generate distinctive
results. My choice to work with the questions, though strategically promising, is also linked to my strong sense that biblical language is less singlestranded than often presumed. Reading its ambiguity fruitfully does not
excuse us from its complex effect but increases our responsibility to engage
it. The questions all activate dialogue, in one way or another, concomitantly
exploding univocity and promoting the need for readerly answerability.
How a reader authors what another has crafted will be distinctive, a result
of the reader's standing point and place of orientation. The best readings
(or re-authorings) of a classic story such as this one will be done in consultation with the best of the tradition in which the story stands. Before turning
to 1 Samuel, let us look at Bakhtin's contribution to the processes of authoring.
2. Bakhtin on Authoring
This global concept, like dialogism, is fundamental for Bakhtin's thought
(called 'master trope' by Clark and Holquist [1984: 80]), the place where all
other concepts weave together. But compared with the relative constancy of
his dialogism, chronotope, genre, and utterance, authoring changes substantially over the time Bakhtin shapes his sense of it. Since my purpose here is
not to trace the evolving concept so much as it is to set it up usefully for
1 Samuel's treatment of Saul, I will select from Bakhtin's longitudinal considerations the material that is most germane.2 As always, many other path1. The questions occur at 9.7,11,18,20,21; 10.2,11,12,14,22,24,27; 11.5,12;
12.3 (several), 17.
2. The second essay ('Author and Hero') of the book edited in English as Art and
Answerability (1990) runs from pp. 4-256. Bakhtin had projects in mind for that essay
which are not relevant to present purposes. He tends to circle and repeat, to assert and
then rebut, which makes precise referencing of his words on this or that page seem
inadequate. He also often stops to argue against other positions in order both to show
their inadequacy and to further explicate his own assertions. The issues most important
can be found explained, illustrated, intertwined and summarized in that essay on 1990b:
4-17, 22-25, 82-87, 97-101, 172-79, 187-96; he also makes a grand summary on the
last pages of his 1990c: 317-18.
166
ways are available from notes and bibliography. Though he at one point
alludes to authoring as a dance (1990: 137), his definition is not quite so
gracefully elegant:
An author is the uniquely active form-giving energy that is manifested not in
a psychologically conceived consciousness, but in a durably valid cultural
product, and his active, productive reaction is manifested in the structures it
generatesin the structure of the active vision of a hero as a definite whole,
in the structure of his image, in the rhythm of disclosing him, in the structure
of intonating, and in the selection of meaning-bearing features (1990b: 8,
unpacked on pp. 4-21, 81-85).
For the present purposes, authoring can be envisioned as a set of concentric circles. At its most inclusive, authoring is an architectonics of consciousness, a subject's attempt to make sense of the world and to make
coherent the role of the self in that world: 'Authorship is the primary activity of all selves in a world dominated by the self/other distinction' (Clark
and Holquist 1984: 94, and Chapter 3 in general). So whetheraswe are
thinking of God interacting with creatures, a self authoring a deed or a
work of art, a subject working on a critical (auto)biography, a parent dealing in a healthy way with a maturing child, a literary artist shaping a character, or perhaps a beleaguered king talking to himself as he tries to control
incoming pressures exerted by other 'authoring' characters, the dynamics
can be seen as fundamentally homologous. Constant and crucial is a radical
distinction between the self and the others, coupled with their simultaneous intensive relatedness; I and the other(s) maintain distinct consciousnesses, for all of the binding factors. How I see myself, how I see another,
how I see another seeing me all exist on a different plane than they do for
that other, however unified the point of our appraisal may seem. Morson
and Emerson remind us that a self-portrait and even a scrutiny of the self
in the mirror is never the same as the drawing or viewing of us by another.3
For Bakhtin, an author is always doing a self- portrait while drawing an
other, is always reaching toward the other dialogically while constructing
the self. Authoring an other is intricately linked to authoring a self. The
other we shape is, to a great extent, an exploration of the self; the response
of the other is needed for us to find our own edges.
Though these issues are often ramified and critiqued in terms of classical and contemporary philosophy, the scholar most useful for present
3. 1990: 74. Morson and Emerson's very comprehensive discussion of Bakhtin
and authoring is in their 1990 study (pp. 123-236, Chapters 4-5). It is a valuable supplement to this short summary, which seeks to specify authoring much more pointedly.
3. Saul's Skin
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purposes is Ruth Coates, whose aim is show the interpenetration of Christian motifs, as she calls them, with Bakhtin's lifework.4 As already summarized in the introduction to this book, Coates's sense is that biblical
narrative provides a fundamental structure for Bakhtin's understanding of
the processes involved in authoring. Coates allows us to consider three
phases in Bakhtin's thought about how authoring works, an arrangement
that shows both the continuity and the change. Authoring is discussed at
length and with philosophical precision in Bakhtin's earliest work: in his
earliest writings he explores how an authoring self can act in the world,
can participate in the event of being, can unite in the self what is given to
be shaped (Coates 1998: 26-29). Bakhtin says:
What underlies the unity of an answerable consciousness is not a principle
as a starting point, but the fact of an actual acknowledgment of one's own
participation in unitary Being-as-event, and this fact cannot be adequately
expressed in theoretical terms, but can only be described and participatively
4. The terminology is slightly problematic. Bakhtin is surely a Christian, so in one
sense 'biblical' and 'Christian' can be synonymous; on the other hand, much of what
Coates shows Bakhtin to reference comes from the Hebrew Bible, rendering the label
'Christian' inexact and unintentionally tactless. Motif, at least in standard folkloric use,
can include very small as well as large elements; Coates' point is that Bakhtin is selective, omitting some 'motifs' that are as prominent as the ones he chooses (1998: 21,
e.g., the resurrection). Nonetheless, 1 think 'biblical elements' works better than 'Christian motifs', and I will use that phraseology. My appreciation for Coates' work rests on
her case that Bakhtin's philosophy is not alien to the texts on which I am using ita
claim she did not aim directly to make but acknowledged readily (private communication). She (1998: 1), as do I, overrides the view of Bakhtin himself that biblical texts
were not amenable to much of his thought, being 'epic' rather than 'pre-novelistic', not
to mention that as Holy Writ he assumed them to be fundamentally non-dialogizable.
Coates draws explicitly on the less developed work of Ann Shukman, who says, 'The
relationship of author to hero is one such inter-subject relationship: they are participants, according to Bakhtin, in the aesthetic event [Russian word], which is the coming
together of two participants, two non-coincident consciousnesses. Bakhtin's study,
'The Author and the Hero in Aesthetic Activity' is largely devoted to this question but
it also considers the wider questions of the relationship of man to himself, of man to
man, and of man [sic], to God' (Shukman 1984: 245). Coates' intuition about the
analogy between authoring and creating, so between an author and God, and her
calling attention to Bakhtin's dead end and then about-face as he transposes from his
earliest works, through his more socially conscious works on language, toward his
development of polyphony, lays bare the whole question of how to read God. Coates
seems to worry a bit about whether Bakhtin loses faith in God's transcendence (1998:
152-76, Chapter 8); I wonder if in fact he comes to sense processes for God and 'all
other' as profoundly more perichoretic than had once been the case.
168

experienced... I occupy a place in once-occurrent Being that is unique and
never-repeatable, a place that cannot be taken by anyone else and is impenetrable for anyone else... The uniqueness or singularity of present-on-hand
Being is compellently obligatory (1993b: 40).
In the three essays bound as Art and Answerability (1990) he goes into
almost stupefying detail about specifically what the author does to create a
hero (so how an I 'does' an other). Coates directs our attention to the meat
of his early thought: 'That... Bakhtin's understanding of God and Christianity forms the organizing centre for his phenomenological analysis of
the self/other relation becomes frilly apparent only in the last third of the
1990b essay with some of the most pertinent passages situated in the last
few pages' (Coates 1998: 39, and Chapter 3 in general). Bakhtin envisions
a creator God who remains transcendent to creatures, authoring them from
a wholly other realm and angle of existence. The human creature with
whom Bakhtin is concerned is authored with the self needing at least
partially to be bestowed by another. We cannot provide independently for
ourselves. As biblical texts assert repeatedly, breaches of solidarity and
relationship become apparent, not simply between creator and creatures
but among creatures themselves. The root of the disorder, in Bakhtin's
view, is pride and illusory self-sufficiency. In order to struggle against such
isolation, human beings need and are given an authoring assist from the
outside, given value, offered an aesthetic justification. As I have already
suggested, Bakhtin's language for this process is biblical: redemption,
atonement, salvation, grace. The clearest expression of God's authoring is
in the incarnation of Jesus and the resulting patterns of Jesus' dealing with
God and with fellow creatures. Benign rather than judgmental, this way of
relating engenders the responses of love and hope from the creatures to
whom it is offered.
Coates moves next to detail the way in which Bakhtin's subsequent
works showed the creature/hero able to break somewhat free from this
high degree of authorial control or finalization. It is her contention that,
although in his 'middle period' (the 1930s-40s) Bakhtin went silent about
this rather heavy-handed authoring (and about God). He developed a
variety of ways in which authored creatures (heroes) show substantially
more independence from monological authorial control, and by which
authors have less influence on socially centrifugal language than might
have been supposed. But his last writings show that, far from eroding his
sense that a fundamental outsidedness is required for authoring and creating, Bakhtin's concepts of heteroglossia, polyphony and even the carniva-
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lesque enhance his view of authoring.5 That is, Coates suggests that not
only have Bakhtin's fundamental insights survived, but they have also
been deepened by the contact with the heteroglossic, polyphonic and
carnivalistic realities that interpenetrated them in the late 1920s to the
1950s.6 The main points Coates details show that Bakhtin recognized the
danger of tyrannical monologism in the author's capacity to finalize a
character but nonetheless maintained the necessity for the two centers of
consciousness while making them less uneven; that is, outsidedness is
prerequisite for authoring, but so is continuous dialogue between subjects.7
If, as Coates holds to be the case for Bakhtin, the point of freedom is to
allow for the unfolding and self-expression of personality, then the forays
into heteroglossia, polyphony and carnival serve ends commonor at
least compatiblewith his earlier work on the creator and creatures, the
author and heroes.
Another commentator who develops the theological undertones of
Bakhtin's authoring language is David Patterson. He writes,
The author undertakes this project of becoming a self by placing the word
in the mouth of the hero like a creator breathing a soul into [her] creature.
And the breathe [s]he breathes is the breath [s]he draws: dialogically generating a presence in relation to [her] hero, the author is summoned as [s]he
summons.8
5. Coates makes these points in Chapters 3-5, 7 of her 1998 study. As Palmieri
1998: 45-55, puts it, Bakhtin becomes eventually interested not only in the way the
subject relates to the act of authoring but how the authored deed/text is part of its own
broader environment.
6. Bakhtin's work on the vastly social and heteroglossic implications of language
are developed in the four essays comprising The Dialogic Imagination (1981); his
insights into polyphony are worked out in both of his books on Dostoevsky, of which
Problems ofDostoevsky 's Poetics (and notes toward the reworking of it) are available
in English (1984). Tiupia 1998: 105, pursuing another point, remarks without developing it: 'At this point it is essential to emphasize the obvious fact that Bakhtin's dialogism was born from the Christian idea of the collectivity [Russian term] of souls, the
convergence of individuals, and ultimately the dogma of the non-fused yet undivided
character [Russian term] of the Holy Trinity'.
7. See Coates 1998: Chapter 8, for detail. She, like all the Bakhtin scholars who
work with Russian texts, has wholly different page numbers for texts on which those of
us who rely on translations consult.
8. Patterson, 1993: 59. Ihave altered the genders here, mainly to avoid the confusion of all 'he' and 'hims'. Shortly I will shift to a second person address, in order to
remain as simple and clear as is possible.
170
Patterson further describes that the author draws a hero in terms of his (the
hero's) past as though that figure is looking ahead. The hero becomes
someone who can reply to the author about what has been conferred. Patterson stresses the vulnerability of both partners in the transaction, since
each is (granted, in different ways) accountable to and for the other (1993 :
59). Bakhtin's language seems to underscore the author's dying away from
self in order to create an other, using words like 'wound' and 'debt'; but it
seems as clear that the process is mutually enhancing for author and hero
(Patterson 1993: 59-63, referring to Bakhtin 1990: 52).
The implications for our concentric circles of authoring are readily
apparent. As already noted, Bakhtin's point of departure for how human
beings constructwhether another human being (friend or opponent) or a
hero in art (literary or visual)rests on his sense that we exist both outside
(exotopic) of every other being as well as involved in a variety of ways.
Each of us sees the other in a contextualized environment and sees something of the other that the other does not seevisualized as the space
behind your head and called by Bakhtin the 'surplus of seeing'. Concurrently, as I see and shape you from the outside, you conceive yourself from
the inside, as it were, and look out on a horizon that does not visually
include yourself. You facing me, see simultaneously what I cannot see
me in an environment, my blindspot; and you can know certain aspects of
yourself that are not quite available to even a loving other, can slip
through this loophole, lest you be finalized or summed up completely by
someone authoring you. An ongoing dialogue (or utterance exchange)
exploits this set of interlinked but non-coinciding relationships; in this
space transformation of one kind or another occurs. The difficulty arises
not so much as we think of sets of live humans (whether linked by
relations benign or malign) but when we work with dead authors, literary
heroes, many readers and the intangible Other (called the Third).9
When an author acts, creates in the literary sense we are discussing here,
the process includes something like the following for Bakhtin: she, starting
from her unique and exotopic situation (with whatever attainments and
lacks), begins to articulate a literary character, leaning toward and living
into that hero, shaping him with all that she knows of herself but also committing to explore what she does not yet know. The author's subjectivity is
rendered as an object, thrown outside of herself, as it were. What she
9. Ann Shukman (1984: 244, referring to Bakhtin 1986c) insists that it is not
whether authoring is in life or in literature but the quality of relationship between participants that is key.
3. Saul's Skin
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authors will be populated by all that she has already become as a human
being; so her ethical/moral/spiritual/ religious self is what is cast forward
as she authors, with whatever quality it bears at that momentall contributing to what she wishes to understand additionally.10 She sees, because of
her position or angle outside the hero, some facets of that character of
which he is not conscious; concomitantly, there are facets of her own
being that remain opaque to her which will construct the hero as well and
will, ideally, become more available to her. Bakhtin says of this moment:
When I contemplate a human being who is situated outside and over against
me, our concrete, actually experienced horizons do not coincide. For at each
given moment...! shall always see and know something that he, from his
place outside and over against me, cannot see himself... As we gaze at each
other, two different worlds are reflected in the pupils of our eyes (1990b: 22).
Such is Bakhtin's aestheticization of a hero. The project becomes aesthetic to the degree that second consciousness (the hero's embodied discourse) has its own logic and coherence, distinct from the author's. The
author also gives to the other/hero certain constraints of time and space,11
(of physical and socio-historical charactermeeting the character at the
skin, as it were,) and she begins to shape the inner life of the hero along an
axis from the more already-known and controlled (the monologic end)
toward the end more free of finalizing management and thus more open to
the less controlling (the polyphonic).12 The author builds the character with
language, authors him to be a speaking consciousness (Palmieri 1998: 52).
And additionally, the author makes such a hero to face a serious crisis or
dilemma upon which he ruminates in some relationship with others: how
to act, what to do or not to do. What is created, Bakhtin insists, is not a
10. Part of the implication of the author-hero relationship, neither equal nor separate, neither fused nor disengaged, is that the author does not act without bringing his
or her own ethical or axiological identity to the deed (Palmieri 1998: 45-53). 'It' is
constitutive of all authoring.
11. For the spatial discussion, see Bakhtin 1990b: 22-42; for the temporal, see pp.
99-132 of the same work.
12. Coates 1998: 84-162, Chapter 5, and others, judge that Bakhtin never quite
satisfactorily resolved the tremendous problems implicit in his theory of polyphonic
authoring; nor, perhaps, have philosophers or theologians quite resolved the enigma of
God's sovereign power and human freedom. For purposes of reading the biblical narrative in which I am interested here, the intricacies of polyphony need not be pushed to
their logical extreme, since it is not really very polyphonic in the precise understanding
of the term.
172
psychology but language around consciousness, orchestrated but not fully

controlled by the author. Such a hero is drawn primarily in terms of his
own speech. For Bakhtin, what the author provides is an angle from which
the hero may be constructed or construed, a wholeness that is maintained
whatever else may happen to that character as time goes on (which I take
to be the 'durably valid cultural product' mentioned in Bakhtin's definition
of authoring). Again Morson and Emerson sum up: 'The author's task,
therefore, is to organize a concrete world with three attributes: a spatial
world with a living body as its value-generating center, a temporal world
with a soul at its center, and a world endowed with meaning as the unity of
the two' (1990: 78). The challenge is twofold: how to do the hero's soul
(as we remember that 'soul' for Bakhtin is a gift granted by an outside
other) so that it is coherent without foreclosing growth; how to build in,
without losing authorial control, the possibility for the hero to exceed expectations. The hero requires such authoring: 'For Bakhtin, selves are
creative in response to images of themselves given by others' (Morson and
Emerson 1990: 191). A similar case can be made for 'live' relationships:
'One needs the limitations of one's own past and of other selves' (Morson
and Emerson 1990: 230). Ken Hirschkop, whose confidence in Bakhtin's
bringing all this theory off well is not unqualified, says:
While the artist is naturally 'a participant in life (practical, social, political,
moral, religious) from within', he or she becomes an 'author' precisely to
the extent that he or she 'loves life from without, in the place where it is not
for itself, where it is turned outside itself and is in need of an outside activity
beyond meaning'.13
Such authoring, though often uneven, avoids subsuming the other in the
self and also losing the self in the other. That is, the author neither merges
empathetically with the hero, nor does she control him wholly. Bakhtin's
name for this balance is 'sympathetic co-experiencing' (1990b: 81). For
from her initial moving toward the hero, the author retreats back to her
own position, enriched by what she has authored, considering what she has
explored. Authoring is a making oneself to be an 'other', an attempt to see
binocularly, to hear dichotically (Clark and Holquist 1984: 73). The cost
of such authoring is the energy expended in the struggle to bring form to
13. Hirschkop 1999: 60, providing his own translation of the Russian edition of
'Author and Hero' (p. 175), a text which the English reader will find in Bakhtin 1990b:
191; the emphasis and I presume the extra quotation marks are Hirschkop's. As is often
observed, Bakhtin thinks primarily in terms of benevolent relations, 'lovelike sympathy' (Bakhtin 1990b: 82) rather than abusive ones.
3. Saul's Skin
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the inchoate. The gain, so far, is what the artist has learned and experienced while authoring another who does not coincide exactly with herself
but with whom she is clearly intermeshed in many significant ways. An author comes to be herself more intensivelythrough gifts bestowed by the
other (the hero); she authors a hero who begins his part in authoring her.14
The key task here is for the author to see herselfif temporarily, repeatedly and perhaps habituallyas through the eyes and ears of another,
which will involve seeing something that is new to herselfan appropriate gift. Such an aestheticand ethicalevent comprises '...the process
by which the author approaches [her] self as a living subject through h[er]
relation to the fictional hero' (Patterson 1993: 56). Hence the possibility of
transformation. 'In order to live as I, the author must become other to
[her] self, concludes Patterson (1993: 60). And though he is criticized,
justifiably, for presuming that such interaction is typically benign, such a
view is indeed part of what Bakhtin posits:
Only sympathetic co-experiencing has the power to conjoin or unite harmoniously the inward and the outward on one and the same plane. From
within a co-experienced life itself, there is no access to the aesthetic value
of what is outward in the same life (the body). It is only love (as an active
approach to another human being) that unites an inner life.. .with the value
of the body as experienced from outside and, in so doing, constitutes a
unitary and unique human being as an aesthetic phenomenon. That is, only
love unites one's own directedness with a direction and one's own horizon
with an environment (1990b: 82-83, emphasis original).
We have approached once again the sort of transformative construction of

which Schneiders and West have spoken. Conceding the various challenges
this conception poses, it represents Bakhtin's view of authoring.
Additionally, the author can make available and tangible for other readers as well as for herself such vantage points, thus creating time and space
where meaning can be constructed and sites where intensive self-knowledge can occur. By choosing to cede some control to characters, creating
and allowing their subjectivities to convey their viewpoints in a dialogical
way, the author puts herself in a position to learn from them, to see new
richness, and to change. Insofar as each of us becomes a self as we pick up
14. As scholars agree, this is the moment in which spirit becomes soul, resulting
from an encounter with an other. Dialogism aestheticizes spirit, which means that this
particular way of writing gives form to responsibility; giving soul is the task of aestheticsethics too, and religion. It is awkward and artificial to talk about the author
without talking about the hero's and readers' part of this 'dance' as well.
174
multiple cues from others, that is, as we need to and inevitably do (with
whatever degree of consciousness of it) imagine how others see and
respond to us, then this sort of authoring can make the process substantially intentional. Readers in this sense become both authors and others as
they reconstruct heroes and as the original authorial dynamics at the site of
the textual hero, construct new others, or aspects not imagined under the
original circumstances of production. Lest this seem too strangely abstract
or its theological underpinning too prescriptive, Nielsen urges the analogy
of relationships: What is the particular quality that 'authors' bring to their
most sincere relationshipsfriend to friend, teacher to student, parent to
child? Is it not both a depth of self-awareness and also an outsidedness
(otherness), offered as generously and honestly, the drawing forth as much
truth potential as is possible from another while leaving both in some
aspect free of each other? (Nielsen 1998: 227). Shukman cites Bakhtin's
interest in maternal authoring and reminds us as well that he was intensely
interested in God's capacity to author human beings in just this way (Shukman 1984: 244-45).
As is true of most of Bakhtin's other concepts, this one wants considerable refinement and expansion (a task which is beyond the scope of the
present work). One fruitful point to explore would be the extent to which
Bakhtin's early and more philosophical concept of authoring is undermined in his later and more cultural studies, or whether in fact his original
instinct emerged strengthened in the cryptic and abbreviated jottings of
his last years. Another way to put that matter would be to ask whether an
authored literary character is really either monologic or polyphonic, or
whether there is some more helpful way of seeing a spectrum without
losing the distinctiveness of what Bakhtin has argued.15 Related as well is
a question Coates poses: (to what extent) is a creature (a hero) free to
refuse, reject or resist the shaping of a creator (an author)? (Coates 1998:
51-56). She maintains that in the very non-pantheist thought of Bakhtin,
the outsidedness of God is the most central attribute in that creational circle
of authoring, so that a character is not very free in relation to it (Coates
1998: 51 -56). Whether that view really holds quite so strongly in theory or
15. Carolyn Ayers' article is particularly useful for questioning the absolute categories Bakhtin posits between the authoring required for the genres confession, biography
and autobiography. Ayers also makes explicitly a huge point I presume many scholars
count on, that an ethical document can be approached aesthetically by a reader (1999:
83), by which I construe that the reader's strategies are close to authorial in shaping
even fundamental things about a text.
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175
in texts is questionable, especially in view of her thesis about the expansive resilience of these original points (and in view of Bakhtin's writing on
the creaturely capacity for alibi and pretending). As contemporary theology
finds fresh ways to talk about the whole creative process that essentialize
the roles less, Bakhtin's ideas may get a fresh bounce. Also left hanging
here, temporarily and artificially, is the whole matter of the polyphonic
hero and his capacities in relation to the author. That topic I will pick up at
the appropriate moment below.
What I do suggest here, provisionally, is a set of strategies for authoring
that set up a hero who is not fundamentally monologic. That is, to shift my
authoring analogy from concentric circles to angles, what are some ways
to construct the relatedness between author and hero? Without (yet) enjoining the matter of whether Saul is, ever even briefly, a polyphonic hero in
the strict sense of the term, I will lay the groundwork here for asserting
that even in Bakhtin's terms, the authoring is not monologic. So how, specifically, does the sort of sympathetic co-experiencing that Bakhtin makes
central to authoring work out in practice as the authoring Deuteronomist
draws (and draws others who draw) Saul? A few points can be noted.
First, there needs to be sufficient time and space for options to open out
before the hero; the work need not be a full length novel but it does require
a series of related episodes in which the hero is central. Second, the author
must provide for the hero to dither, that is, to dialogue with others, internally with self, and probably with the narrator as well. Third, the crossing
of such indirect or other variously shared speech needs to be plentiful,
such that it resists adequate mapping and organization. How language
operates ought to some extent resemble the London Undergroundit can
take one to virtually any place in the city, but by a near infinite set of
possible combinations. 'Doing' the Underground in any finalized way is
inconceivable. Fourth, the segmentation of the hero's life needs to be episodic and temporized rather than planned and co-ordinated. This topic
arises under polyphony, where certain novelists (e.g. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky,
Dickens) are shown to have published their work serially to help them
resist finalizing the characters early in the writing process. That feature
may have a cognate in some of the theories of biblical narrative composition; but at least the authoring needs to resemble little the sort of plotting
necessary in a mystery, where details need to be resolved competently by
the end and hence must be provided for as the plot and character relationships develop. Fifth, there will be some degree of subject consciouness
made available in the hero, though it may be rather dwarfed or miniarur-
176
ized, especially compared with characters in modern novels who ruminate

extensively. Perhaps it may be called intermittent consciousness. But the
narrator will allow the hero to announce most of his own insights in direct
discourse rather than stating them directly over the head of the character.
Sixth, the hero needs to be caught up in a dilemma of some significance,
ultimatelyeven if some of the aspects of it seem trivial. The hero is
carrying a reflection whose importance surpasses (while including) the
hero's own purposes, whether that is clear to him or not. Finally, and seventh, the authorial artistry will include cues like mises-en-abyme to keep
the reader tracking well.
Polzin's insights are again central for mine, though I do not always accept
his emphases. A careful reading of his material on this section of 1 Sam.
8-12 (1989: 80-125, Chapter 3) also indicates a different sense of the
scholarly discussion of certain points than I will track. His salient points
(which will be eight in my summary), include the following. First, the
chapters immediately preceding 1 Sam. 8 have worked more parabolically
than will those following; from ch. 8 onwards readers may take characters
as speaking 'for themselves' rather than articulating more artificially or
indirectly in their speech the story of the rise and fall of Judah's monarchy.
However, the character discourse is still selective and we must remain
alert especially at places where the quotation marks are not clear (so to
speak) (Polzin 1989: 80-84). My only cavil here is that the speech remains
more stylized and the genre more parabolic (especially chs. 9-11) than
Polzin indicates. My second of his points includes how the character zone
of Samuel emerges in 1 Sam. 8: for Polzin the prophet is thwarting, obstructive and resisting God's word, a reading which is plausible. That the
speech Samuel delivers to the elders asking a king is partial and has its
own limited aims is also well-established by Polzin. Clear as well is the
reminder to us that there is no free lunch. Kings takethat is how they get
their job done, and to be shocked at the description of royal administration
is naive. Polzin's interest to show the substantially negative character zone
of Samuel is not my particular interest, since I am drawing Saul. I do not
so much question it as stand in a different place; Polzin seems to attribute
motive where I note a situation or consequence available from discourse
(Polzin 1989: 82-83). Third, Polzin has made an extremely tight case for
the intrinsic evil of the kingship, which he considers 'bedrock' to the
whole narrative. What is freshly (though not newly) established in this part
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of the narrative is the need for a prophet to keep clear the royal path and
keep the king upon it; that Saul's prophet is reluctant or incompetent in
this task is ominous. To that I would simply reiterate that 'intrinsic evil' is
misleading if it is taken to mean that the project could not have gone well;
that it did not go well is the point (Polzin 1989: 88-89).
As Polzin moves to discuss the actual choice of Saul (so from 1 Sam. 911), some additional pivots are offered. He (fourth) takes us through the
four dialogues that comprise chs. 9-10 and notes that the key topic is the
capacity of the reliable prophet and the narrator to speak truthfully (Polzin
1989: 91-98); with that I agree. The various nuances of 'prophetic' and
'predictive' do not strike me as useful; the significance of the narrator's
speech over the heads of characters to the reader is important. A fifth point
he offersbuilt on the three legs of the character zone of Samuel, the
importance of the prophet to the king, and the complexity of the prophetic
discourseis that by giving him radically incompatible directions, especially by prescribing a mix of the prophetic and kingly, Samuel sets Saul
up to fail (Polzin 1989:100-108). Polzin reviews and piles up the way that
Saul is an asker, a doubter, lacks characteral definition, and so forth. It is
one of the places 1 follow him most gratefully; but of the deadliness of the
prophesying Saul, I am not so sure. I think the mixing of the roles is not
the root of what goes awry. A sixth point, carefully observed at the very
least, is that the peoples' question which prompts Samuel to urge 'renewal'
of the monarchy is ambiguous. Polzin's conclusion is that the people, having seen that Saul as judge-savior still works compatibly with YHWH'S
reliable intervention against foes, want to go after those who proposed
kingshipand that Samuel from his obstructive zone deflects that reforming move (Polzin 1989: 108-17). I will reconsider that moment, coming
from another position. Seventh, as he comments on ch. 12, Polzin reminds
us to watch for speech interference, of which the whole section (and Bible)
is filled. It is one of his Bakhtinian stresses: how speakers constantly borrow and reintonate language, challenging us to listen to the layers of it, not
simply to its surface (Polzin 1989: 117-24). His last (eighth) point, not so
much developed as he goes as asserted in summary, is that God calls all
the shots, directs all the traffic (Polzin 1989: 124-25). At one level that is
so, but I aim also to show the deity as more interactive than Polzin may
prefer, as more at the whim of human deed, more permissive. Though I
will be stressing Bakhtin's processes of authoring as I discuss the chs. 812, Polzin's reminders about character zones and speech and about the
narrator's interaction with readers are key.
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4. Authoring a King(ship)
Returning now to the analogy of artists working with a model: How does
the authoring of the monarch(y) appear to be taking shape on my canvas,
including as it does the work of all the other artists in the room as they too
draw the subject? The first point to clarify is that the transaction occurs in
two steps. First the institution of kingship is set (1 Sam. 8 and 12) and then
the king is selected (1 Sam. 9-11). My basic point to demonstrate is that
within the story, the various authorings of the kingship and king show it,
render it inadequate to the demands that will be made upon it. The responsibility for its root problems, later to flower in detail, is well distributed
among characters. But at the level of reception and appropriation, there are
rich possibilities of insight, even wisdom, to be claimed by the two sets of
readers with whom I am working.
a. Designing Royal Robes: 1 Samuel 8 and 12
First, to make a point about composition: Chapters 8 and 12 are composed
of eight pairs of exchanges and then two odd utterances which generate no
response; in each case the discourse is dyadic, between Samuel and people
or Samuel and God. The people do not address God or God them; and Saul
is absent from reference. The exchange a-b is in 8.1-5 and is between
Samuel and people; c-dis in 8.6-9 and is between Samuel and YHWH; e-f
is in 8.10-20 and is between Samuel and people; g-h is in 8.21-22 and is
between Samuel and Goddebouching into y, where Samuel gives an
order at 8.22; i-j is in 12.1 -4 and is between Samuel and people, as is k-l at
12.5; m-n is in 12.6-19 and continues between Samuel and people, with the
added oddity of Samuel's quoting the people at vv. 10 and 12 and carrying
also transaction o-p, a request by Samuel to God which seems granted at
12.18; at 12.20-25 comes Samuel's last wordszto which there is no
response.
The sketch on my pad is thus very skewed. There is, at first, no one in
the middle to be drawn, simply the empty daisthe throneon which
someone will sit; but it is now being designed with no one there. In fact,
and more pregnantly, the center of the room contains empty clothing, royal
robes for someone to slip into later, if possible. The artists are all working
as dyads: people focused on Samuel who focuses on them, or Samuel
focusing on God who responds only to him. And, as any might expect who
have ever been involved in such a shuttle negotiation, the items proffered
for conversation and debate are not necessarily or obviously the most
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central. What most rankles the people, Samuel refuses to own; what primarily vexes God comes too late into the peoples' purview; and what most
exercises Samuel determines the verbal pathway he takes. The result is
very flawed, very unbalanced. As I look and listen, I am on the prowl for
blindspots and exotopy, which abound.
Since I am not at this point proceeding inductively, let me give my
sense of the most important facets of my reading (re-authoring) of 1 Sam.
8 and 12: First, on kingship. The particular moment and manner of the peoples' asking itwhich is not the same as the abstract possibility of kingshipis to be repented of, but the story under consideration must deal with
the fact that kingship existed. The institution is not inevitably or essentially
wrong, not unviable, though in practice it goes very badly. By the end of
the last speech of Samuel (12.6-25), it is clear that the stakes are high and
that all partners in the enterprise will, like climbers roped together, succeed or fail as a unit. Second, a persistent movement uniting the material
here is that, as the enterprise of monarchy moves forward, it comes several
times to a crossroads; there is a move to roll back the choice, but always it
goes ahead as if by some invisible shove. Kingship is set in place a number of times, with participation by many. Samuel may have a prominent
role in that dynamic, but it rises from his being the intermediary between
other consenting parties. Third, the key point in the narrator's drawing
which I must include and with which I will interact in my own rendition
is to show both the king and prophet and also the prophet and people to be
dialogically inseparable and designed to serve faithfully together the
relationship between YHWH and Israel. But that the task of intermediation
is challenging appears from the outset. Part of the difficulty will arise from
differing agendas, as will be unfolded. The conversation partners seem to
be talking about the same thing, but only apparently so. Some very crucial
topics are not covered as kingship is designed. Fourth, in my interpretation,
no character is malevolent, a feature used previously for Hophni and Phinehas (and by extension for the empty nameplates of Joel and Abijah). I will
make a case for strong cooperation between YHWH and Samuel. There are
glitches, inevitable in the human condition and especially in the sort of
communication presupposed here, where Samuel is the sole intermediary
between divine and human realms. Weak is not the same as bad.
A fifth point, the kingship drawn here is not really a plan for a future
governance but a blueprint in reverse, a representation of how kingship
and kings will have done over time. It is thus constructed not by an author/
reader running alongside an institution with the possibility of redesigning
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things but from the point of reflecting backwards, to shed light on a current
problem (kings after the exile or not). One point we may miss prominently
is any explicit or clear reference to the single positive criterion of Deut.
17: that the king is to digest the law for enacting. Sixth, kingship is drawn
by characters who are not approaching it directly. What is really giving
rise to their request (sons appointed as judges) is not mentioned by the
people on either occasion when they might have done so. What bothers
God most fundamentally (a gross violation of the YHWH-Israel relationship) is not brought into full conversation until very late into negotiations.
What most engages Samuel seems to be his own innocence, which may
not be the best foil for kingship. Seventh, a most fruitful place to probe the
narrative is at the questions which occur in the mouths of the characters.
Questions are implicitly and inherently dialogical and thus somewhat unstable rather than clear and definitive. Questions can also exploit the gap
between blindspot and surplus, between one speaker's environment and
another's horizon. Hence I weight them disproportionately to their surface
value. The questions in this pair of chapters are the flurry Samuel looses at
12.3-4 and the one at 12.17, which is also layered past its obvious level of
querying the time of year. Finally, eighth, I sense that chs. 8 and 12 serve
to frame another masal-like scene, more similar to what we saw in chs. 13 and 4-6 than is commonly supposed. I will explore that frame first and
then move to the middle three chapters, even though it seems likely that
ch. 11 's event provides the context for the speech of ch. 12.
A more detailed discussion of the kingship in chs. 8 and 12 can now add
flesh to some of the bones just laid out. Though there is significant parallel
structure between these two chapters, I will treat them in narrative order as
I make my first sketch of 'authoring artists' and distill from them the substantiation of insights about the eight pivots just asserted. By the time the
encounters of chs. 8 and 12 are completedthe interlinked efforts of God,
Samuel and people have produced a role, a job to be done, a situationa
throne on which a king may sit, a set of clothes for the king to inhabit.
(1) a-b: 8.1-5. We begin with the narrator's authoring of the monarchy, his
presentation of Samuel surrounded by a dynasty: implicitly by the fathers
who begot him and explicitly by two sons who do not walk in his ways,
who have corrupted the office into which he, an old man, has set them.
The old Samuel is thus drawn to resemble the old Eli: not personally evil
but responsible for what he does not effectively prevent his sons from
doing. Their fault is not simply ad hoc but official and core evil. Whatever
the words technically denote, for sopetim to pervert mispat is inherently
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abusive (not to mention their reaching for gain and bribes).16 Samuel,
though not shown as literally blind as was Eli, overlooks in his own speech
the leadership and succession problem, first by omission here and later by
denial (12.2), where he presents the dynastic pair unproblematically as if a
solution to their father's obsolescence. Samuel's incapacity of acknowledgement is made significant by the narrator's noting that the corrupt sons
appointed to office by their old father serves as impetus for the peoples'
request. Corrupt dynastic sons lie at the base of the royal tree. Another
effect of this narrator sketch is to make the request of the elders for an
alternative to Joel and Abijah seem reasonable.
But is it ultimately so presented? The elders approach Samuel with
some cause, even with urgency, and while referring to the deficiency of
their dynastic experience, they ask for something too closely resembling it.
Their request of 8.4 has four elements, each worth noting: (1) they ask
Samuel to do the placing (sym) over them, (2) of a king/mlk, (3) whose
role is to judgQ/spt them, and (4) like the nations. Though they count on
Samuel (who set/sym his own sons) to do the placing, they change the title
of the appointee to king, while keeping the function of judging/spt; and
they characterize the arrangement as being generally like the nations. They
omit anything relational as they speak out their desire. The elders construct a job description, an abstraction, a uniform. This asking of theirs is
not new to us, who have watched them with the ark of the covenant, which
they sought to employ in a similar way, with disastrous consequences. So
though not wholly unjustified in the lack they perceive, the elders remediate it deficiently. In the long story under narration here, it seems dubious
that there is sufficient insight intoarticulation ofthe leadership problem for the new design to inspire confidence. The solution, presented to a
myopic Samuel by the elders who seem now to speak from their blindspot,
will be carried by Samuel to YHWH. Like the nations in what way? Some
of the nations clearly had kings, as they had priests, prophets and many
16. That Samuel has corrupt heirs makes a father-son contrast but also indicts him,
because of a failure on his part to rebuke them or later to respond about them when the
elders mention it; having sons is a problem. All the coloration of the Elides is refracted
in the brief description of these two: dynastic evil, powerfully positioned. Commentators make various points here: deliverer judges do not 'do' sons (Fokkelman 1993:
326); the appointing of sons implies Samuel's resignation (Gunn 1980: 59); the sons'
venue is quite removed from the father's (Klein 1983:74); the sons violate Deut. 16.1820 (Miscall 1986: 43). Jobling (1998: 62-63), in contrast to my stressing these verses
as crucial, finds them among the least practical in the whole book.
182
things in common with this group. But Israel also has YHWH, and of that
there has been no mention so far.17
(2) c-d: 8.6-9. So we leave the meeting between people and prophet-judge
and shift to glimpse part of the first transaction between that intermediary
and the deity, who are shown in conversation over this request of the people. That the divine and prophetic talk proceeds also somewhat at angles to
the speakers helps us discern a crucial difference in their viewpoints.
Samuel, the narrator tells us, brings in prayer to YHWH some sense of evil
in the request, though its nature is left vague (as the narrator slightly recasts the request when Samuel is appraising it).18 When YHWH responds to
that (wholly-summarized-for-us) prayer of his prophet-judge, God is the
one who names the problem: rejection/w 's. That is, God immediately reads
the requesting as a rejection: '...they have rejected me from being king
over them...'as before, when they abandoned 'me' to serve other gods.
YHWH makes this particular asking for a king equivalent or analogous to
other deeds where the people have selected other than YHWH. We may
suppose that Israel has fired God from the job of king, whether with
17. The views of scholars on these crucial matters (vv. 1 -5 and beyond) where the
king is asked and granted are too many and diverse to review here (see Eslinger's part
8 [1985] for a survey of them). Those most helpful to me were Gunn 1980: 60, who
notes that YHWH seems to have little else to offer back; Miscall 1986: 48, who wonders what Samuel wants from God; Edelman 1991: 38-39, who unpacks a bit what
those approaching Samuel want him to do: speak a name? approve their plan? do an
anointing on the spot? She also notes (p. 41) that the elders in speaking overlook
(understate, I would amend) God's role in their wars. Eslinger 1985: 254-72, exploits
the gap between characters and narrator. The views on whether or not Samuel can be
seen as reporting faithfully all that he had heard and been instructed helped move me to
my point of'eventually'. Deist(1993:16n. 2), and Miscall (1986:49), point out (without referencing Bakhtin) the way that YHWH'S and Samuel's language cross and mix.
Miscall 1986: 42-43, calls attention to the fact that the spt root occurs nine times
between 7.15 and 8.20 and with a broad range of meanings; he also reminds us (p. 48)
of the imprecision or incompleteness of the narrator note that Samuel prayed to God:
what specifically did Samuel want or expect?
18. Where the people asked him (in direct discourse) to set or place a king, the
narrator represents Samuel's indirect report of it to God to say 'give' us a king' (8.5-6).
It seems possible to me, though perhaps over-subtle, to suggest that Samuel either inferred or implied (perhaps both) that the people expect him to choose the king, a prerogative that is clearly God's in Deut. 17.14-17.1 do not remove that possibility, but it
does not get picked up in any major way as the piece develops. It is surely one of a
number of tiny elements working together to skew communication disastrously.
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explicit awareness or with blindness. Or we may sense that the people who
have approached Samuel have more radically fired God from being God
by their refusal to cry out to the deity in their troubles, turning instead
directly to Samuel. In this drawing God is represented as though caught
offguard by having been made redundant. But, as the deityshocked
further ruminates, it is not a new problem, rather an endemic one. Not the
first rejection and far from the last.
However, in this weighing of matters, the deity moves not backwards
(to provide another Moses or Joshua [or perhaps a Noah]) but forwards
(toward the king), in a way I will call both permissive and creative. God
accepts, accedes to the new possibility, without sufficiently pointing out
the peoples' blindspot to them and without seeing to it that Samuel had
done his communication task adequately. For not until 10.17 (when the oil
of anointment has already been poured) and finally at ch. 12 (when the ink
is virtually dry on the royal contract) does Samuel bring to explicit language what he heard from God in ch. 8. Part of what is also made clear to
us (as distinct from being revealed to the characters) is God's failure once
again to come to grips with the negative consequences of a divine tendency to rescue temporarily those who cry out. That is, though God's
speech indicates that the problem presented here has deep and oft-flowering roots, the deity once again writes too blank a check in 8.9 and 22 (and
will emit too ineffective a communication in 12.18). If the people are to
stop calling for a problem-fixer, God may need new behavior too.
Though YHWH frames these words with the command to Samuel to
heed the request, and though God indirectly counters Samuel's unspoken
sense that the elders are also rejecting their prophet-judge-priest, in fact
the words do double duty by the end of God's musing. That is, God's
choice of the word 'rejection', God's applying itreflexivelydenying first
its relevance to Samuel though eventually (without using the word directly
for Samuel) conceding it'.. .thus are they doing toyou(r dynasty)', gives
Samuel as well as God and people definition here, though each in a very
different way. In this scene both deity and prophet('s sons) are rejected by
those seeking an alternative, that is, they are conspicuously overlooked
while implicitly present. 'Rejected' is a word the narrator will use of Samuel later in 8.19, though with implications for God as well. God also here
begins the long string of wordplay on ngd, assigning that function here to
Samuel: he must make the people know.19 It is impossible to discern what
19. In my drawing, this wordplay (linked with the s 'I quest root developed in the
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Samuel felt was evil before YHWH articulates it. But once the word has
been used, it defines the verbal path that Samuel next takes. It seems that
the edge of speech that Samuel carries back for direct discourse is only a
small part of what was communicated to him.20
(3) e-f: 8.10-20. As we shift back to Samuel and the people, my drawing
shows Samuel acting like a rejected spt/judgeor perhaps even an overlooked candidate for mlk whose job is to spt Can even Samuel be, Samuel
also be, among the kings? Samuel's being asked to name a replacement for
the job he and his sons were doing is of course a rejection. Samuel has
indeed been fired. God's slightly perfunctory denial followed by a tag-end
concession makes the point all the more audible. The narrator sums up that
Samuel told the words of God to the people, but what the narrator chooses
to detail of those words is perhaps not the most needful part. What is
relevant about Samuel's speech of 8.11-18, pointed out by Polzin but
needing some development, is thatas if distracted by his own cue from
the word 'rejection' and rushing to demonstrate the unfairness of it in his
own caseSamuel apparently omits to put into serious play the more
crucial information: that YHWH has identified the asking for a king as a
rejection of himself, has associated it with the going after other gods. To
have avoided that part of the communication seems a serious omission,
made visible not least by the fact that the prophet will say it later in chs. 10
and 12.
What emerges from Samuel's mouth in 8.11-17, his ear seemingly
caught by God's use of the word 'rejection', is a description of how the
kinghow all the monarchswill pay bills as governance is managed.21
first three chapters of the book) is what most foundationally binds all these characters.
See BDB: 616-18.
20. Samuel is said by the narrator to have said all the words of YHWH, but it does
not say that he said them all effectively or immediately; they emerge in our hearing,
but tardily. Another way to construe this narrator drawing is to say that when the narrator gives us the detail, the words that seem most important are not the ones we hear the
prophet explicate. At the very least, Samuel does not communicate it effectively; see
Polzin 1989: 82-83, for some other possibilities.
21. Samuel recites these kingly prerogatives in a series of descriptions, which place
the object first, with suffix, followed by the verb of appropriation with the king as subject. If the Samuelids stretch for bribes and twist justice, this new mispat is not characterized by such verbs. Though many find these royal moves excessive, we may also take
them as a sober description of the cost of the new institution: your sons for his chariots
and horsemen, for his officers, for his farm workers, for his weapons manufacture; your
3. Saul's Skin
185
Samuel's rhetoric names each object firstbeloved children, ancestral

heritages, staple crops, valued servants and animals, even God's ear
which the king will take and place (remake) as his own. He intonates
(8.17) the king whom you have chosen, as though stressing a violation of
Deut. 17.14-20. Though we may disagree that 'king you have chosen' is
fair, the peoples' eventual emendation, the narrator characterizes them as
indeed refusing to listen to Samuel. Their determination emerges stronger
(8.19-20) as a result of his words (and his nonwords): 'No' they say to his
speech.22 And they reiterate (1) that a king will be over themif not set in
place by Samuel, then presumably acquired in some other way; (2) 'we
will be like the nations''even we/we also', they stress; (3) our king will
judge/sp; us, and they add; and (4) 'He will go before us and fight our
battles'. They are asking for a function, for a job to be done 'over them',
as indeed judges have in the past done, as Hophni and Phinehas most
recently failed to do effectively at ch. 4. Whether Samuel's description of
royal custom is reasonable, or complete, how exaggerated or minimized
parts may be, is not the main point here. The narrator draws, 'They refused
to heed...' Samuel's speech is not effective in this scene, does not accomplish the purpose for which it was ostensibly designed.
(4) g-h: 8.21-22. The final communication between God and prophet links
these various points. The people have not succeeded in making Samuel
focus on the problem of his sons. The deity has not made sufficiently
prominent in what we overhear the matter of the rejection of himself. The
prophet has not accomplished in his speech to dissuade the people from
their request. But though the narrator relates that here also (as at 8.10)
Samuel told God all that had been said, does God hear? Is 'give them what
they askking them a king' a suitable utterance here? How is God hearing
daughters for his perfumers, cooks, and bakers; your fields, vineyards, best olive groves,
your seeds and vineyards tithed for his officers and servants; your servants, your choice
men, and your donkeys for his messengers, your small flocksyourselves for servants.
No free lunch. Kings have such needs and such is their way, perhaps their justice too.
The exact nuance of 'warn' or 'enjoin' is not clear. J. Ackerman 1991: 10, 23 n. 35,
maintains that it never contextually means warn about future negative consequences (he
reviews the passages), suggesting rather how the kingship is to be shaped. Miscall 1986:
50, instructs us to asks whether this is a warning, a threat, a promiseeven though we
cannot know with certainty, the differences would not be insignificant.
22. Miscall 1986: 50 asks: No to what specifically? My sense of this 'no' is that it
is a resolute shaking of heads all the while the prophet speaks. To refuse to heed the
prophet recalls Deut. 18.19.
186
the prophet hear the people? From what base does the divine response
arise? It is impossible to say definitively. But the angle from which I draw
YHWH'S conclusion of rejection, as stated in 8.7-8, can be established a bit
more definitively.
I think it is specious to say a divine leader obviates the need for a human
one. The leadership problem in the early DH is obvious. There is no room
in the very earthbound Hebrew anthropology for any such disembodied
ideal practice.23
If the problem does not split out as divine/ human, why is the request so
offensive to YHWH? What I hearand drawGod to miss while listening
to the words Samuel pours into the divine ear (8.6, 21), is that the request
for a mlk in place of the sopetim wholly overlooks and disregards the relationship between God and people. That is, at least in former days the people cried out to God; now there is no mention of that step. Nor do the
people bring the request for a king to God, as envisioned in Deut. 17,
where God will do the choosing. God is made redundant as a helper, whatever the name of the role. A king to judge is made a single-sided solution
to problems which will be presented to him as if fallen from the sky rather
than generated by the group trying to name the solution. That there is no
popular recourse to God makes evident, embodies the non-functionality of
the relationship from the peoples' point of view. This faulty construction
is not simply their poor reading of the deity but of themselves as well. It is
as if the choice of Samuel to appoint his Joel and Abijah moves the leadership problem into so extreme a state that recourse to YHWH becomes
unthinkable. And in drawing such a cosmic solution the elders falsely minimize their own part in what has caused the problem. I draw here a people
unable to see themselves at all as co-responsible in the various troubles in
which they find themselves, let alone prompted to resort to God. It is their
blind spot, of which YHWH is painfully aware while remaining somewhat
23. Gerbrandt 1986: 40, also urges that viewed against the common ancient Near
Eastern practice of kings, the issue cannot be literally whether nascent Israel will have
a human monarch or not; until there is a king, there is no Israel. Edelman also helpfully
notes (1991: 38-39), that no ancient Near Eastern king would not be theocratic; all
kings would be seen as regents for their deities. One way the scholarly discussion goes
is to ask whether kingship stays under YHWH's sovereignty (control) or is like the
nations (J. Ackerman 1991: 10-11; Jobling 1998: 58: a human monarch alien to or
under YHWH)? Whether, on the other hand, it is a viable proposition by the mid-sixth
century, as Persian-sponsored Israel prepares to repopulate the site of royal Judah, is
another question.
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powerless. The request for a new entity to do a task described with themselves only as receivers and in no aspect as collaborators is a disregarding
and hence a rejection of what God has been doing (and being). That rejection is the core of what goes wrong. A crucial aspect of God's character is
to go along here, co-dependently, we might say.
(5)y: 5.22. But in any case, in one of the unmatched verbal segments, the
scene breaks off when Samuel dismisses the people, each to the ancestral
tent.24
(6) i-j: 12.1-4, k-l: 12.5. Though we need to recognize that chs. 9-11 (the
choosing of the first 'actual' king) intervene here, 12.1 nevertheless
resumes compatibly the dyadic communication about the institution itself.
Samuel stipulates that he has heeded YHWH and has acceded to the request
of the people. The series of five questions Samuel fires off in 12.3 catch
both the spirit and the specific language of 8.11-19. By drawing here on
the list of royal behaviors listed earlier, but to distance himself by exaggeratedly parodic questions and to demand that the people and God agree
with him, Samuel makes a sharp contrast between the practices of himself
and those of the king he has previously described (8.11-18). The prophet's
languageits capacity to call attention to a gross dissimilarity between the
king's behaviors and those of himselfinvites scrutiny of his hearers, but
now perhaps with more suspicion than in ch. 8. That Samuel is himself
unimpeachable by the criteria he lists is true (or so God and people
witness) but moot; reference to the problem of his judge-placed sons is
both germane and mute. Samuel fails to see and consequently mispresents
the problem which he has been handed by the elders and which he has
himself partly constructed. So as instructed by God (8.9), he solemnly
enjoins (as perhaps he may have done at 8.10-20 or at 10.25 outside our
hearing), but his writ goes wrong. The issue the elders have raised is
structural, not simply personal; readers of 1 Samuel have not seen dynastic
sons do well yet, Samuel's included. What this father denies by his refusal
to name it properly is responsibility for evils experienced. Those listening
to his contrast of behaviors refuse engagement with either version of the
problem. We may imagine them as barely swallowing back a rejoinder in
24. Several commentators (e.g. Polzin 1989: 84) find Samuel overtly rebellious
here, dismissing the people instead of selecting from them a king. I do not see it that
way, since (however one imagines the materials of this section, chs. 8-12 received
shape) there must be a candidate searched out.
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12 A when Samuel makes the presence of his sons part of his claim to
innocence and adequacy. That is, the narrator shows us the blind spot of
Samuel and the exotopic angle the elders have in regard to the dynastic
sons but fails to have any exploit it. Blindness in regard to one's children
is not necessarily willful, but in this narrative it is a dangerous faultline,
made more tangible in the peoples' silence.
(7) m-n: 12.6-19, Enclosing o-p: 12.18
Samuel moves next, finally, to full communication of the problem raised
by God in 8.7-8. My drawing of Samuel, here and elsewhere, is that he is
quite closely cooperative and collaborative with YHWH, but slow. What he
might better have stressed in ch. 8before the request had moved into
fulfillmenthe does indeed elaborate in ch. 12but when to abort seems
untimely.25 The speech commences in 12.6, reviewing history briefly as
YHWH had also done in 8.7-8, picking up specifically on the twicementioned similarity to the nations that the people envisioned with their
request in ch. 8. One way to epitomize Samuel's pitch is as follows: 'When
various groups with kings oppressed you (so Egypt, Hazor, Philistia, Moab,
Ammon), YHWH acted to bring up, bring out, rescue you'. Obliquely
Samuel characterizes that the nations and their kings have served only as
threat. Consequently the boast or wish to resemble such a royal-governed
group has a very negative undertow. The nations with kings are the very
ones (in this recital) who have activated YHWH as kingly deity to rescue
the people. Left prominently open but apparently unlikely is the question
of whether a human king will inevitably do better, and whether the rejected
royal incumbent will continue to interpose as God has done heretofore
(note particularly 12.11), especially when not appealed to directly.
In the midst of this speech Samuel places on the lips of his described
audience God's actual accusation (8.7-8); that is, he quotes the Israelite
people themselvesforebears of those presently listening to his speech
as admitting to and then immediately recanting their (typical) abandoning
of God to serve other deities (12.10, 12).26 And then Samuel caps his
25. Klein 1983:114,117-19, calls ch. 12 not a farewell but a DH summary of kingship which reverses the language of Deut. 17. McKenzie 2000: 304, agrees that ch. 12,
along with ch. 8, is a unified DH composition and not easily split into polarized viewpoints.
26. That is, the narrator shows Samuel to quote the people directly at 12.10 to
acknowledge the point God offered (directly) in 8.7-8, a point Samuel had also offered
3. Saul's Skin
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reprise by revealing bluntly God's claim of 8.8that this asking for a king
has encroached and offended YHWH'S role, even recently, Samuel says,
with the Ammonites.27 But all that notwithstanding, Samuel continues,
you asked a king and you now have one (12.12-13). The impact of this
speech would perhaps have been better had it come after Samuel's speech
of ch. 8. The people acknowledge (12.19)superficially? genuinely? insightfully? desperately?the evil of their asking (s T) for themselves a
king, but they beg Samuel to remain in his intercessory role. If, as I maintain, the key prompt for Samuel (both in the scene of ch. 8 and as ch. 12
unfolds) was God's mentioning the word 'rejection', he ends now in a
place presumably consoling to himself, still needed to intercede if not to
act as king or judge.
Samuel moves in, finally, cuts off his own rhetoric, to articulate the
nuanced challenge to the people at 12.14-15 and 20-25: the new royal
arrangement he presents is a viable possibility, though perhaps a slim one,
given the track record. There must be no mistaking of the hat for the
rabbit, Samuel warns. And here we get to the heart of the whole arrangement. Despite the drama of the scene, Samuel articulates the position with
precision. To fear and to serve YHWH, to heed in steadfast fidelitya
thing incumbent upon both people and kingis all that is needful and is
wholly necessary. Inverse behaviors will result in God's opposition, in
God's casting away this people, in their being swept awaypeople and
king together. The elders' way of disregarding the divine to ask for a
human solver was wrong and needs to be repented if possible. But the
same relationality of people and deity that has always been requiredand
remains ever needfulcan flourish with a human king in place (see
Eslinger 1985: 405-407). The choice is not a divine or a human king, not
king or judge, but mutual fidelity or lethal betrayal within a relationship
which must be lived out largely in God's terms. This fundamental demand
is spoken many times in Deuteronomy, which itself envisions, approves,
and provides for a king. The name of the human leadership role is not the
definitive point. Once the people rejoin at 12.19 what Samuel (and God?)
seem plausibly to have wanted them to see and say, their offer of retrac-
in 10.18 with no popular response in our hearing. The'quote' also anticipates what the
people will say in 12.18.
27. It tends to be assumed that the reference is to Judg. 10-12, where the Ammonites
constituted the threat. As likely may be the episode of 1 Sam. 11 (to be dealt with below)
where Nahash of Ammon is the problem to which a king is the solution.
190
tion is overridden. We get the last word on the whole transaction, a

resetting of 12.13-15. What is needful is at hand.
But on what reality can Samuel, God or the people construct confidently? Or how can a narrator and later readers confidently review a record
of balance in the relationality just articulated so well? As Samuel and God
respond to the peoples' words, the evidence for a successful new arrangement lacks conspicuously. As the elders look short range at two sons, we
see a longer line of scions and a more endemic problem. Do YHWH and
prophet here, albeit unwittingly, set up a situation that cannot possibly
work as the root problem has not been clearly diagnosed before the prescription is written? Samuel was not an effective intercessor in the Ramah
assembly (ch. 8); will these nuanced words of his at Gilgal (ch. 12) be
heeded? To ponder the long record from a putative sixth-century viewpoint
suggests, at least on my canvas, that the monarchic institution was fatally
flawed from the start and is not in need of, or amenable to, reconstituting.28
One other point needs to be offered for this sketch of Samuel here, and
it is a matter of countering to some extent certain scholarly appraisals of
him. Contra recent literary work on him (e.g. Polzin, Miscall, Fokkelman
and Jobling) I construct his character deficiencies as falling well within the
range of modest. His blindspotnot just in regard to his sons but also his
ineffectiveness as a mediatoris obvious to us by now, and partly from it
he operates.29 The narrator touches on this feature by drawing Samuel with
several consistent facets: slow to heed (as he was in ch. 3); occasionally
eliding careful language (as in 8.6 and 17, where he misquotes slightly);
faulty in selecting his mediating communication (when he foregrounds his
own rejection and delays to articulate YHWH'S); claiming that God will
not listen when people call out (foretold at 8.18 and clearly not the case in
9.20,10.17 or 12.18). Part of Samuel's prophetic role is to give clear information/ngd, but he needs also to be persuasive. His communications work
poorly in that aspect so far. His speech of 8.11 -18 only hardens opposition.
His words of ch. 12a chapter the narrator hands over to him almost completelyevoke first perfunctory agreement (vv. 4-5), then panicked impossibility (v. 19), and conspicuously only silence at the end (z: *12.26 is
28. See McKenzie 2000: 290-304, for his sense of the DH appraisal of monarchy:
wary, ambiguous, ambivalent.
29. Eslinger 1985: 389,401-402, finds the speech to omit far too much or to select
quite deficiently what ia to be said. McCarter 1980: 217-21, suggests that the people
sense too late what they have opted for and what rejected. If so, the responsibility for
the timing needs to be shared out.
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191
non-existent or composed of only silence). Samuel, then, is somewhat

ineffective as a prophet, but not necessarily malicious. His odd question
ascertaining wheat harvest time and then requesting that YHWH provide a
thunderstorm strikes me as foolish on both their parts and helpful only to
scare the people back towards the reactive mode with God against which
all participants need to struggle against. The transaction between prophet
and deity makes clear the fact of Samuel's intercessory role but not so well
its efficacy. In such a move I do not see any as malevolent, simply as
unskilled.30 The role of shuttling mediator has some structural problems,
as no doubt every prophet who ever wore the mantle can testify. Similarly,
I did not construe as resistant or obstructive his dismissal of the people at
the end of ch. 8 (cf. Polzin).31 In fact, the move enabled space for the
leisurely working out of the question of who the king is to be. Here, also,
his final articulation of 'else be swept away' fail to be persuasive.
Since these points of the authorings of kingship have already been summarized, some description of process may be apt here. We have seen these
character sets (prophet and people, prophet and deity) at cross-purposes,
with somewhat submerged agendas, accomplishing a garment with a 'railroad' stitch which is sure to unravel. They all have blindspots and exhibit
minimal self-awareness; their outside angles of viewing each other do not
seem to lead so far to sympathetic authoring, simply to a series of standoffs, dialogues with the partially deaf. All involved so farSamuel, the
people, even Godare characterized as myopic, with selective hearing,
and with speech impediments. Their horizons are incompatible, not simply
slightly different; and the language which we have shared with these characters suffers at once from excess and deficiency: some excessive claims
have been urged and a great deal that is pertinent left unsaid. The royal
task has been designed to solve the problems of Samuel's sons, God's
sense of rejection, Samuel's sensitivity of being critiqued; the hope is to
have a leader to fight battles. But the king will have sons too, and his presence will exacerbate rather than ameliorate the relationship problems
between God and people. The prophet's task will become immeasurably
30. Eslinger 1985: 411-12, calls rain in dry weather (rain at harvest seems a more
apt descriptor) a heavy-handed way of Samuel's proving that he has access to God.
Granted, it extorts a cry from the people (414-16); Eslinger also queries how this
moment is related to chs. 4-6 and 7.
31. Both Fokkelman (1993: 532) and Polzin (1989: 88) stress that the last word
from Samuel is the ominous 'swept away/sp/z', also ringing at 26.10 and at the end of
2 Kings.
192
more complex and fraught with failure. The king will take in order to lead
in war, and in fact the taking will become violent and the wars often, surely
ultimately, unsuccessful.
If what we have watched so far is the drawing of a suit of clothes, we
approach now the question of the skin beneath the clothes, the actual
human being who will first struggle into what has already been shaped.
Though the agreement negotiated here among these parties seems flimsy,
yet now the quest is already on for the man to do the job. The royal robes
are strange and ungainly for a man to inhabit, perhaps particularly a man
absent as the design is worked out. Has the man who will be wearing the
robes been present at their design? If the narrator nudged us to think of
Saul when the man of Benjamin ran the message of the loss of the ark
(4.12), I see no such sign of his presence here among the elders who have
first approached Samuel, no tall figure unobtrusively taking notes or holding cloaks as others deal. By the time we hear the prophet's words at Gilgal
(ch. 12), though there is no reference to it, we may understand him present; but it is too late for modification. In any case, our next step is to
watch the sketching of Saul's skin. The issue, as I have read and set it up,
has relatively less to do with whether kingship itself is good or bad, approved or disapproved by DH. The construction is drawn unlikely of success; but those who have joined their voices to ask and give it, to design
and paper over its problems, share the responsibility to make it work.
b. Sketching Saul's Skin: 1 Samuel 911
We come, next and finally, to Saul's selfhis skin, so to speakwhich is
going to be variously drawn, represented. Diane Ackerman has written
usefully upon this facet of our human bodiliness.32 It is easy to ponder all
the ways in which our own six to ten pound skin encloses each 'us', sets
us off from others, marks a clear boundary, and so forth. We learn early,
from whatever cultures we are raised in, what is permissible and what is
not, insofar as touching others' skin (embodied selves) goes. We can also
think about ways in which we dress or adorn our skin, project and protect
it as we blend with others. Wounds and injuries make tangible the danger
to us if what needs to be inside our skin leaks out, escaped blood being the
most obvious threat. But, we can as bountifully think about all the ways in
which our skin is no barrier at all to communication and communion with
others. We can speak across skins, can interpenetrate in a variety of ways.
Microscopic organisms traverse the transepidermal superhighways of
32. D. Ackerman, 1990: Chapter 2, most helpfully on pp. 68-69, 71-82, 88-96.
3. Saul's Skin
193
creatures, under our very eyes but invisible to us. Our emotions are not
checked by our physical boundedness. To sit at a tense meeting, watching
others in their discrete chairs, often tempts me to try to imagine, label and
track the emotional emissions that fill the air and hence the lungs and
systems of all present. And of course the biochemical composition of our
skin makes it kin to all other creatures composed of skin, scales, fur, feathers, fins and so forth. So we are both outside of every other animal, vegetable and mineraland we are simultaneously connecting with them in
many more ways than we can name. So skin is a useful way to make
tangible the border at which an inner self both finds its own far edge and
where it encounters 'skin-bearing' others and is met by them. And just as
we (think we) can envision, can almost know what underlies our skin, why
it takes the particular shape it does at thumb or shank, we have some sense
of inner geography which pushes the concavities and convexities of our
personalities. For the present purposes, all of that inner terrain (though
shaped by the environment as well) is what is articulated into language.
Our ability to experience with or speak of an other derives from both
authoring and 'heroing', from being both creating and created.
Returning to the image of myself sketching a roomful of artists sketching, whereas chs. 8 and 12 registered on my canvas as a series of dyadic
transactions across a center empty of humanity, now in chs. 9-11 the room
is fuller. All the artists are at work, and in a series of nine episodes, which
I will visit below as (1) to (8), of uneven quality they bring forth the central
character well. There is more genuine interaction among them than before,
though in several instances it is simply a character (set) intersecting with
Saul. But together they represent the skin or surface of the royal hero who
is to fit into the clothing designed for such a figure. He, in his own odd
way, pushes forward to meet them at his outer edge. As before, this time I
will go through the authorings or drawings in story order, suggesting this
time not so much the parallel tracks we had at chs. 8 and 12 as something
more circular. The narrator orchestrates a variety of voices and viewpoints
here to continue the telling of how and what kingship and kings came to
be, how the first of them was selected; he begins to recount how the first,
embodying the whole set, failed, such that kingship ceases. At least such
is the drawing I am continuing to make visible. As the earliest parable
(1 Sam. 1-3) was threaded with references to asking (s 7) that led to the
granting of 'the sa 'til, so here that motif is supplemented with one where
searching that culminates in finding (ms'}. How the first son asked became
both granted and lent back (chs. 1-3) recurs here as the seeker becomes
194
sought and found. That particular theme gives definition to the road or
journey, whether past, at hand, or future. As we watch the man who will
inhabit the royal skin begin to function, the emphases from chs. 8-12 continue to be worked out. If the manner of asking the king implied a rejection of God, still, having a king need not inevitably be such. The glue of
ngd or making known which holds deity, prophet, king and people in
tension continues to be sounded.
My main point continues to be the riddle of widespread responsibility of
demanding a flawed solution to an inadequately acknowledged problem.
The emergence of a particular figure onto the narrative scene opens now as
well our opportunity to negotiate the various problems of human relationality that he will embody. Also as before, for the sake of clarity, I will list
the stable elements that I think are most important before moving on to
detail them in the discussion of the text that follows. I will use the same
eight factors for the king as I did above when summarizing the authoring
of kingship, stressing continuity where it is present and change where that
is a feature. So, first, the choosing of Saul to be king marks a moment that
may theoretically have developed successfully. That YHWH is, at least
twice, the clear chooser of the king signals a divine willingness to attempt
this new relationality between the deity and the people. Though it is possible to build a case that YHWH and Samuel (either or both) set up the man
and the institution to fail, I will not pursue that path even so far as to argue
against it. What becomes obvious is that the man chosen is anomalous and
that the divine process omits steps we may think key. But that does not
mean the project of Saul as king is not feasible. Second, as clearly as
before, and more often, the momentum toward the choosing of Saul seems
difficult to stop, once it has begun. That is, as Saul is being chosen in the
several ways represented here, various impulses to stop his selection arise
but none carries the day. Third, more even than before, the intermediating
role of the prophet is shown as key to the project of the king. Samuel has
information from God that none share except insofar as he communicates
it. Other human beings are almost wholly dependent on him for information, Saul in particular. This imbalance is one of the cardinal weaknesses
in the whole project, as will be one of the main points to unfold as the
story of monarchy develops. Often in the Hebrew Bible, God is able to
improve on past performance, and this narrative will show one aspect of
that pattern. The mistakes we are about to watch God make with Saul will
not be repeated with David. Still, fourth, I see and sketch no inevitable
malevolence on the part of deity, prophet or king. Samuel's intermediation
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will be inadequate as such communication often is. God's manner will be

too hidden and sovereign, especially in relation to Saul whom he will
never address. And Saul's passivity will hobble the whole construction.
But these are weaknesses, not evils. As I trust will emerge, I findconstructSaul as a very appealing character.
Further, fifth, this is a drawing completed as a retrospective at the end of
the monarchy rather than developing in some way from its inception. The
evident bumps in the storyline suggest that we are more likely to have a
reverse reflection than a fresh composition. The facets of the man that are
representative of kings in general begin to receive cross-hatching and tone.
Sixth, as was the case when the kingship was designed, some key elements
are conspicuously missing as the skin under the robes is arranged. There
will be a military role made clear, for which a young man may seem wellchosen. Related: the hidden cost of the king, of the tall Saul, will drain the
resources of those who engage with kings, more so than they can know. It
is possible that the law is made focal at the choosing of the first king, if we
can equate the mispat of the king with that text (10.25) rather than with
8.10-20 and ch. 12. But even at best, if in fact Samuel reads out the law at
the 'coronation' and binds it up, it is the last we shall hear of it in the DH
for some very long time. The fact that only when spirit-rushed does Saul
seem to acquiesce may also emerge as a deficiency. So much is left unsaid.
Seventh, the several questions salted through the three chapters are very
important to guide us, especially insofar as we allow them to function in
that genre and to work variously. By following the questions creatively we
get at a whole set of insight that is fresh. The key one is the identity of the
royal figure as a nagid, which is not just a technical title or a discrete task
but part of his identity. He will make known, function as a riddle of what
happened, what did not, and why; eventually the nagid will provide a way
out of the dilemma he embodies. Part of the irony or paradox is that Saul
will, at least within the story, be a particularly poor communicator in many
ways. But that very failure will be part of what is to be made known to
readers. Finally, eighth, related to the questions is the masal-like nature of
these chapters. The characters who compose these scenes speak in ways
similar to their fellows in chs. 1-3 especially. Their language is often quite
odd if taken at face value; and as before, this feature helps us pick up on
the play that is raging beneath the surface of the narrative.
(1) Kish and Saul: 9.1-3. The narrator begins with a genealogy, six deep,
like the one which opened the book of 1 Samuel, pausing (as there) briefly
196
at the fifth man, father to the sixth son. It is a strategy which intensifies the
bond between the two sixth sons, whom we know nowor will shortly
as Samuel and Saul.33 The loss of prized animals is related next, followed
up by the requisitioning of a choice son who will be given over to special
service by God's collaboration. The narrator's sketched scene thus begins
to echo the prophet's warning about royal takings, granted in an indirect
way here. The next part of this story of fathers and sons is offered through
Kish, who gives his son directions: 'Take one of the boys with you; go and
look for the donkeys' (9.3). It is not possible to discern the precise nuance
of the father's evaluation of his son in giving the commands. The narrator
sets Kish himself up as enigmatic and potentially contradictory: a man of
Benjamin (with all of the negative residue and implied marginalization
from the last three chapters of Judges) but a male of means (so with some
strength and with wealth to be utilized). The narrator appraises the son as
good in some aspect, and as tall. Kish loses donkeys temporarily but is
also the first to lose a son bahur watob, as was warned in 8.11, 16.34 This
father's authoring of the king is not so minor. He begets him, entrusts him
with a royal task of caring for animals; he borrows prophetic language
when he instructs 'the king' to take a boyand he himself suffers the loss
of his sonsince by the time both young men come back, Saul has met
Samuel.
We may choose to stress that the father entrusts to the son a responsibility that fails, a search in which the seeking son does not find the objects
of his charge. Or we may note rather that the quest assigned debouches
into a larger one where the son's quest both facilitates the return of what
he is looking for and his own finding as well. It is, at this point, a rich suggestion about the king. Saul has no choice in being a son, but he accedes
wordless, perhaps passive, to the command of the father. Often Saul is
praised as an example of filial piety. But we, asking language to be more
33. Wordplays on the Samuel and Saul names continue from chs. 8 and 12, as we
have just reviewed, and now also through chs. 9-11. Gordon 1994:263-64, reminds us
of the close link between even the names of Samuel and Saulsuch that s 7 is an
etymology for the prophet's name too, 'their fates tangled together', he says. See also
Garsiel 1985: 83-85.
34. Some would emend with MT and make 8.16 refer to bkr ('cattle'), rather than to
choice young men (bhr). I am emending as little as possible and so will stay with the
resonance noted. McCarter 1980:173, says that the words suggest both Saul's age and
his good looks; Sternberg 1985: 355, suggests good and good looking. Eslinger 1985:
284-88, on the other hand, stresses the inadequacies of this introduction to Saul.
I.Saul's Skin
197
sophisticated, may wonder at the silent acquiescence here of a son to his

father as we struggle to author the quest as an opportunity or as a setup.
Alter's appraisal seems harsh to me: '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' (1999: 47). 'Ignorance' does
not begin adequately to approach the character Saul.
Kish appears no more, except to be talked about and quoted. I will comment on this language again when it spoken by Samuel. But since Kish is
the referent, a note on it is apt here, since it is a most odd and intriguing
point. The father is three times imputed a concern for his son that overrides his anxiety over lost donkeys. First Saul will say it (9.5), then Samuel,
who will place on the lips of certain men the concern, phrased as their
direct quote of Kish first directly and then via the speech of two men
(10.2): 'What shall I do about my son?' This is a most provocative query,
especially since we only hear it spoken of rather than hearing it firsthand.
That is, in this story about fathers and sons, where sons escape paternal
control (as Eli's and Samuel's have done to disastrous effect) we are told
three times that Kish wrings his hands over his son; but we never see it
perhaps the contrary. That this son, two men and a prophet anticipate a
concern on his father's part seems unjustified, projected. Is the father
concerned about his son? He fails to speak it. Saul, if set up by his father
to fail and be abandoned by him, verbalizes the opposite. Again, the point
here is not to discern his inner state but to note that his picture as ineffectual dynastic father joins the others in the gallery. The donkeys are red
herrings, in fact, in this scene of kingmakers. And Kish is our first artist,
drawing a most distinctive portrait that only he as father can contribute.
Saul, as I sketch this first view of father and son, fails in the royal role
given him herecare for lost animals. That they are 'found' offscreen intensifies rather than lessens his relation to the quest on which he was sent.
(2) The boy and Saul: 9.4-10. The narrator provides an ostensibly detailed
itinerary covered by the two seekers after lost donkeys (sites which resonate paronomasially with Saul's name), and a moment of decision arrives
when they reach the land of Zuph (related by pun to the verb sph, 'sweep
away', echoing back from the end of ch. 12).35 What to do at the chronotope Zuph/sweep/be swept away, is Saul's dilemma. The first direct
35. McCarter's map (1980: 163) is helpful, both to envision possibilities and to
remind us that the sites are unknown and possibly chosen for their contribution to
wordplay rather than for geographical accuracy.
198
discourse of Saul's biblical existence occurs at 9.5. 'Let us turn back...',

Saul suggests, at what we recognize as a crucial juncture. His words signal
another instance of the yellow light we saw at 8.11 and 12.19, when the
march toward monarchy might have been deflected but is not. That these
are his first narrator-assigned and quoted words is perhaps ominous, though
perhaps not, since what lies back and what lies ahead are not themselves
so easy to evaluate and label.36 The boy taken by Saul on his quest intervenes, counters. He, like certain others, has a short life in the story, called
and assigned his place at 9.3, speaking in vv. 6-8, then accompanying as
silent companion for the whole stretch of the chapter until he is sent offstage by Samuel at 9.27. His interaction with the young Saul functions to
draw both in a clear if small sketch and to delineate Samuel as well. Saul's
intuition is to abandon the quest, to go home with his assignment unfulfilled, the donkeys not foundlest his father worry about him, Saul
envisions. The boy (youth, servant, or both) opposes that plan, whether
fatefully or propitiously. His words redirect the quest from a search for
donkeys to a search for the man of God. The boy provides a definition for
this figureone of whom we have already met in 2.27-36: a man of God
is honored (kbd) for the truthfulness and accomplishment of his utterances.
To which point the boy adds, 'Let us go there now; perhaps he will tell us
(ngd) about the journey on which we have come'. The short sentence
brings the language of ngd forward from 8.9 and associates it here with a
truth-telling man of God. The boy assigns the man of God a specific truth
to tell: the way not so much before them but on which they have come.37
At the surface, the quest continues to be for the lost animals, with the
easy assumption that the way to be spoken will end at the donkeys. But in
36. My interpretation will build toward Saul's last direct discourse, when once
again, accompanied by a nameless boy (his armor-bearer), Saul faces a choice in the
company of a subaltern. Though seeking to avoid responsibility, as will have become
his default move, Saul will finally in that scene act for himself at the moment and place
of 'sweeping away'. He does not avoid his own death but he does qualify the manner
of it decisively.
37. The root ngd occurs at 8.9; 9.6, 8,16,18,19; 10.1,15,16. SeeMcCarter 1980:
176-79 and 186-87, for discussion of the words. Commentators tend to agree that a
nagid is a designated individual, so here neither a charismatic nor an anointed king
(Alter 1999:49; Fox 1999:42; Linville 1998:139-49; McKenzie 2000:298). A technical precision, if warranted, does not eliminate or displace the wordplays available as
well. They, however, continue to make the word nagid into some sort of a position for
Saul to fill, while I stick with the wordplay and say it is a word that makes him a riddle.
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fact the verb tense calls attention to what has already happened. It is the
journey-past that the king-designate needs the man of God to make known
to them. Insofar as the narrative has already rehearsed the way of kings,
and to the extent that one of the subtopics under discussion is the blend of
manner of kings and prophets, the words are quite prescient. A man of
God (about to be equated with nabi '/prophet and ro'eh/seer) has as his
task to tell truthfully the path or way (similar to the mispat/mores) of the
king. The boy restates for his companion what his path must beto the
man of God (or prophet or seer) who will make his way known. The
narrator steps in, not only to equate three pieces of terminology, but to
reiterate that the quest of the principals is a search for God. For having so
minor a role, the young man gets a good deal of information onto his
'canvas'.
Though the two searchers start inclined toward opposite decisions (go
back, go on), Saul pliably takes on the suggestion and moves next to worry
not about whether they will go on but how; his question, with its double
construction, has been noted by several. Saul says both, 'What shall we
bring the man?' and 'What is a prophet to the man?' (9.7). He is also repositioning a question rehearsed by the Philistines in regard to the sending
forth of the ark or advised by their wise men: go empty or with something
'to hand'? The question itself is more significant than the answer pertaining to this quest. How the king approaches the prophet and how the
prophet relates to him is key to the tale as told, to the interpretation we
must make. That the king and the prophet share responsibility for the way
does not mean it is obvious how they will work together. The prophet
assists the king to know and to stay the path. The boy resolves the 'how to
approach' problem as well, if temporarily, by producing a small coin and
repeats that it will facilitate the man of God to make known (ngd) the way.
The ambivalent sentence functions partly to let Saul ask two questions at
once. But the query also invites from the companion a reiteration of the
task of the prophet: to tell the way. The boy speaks truthfully, his words
abetted by the narrator, who, in v. 9, redescribes their task as an inquiry
(drs) for God and mingles the terminology so that the four terms and their
functions become roughly equated. They go and accomplish all levels
of the journey: information about the lost animals, contact with the one
who provides information about their way, access to the counsels of God,
and of course more. Saul once again falls right in with these persuasive
words'Good plan; come on, let's go', he urges. Saul's trajectory as been
reshaped significantly by the speech of the young man.
200
The young man, whose presence can be discerned intermittently ahead

in pronoun references and plurals, accompanies Saul in the events that
unfold, to be sent on aheadout of the drawingat the moment Samuel
gets down to the brass tacks of anointment. So, companion to Saul, his
chief authoring has been to send the son of Kish to be made king and to
clarify for us the role of the prophethowever named. The boy himself
speaks prophetically, to advise Saul on the way they have gone: stopping
him from failing utterly, redirecting him to a destination for which Saul
had no inkling. Saul obeys readily, compliantly, obediently, passively
each reader must decide. This nameless boy is given as companion to the
young Saul on his quest, to identify the true nature of their search: for the
man of God who is to be sought and found, who is honored for his reputation of speaking what comes true. The boy, less overtly than Samuel
but arguably with more success, functions as a prophet. Saul intermeshes
smoothly with him, confides a plan to him which he changes upon advice;
he goes with him, obeys his word.
(3) The girls and Saul: 9.11-14. Also minor artists and prophetic speakers
are the young girls whom Saul and the boy meet in their quest for the man
of God in the unnamed city in Zuph. As the male pair makes the ascent to
the city, they first find not the man of God but girls coming forth to draw
water. To these residents of the city the two address a question: 'Is the seer
here?' The response proffered is full: 'He isjust ahead of you [singular];
hurry [singular], now, for today he has come to the city because there is a
slaughtering for the people today at the high place. When you [plural]
enter the city you will find him before he goes up to the high place to eat;
for the people do not eat until he comes, for it is he who blesses the
slaughterafterwards the invited guests eat. So now go up [plural]. For
himtoday, you shall find him.' Resisting, again, the temptation to emend
or smooth out this utterance (which makes adequate sense as it stands38),
we can see that the girls, like the boy, draw the king-elect forward on his
way to meet the prophet. They, when asked, provide helpful and accurate
information that comes to pass immediately. Thus, in this narrative section
concerned to give some detail to the offices of king and prophet and to the
importance of their intersection at the high place, the exchange between
the two character sets (Saul with his male companion and with the girls of
Zuph) assist the quest for and finding of each other (man of God and king38. Bar-Efrat 1989: 97, characterizes it as a medley of several voices, all eager to
respond and hence talking simultaneously.
3. Saul's Skin
201
to-be). Though we may have a readerly confidence in the inevitability of

an encounter between them, Saul has no clue at all and Samuel hardly more
as to what each is already embarked upon. These unnamed and minor characters provide language which assists. The girls, also contributing to role
definition, indicate one of the tasks of the ro 'e///seer, which is to bless the
slaughter of animals before any meal is commenced. And the narrator
shortly confirms the suitability of their description: nothing has started in
this high place until Samuel and his guests are seated. Again, the royal
designe obeys.
At one level, it seems a pointless episode. The seer is just ahead of the
searching pair, and they can have met shortly in the gate without help from
the young women. The very detailed information is not necessary so much
at the practical story level as at the discourse level. We need to understand
their words as assisting the king to search for and be found by the prophet,
need to validate that the sacral encounter is done correctly. 1 am not interested in splitting prophetic from predictive speech; the young women for
me slide into the set of those mediating the encounter between seekers
Saul and Samuelthat culminates in the establishment of Saul as king.
That the girls do not know the whole impact of their speech is moot; they
speak words that come true in the eyes of those who need to trust the
prophet. So, at this structural level, the young women are also prophets,
directing the 'king' further along the path he has come. Those who speak
words which come to pass are worthy of respectas we are about to be
told (and have heard in 9.6 as well as in Deut. 13 and 18). The particular
rhetoric of the girls' speech, the drawing on their canvas, can be parsed a
bit more. The prophet is he whom the king-elect seeks; the prophet precedes the king to the sacral site; guests need to wait. It is clearly part of the
intertwined prophetic and kingly mispat, of which all involved need to be
apprised.39 How the blend will work out is another matter; but here it is
described optimistically. The young girls draw Saul in relation to the
prophet, advice which he accepts and sees proven true. Saul, once he has
does his characteristic asking, does not engage with them again but unprob39. The young women recall, perhaps because the female population is not so well
described, the woman of Endor who also mediates a royal and prophetic encounter at
the farther edge of Saul's kingship (1 Sam. 28) and also Huldah, who advises Josiah
near the end of the monarchy (2 Kgs 22). Asked, they already know and voice their
wisdom. Gunn 1980:62, reminds us that David is selected in similar circumstances and
that Saul will run into difficulties shortly as well again at such a sacrificial meal. We
may also recall that the first asking by Hannah occurred at a sacrificial meal.
202
lematically accepts their word. Having worked with these three rather
minor character sets and Saul's interaction with them, the narrator now
turns again to the bigger guns: Samuel and YHWH.
(4) YHWH and Samuel: 9.15-17. As we have been instructed, God, though
offended by some aspect of the request for a new mlk, has nonetheless
acceded to the plan of the people. As Samuel dismisses the people to go on
about their business for a time (8.22), YHWH apparently turns attention to
the question of whom to choose. Any doubts about the identity of God's
elect are about to be dispelled. And, perhaps to remove from us the all too
easy possibility of saying that the first king went bad because God was not
sufficiently involved in the selection, the narrator becomes uncharacteristically unsubtle in this part of the story. Once again we drop in on private
communication between God and Samuel, where God, in two steps, indicates to Samuel whom to make king. The point here is not to be first-time
readers, as though unaware that we have met the king who is searching for
donkeys with questionable success. So the element to probe, as I draw the
narrator sketching, is what is the impact of the narrator's way of proceeding with the story.40
Prior to revealing the specific identity of the king, God gives crucial information about the role itself, correcting and amplifying what we have
already seen. Samuel's directions are to anoint the man as a nagid over
YHWH'S people, to save/ys' them from the Philistines, since YHWH has
heard their cry.41 God seems to have picked up on the last words the elders
added to their job description in 8.20that the king should fight their battles. Is this the same commission, we may wonder. Will there be confusion
should YHWH and king command differently? And YHWH further specifies when pointing directly to the man: he will restrain 'sr the people. And
what, we may ask, is the significance of God's avoidance of the word mlk
and choice to call the anointed figure a nagid! Counter to so much schol40. The topic of the choice of Saul is fully discussed in virtually every source being
used here, and in many other places as well. Since I am prescinding from the question
of the actual historical details of how the kingship and first king came to be, not
because they are not important but because they are not directly accessible from this
narrative, a good deal of the discussion of the origins of kingship is not relevant here.
41. Though Samuel has indicated in 8.18 that God will not listen or respond when
people cry out over their king, that point is called into question in 9.20 when God disputes it and also in 10.17 and at 12.19. God consistently caves in to outcries, whether
they were addressed specifically to him or not.
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203
arly opinion in recent years, I suggest that here it is not so significant. That
we are talking about a mlk seems obvious; so not not a king, but a king
whose characteristic identity and task are nagid. That the section here is
full of wordplay on the verb ngdltv make God's instruction knownkey
function of the prophet, I recommend here that the king shares that same
job. As nagid\\Q has a communication function as wellat both story and
discourse level. That is, he must give information to people; and his story
is itself a gnomic recital, as has been suggested above (Introduction and
Chapter 1) where genre was discussed. As nagid, Saul is the story of the
kings and how they came to be and went mostly wrong, a narrative whose
task is to invite reflection and self-knowledge. As God chooses Saul, or as
the narrator draws the deity selecting the first king, that is a crucial part of
his responsibility: to embody insight, in fact to facilitate it.
What criteria might God have in mind to fulfill the roles just named?
They are not disclosed directly to us, so I, drawing and watching others
similarly engaged, speculate. The narrator will describe his angle on Saul,
but we cannot assume that God sees as humans do. In fact, it comes clear
later (16.7) that those views do not coincide.42 What I would like to stress
here is the conundrum of the choice: a tall Benjaminite. To be tall in the
narrative of 1 Samuel, as has already been discussed, is risky, inviting
a fall. To be a Benjaminite, on the other hand, is to be insignificant and
worseshamed and almost eliminated due to their behavior in Judg. 1921. Has God made a good selection here, we must ask. The other factor
that may be relevant is that a man of Benjaminindeed this very one, the
rabbis saywas witness to the capture of the ark and to the collapse of the
house of Eli. Perhaps he will remember well and make known salubriously
this experience of his. But whatever the case, God's selection here offers a
substantial challenge to the man chosen. Will a 'tall Benjamin' be a good
choice as Philistine fighter? The Philistines have been irrepressible so
farthwarted intermittently but always springing back to threaten again.
Saul will not do very well with them; in fact, they will become quintessentially 'his foe'. Is this man thus set-up by God? We may note as well that
God's choice of an individual is made in a sovereign way, with no apparent input from any. In narrative terms, God makes the decision alone and
then communicates the result while we are looking at Saul look for donkeys and as Samuel is moving along his circuit. Such is my sketch.
42. Steinberg 1985: 96, suggests that Samuel left to his own devices might not
have selected Saul.
204
(5) Samuel, YHWH and Saul: 9.17-10.13. This next long section is, I think,
the heart of the authoring or asking of Saul. The other factors remain significant, but something more definitive happens here. The actual encounter
of king-designate and prophet is worked with great care by the narrator.43
It begins actually at 9.14before any but God know who Saul 'is'. The
narrator describes Saul and the boy as they see Samuel coming toward
them on his way to the high place. When we next join them, after the interlude just sketched between God and Samuel, it is as though the camera
having paused at the moment of their seeing Samuelretakes the scene so
that we stand with Samuel and see Saul as YHWH points him out as the one
of whom he just spoke. God also adds a fresh piece of information: Saul is
to be the one to restrain God's people.44 We thus stand briefly behind the
eyes of each with some sense of what each one sees. The primary character here, however, is God. What is it that God sees that makes it likely
that Saul can restrain the people? Or does the comment come from an
appraisal of the people as needing restraint? Is God perhaps also selfappraising when he prescribes this new feature of kingship? God is too
laconic here. But at once Saul approaches Samuel in the midst of the city
to pose another question.
Saul asks, 'Tell me (ngd), please, where is the house of the seer?' If, as
we have recently learned, both king and prophet share the responsibility
for ngd, each in a distinctive way, we see them share it here for the first
time. Saul's question itself is odd, almost wasted in the story's action,
except insofar as it sketches Saul's seeking the seer as a search for God
(9.9). The impact (if not design) of the question is not so much to elicit an
address but rather to locate, even engage, the seer and get the motif word
flowing between the two who share it. Samuel readily self-identifies as the
43. Fokkelman (1993:393-94) sees the flashback as a drastic intervention, resulting
in the mixing of YHWH'S and Samuel's words, which as Eslinger (1985:319-20) points
out, can give rise to slippage between them. Deist 1993: 7-9 is interesting here, seeing
the narrative choice for God's direct or more remote intervention not so much a matter
of early/late as an indicator of urgency: when the narrator indicates that God intervenes
directly, the pace accelerates. Deist goes on to suggest that Samuel's resistance to
God's order flushes God into action to end the stalemate.
44. As noted by several (e.g. J. Ackerman 1991: 12) the verb is rare: in Job it is
used in reference to restraining waters from flooding. Commentators struggle to say
how it suits Saul's job. For example, is he to hold people to the covenant bond (Edelman 1991:48)? Eslinger 1985:310, thinks God's implied description of the people bit
ironic. It seems an antonym ofsph/sweep away. If so, God attains another discourse
with which to weigh in on the side of theoretical or initial viability of the monarchy.
3. Saul's Skin
205
seer, then invites the royal designate to accompany him to the high place
for the sacrifice as an invited guest, promising also to tell him (ngcf) what
is in his heart (that is, on his mind). The prophet makes an immediate
downpayment by speaking about the lost donkeys which may be part of
Saul's concern. Samuel also poses an enigmatic question back to Saul:
'.. .on whom is all Israel's desire, if not on you and on all your ancestral
house?' (9.20).45 Saul counters that odd assertion/question with another of
his own: 'Am I not am a Benjaminite from the smallest of the tribes of
Israel and my family the humblest of all the families of the tribes of Benjamin? Why have you spoken to me such a thing?' (9.21 [my translation]).
Saul re-authors himself as a small Benjaminite.
At one level, neither question gets much of an answer. Samuel's query
needs some probing. Does it refer to the desire of all Israel for a king?
Does it suggest that all that Israel finds valuable (so its wealth) is to come
to the house of Saulthus restating more cordially the speech of Samuel
about the king's capacity to take? That Saul self-deprecates is no surprise
here, culturally or personally. Though some commentators see him here as
shrinking from a compliment, in a self-protective gesture we might anticipate in an honor-shame culture, the language itself is what we need to
notice. Saul aptly describes himself as inadequate: dishonored tribe, most
insignificant tribe, the smallest family.46 Saul's words, whatever their other
nuances, deflect and resist Samuel's in some key way. Saul speaks directly
in this whole unit (chs. 8-12) only ten times, rarely letting much out. That
both of these questions are framed as negatives is interesting. 'Is it not the
case', each begins; to such a question the bent is toward agreement: 'yes,
such is indeed the case', the speaker invites us to respond. But we, reading,
may also maintain the opposite: the desire of all is surely not for this man
45. Readings of this question vary widely among commentators, depending on
what their aims and contextual concerns. Fokkelman 1993: 405, links it to Hannah's
words and to the special portion Saul is about to be given. Eslinger 1985: 312, thinks
the thrust of the question not clear to Saul but understood by the reading audience; he
also offers options generated by the ambiguity of the noun hemddl'desire (or desirable
things).
46. Eslinger 1985:312-13,327, discussing the character of Saul, gets to a comment:
' Welcome, Saul, automaton' and finds Saul too pliable with Samuel, a point I would not
put quite as he does. Pyper 1996:175, reminds us that Saul later sneers at David's humble lineage, as though forgetting his own remarks here. Esler 1998:222-25, stresses the
cultural reasons that a person in an honor-shame culture would shrink back from such
unwelcome and destabilizing attention. Polzin 1989: 99-108, comments on the inherently dialogical nature of these questions worded with a negative and a question.
206
of Benjamin and he will not long think of himself as too small. The
questions, pairing as before the unstable compound of great and small, are
a crossroads where the story might have verged off differently; but it does
not. Samuel makes no response to Saul except to move ahead with what he
has been given to do, while Saul acquiesces. Samuel here is set up by the
narrator to establish the credentials which the young man and young
women attributed to him when yet unnamed. He begins at once to tell the
journey of Saul, demonstrating the coherence of the choice-of-Saul-asking project among those involved in its design. The seer presides over the
making visible of God's choice, tells the king his path, makes the sought
seeker to function as a nagid.
The scene continues at the high place, where the narrator manages most
of the language. The stress seems to me to be on the welcoming of Saul as
one whose arrival has been anticipated: his place at the head of the feast,
his portion the one already set aside by the attendant, the fit shown between
all that is ready to hand and his participation in it, though his appearance
comes as a surprise. The narrator orchestrates these minor figures (whom I
am counting as 'props') as rolling smoothly along on the path God has
selected for the king. Samuel takes Saul (and the young boy, the narrator
echoes 8.16), and gives them the place at the head of the gathering, which
Saul wordlessly accepts. As the young girls have indicated, nothing has
commenced without the presence of the seer, until the meeting between
seer and seeker has occurred. Samuel's direct discourse underlines the timing of the arrangements. All has been anticipated, and the appointed time
is now. The Hebrew text is difficult several times in these verses: the tall
man at the head of the assembly in the high place is also briefly on the
roof, it seems. But in any case the words of Saul about his small stature
seem rolled back effectively by the words and gestures of the prophet, in
which Saul has now participated (9.22-25) and thus tacitly assented.
We come, finally, to the scene of not only anointing but of also divulging
some key information to Saul. The nameless boy is sent on ahead and in
fact vanishes from the scene (though we may glimpse 'him' in certain episodes ahead). There is no witness, or alternatively, there is no one to speak
at angles to Samuel's words. We are perhaps so ready for this moment, so
familiar with it, that we forget its oddness. And so, at 10.1, we see once
again the compliance of Samuel with words God has given him. The narrator describes Samuel's pouring on Saul's head from a flask of oil, kissing him, and asking a question (all three verbs linked by similar sound):
'Is it not the case that YHWH anoints you over his heritage as nagidT (my
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translation). Again the odd phrasing: a negative question to make an assertion, carrying with it an envelope in which dissent may (and shortly will)
be returned. Samuel here credits the deed of his hand as YHWH'S, which
seems fully justified, given all we, reading, know. And with no language at
all from Saul, Samuel moves on to announce the four things that he says
will happen, adding to the already great quantity of predictive or prophetic
language that constructs the chs. 9-11. These sentences are widely discussed in the scholarly literature, so I will simply comment in terms of the
sketch I am making. Samuel continues his task of making known to Saul
how he will go, what he will find (ms'the word recurs repeatedly in these
episodes), calling them signs at the end of the recital (10.7).47 The first
sign includes speech from two men by Rachel's tomb about the alreadyfound donkeys and the alleged overriding concern of Kish for Saul. Samuel
indicates that these men will tell Saul of his father's words: 'What shall I
do about my son?' This is one of the moments where the father-son motif
is reintonated, here the father concerned (appropriately) for the safety of
the endangered son. The question, coming where it does in the story of the
making a king of Kish's son, rings perhaps more urgently than when we
last discussed it. As tends to be true of questions in this section, it gets no
clarifying response; the question, not the answer, is important. Does Kish
regret the taking of his son, fear it? We will never know. The second
encounter, studded with s 7 wordplay, involves the finding of a trio of men,
a greeting and a gift of bread, noteworthy perhaps in that we already know
that the two searchers have used up their food supply, a situation presumably not shared with Samuel at the feast. Alternatively, or additionally, it is
his first exaction of peoples' goods that the king just anointed receives. So
these first two signs validate Samuel's capacity to tell the past way as well
as the future journey.
The third sign, which typically and appropriately takes most of the scholarly attention, involves Saul's meeting a band of prophets preceded by
musicians, coming down from the high place of Gibeat-Elohim48 and his
being bidden by Samuel to go with them: '...mah-YHWH will rush you
and you will act the prophet with them and be turned to another man' (10.6
[my translation]). When these three moments will have come, Samuel
47. The LXX makes the link much more explicit: Samuel says before indicating them
that the signs are verification that 'YHWH has anointed you ruler over his heritage'.
Fokkelman 1993: 431, makes a comparative chart of what is said on these matters.
48. Alter 1999: 54, though without explanation or justification, equates Gibeath
Elohim with the Gibeah of Judg. 19 and with Gibeah of Benjamin and of Saul.
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instructs, do what you find in your hand to do, for God is with you. And
then a fourth directive: 'And you shall go down to Gilgal ahead of me;
then I will come down to you to present burnt offerings and offer sacrifices
of well-being. Seven days you shall wait, until I come to you and show
you what you shall do' (10.8), seeding here the occasion for Saul's first
formal repudiation.
The third moment arrives at once, at least as narrated. As Saul shifts his
famous tall shoulder from Samuel, God turns another heart for him and the
three signs line up accomplished summarily on the same day. The third
gets the detail. When Saul meets the prophets, God's ruah rushes him and
he acts-the-prophet49 (10.9-10). Samuel's word is verified for them both
(and for us) as the narrator orchestrates the events. God's collaboration
with Samuel's word and with Saul's self seems clear at least for them.
Saul's lack of assent here is the most noteworthy. Barely has he reversed
direction, wordless, to leave when his other heart/mind arrives. A new
heart is traditionally understood as a change of mind. His old heart has
been burdened with care for strayed donkeys he cannot locate, Samuel told
us at 9.20. What is on Saul's new mind? Saul had not agreed, at least in
speech, to anything Samuel said; is the new heart a gift from God to
facilitate his acceptance of Samuel's words? The spirit of God, which
visits or attends Saul at least intermittently from this moment (until it,
also, is exchanged for an other) seems to have the same impact.50 Saul
becomes, in a moment and perhaps only for a moment, an other to himself.
It seems a place to which we are denied full access, can only see from the
very outside. It remains, I think, a prime enigma of the royal character
Saul. It seems related to the fact that nowhere in the story does God speak
directly with Saulor Saul with Godcontrasted as this will be by the
frequency of interchange between God and David. Saul's spirit-rushed and
prophet-told behavior when he meets the band of prophets shows him
going with them as indicated. As conveyed to us, with no apparent choice
on Saul's part, he acts-the-prophet in their midst. It is a literal blindspot to
him, opaque to us, and I would suggest finalized almost privately by the
character God.
49. This moment is characterized three times: Samuel and the narrator uses the
hithpael (10.6,10), which some would think impliesor leaves room for'frenzy'. It
is my choice to preserve the opacity of the word, since it remains far from clear (here
and elsewhere) what Saul does.
50. Fox 1999: 34, characterizes Saul as not able to handle YHWH'S spirit well.
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This third sign, in addition to being anticipated by the prophet in 10.5-6

and narrated in 10.9-10, is also replayed in the eyes and mouths of some
people who see Saul acting-the-prophet amid a band of prophets (10.1113) and who watch without the filters available to prophet, king, deity and
readers. This key moment is given substance with three questions. They
are difficult to pin down except in the most minimal terms, though scholars do not lack opinions on the exact inflections. But sticking close to the
language here, those who had known Saul previously register surprise to
see him acting alongside of prophets and remark: 'What is happening to
the son of Kish? Is even/also Saul among/with the prophets?' (my translation). Startling, apparently, is the associationnot necessarily the behavior
that commentators and translators have urged us to see as frenzied. Saul's
company, not only or necessarily his actions, evoke comment. The first
questions give rise to another from within this group: 'Who is their father?'
That remark may be aimed at the group of prophets themselves, who in
certain narrative instances have a leader or patron (if the Elijah/Elisha
pattern is valid here). Again, the query is difficult to construe with regard
to tone. It could mean something as straightforward as'Oh? which group
is he with?'to something much more slightingly directed at their social
status. But in any case it raises for us the dynastic topic again as well as the
question of how king and prophet will relate. Prophets are not dynastic;
that particular call is not inherited. Kings are not typically prophetic. So
the speech of the people here offers access to our focal topic: What, how is
a king to a prophet? The narrator brings to this language site the third question, a sort of amalgam of the other two, asked not simply then and there
but also later: 'Is Saul also[/even] among the prophets?' If, as we shall see,
the associations for him include mlk spt ngd ys' nsl and restrainer 'sr
here the possibility is raised that he is also nb '.51 Whether the slogans are
meant to disparage him is far from clear. What seems most immediate is
the questioning of the blend: this man with that group, that man with this
identity and job also. And, as the narrator indicates, the question persists.
Questions are good rhetorical indicators of what we, reading, need to
query. Often we might have noticed what they argue in any case; but not
always, and I think not here. Questions tend to allow for multiple responses
to those not tied to the immediate context, surely the case here. The narrator closes the episode at 10.13 by describing the king's return to the high
51. See Eppstein 1969: 302. The sense isall those other functions and a prophet
too!
210
place. The fourth sign spoken, if such it is, still awaits its fulfillment.52
Leaving for the moment the significance of this blend of king and
prophet in one man (on which Polzin hangs so much of Saul's defectiveness), it seems that God and Samuel (and the smaller artists) have between
them shaped the king, setting the details such that there is no assent or
dissent for Saul to contribute. His new heart and especially his spirit-rush
both emphasize his own minimized participation in this authoring. His
lack of speech from the time of questioning Samuel's manner of speaking
to him (9.21) leave us to infer his consent primarily from his external compliance. Though the time is not far ahead when Saul will bend all his energies toward being king, that moment is not now. The contrast is marked. If
we recognize the prophetic qualities of the unnamed boy and girlsa
move which seems legitimate on the basis of their speech and functioningwe have yet another bond linking the king to the prophets, the intermeshing of which roles seems so stressed in these chapters.
(6) The dwd and Saul: 10.14-16. Next the narrator invites us to look
over the shoulder of another family member, the uncle or dwd of Saul. His
appearance makes no natural sense in the narrative, where we would
expect the oft-described Kish to emerge anxious or relieved to question the
last returned stray. In a narrative where it has already been amply demonstrated that names signify pregnantly (e.g. the constant playing on Samuel
and Saul, on heeding and asking), it is difficult not to suspect that the dwd
may be the unwelcome voice of a usurper or a next claimant, but in any
case of an opponent. He also asks a question: 'Where did you go?' (10.16).
Again, the question can be sorted in more than one way. Is this inquiring
man seeking information? Probing to test veracity? Watching to be cued
by speaker response? Taking a question at face value is only one option,
and rarely a place to stop. This speaker shares language with the journey
of the two searchers, as will be discussed more fully below. The way the
donkey searchers have gone comes to be a way of testing the prophetto
see if he can tell them the way they have gone (which he has done).
Saul here, asked the same question, answers the query truthfully, so far
as he takes it. He did go after lost donkeys, which, when not found, occasioned his turn to Samuel, who confirmed the finding. The language revisits
52. This sign, or these directions, is the subject of considerable scholarly discussion
as well, which I will pick up below when it becomes relevant. Here my point is that
Saul is told to anticipate four things, of which three come to pass at once.
3. Saul's Skin
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the intensively used verb of finding (ms') and invites Saul to articulate his
own failure to find what was lost and to make known (ngd) what was
found. Beyond that he does not utter. Two things seem indicated as we
sort the brief exchange. We may read Saul as not recalling all of his way
given his new heart/mindor we may pick up on his refusal to say the
whole of where he has gonethat being the prophet's to make known
which Samuel is in fact about to do. But in either case this quizzing uncle/
dwd occasions from Saul language that is less than complete, a role we
will continue to see later as Saul interacts with the other dwd. What we can
ponder here is the utterance construction of both speakers. How do we read
the 'uncle' composingso as to evoke or generate what response? How
do we construct the 'nephew' reading: anticipatively, organizing his rejoinders to the uncle? Is the dwd trustworthy in the view of the sa 'ul, and the
reverse? This is obviously so small a piece that it is inconclusive; yet it is
pregnant and will be revisited as time goes on, developing in a manner
which we may (though need not) interpret as competitive. With what consciousness the utterance is shaped and how its addresses formulates his
response we do not see. We do witness and hence must sketch the effect:
Saul speaks selectively. The dwd draws Saul hesitant, guarded.
(7) Samuel, God, people, and Saul: 10.17-27. As if picking up on the
uncertainty resulting from the exchange between uncle and nephew, Samuel now calls the people to Mizpah (as he did in 7.5 when Philistines
threatened) in regard to their king, the narrator indicates.53 Communicating
now more explicitly some of the language of ch. 8, the prophet faithfully if
tardily delivers to the people the words of God spoke at 8.7-8, altering the
persons. That is, Samuel speaks for God (who spoke in the first person in
the scenes of ch. 8), and the people are addressed (rather than being spoken
about, as before). The brief reminiscence of Egypt which God offered in
response to the Ramah request Samuel now enunciates as God's assessment of the asking for a king (a pair of sentences which Samuel alters
slightly [8.5 and 19 at 10.19]): a rejection (m's) of their deliverer (ys').
The narrator characterizes this as the mispat hammelek, as in 8.9. Samuel
here interprets the request for a king as the rejection, whereas my reading
allows for the manner of asking which disregards God to be the cause of
God's reaching for the word 'reject'.
53. Linville 1998: 269, summarizes the prominence of the site of Mizpah for the
story of Saul and Benjamin as well as its prominence at the time of the collapse of
Judah before the Babylonian onslaught.
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Though some hold that Samuel has delayed obstructively, I do not

choose to read it that way.54 Once Samuel has been told that he is to make
a king for the people, the next question is who it is to be. The responsibility for the choice is clearly God's in this recital (and in the legislation at
Deut. 17). The choice of YHWH is shared so far only with the prophet
(unless we include Saul, whose information still seems minimal to me). So
now Samuel reconvenes the group of elders to do as he has been told (8.69,22) in the presence of king and people. He indicates that the choice will
proceed publicly by lots, presumably giving God (another) opportunity to
do the choosing. There seems no conflict with the language of Deut. 17.1420. In that text, the king, whom the people may set over themselves in the
manner of the nations, must be chosen by God from among brothers (i.e.
not be a foreigner). The other qualificationspresented as before by negatives rather than positives, warn against choosing a man who acquires too
much (of horses, women, silver, gold) for himself or who acts so as to
return the people to Egypt as slaves (reference to alliances? to internal
oppression? to exile?). Saul is so far and will remain innocent of those
charges.
So as the lots are cast among the tribes, it seems clear that a brother will
emerge. And with the conventional ideology of lots, God will have selected
the man. And so it falls out, with the process narrated in abbreviated form.
When at the final casting the unnamed son of Kish, though sought (bqs) is
not to be found (ms'), an ad hoc inquiry (s'l) is made to God (presumably
in case the lot needed to go on to bring forth another winner). That is, in
this miniaturized version of the larger storyline of acquiring a king, there
is once again a moment where the absent Benjaminite might evade being
taken. But consulted, YHWH indicates as previously to Samuel at 9.17:
There is the man, hiding/hidden at the kelim.55 The people run and fetch
him. Samuel reiterates that this man is God's choice/Mr (10.24) and that
there is no one like him for height, the narrator makes us see. Saul stands
forth taller than the rest, acclaimed by the people when presented by Samuel: 'Long live the king! '56 The people are only now (10.25), according to
54. Over against the several who see Samuel as continuing to be recalcitrant here
(e.g. Eslinger 1985:341), Fokkelman (1993:447 n. 13) says that here and now Samuel
does obey the command of 8.21.
55. The kelim have been mentioned twice before in this section: at 8.12 it seems the
apparatus of war, at 9.7 the gear of searchers.
56. J. Ackerman 1991: 12, carefully notes that Samuel never says the word 'king'
except to quote others; it is the peoples' word here (see also Fokkelman 1993:448-49).
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213
the narrator, made aware of the mispat of the king; we, though tantalized,
do not hear its detail though watch it written up and stored before YHWH.
Does that last procedure mark it as the law, so to be handled in Deut. 17?
If so, then Saul's task seems clear and cosmic if not very detailed and emphasized. If the mispat hammelek is to be equated with the referent of Deut.
17.18-20 and with the fundamental charge recited by Samuel in 12.14-15
and 20-25, then Saul stands with hands at his side as the prophet takes on
the kingly task. If not, we remark the omission of the moment when the
king makes his copy of the law to guide him and keep his (new) heart level
with those of his people.
But there is a colophon to all this enthusiasm, voiced after all have
once again gone home. The narratorsplitting off those whose hearts are
touched by God from those labeled as sons of perversity, ne'er-do-wells,
as was used for Hophni and Phinehascharacterizes this latter group as
speaking up in some way (10.27). The question is a good one, however we
may appraise the lips from which it issues: '(How) can this (one) save us?'
(my translation). The query crashes against the question Samuel addressed
to Saul in 9.20: Is not the desire of all Israel for you? Evidently not. It also
prepares us to ask the same question in the episode ahead: How is this
salvific? They, scorning him, withhold a gift, while he (the subject is not
specified in the Hebrew text) holds his peace at their demur. Saul's action
throughout is once again strangely passive. He hides or is hidden during
the lots, perhaps recognizing what is likely to turn out and intending to
avoid it, to defer it? Or with his new mind, does he not know what the lots
are likely to indicate? When found, taken, pointed out and acclaimed, he
does not speak; even when he is dishonored by some, he refrains. His only
act is to stand forth, stand tall. How will this one save?57
(8) The people ofJabesh and Saul: 11.1-11. The last of the minor artists
is the people of Jabesh Gilead, who make their own contribution to the
'kinging' of Saul roughly similar to the other minor characters described.58
While the father, the uncle, the young boy, and the girls appear early in the
57. The MT ends the episode here, cf. the LXX which has additional information.
The Hebrew text leaves a rough join with the episode that follows.
58. Again, scholarly discussion of the relationship of this episode to the rest of the
nearby material is quite diverse and can be consulted for many good insights. Prominent in the discussion is whether or not this is a kingly deed or simply a 'judicial' one.
For the case that Saul acts as a judge, see Miscall 1986: 66-67; as a king, see Fokkelman 1993: 465-77.
214
69 verses which focus on the man and his position, the people of Jabesh
come almost at the end of the stories of the authoring of Saul. Once again,
the story is straightforward at the surface.59 Nahash of Ammon pitches
camp at the edge of Jabesh of Gilead, such that its inhabitants offer to be
his vassals. His insulting response is that he will accept them as allies only
under circumstances that demean and disable the men: their own gouging
out of their right eyes. It is an odd narrative moment in these chapters: a
king's demand for a people. The desperate men of Jabesh beg a reprieve of
seven days to get some help from another source within Israel. The narrative, again efficient, shows us the scene only at Gibeah of Saul, where the
news of the Jabesh messengers occasions weeping of the people of Gibeah,
presumably over danger to their kin. Though already in a bond of reciprocity with Saul's Benjamin clan and his city Gibeah specifically, the messengers do not ask Saul to actSaul who has recently and publicly been made
king.60 Such a non-asking is noisy indeed. What the people of Jabesh have
done, however, is to set up a seven-day window through which his help
becomes available. It is the king himself, arriving upon the scene once
again behind animals, who queries the source of the weeping, is informed,
and is rushed by the ruah-YHWH. He responds to coerce enough help from
other farmers to encourage the demoralized people of Jabesh. As prominent and puzzling in 1 Sam. 8-12, as the non-asking of Saul, is his initiative in volunteering. We have seen nothing like it from Saul to this point in
the story which represents his shaping as king. The deed that he effectively
leads is calledboth before it occurs and after it has happenedas a saving/tesii 'a and a deed of YHWH (11.9, 13). The narrator, who spends relatively little time on the details of it, rather reinforces the source of it by
describing Saul's decision to respond to the messengers' tale and the
59. Klein 1983: 105, finds little problem as to the site of Jabesh Gilead, locating it
on the east side of the Jordan River, some 20 miles south of the Sea of Galilee. McCarter
1980:202, refers us to Judg. (19-)21, which the link between the outrage of the 11 tribes
at the murder of a concubine at Gibeah of Benjamin, the non-participation of the people
of Jabesh is the counsels against the errant tribe, and the equipping of the dwindled men
of Benjamin with wives taken from daughters of Jabesh. McCarter's map (p. 197) shows
Jabesh equidistant from Gibeah and Ammon. There are many possibilities for intertextual investigations between the two contexts, but at the very least, a relation of indebtedness is established, reason for a leader of Benjamin to assist the people of Jabesh.
60. Noted by Eslinger who comments (as if to explain why) that Saul is still behind
animals and only now destroys his livelihood (1985: 363-68). The tone of Eslinger's
point is at variance with the suggestion of Miscall (1986: 67) that this is Saul's finest
hour.
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weeping people of Gibeah as induced by God's ruah. The people of Jabesh

draw Saul doing a rescue like a judge, responding as orchestrated by the
narrator to the question asked at the end of ch. 10. But Saul also resembles
the king who had been designed in 8.20 to go before the people and fight
their battles, whom YHWH also characterized (9.16) when choosing as
able to save people from foes. He also acts like the anointed of YHWH,
given God's spirit in 10.10. Does one of those roles only bring God's
'saving/^sw 'a' deliverance to people in distress? I think it is impossible to
try to split off the deeds of king and judge here.
But perhaps the more pertinent question for us to ponder is whether a
Benjamin man is a likely bringer of God's saving gift. If the threat is from
the nations with kings who menace, who can save? Since it is the Jabesh
sketchbook being drawn here, it may be helpful to ask what they seem to
wantseparable from what 'the [other Israelite] people' ask. The Jabesh
episode is oddest, perhaps, because it seems at first to be the free lunch
which Samuel indicated was not available. That is, Saul fights for Jabesh
without their asking him to do it and without his taking anything from
them. But, especially if we track the story backwards into Judg. 19-21, the
tribe of Benjaminspecifically at Gibeahhad just embroiled all Israel in
a ruinous war, where the narrator calculates that after the episode of the
concubine, more than 400,000 of Israel and 48,000 of Benjamin, and a substantial number of the adult population of Jabesh died.61 The saving of Jabesh by a man of Benjamin has cost greatly and will continue to exact a
price (1 Sam. 31.11-12; 2 Sam. 2.5-6). That is, the people of Jabesh draw
the king as temporarily effective but very costlyeven destructive, over
time, and they sketch a pattern of relationships that ruinously entangle.
The people of Jabesh draw Saul as a wounded healer, or better, perhaps
as a lethal surgeon, offering help that may not be affordable. Samuel the
prophet is conspicuously absent from this anomalous scene of Saul's nonpassivity.
(9) People and Saul: 11.12-15. There are two ways to see these last verses
of ch. 11. They are either the final event at the end of the Jabesh story or
else the beginning of the episode which comprises ch. 12. The piece has to
be examined from several angles, since it is so undecidable on its own.62
The nub of it comes from a questionor from what may be construed as
one. The people of Gibeah say to Samuel (who has been present only in
61. The casualties are given in Judg. 20.21, 25, 35, 44, 46; 21.11.
62. Eslinger 1985: 372, reviews options for construing the words.
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Saul's words of 11.7), 'Who is the one saying (masculine singular participle) "will Saul rule us/yimhk 'alenu...!" Give the men that we may
kill them' (my translation). The quotation is ambiguous: a statement? a
question? missing a negative? Whose words these are is similarly unclear:
who is 'us'? Though it is certain that their wish is for the death of such a
speaker (or speakersas is frequent in 1 Samuel, singulars and plurals
jostle comfortably but unexpectedly with each other), what is not nearly so
clear is whose quote the three words is. That is, if we are precise about
reused language, it does not suit closely the reported discourse of the
elders, who asked Samuel to 'set' over them such a person (8.4-5,19-20);
nor does it match the language of YHWH at ch. 9 or at 10.11 -12,19. It does
not coincide with the speech of the people at 10.24 or even of the sons
of perversity of 10.27, with whom it is most obviously and frequently
associated. In fact, the lack of a match draws additional attention to the
ambiguity of the three unpunctuated words: Saul.. .rules.. .over us. Commentators urge it be read as a question, or they emend the text to insert a
negative, even imply a tone of scorn (Saul will not rule us\}. But the ambiguity of the utterance is its clearest feature. Is the death sentence aimed at
those whoarguably wrongly after the Jabesh demonstrationhad questioned Saul's capacity to save in 10.27? Is it perhaps an assertion or wish:
Saul will reign over us too? Or is it aimed at those who agreed to a king
when perhaps a judge would do as well, again a point that might have new
relevance after the Jabesh deliverance? Is it aimed at the man himself? Or
at the office he holds? Is it directed at the prophet who, however reluctantly, anointed the king? The only clear thing is that there is some sort of
cavil registered.
Saul speaks for the last time in this section to indicate that none should
be made to die on the day YHWH has 'made salvation'. But it is Samuel,
whose presence is fresh hereexcept insofar as Saul named Samuel when
urging the peoples' participation in the Jabesh actionwho calls them all
to Gilgal to renew the kingship. Here there are three things to watch: the
people, the narrator indicates, make Saul king there, to both rejoicing and
to the accompaniment of communion sacrifices. Saul himself falls silent
and in fact invisible at Gilgal, except as the object of the peoples' coronating. And Samuel, when he speaks up in ch. 12if we are to see 11.12-15
as the narrative context for that materialhas to be seen as addressing the
question asked and the action that is described as ensuing.63 If, as I am
63. Fokkelman 1993:481, attends carefully to the question and sets the whole unit
as 11.14-12.25 in order to make the link obvious.
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217
arguing, the narrative's cosmic question is not simply about Saul as a person or as the first king, but rather the question of whether a dynastic son
and a Benjaminite at thatis 'to be king over us' or if that enterprise is
doomed. If it is the case that the stories in 1 Samuel are doing double duty
both describing a past which occurred and sorting the more open question of what is to come nextthen we can perhaps translate this moment a
little more clearly. At the surface story level, the oddities and ambiguities
have already been exposed. At the more parabolic level, when the problem
is a threatening alliance, leadership came well enough from a Benjamin;
but if we 'read backwards', we must not overlook that part of the problem
came from Benjamin of Gibeah as well. If we are construing rather that
the main issue is about future leadership, then is a sa 'ul reigning over us a
choice to subvert or renew?
In this, the last of our scenes, the impulse to question is overridden by
King Saul himself, by Samuel the prophet, by the people who adjourn to
Gilgal to make Saul king and who share in the feasting, and to rejoice.
Since I am not working to reconstruct the redaction process, I will stop at
noting the persistent presence of the stop/go ahead motif. Once we pass
the events of ch. 12 (already discussed), the question will shift to the
king's removal and replacement.
5. Summary and Conclusions
Who made King Saul king? Many shared in it, are implicated, entangled in
the project. The making of this institution and the selecting of its first
leader was neither inevitable nor automatic, did not simply carry along of
its own momentum. To the contrary. The king was constructed repeatedly,
the energy of authoring him never allowed to peter out. How has the process represented? Strategiesartistic stylesvary, as has been suggested
and that detail will not be repeated. Most foundationally, the king has
taken shape around wordplay and by questions. He is sa 'w//Saul: requested
and lent, asking and asked for. And he is nagid, a designated leader and an
urgent communication. Much of what he needs to know from others who
are in the know he never learns. We, reading, can observe those lacunae.
Saul begins now to encode and to riddle a reflection which others must
interpret so as to understand the past as a corner is being turned in time.
That a man can be a cipher for a social experience, that a king can somehow embody adequately and fruitfully the co-ordinates of a whole dynasty
is not simple to do or obvious to read or to make compelling. But, since
that is the task I have taken upon myself, let me total the columns we have
218
been working with in a slightly different way than I did above (when I
twice suggested my points 1-8 or laying bare the dynamics of the text): to
make the case for the inherent weakness of the king.
a. The Royal Robes
To design a job in absence of the first who must do it may make a certain
kind of sense in our contemporary experience, but in this story it is a
fundamental problem. To seek to remedy a problem without fully naming
and exploring it is similarly disastrous. The royal role was shaped by those
characters who saw limitedly, heard selectively, and spoke somewhat past
each other as they crafted the kingly task. Consequently it suffers from
underdesign. God and the prophet must take some responsibility here, or
such seems to be the narrator's drawing of the characters' shaping of kingship. God's fundamental incapacity in this story (and perhaps in the whole
Bible) is to evoke from a collectivity of human beings a consistent and
deepening response and relationship. That Bible-sized grief is given a
particular shape in this story of monarchy. Saul will provide a superb
study of that condition of yearning estrangement. As the human king was
being asked, God recoiled at rejection but did not make that pain sufficiently focal as subsequent events gathered speed. God and Israel here are
like a squabbling couple who decide to have a baby; perhaps it will consolidate and heal, will strengthen their relatedness, but the odds are really
much against it. More likely it will tear what is already frayed. Of course
even should the deity have exposed more clearly the root problem, there is
little to imply that the biblical people would have been able to address their
cardinal weakness and much to suggest that they would not. The prophet
Samuel takes on here the weaknesses of his kind. Though drawn as privy
to the divine hurt and anger, his communication of it is represented here as
certainly too late and arguably too little. Samuel seems caught in his own
issues, as it were, which distortthat is, affecthow he deals with those
between whom he mediates. To put it in other language: Samuel, like
Moses, is a prophet with a speech impediment. But of course we are talking here about the nature of human speech and communication as well as
about prophecy. Samuel is late, slow, off-beat, leading with his left when
his right is wanted. It is not so much a choice of his as a situation endemic
to his calling.
b. Saul's Skin
Saul is, of course, a son: not an Elide but in fact a Benjaminite. He is tall,
not a propitious quality in this story where the tall are prone to fall. And he
3. Saul's Skin
219
is small, or his tribe is, for reasons that present themselves ignominiously
in Judges. As we focused upon the interactions of the man Saul and those
who have drawn him, we can see how firm and determining has been the
hand of even the slightest of them. Saul was directed to seek the seer and
went. The seer shaped a path for him on which he embarked. Other minor
voices, prophetic assistants we might call them, have abetted the major
authoring of God and Samuel.
Samuel has been opaque with Saul, inconsistent, we might say (with
reference to our image of a quibbling couple raising a child), giving contradictory information most particularly in the famous 10.7-8: 'Do what you
find to do.. .but wait until I come to tell you what to do'. Prophetic speech
will become a surd to the king. Again without imputing motives, it is
difficult to imagine a scenario more likely to go awry than one directed by
such speech. God's selection of Saul is mysterious except for a few brief
comments on the task to be done. Why a tall Benjaminite is a good choice,
why Saul himself is a likely nagid is never made clear as God draws.
Though we may suppose an ill-intentioned setup, I do not make that move.
At most God's refusal to ruminate in our hearing is drawn as a character
trait, perhaps a deficiency, surely part of a perennial mystery. That God
never speaks to Saul is the most lethal element, beginning here and escalating later. Of him, yes, and at him through the agency of the spirit. The
trading of loaded questions, most of which are parried rather than being
taken up directly and straightforwardly by those to whom they were addressed. It is as if they were oddly lobbed into our readers' court for play
rather than rallied between their story interlocutors. The language offers,
however, vast space for readerly imagination.
Saul's own clearest character is to be malleable, suggestible. There is a
strange indecision at his center. Others are able to assign him tasks, to
reverse his stated intent, to redirect him upon occasion almost violently,
leaving what residue we are unable to gauge. His consent is difficult to
read in almost every case. His clearest deed, done for the people of Jabesh,
he credits to God; does he understand what he is saying, or is it a formal
deprecation like some of his other duckings away? Saul's direct discourse
is elusive. He speaks ten times (9.5, 7, 10, 11, 18,21; 10.16; 11.5,7, 13).
His lack of clear language, especially though the most intense moments of
his being made king (in ch. 10 and at the crisis ending ch. 11 and sliding
into ch. 12) seems worrisome. Some of his utterances cancel out: his 'let's
go home' reverses to 'let's go on'; his 'is there a seer here' loses steam
before his diffident 'how is it you are talking thus to me?' Information
220
offered to his uncle is dammed up soon. The question most indicative of

some inner compass is his reaction to Samuel's question to him in 9.20,
with which he seems reactivebut why we do not learn. No self is a definite and decisive kernel, all of us are unraveling and recomposing densities. But Saul's conspicuous lack of saying for or drawing with us, any
center that 'catches' is ominous, but again wonderfully suggestive. Saul is
not consulted and poorly informed. He asks little and those few queries are
not addressed directly. At his core too loose a weave, a broken lattice, Saul
is by turns uncertain, passive, amenable, dissimulating, impulsive, ducking
away, conciliating. The struggle of Saul to find his way comfortably into
the skin designed for him, to find his way with integrity to meet it from
within, is palpable. The anomalies can be glimpsed best in a series of paradoxes which we have seen on the sketch pads and palettes of the artists in
'the narrator's studio'. The tall man hiding. The restrainer of God's people
holding his peace before their outrage. The asker compliant. The smallest
as the tallest. The familiar shape with the new heart. The desire of all disdained by some. The failed seeker found. The ignominious feted. The king
prophesying. The first son taken who will be a taker of sons. The nagid
little aware. It is perhaps not clear to us yet how this reluctant monarch will
cling so ferociously to his throne. We echo the question of the ne'er-dowells: How can this save us?
How the king will relate to the prophet has received the greatest stress in
chs. 911, for the king will relate not so much (at first) to God or people
except through the prophet. The prophet, caught in the middle of this problem which he also has authored, struggles to keep the king on track when
not scolding him for having strayed. Our attention having been directed to
the law of the king (Deut. 17.14-20), we will now be conscious that we
have seen no copy of the law made by the king on which he might meditate, nor does he have access to the one stored with YHWH. That deficiency will need to be taken up by the prophet, who will thus continue to
shape fundamentally the relations between God and people. If God and
people recall a fractious couple, Samuel recalls an inept if sincere parent,
frequently lacking a sense of timing that guides him when to correct and
reprove, when to encourage and console. Consequently, most of Samuel's
energy works at cross-purposes with the king, perhaps with the deity as
well. For we have not seen the king relate with God, since to be given a
new heart or act when rushed by the spirit is not the same as relating with
God. What YHWH most desires, in fact demands, Saul will be incapable
of engendering. Saulunspoken to by the deity and pushed more distant
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221
from God as he himself acts so badly, will not salve the rough relationality
between God and people. In fact, Saul will become notorious for this lack
himself. The king falls fundamentally out of any relationship at all with
God. Saul, not knowing what his kingly task really is, will charge and
defend, will tack and bear down with little insight as he performs his role.
And, not surprisingly, he will miss most of the time, since he lacks fundamental insight. The king, the monarchy, is a blind guide, an unsighted
figure refusing to acknowledge the problem and blustering so as to conceal
it, mostly only from himself. But these facets are not unavailable to us,
depending upon our own self-knowledge and interpretation choices.
c. Bakhtin 's Authoring and Transformative Reading
Why do we have, or how do we manage this representation? How can this
save us! The DH authors a hero, a set of characters (God included) authoring a hero as well as themselves, a parable or riddle of monarchy enfleshed
as a hero. I have had to work hard to bring these Bakhtinian categories
to the biblical Saul, since the contrast with his usual and more obviously
self-aware heroes is so great. And yet Bakhtin's key points are operative: I
and the other maintain difference despite relatedness; we interact despite
uniqueness. I construct myself while 'othering'; I contribute to the shape
of others while 'selfing'. I find my edge as I meet another's; and how I
present my edge or 'skin' provides context for that of the other. Saul is
readable as a construct, a series of negotiations between himself and those
interacting with him, minor to major. He has not been finalized by the
narrator or the characters, even by the artistry of all of them; his options
remain at least partly open. The Saul-self we see coming out to meet his
skin is a shape-shifter, his lack of some stability is a signal problem. But
flaws notwithstanding, my sense and contention is that the authoring is
profoundly sympathetic, in Bakhtin's sense of the term. That is, an author
with considerable skill and insight has investigated deeply and generously
a royal experience that is both familiar and strange to him. Though Bakhtin's naivete in assuming that such intimacy is typically benign is critiqued
by many, I choose here to hold out for the fundamental good intentions of
all involved here; weaknesses abound, to be sure, but malice, no. In fact,
weakness will be fully adequate to do all the damage we shall see. Whether
the aloofness of God with Saul, or the distractedness of the prophet whose
speech is poorly chosen, whether the helpful hindrances or the hindering
helpers among the characters who work with Saulin every instance the
design is defective. And yet if the DH needs a narrative that can make
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visible a terrible faultline, a hero whose incapacity to do the one thing

needful can be appreciated, then it must be so. The man must be known
for what he is if we are to learn from him. If we, reading, are to co-author
Saul with sufficient sympathy to be able to accept what we see from his
angle, then his character needs to be presented accessibly. That is the task
of the language at the site of the hero we must visit and interpret answerably ourselves. Saul's royal life, lived amid these others who will continue
to shape him, will give access to what goes badly wrong in kingship. His
capacity (so far) to be answerable is clearly deficient, can be discerned in
all of his language and that which swirls around him. He is only ask-laden,
his etymological DNA tangible as he comes to shape here. Hence the capacity of his character to embody and present for readerly reflection and
appropriation the mystery of this royal failure which brings down so many.
The exercise is not gratuitous; if monarchy with its gross power inequities
has been a fundamental mistake, it must not be repeated, reinscribed, easy
though such a move might be for a community planning a return from
exile. The exploration and the embodiment the DH makes of the story of
Israel and God with kings embodies as well the basic rift of God and
humans, among humans, and even of the split self; in the language made
available at the site of the character Saul we may visit and become more
familiar ourselves with the dynamic. The weaknesses, sympathetically and
yet strongly drawn, invite our own recognitionnot to fall collapsed and
snared into them but to gain from what we have seen as we then resume
our own positions.
Chapter 4
INCAPACITY FOR ANSWERABILITY:
THE FIRING OF KING SAUL(! SAMUEL 13-15)
The reader is left to ponder who this Yhwh is who keeps choosing leaders
with such clay feet.
Randall C. Bailey (1995: 227)
At the very beginning.. .the narrator has set the stage by portraying a king
deprived of information.
Kenneth M. Craig (1994: 225)
.. .Saul's piety is the problem of the day.
Jan P. Fokkelman (1986: 69)
What if God did not know with certitude what would happen with the kingship in Saul's hands? I have tried to show elsewhere that this limited knowledge of the future is a basic substratum of much, if not all, Old Testament
thought'.
Terence E. Fretheim (1985: 595)
1. Point of Entry
Having just watched the determined if conflicted decision for monarchy
and the careful but simultaneously heedless selection of the first monarch,
we arrive at once to an undermining of the king, if not the kingship. By the
end of ch. 13 Saul's dynasty has been pronounced disqualified from
succeeding him; and by the end of ch. 15, he himself has been fired from
his role as king. However, as the book of 1 Samuel draws to a close at ch.
31, Saul's head will still be the one from which the crown must be lifted
by his enemies. The once-reluctant candidate for king will hang on to his
position with all the strength he has. The challenge of this chapter is to
make visible the means of representing that anomaly: the king as representative of an institution, terminated early but somehow continuing in place;
and Saul as a human being resisting a word he has been given. The
challenge is to do both of those readings skillfully. The epigraphs pose the
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issues rather well: Whose are the feet of clay? Do clay feet stand under or
prop up ignorance, whether royal or divine? Does the king's downfall rise
from ignorance or from his sin, or is it perhaps really a matter of excessive
piety? And the questions are not simply for Saul. As he shares a relation
with Samuel the prophet, surely with God, and with the peopleincluding
prominently here his son Jonathanthey continue implicated collaboratively in the same project, as do his enemies, the Philistines and Amalekites. As the narrator orchestrates all these players and others, we must
read responsibly as well. We might start by counterposing Bailey's question: Is there perhaps some human being with some other kind of feet than
clay? How do any of us cope with the feet of clay on which we stand to
interact with others like us? And how, from such feet, do we ponder God
with answerability?
As will become apparent, there is something artificial in trying to name,
let alone evaluate, the way in which an ancient literary hero can take proper
responsibility for his charge. But to show his failureat least in negative
spaceis the task of this chapter. In order to envision the situation in terms
compatible with what Bakhtin can contribute, we might envision a pair of
spectra, one underneath the other. At the left end of the top one we may
find abstract moral precepts such as might be drawn from Deuteronomy,
certain encapsulating formulas for behavior that are identifiable within the
DH, ritual that may be presumed to work automatically or at least reliably,
disembodied principles like retribution, coded ideology. At the right end
of that same line is nihilism, heedlessness of morality, disregard for the
pull of traditional wisdom, irresponsibility. As we consider the second
spectrum, at one of its ends is the sort of entrapment in specifics of race,
ethnicity, class, gender, religion, nationalism, role, and experience that so
easily snares (at least moderns) into extreme individuality; at the other
extreme is a general melange or puree of such factors that overlooks or
disregards the key distinctions produced by the set of variables just mentioned and renders them mushed, universal, meaningless. The task of the
hero is to situate himself between the danger of both sets of inauthentic
extremes. He will need to select wisdom from his tradition, try and test
what is embodied in law and custom, make use of ritual and procedure as
called for, taking care to bring his accumulated consciousness to each
choice so as to avoid amorality. How his role as king, with all of its particularity and specificity, limits and directs his choices and those of others
is his to guard, but with appropriate consideration of the viewpoints of the
others involved. In Bakhtin's terms, Saul must posit what he has been
4. Incapacity for Answerability
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given. There is no handbook to tell Saul how to be king, yet it is urgent

that he do it well. Thatand howhe fails this particular dance is the
story we are told.
Aiming to live primarily from the place where each of us standsour
own particular clay feetthe responsible person finds footing that no one
else can claim. The loose weave which is at the center of such persons is
constructed from the many strands of relatedness which connect us to
many others, whose own strings are similarly entangled to compose us and
others. The answerable person takes what is given (some of the precepts,
formulas, ritual and principles, the situated details that comprise our existence) and makes them workable, each in our own life. There is nothing of
the cafeteria approach here; choices are made as carefully as possible, with
great intentionality, since they accumulate and compose perichoretically
the loose substance that makes an interrelating self. Such a life will admit
no major splitting off of what we desire, think, do, say; nor will it make
fundamental distinctions between how we relate to other creatures (of
whatever type: self to self, to other humans, to other sentient life) or to the
source of life. The raw material of our deeds and the shape we impose
upon themor the reality which takes shape as we act answerablymust
be seen for their interrelatedness. The opposite of living answerably, we
shall see, is Bakhtin's alibi: to claim that I was elsewhere, that my deed
was not my own but someone else's. Bakhtin's pretender will account for
the situation where I become too caught into how I want to see myself,
how I want to see you seeing me, how I want to look to myself through
your eyes and as you speak to and of me. The challenge of answerability is
to negotiate these juxtaposed rocks which form the path under our feet, so
that we grow in the capacity to transform all that we find given and make
it posited, customized, as it were.
2. Bakhtin on Answerability
A huge and potentially useful insight of Bakhtin's in this study of a biblical narrative is articulated in certain parts of his writings that are usually
considered more philosophical-ethical than literary. His concept 'answerability' (or 'responsibility', preferred by some to translate the same Russian word1) roots in the same dialogic sense of reality that permeates all of
1. For example, Morson and Emerson (1990: 76) seem to make a distinction
between ethical responsibility and addressive answerability, not significant in the present context, so far as I can see.
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his thought and writing. Most succinctly, answerability is the lifework of

becoming a self. A cluster of comments can ramify the point a bit:
Each of us occupies a unique time and place in life, an existence that is conceived not as a passive state but as an activity, an event. I calibrate the time
and place of my own position, which is always shifting, in the existence of
other human beings and the natural world by means of the values that I
articulate in deeds. Ethics is not abstract principles but the pattern of actual
deeds I perform in the event that is my life. My self is that through which
such performance answers other selves and the world from the unique place
and time I occupy in existence (Clark and Holquist 1984: 64).
Nielsen summarizes the question for Bakhtin: '...how should I act, not
because of the rules or the expectation of my duty (as with Kant), but how
should I act given the imaginary but not fictional subjectivity of another
who can answer me backhowever different that subjectivity might be
from my own' (Nielsen 1998: 214). Morson and Emerson pose answerability as a response to the question: 'How is the self constituted as an
entity that performs responsible acts in the world? How does my "I" and
the acts it performs fit into the culture understood as a whole?' (Morson
and Emerson 1990: 176). Bakhtin himself says (with an opacity that is
assisted somewhat by the previous statements of his commentators), 'An
answerable act or deed is precisely that act which is performed on the basis
of an act of acknowledgment of my obligative (ought-to-be) uniqueness'
(1993: 42). Bakhtin uses the image of'signing' for answerability: taking
responsibility for making an act one's own (Morson and Emerson 1989:
16).
Clark and Holquist maintain that Bakhtin's whole life is spent on various repositionings of how answerability is to be managed, and in fact they
provide 'architectonics of answerability' as the name of his lifework (1984:
63). According to Morson and Emerson, 'The creation of an integral self is
the work of a lifetime, and although that work can never be completed, it
is nonetheless an ethical responsibility' (1990: 31). The topic of responsibility threads and trails through Bakhtin's writings. Hirschkop stresses the
cardinal position responsibility has for Bakhtin by the following assertion:
The subject of Bakhtin's ethical philosophy is therefore not a distinct sphere
of ethical or moral actions or a domain of distinctively ethical considerations
(which one would then apply to otherwise independent fields like politics,
science, art, and so on), but the absolute pre-eminence of the ethical reality
which endows all spheres of action with meaning and purpose. Ethics would
be not a science or a domain of reason, but a 'recognition' [Russian word] of
the ontological facts, from which everything else would flow (1999:149-50).
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Aileen Kelly adds, 'All the values of actual life and culture are arranged
around the basic architectonic points of the actual world of the performed
act or deed...'; she concludes, the architectonics of answerability is for
Bakhtin not a theory but an agenda for a lifetime and more (1999: 206207; see also Haynes 1995: Chapter 3).
Before explaining in a bit more detail what is involved in this large
notion, it is perhaps clarifying to see what lies opposite of answerability.
Bakhtin has two terms for the refusal to live answerably and supplements
them with other contraries as well. His 'pretender' seeks to avoid the project of selfhood, primarily by living according to others' norms or by hiding within a role that allows for representative or ritualistic living (we
might say rubristic, where 'perqs' of the role are assimilated to one's own
sense of self (Morson and Emerson 1990: 31). The pretender might live
like a character in a novel (we might think of other likelier places where
this particular temptation liesHollywood, Madison Avenue, Wall Street
or some more local address)but in any case some place where we absorb
certain reigning norms of our own subcultures, handing over to that authority decisions which need to be made by the self. Pretending, in this
sense, can also mean to overrate the self one sees in the mirror (Morson
and Emerson 1990: 181). To live with an'alibi in Being'means for Bakhtin to live nowhere, that is, elsewhere from where in fact one is situated
(Morson and Emerson 1989: 19). Bakhtin's non-alibi-in-Being can be
defined as follows: 'I cannot be relieved of answerability for the commission of an act by an alibi, that is by claiming to have been elsewhere than
at the place of commission'.2 Nielsen sums up: 'My non-alibi in Being
means to struggle with the seduction of pretending[,] where I imagine how
the other might see me or I imagine how I would like them to see me'
(1998: 22). The avoidance of shaping what is given into what one posits is
another refusal of answerability, the living apart from one's own valuegenerativity (Morson and Emerson 1990: 194).
Another string of qualities antithetical to the answerable includes that
which is theoretist or propositional, abstract or universal, the systematizable, reductive and transcribable, the rootless, non-compellent, indifferent,
detached, as well as the rule-bound and norm-driven. According to Hirschkop, responsibility (or answerability) replaces the categorical imperative in
moral discourseall such strictures, including those of religion (1999:
153; see also Kelly 1999: 195). Nielsen qualifies, if I understand him
2.
Bakhtin 1993: 95 n. 111, added by Liapunov.
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correctly, that Bakhtin does not so much dismiss the Kantian postulates in
themselves as argue against their formal and disembodied capacity to
ground answerability adequately (Nielsen 1998: 218). Commentators are
also careful here not to confuse answerability with absolute relativism or
with the extremes of post-modernism (see Dop); the choice is not system
or nothing (Emerson 1997: 71). Kelly urges that we avoid dichotomizing
among pairs like pluralism and theoretism, absolutism and nonconsistency, unitary patterns and chaos; Morson and Emerson add to those pairs
the personal and social (1999: 193). The fatal flaw, perhaps, is the failure
or refusal of responsibility, which is why daily life is such a good place to
see answerabilitywhich is not only for special occasions (1989: 13).
Bakhtin warns that though the notion of answerability can sound narrow
and individualistic, such is not the case (1993: 50). Answerability bridges
the realms of life and art, mind and world, self and other. And yet, as explained above in terms of authoring, this denial of isolation, this interpenetration avoids collapse of one into another, as we saw to be the case with
certain kinds of authoring (Bakhtin 1993:15-17; Clark and Holquist 1984:
77-78; Morson and Emerson 1989: 10-12). Kelly also makes the case for
answerability as part of human creativity: The process of creating an ethical deed, not according to some abstract scheme but from and for a particular design lies at the heart of morality and should be the prime concern
of moral philosophy (1999: 206). The root of answerability and the strong
sense of moral freedom it requires and generates is rooted in our unique
and unrepeatable situation in time and space (Bakhtin 1993: 40-41; Kelly
1999: 203). It is just that position which must be enacted, intonatedanswered for, signedsince no one else is in the position to do it. But no less
is it intensively shaped by innumerable value centers of our 'others': 'Life
knows two value centres that are fundamentally and essentially different,
yet are correlated with each other: myself and the other; and it is around
all these centres that all of the concrete moments of Being are distributed
and arranged' (Bakhtin 1993:74). Answerability flows from a certain kind
ofintersubjectivitywhich for Bakhtin is Christie (Hirschkop 1999:153).
There is no set content to answerability.
Since it can be useful to step into the realm of analogy to discover from
another angle what Bakhtin means, we can consider the example he rather
oddly and simplistically adduces, the realm of bookkeeping (presumably
from his own experience with that task)we enter existence through
deeds, which like ledger entries, mark us as answerable (Clark and Holquist 1984: 74). More uplifting is the analogy Neilsen suggests when
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naming the moral and aesthetic answerability of a teacher to a student, a

parent to a child, a lover to a beloved, and so forth (Nielsen 1998: 227).
Emerson, reflecting on Bakhtin's contributions on the centenary of his
birth, comments on Bakhtin's own existential answerability:
What was [his] 'moral deed'?... In part, surely, it was surviving arrest, and
re-integration during the Stalinist period without compromising himself or
endangering others, without hungering after higher professional rank or a
Lenin Prize, and without giving into the vanities of victimhood ('Never', [a
critic] writes, 'is there the slightest hint that his own fate as a human being
and a scholar, kept him from expressing his ideas') (Emerson 1997:22-23).
Another place germane to see the workings of answerability and the various illegitimate efforts to escape it is in the Russian novel. Answerability
is not simply a series of isolated acts; there must be continuity, which
narrative can supply, thus serving ethics as well as aesthetics (Hirschkop
1999: 239).
It becomes clear that Bakhtin grew fond of discussing answerability
from within the scrutiny of novels. He noted that the starting point is not a
formula or principle but 'an actual acknowledgment of one's own participation in unitary Being-as-event...' which cannot be expressed theoretically but must be experienced (1993: 40). I cannot easily speak for the
answerability of another, though the 'sympathetic co-experience' required
of authoring moves me closer to it.3 Hence the examples from Dostoevsky,
the various characters drawn there, are more useful than more abstract discussion. Richard Lynch raises the whole question of whether in the Dostoevsky book(s) Bakhtin is actually writing through 'mediated discourse'
about an actual social situation. That is, Lynch maintains that the whole
question of polyphonic authoring and the language and means of representation at the level of characters in a novel is really a somewhat coded
discussion about authority and social relations. He suggests that the topic
is unfolded more directly in the 'Voloshinov' works (1993:102-106). Malcolm Jones, who calls Bakhtin undoubtedly the most brilliant reader of
Dostoevsky in our time, credits him with ringing a new paradigm for reading the novels that accounts for a good deal if not everything. Jones discusses with care and detail Bakhtin's readings of Dostoevsky heroes: the
idea for the doublehow such a character registers constant scrutiny, how
3. Discussed by Bakhtin (1993: 38-50) and by Morson and Emerson in their

discussion (1989: 10-12).
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a hero's inner conflict comes through the passing of language from mouth
to mouth, how language exposes and provokes a hero, the underground
man with his infinite deferrals and compulsive lurchings, the conflictedness of a character which can in time drive him madworking best, Jones
suggests, when the character is frantic to know or when an insecure character is under pressure to take a clear stand (1990: 77-95, Chapter 4).
The gain for reading of 1 Samuel is in some ways unexpected, a bit
oblique. If, as has been suggested, creating a self is the most difficult
human quest, insofar as each of us struggles to 'do' a self whose integrity
we can claim, love and respect, then the failure to engage the project is
proportionally serious. The challenge to create an answerable T, for which
I need many other collaborating others (selves to them, of course), is the
central test of an aesthetic (including artistic and ethical) approach to the
world, and it is one that Saul pretty conspicuously fails. To indicate some
of the ways in which the failure of an answerable self is part of Saul's
representation and to track the significance of that portrait answerably is
the goal of my reading and writing. I will be cued by Bakhtin's preference
for literary situations rather than more abstract ways to discuss answerability. As before, Polzin has some contributions which need first to be named.
I will summarize Polzin briefly in six points from chs. 13-15 of 1 Samuel
with my own purposes in mind, leaving aside much that is valuable in
order to follow up in one way or another on selected items. Among Polzin's helpful points in this material, first, he reminds us that only Samuel is
the source of the promise he mentions as it is canceled, the promise to
Saul's heirs (construing that 'establishing your kingdom forever' means a
dynasty). Second, the references to Gibeah have, at least on biblical readers, the impact of connecting Saul's characterization and his tendency to
intrude his personal issues into policy with certain figures in the book of
Judges (as well as with other events at the end of that book); it is not a very
desirable link. Third, if Saul fails as king at Gilgal, so does Samuel fail as
a prophet, his words of ch. 10 not coming true effectively (all in Polzin
1989:126-35). Saul is not the character who failed to show for the appointment. Fourth, Polzin points out in the rest of the long Philistine military
confrontation the high amount of ritual language and dichotomous choices,
suggesting that Saul's obsessing with ritual is discredited and that Jonathan is drawn opposing his father's moves, abetted by the narrator (Polzin
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1989: 130-37). One of the contrasts sketched his the eye/heart differences
that marks Saul and Jonathan at 14.7 and 40 respectively.
In a fifth point, Polzin makes the wonderful comment that Saul's character zone is to inquire, contrasted with Jonathan's, which is more to show
himself. Those who hide (Saul and the Hebrews) also make a contrast with
Jonathan. Jonathan is drawn to dispute with his father, a tendency the narator abets. Saul's disposition is to punish, which he gets wrong consistently.4 Sixth, Polzin similarly underlines the capacity of the DH to catch a
story well in a single image, as he will here with Agag's self-presentation
to Samuel (Polzin 1989:139-40). Perhaps Polzin's most valuable nexus of
insight centers around the ambiguity and complexity of repentance, where
his readings show characters to turn first this way and then the other.
Samuel slows Saul from sparing Agag, God does not spare Saul despite
his confessing and turning. Repentance does not force God's hand, or at
least Saul's turning does not. Agag shows no sign of repentance, hopeful
even at the end, but his demeanor does not save him (Polzin 1989: 13947). And victories come amid these various moves, so that we can make
not simple equation between right behavior and success or some inversion
of that formula.
4. Setting Saul's Answerability
Why is the concept of answerability, in certain ways so alien from ancient
Hebrew prose, useful for considering the character of Saul? Scholars
both historical-critical and newer-literarytake up the question of what
Saul did so wrong as to be rejected as king by those who had set him into
place. Historians approach the question in one set of ways and literary
theorists adopt a different set of assumptions for negotiating the same text.
As indicated in the Introduction, I have no confidence that the story in chs.
13-15 can give us access to the failures of an historical Saul. And I disagree with the fairly extensive set of literary critics whose aim (stated
explicitly or working more hiddenly) is to read the psychology of the
narrative Saul. My aim here, rather, is to discuss the failure of the monarchic project as represented in discourse through the incapacity of at least
one central character to be answerable. I will focus on the particular language that articulates it and claim my own reading (rather than ascribing
4. Polzin 1989: 137-39. Alter 1999: 83, makes a similar point: '...Saul's failed
inquiry here participates in a larger pattern in his story: he is constantly seeking knowledge of what is about to happen.. .but this knowledge is repeatedly withheld from him'.
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my claims primarily to historical facticity, authorial intention, or foolproof

gap-reading of literary characters). So, though I will explore Saul's struggles with answerability, those of the other characters (including God) and
of the narrator will require participation as well; and I must be answerable
for the reading I do, offering it for critique of its efficacy rather than claiming it as right.
To make as clear as possible the assumptions which ground my reading
of the representation of 1 Sam. 13-15, let me state seven. First, the rejection of Saul as king, which I will call 'the firing'in order to stress that
both the people's rejection of God and God's pushing away of Saul are not
ultimate and total repudiations of persons and relationalitiesis not a
matter of some trivial or technical infraction. The move of replacing Saul
is too important for it to hang on some thread of divine whimsicality or
petty tyranny. Second, insofar as Saul is a construction of a whole set of
experience of Israel with kings (and kings with Israel) and that the rejection/firing is the story to be offered for reflection, then the issue shifts from
what a man did wrong to how DH is going to represent a huge and historical-social reality in terms of how a character, in company with others,
went wrong. Third, this general 'failing', which I want to call itnot to
mitigate it from the language of sin and idolatry which is used in the narrative but to underline the chronic, active and irresolvable nature of itis
the working out of the most dangerous part of the relationship under discussion: in the sensitive nexus of military and cultic events. Saul's mismanaging of such topoi is a classic of his characterization.
Fourth, the description of the failing will not simply fill a moment but
will show itself as a pattern, which will have been sketched repeatedly.
But it is also on occasion shown punctiliarly, in an instant, in a mise-enabyme like Hannah's delaying to request and bequest her son, Eli's falling,
the tall man's hiding; shortly we will see it in another king's presumptuous
and premature approach to the prophet. Once we get a fix on the failing,
we will see it everywhere. Fifth, Saul's incapacity to be answerable is
inclusive. The relationships under discussion involve not just king but how
a king will work with God, people, and prophet. In the context I have
already stipulated for the production and appropriation of DH, the urgency
is to discern whether monarchic leadership is about to or has run its course;
but the other three parties will continue to interact for some time, problems
notwithstanding. Sixth, the failing will get exposure certainly from action
but primarily from talk; talk is what happens (as Bakhtin says of certain
novels). And what is most talked out is Saul's inability to be answerable
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for the responsibility he has been given. At the most obvious level, we
have never seen him make his copy of the law to read, do himself and
enact with the people; hence he is hampered in that foundational aspect of
his charge and has to resort to other places to get his information. These
sources consistently do not work well for him. More subtly, he fails at the
job description we saw authored in the previous chapter of this studynot
only because he is a personal failure but because he is a structural failure.
How his kingship does not work well is what is shown and explored. The
failing is not psychologically rooted, though since it is sketched in a
person, it is psychologically plausible. Nor is it historical, as though there
were some discrete episode to be recovered or reconstructed.
Seventh, Samuel will be the speaker to articulate the king's failing most
clearly, but he does not do it with magic and failsafe language; he speaks
with fragile and fallible words, the only sort human beings, even prophetsperhaps especially prophetshave at hand. And the failings he articulates are not simply the king's. Samuel implicates all the participants to
some extent since the project of evaluating the monarchy is common to
God, people, king and prophetand to storyteller and readers. Part of the
answerability is God's here, represented in terms of the issue of divine
repentance or regret. It is too easy to take potshots at Saul, who is so easy
to set up as starting on his left foot and then never able to get in step, so
clumsy until the dance ends. Saul was chosen by God, who must answer
for it; and we must read answerably as well, so that we take on the complexities of this sort of literature. Scholars blame variously: some focus on
Samuel (Eslinger and Polzin); some on God (Bailey and Exum); many aim
heavily at Saul (Fokkelman and Sternberg). They are not wrong, but there
are other possible angles from which to appraise.
My thesis is as follows: Saul's failing as king may be read as a massive
and systemic failure on his part to take responsibility for the self and role
he has been given to be. As Polzin has noted, Saul's fundamental character
is to ask; he seems unable to 'answer'. Specifically, he is most charged
with a failure to hear or heed well. As noted above, he has omitted the task
of reading his scroll of torah, so he has nothing wise to ruminate as he
shapes his deeds. He intersects with the other key players, but he does not
'catch' with any of them such that there comes to be a design of self as he
interacts. With no such center from which to be, he careens from excess to
defect, from malleability to rigidity, from frenzy to inaction; but he can and
is always faulted, since he consistently misses. To put the thesis in Bailey's
terms, the problem is not Saul's clay feet but his inability to stand squarely
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on them and cope from there. His failing afflicts others, who in fact contribute to his lack rather than help him with it. Saul seems capable of remorse
if not repentance (turning back, confessing his sin and transgression), but
even those moves on his part are, at least for the moment, ineffective. This
collective project of how the king persists in alibis and pretending makes
sense of the DH presentation of Saul. It is not 'his fault' that he fails. His
role as a hero is to make knowable, granted in parable or riddle, a cardinal
defect. That he fails, and how, is given to us for consideration. Our challenge is to read it answerably.
a. Overview
Chapters 13-15 are taken up with two significant military actions, cultic
elements playing a prominent role in each. The first battle is against the
Philistines, a foe contemporary with Saul; the second is with the Amalekites, an ancient enemy. In each case, presumably thanks to YHWH, Saul
and Israel secure a victory, but also in each case actions of Saul diminish the triumph in some way. Each episode offers as well an encounter
between king and prophet (with God audible to us behind Samuel), where
the prophet, claiming to speak for God, critiques Saul and announces a
rejection of the king by God. Yet as each event ends, Saul continues his
rule. The failing of Saul has, in each of the battle narratives, certain common characteristics. Saul is unable to restrain or control the people, who
grab at spoil in some inappropriate way. Saul in fact struggles to manage
himself, and part of what thwarts him is a lack of the information he needs.
Jonathan's moves, secret from Saul, lead to the loss of Saul's authority
and the non-fulfilling of his oath which ends ch. 14. Saul's lack of access
to the feeling of regret we hear God impart to Samuel before the prophet
and king speak puts Saul at a disadvantage in the second encounter (ch.
15). In both conversations, Saul's verbal strategy, when questioned by
Samuel, is to place the faulty actions of 'the others' before or mixed in
with his own deeds. His 'rhetoric of persons', as Sternberg aptly names it,
evidences his inability to stand answerable for his own leadership, though
he is not wholly wrong in his descriptions. Reactive, he is slow to get to 'I
statements' about the actions under prophetic scrutiny.
The charges against him, though they can be made to seem trivial or
obvious by commentators, are serious, at least in the narratives. As we
shall see, Jonathan's accusation that Saul has troubled the land has heavy
235
overtones, as does Samuel's language accusing the king of foolishness and

neglect of what he was commanded, then of sins of sorcery and idolatry.
The narrator's language is similarly harsh. Whether those words are conspicuously too strong for the deeds to which they are attached is a matter
for our inquiry. If Samuel speaks strongly, two other character sets underspeak. The people are either silent in regard to Saul or back Jonathan in
the face of his father's clear intent to condemn the young man; and God
speaks only with Samuel and never to the king, whom Saul comes to characterize to Samuel as 'your God'.5 Saul's radical incapacity to collaborate
effectively with prophet, people and deity in the most serious and interlocking realm of war and worshipa topos we have seen before and will
encounter againa fruit of his inability to suit the role crafted for him,
marks him and the experience he represents as fatally flawed, a comment
reinforced graphically as Agag is dispatched.
b. Saul vs Philistines: The Battle ofMichmas Pass to Aijalon: 1 Samuel
13-14
As Jobling enjoys exploring and reporting, the Philistines have, over time,
represented for readers more than their likely historical selves.6 Without
needing to make the case quite so strongly or extensively as he does, I
think in DH the Philistines also assume a significance slightly out of focus
in terms of their likely actual existence with Israel. They appear on the
scene first in Judges and dominate the enemy landscape during the time of
the last judges (Samson, Eli, Samuel) and throughout the reign of Saul, to
be defeated eventually by David as he consolidates his power. Put differently, they are the constant external threat during the narrative time of transition to monarchy. They are the opponent from whom Saul was assigned
by God to save Israela hope not ultimately fulfilled. Saul does not save
Israel from Philistines, nor does anyone save Saul from them. They are
'his' enemy. Insofar as the Saul persona stands for kings, the Philistines
5. Exum's work on the commingling of the characterization of king and deity is
very thought-provoking. She claims that Saul cannot be diagnosed apart from God
(1992:17) and suggests that God acts from a strong sense of anger and rejection (p. 35).
Though I do not agree with her tendency to see Saul's guilt as a byproduct of God's
character in quite the way she sketches it (p. 40), I appreciate the link that she makes
between these two characters. Saul's guilt is clearer to me than Exum sees it (pp. 27-29).
6. Jobling writes at length of how various readers have understood Philistines to be
a pejorative and expansive category of 'other' (see 1998: 197-243, Part IV, for his
extensive treatment of them).
236
are a royal nemesis, the dangerous other who threatens Israel's life in
the land. Though there will be other references to the protracted struggle
between these protagonists, the significant encounters include this one
early in Saul's reign (chs. 13-14) and the one which closes his life (chs. 28
and 31 in the larger matrix of chs. 27-31). This first encounter gets unusual detail, at least as to tactics, and it is the matrix for some grievous
errors of Saul. In order to look at it carefully and fruitfully for the hypothesizing of Saul's radical incapacity to 'sign', we will look at its (five)
phases and the event which concludes it.
The episode begins abruptly and enigmatically (following a problematic
notation relating to Saul's reign). Its first phase (13.2-4) shows Saul
employing judgelike tactics, gathering and splitting a small force into
units: 2000 with him at Michmas near Bethel and 1000 with a character
we meet now only as Jonathan in Gibeah of Benjamin.7 Jonathan, whether
according to plan or not, strikes a Philistine garrison (or official) at Geba,
with two results that we can see. The Philistines react by mustering (v. 5),
and Saul activates 'the Hebrews' to learn of the event. Commentators vary
in their assessment of this joint deed of Jonathan and Saul;8 similarly, the
question of who 'the Hebrews' are and what they are supposed to understand when the trumpet sounds has several possibilities.9 One consequence,
the narrator implies, is that Israel hears that Saul has defeated the garrison,
that the Philistines were riled over it. They gather themselves at Gilgal.
Commentators who are tracking Saul's missteps here tend to accuse him
of taking credit for Jonathan's move, but that is not what the narrator says.
In fact, the assertion looks to be a quotation of 'all Israel', not of Saul nor
even of the narrator. The people conclude and articulate that their king has
7. McCarter's heuristic map and comments (1980:227,231,237) suggest that the
two Israelite leaders and these men are about a mile apart, though with a ravine
between them. Miscall 1986: 83-84, provides parallels to stories in Judges.
8. Edelman 1991: 77, thinks Jonathan spoiled the synchronicity of the pincer
movement by pre-empting Saul's own strike. It is not possible to tell, but important not
to assume that the move is obvious to assess or that the co-ordination between these
two went well.
9. It is a bit unexpected that Saul would address his own people by the 'outsider'
title. Fokkelman 1986: 30, suggests that he is using a Philistine term of contempt
ironically; Klein 1993:125-26, refers to a suggestion of Gottwaldthat by 'Hebrew' we
are to understand the apiru mercenary types that may have been shifting from one side
here to another, especially if, as is supposed, the Philistines have an outpost at Gibeah
(1 Sam. 10.5, though the reference is to Gibeah Elohim). The Gibeah and Geba locations are not possible to sort cleanly in the view of all.
237
struck the garrison. Theirs also, presumably, is the assessment that Israel
had become odious to the Philistines, hence the assembling at Gilgal
(though Saul had just sent them all home). More significant, perhaps, is the
narrator's redirection of our attention back to the anointing of Saul and the
third sign of Saul's mingling with prophets, set at the Philistine garrison at
Gibeah, where Saul was also instructed by Samuel to '... do whatever you
see fit to do, for God is with you...' and 'go down to Gilgal [and]... wait...'
(10.7-8). At least one scholar thinks we are able now to connect those two
phases of earlier direction to these events in ch. 13.10
A phase two ensues (13.5-14). The Philistines gather themselves to fight
at Michmas. There the numbers of chariots, horsemen, and infantry begin
to be counted but finally just compared to sand on the seashore. The sight
of such a quantity of foe and some condition of already being hard-pressed
scatters Saul's people into hiding: caves, holes, crags, tombs, wells. Some
even cross the Jordan to the east. Thus, though he started with large numbers and sent them home, and though those numbers evidently returned to
him after Jonathan's deed, resources once again ebb from Saul. The few
he still has follow him to Gilgal trembling. If, as Long suggests, Saul has
done what 'he found' to doact decisively to engage the Philistineshe
is now awaiting the arrival of Samuel to do sacrifices and tell him what
comes next. Without delaying too long over questions that are beyond us
to solve (e.g., why there is need to offer sacrifices before a battle11), we
wait with Saul for seven days while he anticipates Samuel, evidently as
instructed by the prophet in 10.8. And while waiting, some of those few
who had so far remained with him, though trembling, now scatter. The
narrator seems to me sympathetic to Saul's problem: diminishment of
reserves on the eve of battle.
10. Long discusses these verses (1989: 51-58, 63-64, and 78-83), suggesting that
we see two complementary but separate pieces of direction, caught in ch. 13 by two
complementary but separate follow-ups. The question of how 10.7-8 is linked to ch. 13
is much discussed; Long's treatment seems feasible to me.
11. The act of doing such a liturgy before a battle seems unmotivated in this passage
(Klein 1983:127); nor is it clear from simply this context exactly what the offerings are
for: to stem desertions (so Fokkelman 1986: 38), to sacrifice instead of fight (Miscall
1986: 87). The significance may lie in the fact that the same elements cluster in the next
battle(l Sam. 15).MosheWeinfeld 1992:177, clarifies that Deuteronomic law does not
anticipate or describe expiatory corporate sacrifice. He does not mention this passage
from 1 Samuel, though if his distinction between D law and that of other sources is
valid, it also reinforces the sense that Saul has misperceived the situation.
238
And so in 13.9, Saul calls for the offerings to be brought near and he
does the holocausts. Two things strike me here. First, we get no inner
process from Saul, who will offer it only when questioned; and second,
what is most conspicuous here is Saul's inability to keep the people (fighting men, I assume) with him. In any case, as Saul is finishing the holocausts, Samuel does appear and asks a question: 'What have you done?' It
is difficult to think of the question as primarily informational, or that it has
a simple answer ('holocausts'). And only now we are given Saul's inner
process, 27 words worth (Miscall 1986: 85). Saul mentions three: the people scattering from him, the failure of Samuel to come at the appointed
time, and the Philistines accumulating at Michmas. Then, Saul continues,
'I said, "Now the Philistines will have come down upon me at Gilgal and I
have not entreated the favor of the LORD"; so I forced myself/restrained
myself [my translation here] and offered the burnt offerings'.12 Before
Samuel speaks, what can we notice? Saul cites the otherspeople, Samuel, Philistines, Godas factors in his decision. What he explains the narrator has already assured us is the case. Nor can we simply suppose, as
have some commentators, that his error is to preside illicitly in a priestly
role. And I have already stipulated that it cannot be a minor thinga
couple of minutes of timing that is the root of the issue; nor do I go along
with those who suspect Samuel to have timed his arrival so as to have
caught Saul off balance (Gunn 1980: 66; Alter 1999: 73). So what is the
offense?13 On a cultic/military occasion, Saul cannot lead well. He has
dismissed and regathered his men; the battle commences not at Saul's
command but when Jonathan strikes. He is delayed by his absent prophet.
The king sees his troops are going and the enemy is massing; alone and
without recourse to advice, he acts precipitously, to appease//?//? God. His
language~wa 'et 'apeqitself implies that he had to place some effort
between what he did and some alternative behavior. And the project he
names seems out of place in terms of God's character, since God has
demanded nothing of the sort in any scene that we have seen. Far from
12. Both(Polzin 1989:129)and(Long 1989: 8 8-90) prefer the sense of Saul pulling
himself together and asserting some personal control over the sense that he forced himself to do something; Long reviews the usage of the verb 'pq in the hithpael, which
seem to support his reading. In the context of the diminishing numbers, it is feasible to
imagine Saul tempted to join those departing.
13. Jobling 1998: 85-86, thinks Saul's core error is to interpret wrongly the snarl of
10.7-8: but I cannot follow him there, since interpretation is inevitable. As Long points
out, however long Saul waited, it was clearly not sufficient; but he finds the reaction
disproportionate to the deed (1989: 85-90).
239
restraining the people, Saul seems to find it a struggle to manage his own
role, and when he pulls himself together, he errs (see Exum 1992:162 n. 56
for an alternative). Saul shows himself unablenot necessarily unwillingto perform the charge he has been given to lead the people successfully against Philistines. And he implicates his 'others' as he offers his
alibi.
Samuel's words help a bit too, though not perhaps quite as we might
like. Samuel characterizes Saul's deed as foolish (ski) and as a failure to
guard the command of God '...which he commanded you'. What command, we may askand may pause either at Samuel's fourth sign (10.7-8)
or at something larger, for example, 9.16-17, where he is to rescue people
from Philistines and to restrain them, or at 12.14-15, where king and
people are enjoined to obey the command of God.14 Though Samuel does
not comment directly on Saul's need to appease God before a battle or link
the urge to placate with shrinking troops, the words he does speak allow
the construction that the king did what was not wanted and failed to do
what had been explicitly asked. The likelihood of this explanation increases, in that it is made explicit in the next military/cultic episode. But
two more things come to light: first, YHWH will not continue Saul's kingship (dynasty) foreverwhich Samuel now mentions for the first time to
Saul and to us.15 God has already selected another man after God's own
heart who already commanded as a nagid.
Saul makes no response here, leaving Samuel's words uncontested in
our ear.16 Samuel leaves Gilgal and returns to Gibeah, and Saul musters
his people, dwindled now to 600 men. Though there are many things we
may feel we were not told, we are informed that Samuel characterizes
Saul's worship activity as ski and as a failure to keep a command God
made to him (swh). What we saw Saul do was lose his men (not deliberately reduce them to a small number). We heard him offer a lot of language when asked about it, including that a need to propitiate God was
14. Gunn, rather lonely in the field of those commenting, speculates that Saul has
not broken any general command of which we know (1980: 34), and if he violated a
specific one, it was ambiguous in its phrasing (p. 39). He concludes that both the reason
for the rejection and the specific 'item' rejected remain at least slightly unclear (p. 67).
15. Jobling 1998: 80 reminds us that for a king to expect that his lineage will
follow him on the throne is the default assumption, so we are not to imagine easily that
Saul would never have had such an expectation. I am not reading Saul's expectations
but appreciate the point that the 'rejection' here is not so tacked on as it might sound.
16. Saul as depicted has a wonderful capacity to disregard, simply to rise above
stunning news that he seems not to wish to hear.
240
one of the factors prompting his deed. There is no evidence to suggest that
the circumstances were not dire, or that he had no right to do holocausts in
general, or that another five minutes would have made a difference. Some
(e.g. Polzin) have recently asked whether Samuel is a reliable prophet. The
specific words Samuel delivers were not shared with us, leaving perhaps a
question of prophetic authority and the various slippages of intermediating
communication. I construe Samuel as limited but not fundamentally flawed
in this narrative sketching the roles of prophet and king. Those three have
not interacted well here, appearing at cross-purposes, nor have the people,
who were sliding away. If the play started with Jonathan going offsides,
then he has some responsibility as well. But Saul pays a price here, a cost
he seems ready to pass along to others.
The next scene relinks us to the specific event of 13.2 and 5, with the
Philistines: a.phase three, which will run from 13.15-22. Saul and his 600
and Jonathanwho we now learn is Saul's sonstay at Geba (where
Jonathan had first struck the Philistine presence), while the Philistines
remain at Michmas. The Philistines now adopt the tactics of division and
send their destructive force out in three parties. The narrator's point strikes
me as being again quantitative here, stressing the powerful and encircling
presence of the foe contrasted with Saul's small group huddled at Geba.
And the narrator follows up with an extended aside about the lack of metal
technology available to the Israelites. Historical critics have made good
progress on deciphering its plain sense, which McCarter calls the disarming of the Israelites (1980: 232). The comment strikes my ear a bit oddly.
No smith to be found in all the land seems unlikely, especially when appended to a quotation from the Philistines, who proscribe Israelite weapon
production, or announce such a desire. The description of Israelites taking
their farm tools to the Philistines for sharpening intrudes oddly into this
battle, not to mention the otiose detail of price quotations. The narrator
seems to set it up as an analepsisthe situation pertaining prior to the battle we are about to seewhere the only side with weapons is nonetheless
defeated. The apparently extraneous comment seems to me aimed at
reinforcing the odds against Saul's and YHWH'S people.
In this military encounter, which seems slow to get going and frequently
delayed by the storyteller, the action is about to pick up. In phase four
(14.1-23)with a huge number of Philistines clustered at Michmas and
also with three units out from thereJonathan makes a move. Though
Jonathan and Saul were left together at Geba in 13.16, Jonathan again acts
on his own, a move where the secrecy is essential to all that results from it.
241
This secrecy factor, rather than the battle itself, is the heart of narrative
interest. Scholars have a variety of opinions about the role of Jonathan here
as elsewhere (so a foil for Saul, an improved edition of him [J. Ackerman
1991:16;Edelman 1991: 83;Fokkelman 1986: 61; Jobling 1998: 94-95]).
Miscall reminds us how open the authorial construction of Jonathan is and
how many ways he may be read (1986: 90-92). Part of reading answerably
is to note one's own moves. I am not interested is attributing motives to
Jonathan but see this just-fired dynastic son here taking initiatives that
prompt Saul to make a number of reactive decisions, most of which go
badly in one way and another. Dynastic sons are again drawn as inadequate.
Jonathan is accompanied by an armor bearer, a boy analogous to the
young man who accompanied Saul's search for animals, to the young
David who will bear weapons for Saul in ch. 16, to Jonathan's companions
in ch. 20 and even to Saul's weapons bearer in the scene of his death. At
one level, the young man plays no role except to agree and accompany,
and yet he is mentioned consistently in this account and persistently in 1
Samuel. In any case, Jonathan and companion take decisive leadership in
this scene, in contrast with what we saw of Saul in 9.5-10, and even now
in contrast with Saul, who remains stationary under a pomegranate tree in
Gibeah while Jonathan is scaling rough terrain.17 Additionally, while Jonathan is attended by a nameless armor-bearer, Saul's named company is
Ahijah, great-grandson of Eli, grandson of Phinehas, nephew of Ichabod,
son of Ahitub (brother of Ahimelech)priest of Shiloh who is bearing the
ephod. As is consistently recognized, attendance by Elides in this story is
not good news. As was the case at 13.3, this action of Jonathan's is not
necessarily a good choice, but it is a move and he makes it decisively. The
secrecy is stressed: first, Jonathan is said not to inform his father; and
second, the people are said not to know that he had left his place.
With the scene set in such detail, direct discourse resumes. Says Jonathan, 'Come, let us go over to the garrison of these uncircumcised; it may
be that the LORD will act for us; nothing can hinder the LORD from saving,
by many or few'. All this language is loaded. The restraining task Jonathan undertakes is part of Saul's job as articulated by God; the saving job
is God's. And sizes in this case help us think of the innumerable Philis17. The geographical notices, as already observed, are far from smooth. I am minimizing the problems, assuming that the moves among places named do not alter substantially the picture being related here. That is, though we last left them at Geba, Saul
is now at Gibeah.
242
tines and the 600 Israelites, Saul's insecurity with his 600 and Jonathan's
brashness with merely one companion, the tall father and smaller son (and
of other mismatched physiques lying ahead). Jonathan's words help focus
us on the issue at hand: God's commitment to save and Saul's to restrain
Israel and to defeat Philistines. The armor-bearer speaks his agreement in
equally 'heavy' language: Do what is in your heartour hearts are as one.
Who is this (masked) armor bearer, speaking about God's options and
hearts beating as one? This single sentence is all he says, but the hearts
aligned suggest that the boy is a marker for the young David (of one heart
with Jonathan, and with God). This is a narrative move, all but subliminal,
similar to the slight trace of Saul we may have glimpsed in 1 Sam. 4.12.
Jonathan continues with a 'plan a' (stop, no action) and a 'plan b' (continue and anticipate God's action). Those who find fault with Saul for
excessive religiosity incidentally make visible that Jonathan has done
something similar here: set up clear alternatives and assume that God will
indicate the way forward by means of them. 'That will be a sign for us', he
says, similar to what Samuel promised Saul: signs to confirm YHWH'S
support. The narrator's next move, once the young men have crossed successfully enough to be spotted by the opponent, is to let us hear what the
Philistines see and say. They describewith eyes fixed presumably on the
two they have been shown'Hebrews are coming out of the holes where
they have hidden themselves', evoking for us the narrator's description of
13.6 when Saul's people were overwhelmed by the mass of foes who mustered after Jonathan's last deed. The Philistine utterance is quite different
from what Jonathan's assay has just suggested: a means for God to save.
Their appraisal, furthered by the rehearsed offer of Jonathan and the armorbearer, assists the Philistines to invite the two 'Hebrews' forward, language matching closely what Jonathan had anticipated. Jonathan confirms
the 'plan b' as YHWH'S choice and the two scrabble forward and kill
specifically fell and killsome 20 of the foe in the small space. The result
of this second smiting by Jonathan is, according to the narrator, substantial
(repeated) trembling and quaking.
The narrator, switching us back to base, registers that Saul's lookouts
see it as a roiling panic. Saul's words give orders to ascertain by a muster
who is missing from his camp, presumably to see who caused the panic.
That he does not at first recognize it as God's panic is, if noteworthy,
likely not to Saul's credit. The roll-call also draws attention to Saul's other
information gap, that Jonathan and his armor-bearer are missing. Saul
orders the priest to bring the ephod (or less plausibly but more literally the
4. Incapacity for Answer'ability
243
arkwhich the narrator notes in an aside, was traveling with Israel in

those days). Though the storyline has already suggested that the ark is at
Kiriath-jearim and we have just seen that Ahijah is managing the ephod, I
will leave the text as ismostly because nothing comes of the move
toward it and that Saul's impulse to get it sets us analogically back to the
scene of Israel vs. Philistines in ch. 4 that went so badly, once the ark was
summoned and panic ensued. Saul here, frequently criticized by scholars
for indecisiveness, at least does not repeat the Elide error with the ark. In
fact, the narrator suggests that as panic in the Philistine camp increases,
Saul stops the priest from whatever assay had been commenced.18 The momentum having activated Saul, he moves (though unarmed) into the battle
where the sword of one Philistine finds that of his fellow, while confusion
mounts. The indecisive 'Hebrews' (who had been with the Philistines)
reverseeven they are now with Israel which is with Saul and Jonathan,
the narrator says. And, true to the prescient or premature words of the
Philistines in 14.11, those who had hidden in the hills hear that the Philistines are melting away pursuedeven (or also) they. The narrator concludes by saying that YHWH saved (ys *) Israel that dayas the troops of
Saul climb back to 10,000, and the battle spreads out over a wider area.
Saul so far is able to make good use of the pattern offered him by the collaboration of YHWH and Jonathanwithout tactical advantage, superior
numbers, or sharpened metal weapons, we must remind ourselves. If there
is anything to be concerned about, it is Saul's tendency to be in the dark
and slow to move.
However, there is a change as matters progress, in what I am calling
phase five (14.24-46). Saul assumes the practical military leadership here
for the first time in this Philistine confrontation (at least since 13.1 when
he divided his troops). The narrator speaks evaluatively if ambiguously
about his act, saying wayyo 'el: either (or both) that Saul acted rashly/put
the people under oath (Klein 1983: 138; Long 1989: 117). Saul's words
are: 'Cursed be anyone who eats food before it is evening and I have been
avenged on my enemies'. The order is clear at the surface: the troops must
fast for a reason Saul speaks of in the first person singular. Such a time
designation, as we saw when dealing with 10.8 and 13.8-13, is not very
precise, though in this narrative time is not the most troublesome aspect.
18. Miscall 1986:92, stresses Saul's slowness to respond. J. Ackerman's supposition (1991: 17) that Saul's mistake is to mix matters military and religious, seems
wholly off-target; they are always mixed in these stories. Whatever is the matter, it is
not what Ackerman calls 'rigid religiosity'.
244
Has Saul characterized his role well: to be avenged upon his enemies? The
wording matches poorly the descriptions we heard from the elders in ch. 8,
from God in ch. 9, from Samuel in ch. 10, from Saul himself in ch. 11, and
from the prophet again in ch. 12. In fact, when we hear Saul talk like that
again (ch. 18), he will be clearly putting his own obsessions above other
considerations. Saul's words here begin to develop a pattern in which he
will unwittingly snare himself; that is, the personage he most thwarts here
is himself. In any case, his words will not serve to restrain the people in
his command. Saul's speech betrays him as appraising poorly his role,
God's and others' roles as well. But, as the narrator notes, the people at
first taste no food.
Then the troops come upon a honeycomb oozing honey onto the field.
When they reach it and see the honey, no one takes any, for the people
respect the oath. And again the strange but consistent disconnect between
father and son, between commander and officer, king and prince. Jonathan
had not heard/did not heed his father's oath on the people; and no one told
him, we may note. And so he extends the tip of the staff in his hand and
dips it in the honeycomb, bringing back his hand to his mouth, with the
result, the narrator says, that his eyes grow bright(er). Whose responsibility is this deed? Scholars tend to blame Saul.19 Was Saul equally wrong
when he levied a similar universal ukase in the urgency of Jabesh Gilead
if it is similarin ch. 11? There he tends to be praised for decisive courage! Miscall shifts the angle by wondering if the move is a blunder or an
intentional tactic, a query useful not so much to flush out the motive of
Saul but to make visible the interpretive possibilities. Suppose we construe
a choice on the part of father or son rather than an inadvertence? Suppose
we read one of them so choosing, or one of them so reacting? Suppose the
verb used for Jonathan, universally translated as 'had not heard' is translated as 'did not heed'? The choices are open.
Only now does someone tell Jonathan, 'Your father strictly charged the
troops, saying "Cursed be anyone who eats food today'". The next words
characterizing the people as faint are perhaps the man's, perhaps the narrator's. The wow is perhaps supplementary but perhaps adversativeso
that the 'reminder' may also be a critique. As though it were, Jonathan's
19. For example, the oath too imprecisely worded (Edelman 1991: 88); a careening
from deficit to surplus of religion (Fokkelman 1986: 62), piety leads to trouble (Gunn
1980: 68-69), 'fatal impetuosity' (McCarter 1980: 240), dumb oath, excessive vengeance, poor timing (Miscall 1986: 93-94).
4. Incapacity for Answer ability
245
next words intensify it. He says, 'My father has troubled ('kr)2 the
land...', and he goes on to point out that his eyes brightened from tasting a
bit of honey (an insight the character rather unrealistically but significantly
shares with the narrator). Jonathan further opines, 'How much better if
today the troops had eaten freely of the spoil taken from their enemies; for
now the slaughter among the Philistines has not been so great' (vv. 24-46).
It is an odd speech from a son, an officer, from the Jonathan we earlier
heard to go somewhat counter-intuitive himself about practical matters.
Without trying to explain what motivates the speech, the blunt and serious
accusation of Saul by Jonathan seems to me unexpected. The oath, Jonathan says, was a damaging tactic in this battle, a point supported or encouraged by the man or the narrator's stress on the fatigue factor.
This conversation is broken into by the narrator who describes the next
effect, if that is what it is, of the oath. The striking of Philistinesfrom
Michmas to Aijalonis attended by faintness of the troops (a third reference to it). And nowat evening (whether after Saul has ended the oath or
not)the people do indeed help themselves to spoil: large and small cattle
and their young they slaughter wrongly, so that they eat with blood not first
drained. When Saul is informed (hgd) of the sin against YHWHto eat with
bloodhe blurts out cryptically and accusingly, 'You have betrayed/played
false' (my translation)and then continues with directions: roll a large
stone, disperse among the people, get the plunder to the stone for proper
slaughter. And so it happens. Saul, the narrator comments, thus (inauspiciously?) builds his first altar to YHWH. But when Saul orders the pursuit
and despoliation of the Philistines to continue through the night, though the
people acquiesce, the priest intervenes. It is he, this Elide scion, who calls
(in a manner unprecedented in the Old Testament [Long 1989: 123] and at
least plausibly at cross-purposes with the king) for a drawing near to God;
when Saul inquires (s'/) whether he should pursue the fleeing Philistines
God's answer is silenceor there is no answer that day.
It seems clear that Saul's inference is that divine silence can indicate
only that someone has sinned, so his next decisive move is to ascertain the
culprit. Saul himself has recently charged the people with treachery, and
so it can be anticipated that he wants to handle the residue of that event
with the inquiry to include his son.21 Is it odd that he assumes a capital
20. Alter 1999: 81, traces the verb to the action of stirring up mud from the bottom
of a pond and refers us to its use in Judg. 11.35.
21. Fokkelman 1986:68, opines that more was needed than what Saul did, to set up
a stone so that blood could flow more freely than when animals were killed on the
246
offense? Is Saul too quick to look for a culprit? Craig points out a threefold repetition of Saul's reaching out to blame the other: in ch. 13, here in
ch. 14 and we know also coming up inch. 15 (Craig 1994: 222-23). Pleins
writes provocatively on texts, including some in 1 Samuel, though not this
one, where the father risks the life of his son, a likely thread to follow in
this story of the death of dynastic sons (Pleins 1992: 29-38). Where is
Saul's prophet in this narrative assay of the character of monarchy, as guilt,
or better, responsibility and answerability are figured and factored? What
can we make of YHWH'S silence? Of the priest's role? McCarter suggests
that Saul ishas beenabandoned by God, and these scenes simply show
the operative effect of that condition (McCarter 1980: 251). When Saul
mentions, with another oath,'.. .even if it is my son Jonathan', the narrator
takes pains to note that there is not a single one of all the people to answer
him; is their silence a no? a yes? Though they know what Jonathan has
done, presumably they know what they have done as well. If Saul is slow
to shoulder his share of the blame, he is not the only one in the scene to do
so. The silent participants in the scene are many.
The lots proceed, apparently narrowing the possibilities in a binary way.
As the scene is describedthe climax of the whole battle (14.36-46), what
is the effect of Saul's first arrangement? All the people on one side and just
himself and Jonathan on the other? Commentators tend to find the assay
biased, to say the least. Again, the narrator describes, the people make no
demur. Saul, rare for him and apparently ineffective, addresses God directly to give 'Tamim' (Thummim, as it is usually spelled). Jonathan is
taken, the narrator notes, and Saul, and the people go (free). Saul again:
'Cast the lot between me and my son Jonathan', and Jonathan is taken.
When asked for information (hgd) by his father, Jonathan acknowledges
(hgd) both his offense and his willingness for the punishment already
announced. His phrasing catches the attention in two ways: it uses a fourply word play (ta 'dm td 'mti... hammatteh ...me'at... 'amut, catches taste... a
bit.. .staff.. .die'); and Jonathan avoids or refuses to use sacral categories
as he owns his sin. That is, he does not say, 'I violated (though inadvertently) the oath which you solemnly (though foolishly) laid upon the
people as we were finishing up this remarkable deliverance from God'.
When considering the possibilities of responsibility, it is worth considering an observation derived from Long (1989: 32-37) that the narrative's
fondness for indirect, multi-focalized, interrupted, analogizing and resumpearth; see also McCarter 1980: 249.
247
tive speech make if difficult to follow commentary; participants hop from

one level of abstraction to another, typically without signaling. So though
Jonathan sometimes seems noteworthy for his refusal to alibi (contrasted
with his father who is prone to it), he also stands out herethough not at
the start of the chapterfor avoiding religious categories. A taste of honey,
Jonathan asserts, for which I am about to die. As did 14.29, the filial summary sounds to me like a rebuke of the father. Saul affirms the result of the
lots with yet another oath (his third). Does Saul reconfirm his intent based
on an argument implicit in Jonathan's sentence? Saul here omits also to
say some things we might anticipate. He does not blame Jonathan for
moves so independent and private that the son falls outside the information
loop, nor does he blame Jonathan for his deed. But the people intervene
now and reset the question: their language mentions neither oaths nor other
violations. They talk a more fundamental theology, asking, 'Shall Jonathan
die, who has accomplished a great deliverance (ys *) in Israel... ?' And then
they take an oath of their own, that no harm must come to one who worked
with God. A serious critique of Saul seems implicit. And, the narrator concludes, the people redeemed Jonathan and he did not die. End of episode.
Saul has nothing left to sayor his answer is silence.
A summary can be offered of this long event. Pitted against a usually
formidable foeand assisted, I presume, by GodIsrael manages a victory, but against the practical odds and more at the initiative of Jonathan
than of Saul, who reacts more than he leads. Military maneuvers seem subordinate to cultic aspects: Saul's sacrifices, his inquiries and oaths, his altar
for proper slaughter, the lots to determine guiltall of which are supplemented by Jonathan's and the peoples' solemn undertakings as well. Saul's
decisions (military and cultic), however, are consistently undercut. Samuel
announces the rejection of Saul's royal future for a reason inadequately
exposed. Though the fault is customarily seen primarily as a breach of
time, Saul himself better characterizes his goal to placate God. First his
dilatory moves but especially his subsequent undertaking of private vengeance on his foes leads to sacral disorder by his son Jonathan, by the people, and by the king himself as three oaths hang about unfulfilled. By the
end of the episode it remains unclear whether or not it is a good thing that
Saul's oath goes unfulfilled and Jonathan lives. The people pressure Saul
successfully to violate an oath he has made three times. Jonathan lives the
rest of his life under this proleptic death sentence, as it were.
Without being able to perhaps do better, a reader can at least ask Saul
how Saul's T can be answerable. It is clear that he has no firm idea. He is
248
consequently unable to take a consistent stance, and then compounds his

incapacity for answerability by a persistent pattern of alibi-ing' and pretending. His tendency to alibi itself falters when challenged by prophetic
words, for ultimately Saul concedes to Samuel, though I doubt from conviction. The whole battle event culminates by seeming to pit sacral vs.
secular and practical, solemn oath against solemn oath (Saul's and the
peoples'),22 innocence vs. guilt. Yet to split the event into such artificial
categories seems much too simple. The threat of Philistines leads, as it will
shortly with Amalek, to a complex military encounter, dangerous directions, a successful deliverance of God which is vitiated by plunder, the
(near) death of a royal, prophetic critique, divine disapproval. The responsibility is shared among all the participants. We could make a case against
Jonathan as a loose cannon, against Samuel as badly timing his participation, against God for inconsistency and unfairness, against the narrator for
insufficient clarity, against commentators who wrong Saul no matter what
he does. How to read responsibly? The question is not what Saul ought to
have done; what is represented is how poorly he did.
c. Frame. 1 Samuel 13.1 and 14.47-52
Prior to arriving at the main topic (13.1), this long military engagement
with the Philistines, the narrator makes a conspicuous failure to give the
vital statistics of Saul's reign. The wording, which most scholars take to
be textually corrupt, says that he was one year old when he began to reign
and reigned two years. The unit ends with a similar summary of information. Those verses (14.47-52) summarize as though Saul's reign were over,
which it is most decisively not. And yet, at the rhetorical level, since Saul's
house has been eliminated from rule and his oldest son stands under a
threat of death, the notation makes considerable sense. The question of narrative choice for these matters is the one to single out. Why introduce the
reign formally at ch. 13 and conclude it at the end of ch. 14?23 Granted,
Saul's regnal formulae are not typical for DH, but these are the closest to
such phrases Saul will get. Though Klein recognizes that the short reign
suits the DH chronology (Klein 1993: 125), Jobling counters most com22. Pyper (1996:143 -46) has written on this problem of oaths in narratives like and
including DH. His theory is that an oath such as Saul's, solemnly invoking God, is
always fulfilledthe exception here reinforcing the norm. And in fact, since oath faces
off against oath, it is inevitable that one will go begging.
23. That the wording suggests the colophon is affirmed by Edelman (1991:97) and
Miscall (1986: 97-98).
249
mentators by finding it inconceivable that the actual information is as

stated or that it can have been lost and not replaced (1998: 79-80). He
urges that it is in some way artful and that it must be read in terms of the
concluding notes (14.47-52). Those details include the summary of military success Saul enjoyed. Everywhere he turnedMoab, Ammon, Edom,
Zobah, Philistia, and AmalekSaul wreaked havoc/was victorious.24 As
even Fokkelman, not one to valorize Saul in these chapters, remarks, the
summary of victories (otherwise unknown to us) is utterly overshadowed
by the relative failures of the two encounters narrated herewhich are
actually victories as well (1986: 81 -83). In other words, the narrator sketch
suggests Saul has failed, even though the fuller and retrospective summaries recount victories. Saul's sons, daughters, wife and lieutenant are also
named, though not without some confusion. And the narrator finally notes
that hard battle with the Philistines ensued throughout Saul's days and that
he gathered to himself every warrior of valor. There is nothing about Saul
and God nor any reference to a prophet.
d. Saul vs Amalekites: The Battle from Havilah to Shur: 1 Samuel 15
This episode gets a tremendous amount of attention in scholarly work on
1 Samuel and on Saul. It is impossible here to bring all of its facets into the
discussion. Consequently, let me indicate four key critical issues and situate them for the task I have set out to do. First is the connection between
kingly actions, which we have seen accumulating (from 10.7-8,11,13-14
and now in ch. 15) and Saul's 'rejection'. The second involves more specifically the precise nature of Saul's guilt in ch. 15. Third is the relevance of
the ban to this event, which is difficult to establish. Fourth is the best way
to construe the issue of God's repentance and the repentance motif in
general.
To summarize quickly the path I will take (and signal those I will avoid):
the behaviors of Saul are coherent, not primarily psychologically but from
the point of representational language. So the episode needs to make visible and reinforce some common failing which is Saul's, though also shared
among all participants (as he is characteristically quick to suggest). It need
not account for such deeds as though emanating from an actual historical
24. McCarter (1980: 254) and Klein (1983: 133) both emend here, noting the frequency of confusing resh and waw. The more normal sense of the word, 'to do evil',
might stand more easily were it not for the commendation in v. 48. McCarter thinks the
implication is that Saul consolidated and added to the territory (1980: 255). See also
Brettler 1996: 89.
250
human being. The pileup of behaviors where Saul refuses answerability

is probed repeatedly and adds to the first firing of Saul's heirs a second
repudiation of himself. Recent work on the subjects of holy war and ban
suggests there is less uniformity about the practice than was previously
supposed.25 Whatever actual practices may have given rise to the practice
detailed in DH, there is sufficient slippage between law and enactment to
make it difficult to cite Saul 'by the book'. That is, the Amalekites are technically not candidates for such treatment, and exceptions made by Joshua
(not only Rahab and family but specifically kings of Ai in Josh. 8.23)
weaken the case that Saul is egregiously in violation of clear policies. So
the case needs to be made primarily from this context, not in terms of an
abstract template assembled by scholars. So I avoid here the notion that
there is one clearcut formula which Saul goes wrong with because he slips
up on a detail; in fact, I repudiate that sort of reading as 'ritualistic' in
Bakhtin's sense of the term. As for divine repentance, Willis sums it up
well when he states that biblical texts say different and inconsistent things:
God does and does not repent. The notion is metaphorical and analogical,
and some readers accept it more easily than otherswhich is to say that
we tend to go along more easily with metaphors for God that do not trouble
us than with those that do, which for many includes the notion of God
changing the divine mind.26 In this matter of Saul, the text asserts that God
expresses regret or a change of mind about the choice of Saul to be king.27
As Polzin indicates, the whole question of reversals, regret and repentance
is fundamental in this chapter and needs to be considered more broadly
than simply God's.
As before, we have phases, not of battle tactics but conversation about
them. Discourse happens. The episode starts without much of a context, at
least in relation to the preceding Saul materials, though it does share a
25. For a fresh set of suggestions regarding herem as well as a brief discussion of
older scholarship consult Nelson 1997a: 17-20, 89-90, 93-106, 111-13 in particular.
The Deuteronomy legislation (13.12; 20.10-17) stipulates that the ban is to be exercised upon local people, and upon occasion spoil is evidently able to be taken, though
not always, as we see from Josh. 6-8. Nelson appreciates the possibility that despite
superficial similarity, the realms of sacrifice and dedication-to-destruction of herem are
not to be mixed.
26. See Willis 1994. Amit (1991) discusses the issue with quite a different result.
27. God elsewhere makes assertions of this sort, perhaps most famously when
involved with Moses and Israel over the golden calf (Deut. 9.13-21); the prophet in that
instance interceded with the result that the divine announcement was not implemented.
Samuel handles this episode in a different way.
251
motif word reject/fire/w 's with 1 Sam. 8 (Fokkelman 1986: 86). So far as
directions go (15.1-3), Samuel seems to reconnect with Saul as with one
having authority. Though the prophet says he anointed the king, Samuel
omits to mention that he also fired him on YHWH'S behalf. As is most
foundational, Samuel opens this new moment by reiterating that Saul must
heed the voice of God, the claim being that Samuel does indeed speak
God's words (here); indeed, Samuel does not typically use so formal a
structure for his communications. The directions are, in the view of Miscall, clear and urgent, in the view of Long, absolutely comprehensive (Miscall 1986: 99; Long 1989: 138). Edelman construes the mix of singular
and plural address to implicate both Saul and the people, which is one way
to account for it.28 Since we know that in fact the directions turn out not to
be clear in every aspect, we can look at them in that regard from the start.
God, speaking in quoted direct discourse, revisits the crime of Amalek
against Israel at the time of the exodus (which DH has reviewed in Deut.
25.17-19). Now, God continues, go and smite, ban Amalek, all that is
theirs. Next come four pairs of merisms which enclose the 'all' by gender,
age, size and type. If smite means kill, if ban means consecrate to destruction in some particular way, if the set of merisms really includes everythingthen the directions are fairly clear, except perhaps with regard to
time. Without prejudging the sincerity of any, it is difficult to give foolproof directions. Once again we seethe 'quadrangle' of king, deity, prophet and people, struggling in relation to each other. This contest, waged
against the backdrops of war and worship, a topos of great interest to DH.
Fokkelman suggests Amalek is an emblematic foe, which I think is useful:
Amalek is a different sort of foe than the Philistines for Saul.29 Saul is
given here a special task, one rooted in the primordial relationship between
YHWH and the people brought forth from Egypt, addressed at Horeb, and
given a new land. That he fails to do it satisfactorily is a different sort of
problem than his prior failures with Philistines but reinforces that lapse
strongly.
The narrator's description of the enactment (15.4-9) seems equally
comprehensive. Saul makes the people hear and musters at Telaim a large
force. In a move with which virtually none (within or without the story)
28. Edelman 1991:99. She also directs us to related passages (pp. 99-100), including
Deut. 25.19. McCarter observes (1980:266) that for the ban to be utilized for a non-local
foe is exceptional.
29. Fokkelman 1986: 88. Alter (1999: 87) calls Amalek an 'archetypal implacable
enemy of Israel'.
252
seem to mind, he allows the Kenites to withdraw from the Amalekite environs. Saul then smites Amalek, the narrator characterizes, with a merism
of space: Havilah to Shur (near Egypt). And he seizes Agag king of Amalek alive but bans all the rest of the people with the sword. And, says the
narrator with some ambiguity, 'Saul spared and the people Agag and the
best of the flocks and herds (and their offspring), and all the lambs; and all
that was good they did not wish to ban; but all the items scorned and
rejected, this they banned'. (I will translate all of the discourse of this
chapter literally.) One person and some animals survive, the main person
and the best animals. And the narrator uses a singular verb with double
subjects without specifying exactly who did whatbut in any case, the
fate of king and people are inseparable (12.25). Before we listen to king
and prophet, we have a general sense of what happened, though it needs
refining. Though a number of commentators, for example, Long, hold that
after this move we cannot credit Saul as sincere and merely inept,301 do
not think it is so simple to sort. If, as I have stipulated, the issue needs to
be important and not simply technical, then Saul has to have a chance
here. Can Saul's choice regarding Agag be an answerable deed, like
Joshua's decisions regarding Rahab, Gibeon, and the kings of Ai?
The next major part of the chapter explores Saul's deed in discourse
(15.10-31). After some preliminary information dispensed by the narrator
(w. 10-13) it moves into six rounds between prophet and king. The preliminary information is crucial. Without much of a narrative join, the word
of YHWH comes to Samuel in direct discourse: 'I regret/repent that I made
Saul king, for he has turned back from me and my words he does not hold
up (qwmy. It is vital to recall that only we and Samuel hear this utterance;
it is not passed on to Saul. Additionally, the divine experience of regret/
repentance is all we hear, though Samuel will expand the words considerably before the end of the passage. Though we next learn that Samuel was
angry and he cried out to YHWH all that night, there is no response from
God to prophet that is shared with us (catching and repositioning Samuel's
30. Long 1989: 145. This may be the moment to mention the meticulous work of
Steinberg (1985) who sets up the whole scene in a way that I cannot accept as fundamentally useful. Though I often appreciate his insights on passages, the fact that his
reading presumptions are so different from mine makes his article almost useless to
me, save for a few points. Among them: the chapter is primarily about Saul rather than
Amalek (p. 489), the combined deed of king and people is never disentangled (pp. 49091), the language of God and Samuel cross and their voices are not able to be wholly
disentangled (p. 501), God may presumably continue to change his mind while Samuel
and Saul argue (p. 502).
^.Incapacity for Answerability
253
own words of 8.18 and making him their object). Additionally, almost
gratuitously, 'they' tell Samuel, risen early and on his way to meet Saul,
that the king has erected a stele to himself at Carmel and is now en route
to Gilgal, a fateful place from before. There is a vast discrepancy of information as Samuel proceeds, in our presence, toward Saul, a handicap under
which Saul also labored in the preceding episode.
The scene opens at 15.13 as the two protagonists meet: Samuel arrives
and Saul blesses him by YHWH and proclaims that he has held up (qwm)
YHWH'S word. The narrator, of course, has already shared with us that
YHWH disputes Saul's word on just this precise point. The nub of the
problem is thus enjoined: Has the king enacted God's word or not? Those
scholars who find fault with Saul suspect his sincerity here. What I hear is
his confident assertion that he has done what he was instructed to do, which
is at the very least partly the case, and arguably what Saul can intend to be
true. That God disagrees with Saul may make him wrong but does not render him a liar. As noted above, this scene develops in six rounds of refinement of that assertion, with Samuel taking over the lead and controlling
the flow of words.
In round 1 (vv. 14-15) Samuel rejoins Saul's claim by asking about the
voices the prophet hears, language reusing with some degree of irony the
initial and fundamental direction he gave Saul in v. 1: heed the voice; here
he asks, 'What is this sound of flocks in my ears, and the voice of herds
that I am hearing?' Obedience, he implies, ought not sound so noisy. It is a
skilled opener. Saul's first response initiates what Sternberg calls his
rhetoric of grammatical persons (1985: 507; see also Bar-Efrat 1989: 16263), where Saul mixes singulars and plurals, first and third persons ambiguously, if not quite effectively enough. He redescribes the scene: 'From the
Amalekites they have brought them; the people spared the best of the
flocks and herds in order to sacrifice to YHWH your God. The rest they
banned.' Saul's reuse of the word 'spare' (hml) is a poor choice, since
whatever else he may offer, the directions were clear about not sparing.
Saul's pattern of looking for others to interpose between himself and
blame is familiar from 13.11-12 and 14.24, 33-34, 39, 41, 43, 44. He
makes of the animals two categories: the best to be sacrificed, and the rest
(he avoids the negative words the narrator used in v. 9) to be banned.
Without judging his motives, it seems a weak and naive defense, given his
directions.
In round 2 (v. 16) each becomes brief. Samuel commands Saul to desist,
dams up (for the moment) any explanations from the king. He adds, 'Let
254
me make known to you (hgd) what YHWH said to me last night'. To which
Saul efficiently replies, 'Speak'. If one of Saul's tasks was to be a nagidl
communicator, he is doing poorly, except perhaps in negative space.
The next moment is key, our round 3 (vv. 17-21). Samuel, contrary to
what he has just promised, does not speak the words we heard him hear
from YHWH. Rather, he asks questions which resemble his previous
mode. He begins with a negative question: Is it not the case that though
you think of yourself as smalla reuse of Saul's words of 9.21you are
head of the tribes of Israel? YHWH anointed you king over Israel (Samuel
quotes his own words of 10.1). And he set you on a path, saying, Go, ban
the Amalekite sinners and 'fight them until you have made an end to
them'. Though Samuel's words start out using God's speech of 15.3, the
prophet selects a new verb (klh) in his summary, bringing out afresh the
notion of completing the taskwhich becomes next the point in contention. His next words also take question form, loaded questions with tendentious phraseology: 'Why did you not heed the voice of YHWH but you
swooped on the plunder and did an evil thing in YHWH'S eyes?' As is
consistent in these chapters, the key words are 'heed the voice of YHWH' :
Samuel claims that Saul failed to do this and replaced that obedience with
evil (repeating now the substance though not the words of YHWH'S words
of 'last night', v. 10). He first specifies the charge, accusing Saul of
claiming illicit spoil (note particularly the similarity to 14.32), a deed evil
in YHWH'S appraisal. Hence Samuel has loaded a number of factors into
his questions, has answered as well as asked them. What we have not
heard Samuel say aloud yet is God's 'I repent/regret making Saul king'.31
How can the king answer these questions? Saul confronts the main
charge, reiterating his claim of 15.13 (which reintonates God's 15.10) by
using Samuel's words just spoken (and parodied at 15.14): 'I did obey the
voice of YHWH, I did go on the path on which YHWH sent me...' But
Saul then returns to his earlier tactics: 'I brought Agag but banned the
Amalekites; but the people took the best from the spoil, some flocks and
herds to sacrifice to YHWH your God at Gilgal'. The mention of sacrifices
at Gilgal reroutes our attention and the conversation to issues of ch. 13, to
the post-Ammonite rout of 11.12-15, and back to 10.7-8. Counsel to Saul
would have inwardly flinched; poor choice, whether true or temporized.
31. MiscalFs way of saying it is that Samuel's words seem to exceed YHWH'S
(1986: 101-108). See Fokkelman (1986: 97) for a chart setting forth the elements of
these matters comparatively. Long's comment is that Saul 'rescissions' his own words,
perhaps too nonchalantly (1989: 147-48).
4. Incapacity for Answer-ability
255
As Edelman suggests without developing it, while he blames, Saul is also

testifying to his inability to restrain the people.32 As before, his blaming of
the others indicts his self as well.
Samuel's portion of round 4 (vv. 22-25) strikes some as widely aimed,
though Long makes an effective defense for its relevance (Long 1989: 5155). Questions, as I have argued elsewhere, always admit some degree of
disputability, even when heavily loaded as are these. Samuel asks in what
God finds pleasure (hps33): is it holocausts and sacrifices (back to the
vocabulary of ch. 13) or, he dichotomizes, obedience to the divine voice?
A reader may be tempted to say 'both!' But Samuel gives out the standard
answer, reiterated in several places (e.g. Hos. 6.6): obedience is better than
the sacrifices Saul seems to have planned, approaching with fat lambs.
And then Samuel intonates the deed which he has previously characterized
as non-hearing: Saul's are sins of divination, rebellion, the evil of images
and presumption. The conclusion of this unit for Samuel is rejection, the
word we met in 8.7: m's, what I have preferred to call 'firing'. Samuel
says, because you 'fired' God's word, God fires you from being king. The
prophet, we need to observe, is the one who has moved the deity's words
from an expression of feeling to an action step, unprompted in any way we
can witness.
Before taking Samuel's words apart, it may be worth noting that Saul
will shortly respond to them about as candidly and insightfully as he ever
manages. Something Samuel has said penetrates Saul's defenses. What is
it? How do these four very heavy words fit their context? Your rebellion
and presumption are divination and idolatry, the prophet accuses. Long's
levels of abstraction comment is helpful here: Samuel, sounding most
unlike Jonathan who claims he has been sentenced to death over a taste of
honey, says to Saul: 'Your planned sacrifices are divination and idolatry'.
Saul says, 'I have sinned'. Pretty good: no alibi, no pretending (for the
moment). And he next explains his sense of it, perhaps to refute what
Samuel has charged; 'I transgressed the order [literally "the mouth"] of
YHWH and your words because I feared the people and obeyed their word
32. Edelman 1991: 107-108. She also reports a suggestion of Hertzberg that,
narratively speaking, this may be the first time Samuel understands that Agag has been
spared. Others note that Samuel talks almost exclusively about the animals.
33. Samuel asked Saul at 9.20 if he and his father's house were not the pleasure of
the people. The question turns ironic suddenly here, given Saul's priorities for pleasing. The narrator used the word as well in 2.25, for God's pleasure in the death of
Hophni and Phinehas.
256
(sm' qwl)\ Fritsch takes this passage apart helpfully: though Samuel does
not acknowledge what the king has said, Saul has admitted his responsibility and with accurate and apt words. Elsewhere, Fritsch suggests, Saul
imposes his will on the people (14.26) but here the opposite.34 Saul acknowledges acting as diametrically opposed to his monarchic charge as is
possible by obeying people instead of God, by caving in to rather than
restraining the people.35 But Saul has more to say: 'Pardon my sin, please,
turn back with me so that I may worship YHWH'. Do these words of
Saul's pick up on the pink slip that he heard issued? Perhaps, but not
inevitably. If these were Saul's last words, would we find him too blithe,
'ritualized', or worse? I argue not, but again Fritsch is useful: he notes that
Saul's words of 15.24-25 closely quote Pharaoh's of Exod. 10.6-17, and
that Pharaoh's lack of steadfastness (to put it generously) casts a shadow
on Saul's characterization. Fritsch concludes that Saul's words are a sort
of boomerang which actually intensifies his guilt, since he soundsunwittingly(?)like that archenemy of God and people, the Pharaoh of Egypt.36
As Bakhtin's language theory so celebrates, Saul's motive cannot be pinned
down absolutely, since his language goes in diverse directions. The narrator
uses language that would both exonerate and condemn Saul. The king's
own capacity simultaneously to deny and affirm, to accuse and confess, is
part of the royal character being drawn here.
In round 5 (vv. 26-27) Samuel (harder on the penitent than God most
typically is) verbally refuses Saul's invitation to turn toward God with him
and reiterates his rejection/firing language, although (because?) Saul has
not alluded to this part of Samuel's speech, whether as though of less
importance than turning back and worshiping God or to block it out as
unwelcome; Saul makes no response except a gestureif in fact he is its
author. Long logically charts the four possibilities here: one of two men
tears one of their two cloaks. Concluding, as do many, that the most likely
is that as the prophet turned to go, Saul reached out and grasped the edge
of Samuel's cloak and tore it.37 How Saul intends the gesture to communicate remains substantially open.
34. Fritsch (1996: 99-101) is in error here, I think, since Saul's being imposed upon
is so far much more frequent than his imposing his will, though that will change shortly.
35. Fritsch 1996: 98-101. He thinks Saul is still avoiding the full brunt of his
actions here, though I do not see that as inevitable.
36. Fritsch 1996: 102-104. He does not have the benefit of Bakhtin's double
voicing to help his with the significance of the comment, but it is a wonderful link.
37. Long 1989:157; he presumes his conclusion on p. 63. The scene in 1 Kgs 11.30
A. Incapacity for Answer-ability
257
But in the last round 6 (vv. 28-31) Samuel interprets the gesture, linking
it to a point he now makes for the third time: 'YHWH has torn the kingdom from you today and given it to your friend, a better man than you'.
The word matches what we heard from Samuel in 13.13, though we must
again take care to note that we have not heard it credited in direct discourse to YHWH. YHWH has regretted making Saul king, but that is not the
same as removing him. And Samuel here in facts contravenes what we
heard him hear from God: the glory of Israel does not change his mind like
a mortal.38 What mortal is that? The most mind-changing mortal we have
seen is poor Saul. Hence the prophet has laid bare the core of the situation:
the hearts of deity and king are not well-aligned. As commentators have
noticed, Samuel does not speak with utter verifiability of God here, perhaps undermining our confidence in him elsewhere. Rather, I would suggest, it may slow us from assuming utter transparency between God and
prophet, as with prophet and king, king and people, and so forth. Language does not often work like that. Saul's rejoinder to that word is to
repeat his plea of round five: 'I have sinned; but please honor me now
before the elders of the people and before Israel. Turn back with me so I
may worship YHWH your God.' Saul's hope for honor from Samuel is
perhaps too reminiscent of Eli and sons (2.30; 4.18). If so, the narrator
concludes that Samuel acceded, turned with him, and Saul worshiped
YHWH (Fox 1999: 73). It may be as well that 'honor' has become an ironic
word since the dynast Eli topples from it to his death (4.18); in this reading, the prophet concurs with Saul's wish to fall, enacts it prophetically
and cultically while Saul, prone, entreats God.
Though the story may seem concludedSaul fired but 'honored'in
fact there is more. In the climax scene (vv. 32-35) Samuel makes his final
living gesture before Saulin fact, while Saul entreats mercy from God.
He orders the Amalekite king to be brought near him, and the narrator
describes the king's approachtottering39speaking words of non-repenwhere the prophet Ahijah and a king tussle over a garment suggests that Samuel here
does the tearing. In either case, it is a dialogical prophetic act. For the opposite conclusion and different methodology see Kruger's discussion (1988).
38. Alter 1999: 92, suggests that the prophet says God will not change his mind
about changing his mind.
39. The word is most difficult. See McCarter (1980: 264) and Talmon (1961) for
the possibilities of either tottering, cheerfully, or manacled; Miscall (1986:112) thinks
the ambiguity does not foreclose any possibilities and makes the link back to 13.9,
where Samuel shows Saul what he is to do. Agag is talking, to himself presumably:
'Surely the bitterness of death is past'. It is an odd comment, the king thinking that he
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tance, assuming that the worst is over. Samuel's words disabuse him and
us quickly, and the narrator tells us in most non-sacral language that
Samuel hewed (ssp) him before YHWH in Gilgal. The king is dead, though
scarcely recognizing it before it happens. The gesture replicates, perhaps,
the garment tearing, letting it suggest the otherwise premature mourning
that will be spoken shortly. The wordplay brings back the threat of Samuel
at the end of ch. 12: the alternative to obedience is for king and people to
be swept away (sph). Fokkelman recognizes that the mourning here uncharacteristically precedes the death, a hint to us that the king is, some sense,
already dead.40 The narrator's afterword clarifies that the king and prophet
do not meet againwhich is not a good sign for Saul's days aheadand
that the king remains in the minds of God and prophet. Samuel grieves
over Saul and YHWH regrets/repents of having made him king.
6. Conclusions
We have examined a diptych, a matched pair of representations of Saul's
failing to be king as charged. A summary diagnosis may be offered, resting
upon the exposition of these chapters. We may also bring forward from the
last chapter the bare bones of what the monarchy and king are described as
needing to do. First, the law of Deut. 17 proscribes certain things (which
Saul seems to avoid), prescribing only that the king meditate on his copy
of the instruction of God; that is the main positive quality required. Second, the people requesting a king underline that they want a non-Samuelidide to judge them, a leader who will go before them and fight their battles
(8.5-6,19-20). Third, God confirms that the king is to secure victory from
Philistines specifically and is to restrain the people (9.16-17). And fourth,
the prophet capsulizes that the king's fundamental charge is to guard the
relationship between God and people (12.14-15,24-25). It is against that
rather general and yet coherent job description that we must evaluate what
we have in these episodes. Bakhtin's answerability is well-suited to this
inquiry.
Saul, though clearly chosen by God and affirmed by the others involved,
never exhibits knowledge of or reciprocal relationality with God. His approaches are uniformly ineffective. We never see Saul draw on anything
has escaped his most dangerous moment. Samuel's words cut short that possibility,
catching not only the Amalekite crimes but the words of Hannah in 2.5.
40. Fokkelman 1986:116; Alter 1999:94, highlights Fokkelman's insight by quoting it: '.. .no stronger expression of termination of the monarchy could be imagined'.
^.Incapacity for Answerability
259
he might have learned from pondering the richness of Deuteronomythat

long narrative of the love affair between God and Israel. Thus, from the
start of his rule, he is like a man with no sense of direction and no
compass; he is never not lost, even when officiously flailing about. That he
misses out on other kinds of insight, knowledge and information underscores the deeper lack. To shift the metaphor, he is like a tone-deaf person
who also resists the sort of training that can limit, for such persons unable
to discriminate musical nuance, the utter mystery of tonal variations. He is
never, consequently, good at appraising or evaluating his own position or
that of others, never sensitive about hearing or heeding what gives words
their fullness. It is not a matter of effort, since Saul consistently tries to get
at what is expected of him. Nor, in my reading, is that word maliciously
withheld from him or twisted upon him by deity or prophet. The problem
is more foundational: the king's incapacity to act answerably rises from
his vast and empty self-center.
The rendering of Saul's deafness (assuming that both lack of a sense of
direction and lack of ability to discriminate music are inner-ear disorders)
has been drawn subtly before the king arrives at the moments represented
here. His vague Benjaminite lineage seems to have prepared him poorly,
and his nameplayed on since ch. 1points up his zone of rootless inquiry. He has no resources of his own to bring forward in the project of
struggling to hear from the prophet what God desires. At best, such discernment is difficult. For Saul it becomes increasingly impossible. God's
words are minimal enough in chs. 13-15, and Samuel's are contradictory
at best. What is wanted prior to the battle of Michmas or during it, what
exactly in the encounter with Amalek, is not so transparent as it may have
seemed before we examined these narratives. That the stakes in both cases
are the continuance of his reign Saul never intuits until it is too late. His
specific errors are not difficult to find. Lacking confidence that the numbers he will have are adequate for a victory, he fearfully moves to placate
God (13.8-12). Saul then mistakes a battle for his own personal vendetta,
a royal choice from which flow a number of sacral violations (14.24-46).
He next confuses sacrifice with the radical state of herem consecration
(15.13-21). He fears the people would placate or manipulate God rather
than heeding God and restraining the people. Consequently, though he in
fact achieves two victories here, he fails more fundamentally to serve the
deeper purposes of his kingship: minding the basic bond between YHWH
and people, saving the people from situations that most obviously threaten
it.
260
Part of the indirect means for representing this vast blank inside the king
which prevents him from acting with integrity must be sought in the way
in which characters and narrator give out information. Since, as suggested
above, it is not possible to weigh the evidence as though we were solving a
mystery or trying a case, the alternative is to attend to discrepancies between speakers' versions of things. That is, we are weighing the representation of these matters, not the events themselves. The drawing makes
clear how Saul failed without needing to detail so clearly the opposites:
what he ought to have done. The narrator does not show Saul ever remediating his disabilities effectively. In fact, Saul so far evinces no awareness
of his lack. He seems to miss the large accusation of refusal to keep the
commands, to avoid noting his lack of trust in small numbers, moving
instead to defend himself by implicating those whom he could not restrain
(13.11-14). His persistence in alibi-ingin the sense of blaming others,
hiding behind pronouns, spinning his own words apparently in hopes that
they will land more auspiciouslyis notably ineffective in any case. Saul
blames others for the things of which he is charged, but his tendency to
alibi boomerangs, as it only makes plain that he is unable to restrain the
people. In no moment does he 'sign' the words his prophet serves to him
in 13.13-14 or 15.28, that his house has been fired. He acknowledges his
sin once, clearly and cleanly, but seems to focus less upon its reality than
on appearances at the next liturgy. Most strangely, he never appears to
admit to his consciousness the words of firing that Samuel pronounces
twice. Granted the convention of ending a scene by giving the character 'in
the right' the last word, this language gap is remarkable. Since, as noted
previously, this is neither a factual accounting of some actual deed nor a
psychological portrait of a specific human being, there is no call to account
for Saul's actions in terms of motive, to assay whether he was malevolent
or naive.
The narrator undercuts and overwhelms Saul's military achievements
with these failings, as has been suggested already. More pointedly still,
both Jonathan and Samuel rename Saul's efforts at what Bakhtin would
call ritualized behavior (his efforts to replace answerable decisions with
automatic processes) in language strongly at variance with what the king
seems to see. The fast that Saul enjoins to advance victory, Jonathan calls
a troublesome move, and he disvalues it by his lack of regret at its
breachby himself or the people. The steadfastness Saul seems to exhibit
in the matter of his technically guilty son Jonathan is trumped, such that
the people side with the man that the lots name as guilty, ransoming him in
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some undisclosed way from the triple oath his father has sworn that the
'guilty' must die. The ineffective words and gestures that Saul seeks to
describe his sparing of the main Amalekite Samuel sweeps aside, replacing
them with terms like evil, greedy swooping, sorcery, rebellion, presumption (15.22-25). Saul has no rebuttal but also no stable sense of owning
these charges; on occasion after occasion, Saul literally fails to answer.
Time and again, resourceless on his own, he seems unable to seek the
assistance of those who hear better than does he. What he might have done
is not so clear as that he failed to do it. The mechanisms he seeks to use
are no substitute for insight and in fact block him from acknowledging his
defect. If Saul is the unnamed Benjaminite who ran the news of the catastrophe at Ebenezer/Aphek, he made no effective use of his experience. His
feet are surely of clay, but he never seems to work with them effectively.
Saul is not fired because he is guilty but guilty because he must be fired.
A final comment, which needs development in the chapters ahead. What
is perhaps clearest to me is the difficulty of communication among people,
prophet, king and deity. God in these chapters is remote and reticent, surely
as regards Saul (more forthcoming with regard to the Amalekites, but even
there, as we have seen, directions are not the essence of communication).
There is no divine discourse in ch. 13; in ch. 14, God's intention is only
intuited by characters as they cope with events and by the narrator. Even
in ch. 15, God's only direct utterance is a sentence of regret or of review,
which I read as wistful rather than as choleric. It is Samuel's task to move
whatever his experience with God ismostly unavailable to usinto
words for the king. And that he does on two major occasions, where he
fires the heirs and then the king himself in the name of God. It is ultimately the prophet who signs the pink slip Saul is handed, though the
claim is that it originated from a higher authority. Again, since we are not
trying to retrieve ancient facts but to read a representation of a complex
event, I am stunned at the opacity of the communication that leads to the
momentous subverting of the first king. Communication is uncertain; there
is no verification, at least at the moment the prophet speaks his words. For
such a hinge moment, the prophet is in a very vulnerable position, as consequently are God, Saul, the communityand the reader. It is a sobering
interpretation, but such is the reading I feel called upon to sign.
Chapter 5
AT THE EDGE: SAUL'S DISCOURSES OF DESIRE (1 SAMUEL 16-19)
[Saul's] struggle with David is henceforth conducted in the context of a lovehate relationship, and the story, inasmuch as it may be considered a mirror of
the human condition, gains immeasurably in intensity and sophistication.
David M. Gunn (1980: 79-80)
[W]hat was previously a gift now becomes a torment.
Everett Fox (1999: 81)
1. Point of Entry
Within the last two chapters we have considered how the king has been
selected and how repudiated. He has been found wanting and replaced, at
least by the mouth of Samuel and, according to the prophet, in the mind of
God. The narrative now moves on to explore in generous and remarkable
detail the relationship between the summarily rejected and about-to-beanointed selected men, since in this present chapter the two interact within
the same household. Once David departs from Saul's establishment, their
relationship will continue to be the focus, though they will come into proximity from a greater distance (1 Sam. 20-31). Though this part of 1 Samuel
is traditionally called 'the history of David's rise', it can also be well
examined as the riddle of Saul's fall and as a dance of two dynasties, as
one clings desperately to power and the other waits somewhat (im)patiently
to commence his rule. Since my focus is on Saul, it is his 'fall' and not
David's 'rise' that will occupy us here. It may be that there is no reason to
be startled that Saul finishes out his life as king. But I sense that it is an
anomaly requiring and repaying our probing. Historically it seems obvious
that kings did not retire but died (in one way or another) in office; insofar
as that is the case, Saul fits the pattern. But perhaps it is also true that
deities do not normally abandon their proteges and choices; that YHWH
does so is the story we are given, and so we watch Saul struggle to know
what to do. Saul shifts shape as we watch and listen, moving from his
5. At the Edge
263
reluctance to be chosen king to an evidently greater distaste for being

an ex-king. In the material to be read here, Saul's desires become more
apparent, move closer to the edge of his self as it intersects others in a
variety of ways. How Saul's desires may be read is the focus of this chapter. He surely wants to remain king, but that is scarcely all.
The specific aspect of narrative most suitably followed here is the language of intensive interaction among characters, since, as several commentators point out, direct speech is unusually prominent in these chapters. The
material of 1 Sam. 16-19 covers the initial interactions of Saul and David,
extending from David's anointing by Samuel and David's summons to
Saul's court by the king himself, to the young man's flight from Saul in
consequence of their frayed relationship. Since Saul remains my interest, a
number of issues that would require discussion if I shifted (with most) to
David remain peripheral. I will move through the material in order, bringing out the interpretive possibilities of the discourse in varied ways from
section to section. As I will shortly explain, Bakhtin offers a rich menu of
possibilities for reading artistic narration, and I will consider these possibilities while considering five chunks of material: first, YHWH'S spirit
abandons Saul for a new choice (16.1-13); second, Saul summons David
to the royal project (16.14-17.54); third, Saul brings David more closely
into his household and begins to regret it (17.55-18.16); fourth, the king
uses his children against David but ineffectually, for the most part (18.1719.17); and finally (fifth) YHWH'S spirit deflects and disables Saul, temporarily (19.18-24). In each unit I will pick up on some relevant aspect of
discourse that opens space for rich reading. The varieties of character and
narrator speech voicing are one of the places where Bakhtin's ideas are
most readily accessible to and adaptable for biblical studies, especially in
its current literary phase.
But before unpacking Bakhtin's theory a bit more for our use, let me
summarize the Saulide lineaments that emerge from my attending carefully to character and narrator speech (others will see different things even
using some of the same strategies). First is the complexity of Saul struggling to stay in his position as king, his determination to override the implications of what he has heard from prophet and deity, which will exact a
high price from all involved. Second, following on what has just been
asserted, Saul's firing and his resistance to it sets him over against the
purposes of God. It is often suggested that God abandons Saul, and that
case can be made. But it is also worth noticing, developing, the 'negative'
of Saul's own desires which place him at consistent cross-purposes with
264
God, a position that is hard on his health. Consequently, third, the one
thing needful from the kingto guard carefully the relationship between
people and deity as summed up in 1 Sam. 12.24 (and stated negatively in
v. 25)apparently falls out of Saul's purview totally. Though the narrator
leaves it to us to discern this lynchpin, it is evident that Saul is a failure at
kingship not only because he cannot restrain his own people or fight
Philistines effectively, but also, even primarily, because he evidences no
concern about minding the relationship with God. Fourth, the particular
language we have to detail that royal flaw gives us not a malevolent king
but a more subtle characterization. Saul is, I offer by listening to and
interpreting all the language, a study in unrelationality. God does not make
it easy for him, to be sureand we will see some divine correcting of the
communication patterns with the next king. But Saul does poorly with
human beings as well. He constantly asks and clumsily responds. He
exhibits, as we shall see even more than heretofore, minimal self-awareness. Rather, though he struggles verbally to bring his inner self to an edge
where 'it' can deal with others, he fails flagrantly. In consequence of his
ineptness, the sources he once had to consult tend to, will continue to, go
silent on him, prompting only the more outreach on his part. Saul's size
now too big, now too little, never quite rightcontinues to be a metonym
for his self, both personal and corporate (as a human, as monarchy).
Finally (fifth), is another way to state this same phenomenon, looking perhaps from the other direction. As before, Saul is utterly unable throughout
the material ahead to answer for himself, preferring to alibi and blame, to
use and abuse others.
2. Bakhtin on Discourse
The particular expression 'complex voicing of speech' is not one Bakhtin
used,1 but its scope is sufficiently wide to enclose the set of concepts and
terminology he does employ to talk about how language works. These
varieties of discourse include in their social-linguistic settings, the range of
language choices extending along a graded spectrum from reporting to
reported speech, from single- to double-voicing and other types of the
shared ownership of speech and the many variations within those concepts
(some of which will be named and characterized below). If we have seen
that Bakhtin's most fundamental concept and foundational base is dialogic
1.
The expression is from Newsom 2000: 23.
5. At the Edge
265
reality, and if, further, we have understood that all utterances are in some
ways dialogic, then this topic moves us to make some finer distinctions
among aspects of dialogical relationality as speakers intersect (Clark and
Holquist 1984: 212-13). Emerson writes, 'It follows that every utterance,
covertly or overtly, is an act of indirect discourse' (1986: 24). Part of
participating well in language and literature is taking joyful advantage of
the fact that all goods are second-hand, with the patina of associations
available from some of the many places our language has already been.
The concept set represented here is not particularly difficult. On the contrary, few of the component assertions about to be offered are startling or
even controversial, the more so now at the start of the twenty-first century.
Bakhtin's seeing these factors and their combined significance some 100
years ago is an amazing accomplishment, one which we have had several
decades and many people to help us absorb.2 The challenge is rather to put
these factors into play and to draw on them, to exploit them specifically
and sensitively, consistently and creatively when writing or reading (i.e.
when authoring in one way or another). The assumptions underlying
Bakhtin's speech voicing which seem most useful for their 'reuse' with
ancient Hebrew biblical prose can be detailed as follows: first, diversity
and a certain degree of chaos rather than unity and order presides at the
birth and then attends the whole process of representation of speech.
Second, the use of language to represent reality is typically artistic, not
simply imitative or natural; to compose or construe requires intentionality
and awareness.3 Third, the struggle to communicate an idea or experience
2. As I have indicated before, it is not easy to cite Bakhtin neatly on these huge
and complex concepts he so loved to reconsider in his decades of notebook keeping. It
seems to me that the best places to read him on 'complex voicing' include Bakhtin
(with Voloshinov) 1973: 65-98, pt. II, Chapters 2-3, and pp. 115-40, pt. Ill, Chapters
2-3; Bakhtin's long essay 'Discourse in the Novel', repositions some of the same
issues (1981d); and finally see his 1984: 181-269, Chapter 5. Notes will suggest some
places to read contemporary commentary, though most scholars are more interested to
bring some of Bakhtin's best insights to new contexts rather than to retrieve or create a
satisfying system of his thoughts about speech. In a sense, every word Bakhtin wrote is
relevant on this topic of how language works; and yet even a successful attempt to
draft a complete schema would fail fundamentally. Clark and Holquist consider these
issues intermittently in pp. 186-237, Chapters 8-10 of their 1984 work, as do Morson
and Emerson in pp. 125-230, 306-365, Chapters 4, 5 and 8 of their 1990 study.
3. Alastair Renfrew 1998: 122-27, rehearses in a theoretically dense study the
question of both what and how language represents, taking us back to Plato and Aristotle (and then forward), pointing out the pitfalls. He makes tangible the key question:
266
must be presumed to draw as fully on social reality as it does on internal or

idiosyncratic factors, whether we are conscious of it or not. Fourth, the
social/historical factors of a language situation must be retrieved insofar as
possible, or imagined or posited, but constructed in some way, lest we
naively andmisleadingly, simply by default, fill in with situations connatural
with our own assumptions and experience. Fifth, meaning is constructed
most deeply and authentically when the collaborative aspects of our
speech are mined. We never say anything significant on our own, by ourselves, even if we appear to do so. Sixth, the more intentionality and
consciousness that we can bring or that can be brought to bear at a
language site (whether we are writing or reading) the better; the greater
our awareness of the various dynamics, the richer will be our participation.
Seventh, we need an awareness of the main 'handles' on an utterance; or
perhaps better, the many hands reaching out from it to pluck at our attention remind us that we can strike out along various paths, electing at each
instance to do this and not that, but liable also to be taken places not fully
of our own choosing. Eighth, it is hence crucial that we select our readings
appropriately and answerably to our situations and goals, knowing we
cannot possibly do everything and so must use our opportunities as usefully as possible.
Bakhtin talks about this set of language characteristics intermittently as
he writes: sometimes with greater stress on and interest in the linguistic
features and at other times drawing more attention to the social dimension;
sometimes interested more in theme (or content) but on other occasions
more attentive to the manner of representation; now stressing the conventional while later perhaps in the idiosyncratic but never wholly separating
the diverse pairs that can so easily be dichotomized in theory. Language
on the hoof (whether 'live' or literary) is always in the midst of doing a
variety of tasks with myriad relationalities already established and at work.
The opponent of these Bakhtinian assumptions is anything simplex,
What is the nature of the object of representation, and how, specifically, will that
representation be best offered? Bakhtin's interest is how to interrelate the speech of
author and narrator consciousness, the speech of characters (and presumably the
participation of readers) with the realities represented. Often what is presented is an
idea (rather than something more tangible) and so only a careful scrutiny of the medley
of participating voices will expose it well (see Renfrew 1998:128-33, for considerably
more nuance). The point for 1 Samuel is to acknowledge that we are not reading a
smudged and encrusted piece from which we can (if skilled) retrieve historical and
cultural facticity.
5. At the Edge
267
wholly or adequately reducible to a formula or a chart, any positivistic

appropriation, the applying of 'messages' from one situation to another,
the temptation to crystallize 'the meaning' of an utterance, and so forth.
Bakhtin's sense of language calls into question the practices and results of
such procedures (which he names and with which he argues in his own
early twentieth-century Russian context rather than in situations more
familiar and useful to us now). For him the choices are not on a crude
spectrum forcing us into either positivistic certainty or chaotic nihilism.
Rather, as each of us participates in the complexity of the voicing, selecting some aspects and bypassing others, attending to certain things while
disregarding others, our construction of meaning will be fresh and distinctive, particular though again communal as well; not in any sense isolated
from the web in which we are flailing, we are nonetheless not reproducing
the choices of anyone else.
Perhaps the most currently accessible analogy for Bakhtin's categories
is to be found in the judicial sphere. Our experiences at court, even if they
arise primarily from fiction, instruct us about the care with which kinds
of speech are created, labeled, handled, may be licitly utilized, or must
be stricken. If we liken our reader's role to that of a member of a jury, we
may recall that a court takes tremendous care to prevent the flow of words,
via the processing of a court reporter, from being jumbled together as
might otherwise happen. The demarcations or tags are rendered clear: the
testimony of a defense witness elicited by that side, an attorney's stipulation, the language of a hostile witness, the interjection from opposing
counsel, the slippage into hearsay which must be steadfastly disregarded,
the judge's instruction, an attorney's summary. Each of these is to be
weighed only in a proper way in the judicial world. Bakhtin has assembled,
over the time of his diverse writings, a number of ways for authors and
readers to craft speech which allow for sensitive constructions of meaning.
There is no court authority to manage this for us, but even a brief look at
some of Bakhtin's classifications of these discourse varieties will give us
plenty of scope for reading. That we come to understand authorial and
narratorial options precisely does not compel our reading inevitably in one
way or the other. Rather, attention to the diversity gives us more scope but
helps us understand better what we are doing as we read and why we can
make certain choices. This is also a place to repeat again that it is my firm
sense of Bakhtin that readers are not guessing at or imputing inner motives
to characters; rather, listening attentively as language occurs, we are clarifying our own meaning-making processes. The process is not unlinked to
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characterization but roots the interpretive answerability with the reader

rather than with the character or author.
Bakhtin's consideration of this diverse though fundamentally coherent
set of strategies comes from the various projects which consumed his
attention: whether working to build a history of genres that precede and
underlie the novel, or looking for a typology which will make Russian
novels most comprehensible, whether engaging (perhaps polemically)
with Marxism or energetically with literary opponents or working out the
implications of the incarnation of the Word of God, these various points
came to light. Rather than struggling further to set up a pattern which will
organize these insights or to reproduce some of his typologies, my plan
here is to describe the working of just ten of these elements and to position
them for use in the materials with which I am working presently. Since to
some extent Bakhtin's larger projects (e.g. his ongoing debate with Russian
Formalists) and surely the complexity of some of his favorite (Hellenistic)
texts are removed from mine, there seems little point in trying to elucidate
his use of these points, which in any case, I plan to abandon for my own.
There is, at least in the material of 1 Samuel, far more available for use
than we can pick up on; so choices must be carefully and answerably
made. With that goal in mindcrafting for my own reuse the elements of
his theory rather than simply redescribing them as he saw themlet me
offer a set of features that is reasonably complete though surely simplified
for present purposes:
1. Bakhtin likes a spectrum of discoursereporting to reported with the
intermediate middle made visible.4 The interesting issue here is all that is
involved as one person reports the speech of another: a direct quote,
accurately offered, is one thing, as is a clearly-owned summary; but much
speech falls between the edges of'clean' direct discourse (reported, with
quotation marks in some languages) and a reporting summary belonging
clearly to a second speaker. All the varieties of indirect or quasi-direct or
4. For general discussion of the first three of my points, all of which make use of
the reporting/reported gradations, consult Bakhtin (with Voloshinov) 1973:65-88, pts.
II, Chapters 2-3 and pp. 115-40, III, Chapters 2-3; Clark and Holquist 1984:186-237,
Chapters 8-10; Morson and Emerson 1990:306-365, Chapter 8 (though distributed as
well in pp. 123-268 their Chapters 4, 5 and 6); Bakhtin reviews some of the same
points in 1981d, starting around p. 306 and continuing as far as p. 366 (while doing
many other things as well). His 1984: 113-20, 135-56 review them again.
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free-indirect speech are included here.5 Bakhtin and commentators call

attention to the edges or borders of 'my' speech as 'you' take it over: will
you maintain those edges carefully, with strong boundaries between what
I have said and what you articulate (he calls this linear speech) or will you
in fact take over my language, invade my territory and make the fence
between us porous, shaping my words as you prefer (pictorial speech)!
Our choice, simply split, is to recite another's words authoritatively or to
retell the utterance with the hope of being internally persuasive (Emerson
1986: 31-35;MorsonandEmerson 1990: 164-65).
2. Another place where Bakhtin makes some fresh points is when
talking about the relation of author/narrator language to characters' speech
(hybridized language}. The narrator (or the speaking voice of the author)
takes a position in relation to characters when his or her 'reporting' speech
shares the same vocabulary or phraseology with a character in some given
circumstance. The point is not that there is a limited amount of vocabulary
to use and that a lazy narrator runs out of choices and hence bogs down
unimaginatively with the same vocabulary, no matter from whose lips.
Rather, this hybridized language sets up a relationship between the narrator
and a character who reach for the same language jointly but from their
different planes. Such use of language gives the narrator a chance to vouch
for a character, or perhaps to undermine him or her.6 It is one of the many
ways that Bakhtin subverts the notion of the reliable, omniscient narrator,
since the pseudo-objectivity is made apparent. The object of representation
is not content per se but consciousnesses, interrelated and reaching out
to a reader.
3. One of my favorites genres, which can be seen in terms of reporting
and reported speech (in fact, it accounts for my being drawn to Saul in the
first place), is the whole category of selftalk. Sometimes if we hear a
lengthy speech of a character who is ruminating ostensibly on his or her
own, we can call this speech a soliloquy. But more revealing and interesting yet is the sort of stream-of-consciousness tape that we all play in our
heads virtually all of our conscious time. When we get a snippet of this
sort of discourse from a character, it is a wonderful moment, especially
5. Morson and Emerson 1990: 164-70; Emerson 1986: 24, reminds us that a full
half of MPL engages this discussion.
6. Morson and Emerson 1990:127-28,332-41, with 332-35 providing examples.
See also Klancher 1998: 26-30, for a very helpful set of examples drawn from life and
literature.
270
once we cue into the many participants in even this most private speech.7
Bakhtin was of the opinion that even this most private genre was heavily
influenced by social experience. Even though we technically do not have
to aim our selftalk at another, it is my experience that we do; and even if
there are no 'theys' on site to contest it, since we tend to want to please
ourselves (emphasis on the plurality of our 'self') we cannot assume utter
candor in selftalk, either our own or 'the other's'. It is an extremely
powerful speech factor and richly revealing in many ways.
4. Another large category to consider includes the variety of ways in
which language is reused and gains richness thereby.8 Related to intertextuality, where the choices are often largely the product of a reader's
ingenuity, Bakhtin's sense of reuse is more intentional on the part of
author and characters, presumably for a reader as well. Where words have
lived before we reach for them, or where they still dwell as we employ
them, makes all the difference in the choices for constructing meaning.
Words and strings of them do not go home to dictionaries at night but
dwell at less innocent and more interesting places. Thus even at simple
levels words and discourse is co-owned, co-shaped, with no speaker being
able to claim sovereignty in any real way. Discourse, in this sense, is again
deeply communal and social; it is speech about what has already been
spoken about. Words and strings of them have already 'been there', been
many places, and the pasts they carry and can make present are diverse,
perhaps conflicted, but one way or the other important.
5. It is obvious but key to pick up on the fact that discoursein life and
in literatureinvolves not tidy rounds but usually ragged chains of communication among characters. In biblical narrative, more sketchily than in
Bakhtin's novelistic examples, the actual face-to-face engagements may
be few and somewhat scattered over the length of the recital. So when
members of a family speak to each other, as they will do in the biblical
text shortly to be discussed, we get a tiny sampling from what we need to
project (abstractly or ideally as needing to be) as a much fuller set. We
7. See Emerson 1986: 25-35, on the relationship between inner and outer speech
and for her development of Bakhtin's sense that even our private speech is highly
social and derived from and modeled on external speech.
8. Bakhtin works out this vast topic throughout his 1981d study (e.g. pp. 338-50
but really passim}. See also Morson and Emerson (1990: 123-71, Chapter 4) for some
elaboration of this feature of Bakhtin's thought) and Charles Schuster (1998) for an
excellent and very helpful set of examples, some from the historical writing of David
McCullough and the work of novelist John McPhee.
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cannot draw on what we have not been witness to, but we can remark the
artificiality of what we have and construe carefully. When we have only
one actual exchange between a wife and husband (as is the case below for
David and Michal) we have to read the sites where the characters are
present but silently with great sensitivity. How characters are not simply
objects for us but can be (depending on how they are drawn) co-creators
with a reader is worth careful scrutiny. We are not, at least in Bakhtin's
company, psychologizing them and ascribing motives to which we have
no access, but rather listening in on what they say and how others talk and
drawing from this 'rich stew' our own conclusionswhich we must claim
as our own. Schuster describes helpfully that what Bakhtin has in mind
can be visualized as an intense conversation among an author, listeners
(readers) and a hero, who might be a character or which might be an idea.
Talk cycles and bounces among all these players, and it becomes impossible to say that one is the object. The 'hero' participates in terms of its
discourse (and all the language comprising it), and that talk affects the
orbits of the other players no less than they do those of the other participants. Language is not owned by any single entity but all struggle to
populate the shared language with their insights and consciousness.9
6. The categories for which Bakhtin is most famous, and which he
perhaps lays out most neatly (neat for him), are his types of double-voiced
discourse.1 It is practical for my purposes to isolate passive doublevoicing, speech which has two 'clear' users (again, this is an intensification of the general category of reused speech) which may be unidirectional/
stylized, used by a second speaker in a way compatible with the purposes
of the first; or it may be varidirectional, where the second user parodies
the language of the 'first' or quoted speaker in some way at odds with his
or her intent.
7. A type of active double-voicing is present, according to Bakhtin,
where the second speaker's consciousness is heightened and undeniable.11
Bakhtin's favorite part of this spectrum, his doubly dialogized active
9. Schuster 1998: 1-4; 'rich stew' is his image.
10. See Chapter 5 in Bakhtin 1984: 184-202; as Morson and Emerson 1990: 23165, Chapter 6 (among others) point out, his explanations and even his numbering
language is quite confusing. Clark and Holquist sum up this material in their 1984:
238-52, Chapter 11.
11. Consult Klancher 1998: 27, for a good explanation and differentiation and
Morson and Emerson 1990: 146-56; Jones 1990, gives many examples from Bakhtin's
writings on Dostoevsky; see, for example, his pp. 35-95, Chapters 2-4.
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double-voicing does not appear in the texts at hand, but the sort of active
double-voicing where the two voices (original and current) are both carefully maintained as distinct (so the current does not tend to override or
nearly obliterate the original) and the two 'users' resist each other more
extensively. In this sort of language, the battle is raging with neither
speaker able to control; the interest has moved to some extent away from
reference to hover around the conflict per se. Intonation, when available, is
a helpful clue.
8. Moving off now in a slightly different direction, we may think about
the speech plan of a character, a simple but important way of referring to a
whole package of theme, genre, conventions and so forth that a speaker
may be diagnosed to have, ranging from non-reflecting to something more
conscious.12 A character's speech plan is set in place by the narrator and in
some sort of relation to the narrator's own plan. Kent reviews the ways in
which one character responds to the choices of another, giving us rich
choices for our own readings (Kent 1998: 40-41, with useful examples).
9. A useful category drawn from Bakhtin is the character zone, composed of the various ways in which language constructs a character. The
character zone includes not simply how he or she speaks but also how he
is spoken of by othersnarrator included, the name, typical epithets, and
so forth.13 The zone travels with the character and can, of course, intersect
the zones of other characters as well as shift and reposition itself variously,
so that we can detect artistic similarities that are not present at the more
tangible level of plot. It should be clear by now that there is a good deal of
overlap among these concepts; the point is not to make a perfect chart but
to comb the information diversely enough so that what is available has a
chance of being seen and utilized.
10. Finally we can think about the huge category of heteroglossia,
which is much more central in Bakhtin's work on the novel than it will be
in the relatively homogeneous book I am working with here.14 Hetero12. Newsom 2000: 23, starts her compact and clear summary of speech with the
single-voiced, the simplest of Bakhtin's chart (1984: 199). It is useful to track ways in
which a character speaks, if for no other reason than to work at the larger delineation of
another major character.
13. Bakhtin works on this concept in 1981d: 302-307,316-24; Morson and Emerson review it in 1990: 325-43.
14. Bakhtin discusses this concept in 198 Id: 275-300, and follows up with examples
from the work of Dickens (pp. 301-23); see Morson and Emerson 1990:123-71,306-65,
Chapters 4 and 8 as well as their briefer note on pp. 139-45. The work of Hopkins
(1989) on Flannery O'Connor provides memorable examples for consideration.
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glossia, as its name implies, catches the intentional diversity of time, age,
class, nationality, gender, ethnicity, intonation, syntax, dialogized language, and so forth but within a single languageso a very historical/social
index for speech (Newsom 2000: 25). These features are not exactly the
same as other kinds of doubling but share in the same interest of what
happens when the diverse language of one speaker intentionally crosses
that of another (Bakhtin 198 Id: 301-23).
3. Bakhtin on Polyphony
A concept relevant here is Bakhtin's very original and controversial notion
of polyphony, specifically the notion of the polyphonic hero. Related both
to authoring as I have set it up in the present project, and to the particular
way in which discourse is arranged and functions, the concept belongs as
properly to Bakhtin's theory of the novel (or novelness). Since I have
come to the conclusion that polyphony as Bakhtin develops it does not
really function substantially in 1 Samuel and that Saul cannot accurately or
fairly be called a polyphonic hero, there is no need to go into a great deal
of detail. But I want to call enough attention to this creative concept of
Bakhtin's to encourage a reading of Saul that plays as far down toward the
polyphonic end of the scale as possible, which will make for a distinctive
reading in at least certain ways. So the task here is to lay enough theoretical groundwork to undergird my moves.
There may be little surprise by now at the fact that Bakhtin does not
define the term adequately; he is more prone to say how other writing or
even other readings of Dostoevesky fail to be polyphonic than he is to
make clear positive statements (1984passim but see pp. 181-269, Chapter
5). Perhaps cueing from Bakhtin's reticence, Morson and Emerson's helpful heteroglossary entry on the term (after calling polyphony Bakhtin's
most original and counterintuitive concept) also says what it is not. Though
sharing some features with them, polyphony is neither dialogism nor
heteroglossia, and of course it cannot be equated with dialectics. Though
accused of it, polyphony does not derive from an absent (or dead, or
passive) author; nor is it a path to relativism.15 It is, rather, the conscious
15. Morson and Emerson 1997:257-61. They have a more developed discussion in
their 1990: 231-68, Chapter 6. See also Clark andHolquist 1984: 238-52, Chapter 11
(and in parts of their Chapters 8-10, pp. 186-237 where they discuss varieties of
discourse).
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and artistic achievement of certain writers (and works) characterized by

the positioning of the hero and his language so as to escape the thumb of
the author, and to develop at the site of the (speaking) hero some freedom
from the finalizing tendencies of authoring and from the orderly demands
of plot. Perhaps the most helpful way to see the concept in the present
context is to recall Ruth Coates's discussion of Bakhtin's sense of God as
creator and of an author 'doing' a hero (1998: 91 -101). Her point was that
Bakhtin's early work on authoring (and his early understanding of God's
nature and creative activity) was rather heavy-handed and significantly
determining of who the hero (or the human) would be and how he or she
would develop. Once Bakhtin moved closer to both the messily social
nature of language(s) and especially to the complexities of the speaking
characters in Dostoevsky's novels, he began to see and to describe a more
respectful process for the creating of an other and for such a hero's being.
Again for the rather simple purposes required here, we can say it is a
matter of how the author manages surplus, the capacity of one character to
see what is hidden from the one with whom he or she is interacting. A
more monologic (the term Bakhtin uses in place of the expected 'homophonic') author draws heavily on what the author knows that the character
does not. Such an author or narrator typically presents a reporting of what
the character has no access to, is not explicitly conscious of. A more
polyphonic author/narrator cedes to the hero the capacity to reflect and
ruminate and thus own in his or her own voice much more of what is being
experienced. Giovanni Palmieri says:
The image of the author as Bakhtin intended is no more or less than the
indirect speech of another voice. In a nutshell, the author must make himself polyphonic, he must represent himself dramatically as a character; in so
doing he inevitably cedes his words, his 'property rights', as it were, since
they can never be uttered directly in his own voice. (1998: 53, drawing on
Bakhtin 198Id: 401)
Such a polyphonic hero can thus be said to escape authorial control (to a
certain extent) and to be able to develop in ways that can surprise the
author (again, so to speak). The hero can 'mean' somewhat on his or her
own, can provide a voice for authorial ideology that is not privileged but
will have to compete for acceptancebe persuasivein the hurly-burly of
centrifugal conversation.
To shift back to the more religiously existential world Coates shows us:
polyphony is a characteristic of a free human being, constructs or represents such a character. The mode for such representation is a particular use
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of language, a particular position from which an author chooses to work.16

Thus we can see that though not the same as dialogism, polyphony is
related to it; not coinciding exactly with the repertoire of speech voicings'
offered for use earlier in this chapter, polyphony makes intense use of
active double-voiced discourse. Since I am not going to claim polyphony
for the present text, I am also going to excuse myself from detailing the
critiques leveled at the concept. I think it is relatively easy to understand
analogically (if that is what is involved) in human relations. To borrow
from Bakhtin's own imagery, the shift is from a universe where there is
thought to be a single center to the realization that there are multiple hubs
(so from a Ptolemaic to a Copernican, or mutatis mutandis, from a Newtonian to an Einsteinian set of assumptions about reality). Or, to raise a
child from infancy through adolescence and see the relationship into adulthood is to have some sense of how an other can break free of former control, can in fact be released by degrees from substantial dependence
without there ceasing to be an intimate and defining relationship between
two subjects. The challenge, I think, is to understand how it can work in
literature.17
Bakhtin's opening chapter of the revised book on Dostoevsky argues
that a polyphonic work can be (mis)read as though it were monologic. I
want to invert that concept and suggest that a monologic work may flower
a bit if we read it with some awareness of polyphonic strategies. Morson
reminds us that 'The polyphonic novel requires a distinctive kind of
authorial activityone that is both special and perceived as special by the
reader' (1994: 98). That is, if we choose to hold a 'polyphonic' ruler to the
authoring of a character like Saul, and insofar as we diagnose what moves
the Saul storyteller actually uses for this hero (rather than heaping onto the
site of Saul every other move available elsewhere in the biblical text), we
16. Morson and Emerson (1990: 234) say that polyphony is achieved by a particular authorial move from a particular position. The author and hero are made or allowed
to emerge as two separate (perhaps radically distinct is better phrasing) consciousnesses who interact with each other but from different value centers. As is no doubt
obvious, the challenge is to understand how an author is both the creator of such a hero
and can at the same time leave a hero free to develop on his or her own. The character
in the Hebrew Bible most commonly recognized as polyphonic is Job.
17. The best work I have found on Bakhtin's sense of Dostoevsky's authoring
(polyphonic and other) is found in the work of Malcolm Jones, who reads texts and
comments on them appreciatively but also critically in terms of Bakhtin's insights.
Jones holds Bakhtin to be the most brilliant reader of Dostoevsky in our time though
maintains that there is more to be said, other richness to be developed (1990: vii-xiii).
276
may read the authoring and heroing process more sensitively, and more
important, may allow Saul to be a little less finalized than he tends to be
read in biblical criticism. The primary point to gauge is the extent to which
Saul can take (is given) responsibility to voice his own consciousness
rather than being summed up over his head, as it were, by an ostensibly
omniscient and objective narrator. Part of what is troubling for Saul is left
to him to articulate, granted he never does it quite as well as we might
hopehence our readerly challenge. And the author/narrator does not step
in and finish the task for us but rather leaves the puzzle of Saul's failure
not the fact but the causeas an enigma to be pondered. More fundamentally still, the characterization of God is more susceptible to such
processes than it usually gets credit for. To put the point in the language of
Coates: Saul is not really a puppet on God's string so much as he is a
figure apparently cut loose from not only control but relationality, but
struggling all the while in some sort of contradictory and futile way to
reconnect. It may be that the deity has a plan that Saul is forbidden access
to and thus can never put into play; but it seems more likely to me, as I
work with this narrative, that God has no such detailed plan here but only
a few general objectives that are clear enough but unattainable by Saul
again the reason for the failure rather than the fact of it being of interest
to explore.
4. Polzin 's Contribution
Polzin's points, though again rarely naming Bakhtin and tending to focus
more on Samuel than on Saul, are nonetheless very helpful to this study
where Saul remains focal, even when David makes his dominating appearance. There are 11 instances (all in his 1989 work) where Polzin deserves
special mention: (1) Polzin suggests that the set of materials at hand deal
with the issue of how it will work out that both God and Saul select David
(p. 152); (2) Polzin offers his view that the Deuteronomistic assessment of
Samuel (whether as an individual or as a member of the group prophets)
remains insensitive to the interests of God (pp. 153-55); (3) God's 'I will
show you what you shall do' (spoken to the prophet at 16.3) is more
reliable than is the prophet's similar statement to the king ('.. .until I come
to you and show you what you shall do') at 10.8 (pp. 153-54)God is
better at pro videre than is Samuel (p. 157); (4) the material in this whole
section (with some variation) is extremely dialogue-bound, which gives it
a particular character (pp. 155-56); (5) all human looking and seeing is
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inadequate or flawed (p. 154); (6) the long chapter featuring the challenge
of Goliath is very spatially (and temporally) oriented and organized, making visual its material and helping us see better the diverse angles which
are featured and the implications of such a strategy (pp. 164-67); (7) there
is also a tremendous amount of double-speaking (the sort of represented
speech which opens up to stylization) in the material of ch. 17 (pp. 16770); (8) Polzin is particularly helpful in reading 17.55-58 (pp. 171-76); (9)
as we enter 1 Sam. 18, the external geography of ch. 17 gives way to a
more inner terrain, of Jonathan and Saul in particular (pp. 176-77) though
I think we get less from the inner information than Polzin assesses; (10)
the narrative helps us to focus upon the problem of the absence of God and
instructs us not to read that (or any thing else) didactically, given the degree
of hiddenness (pp. 178-80); and (11) Polzin concludes with a summary of
the negativity of Saul's prophesying (pp. 183-86), a point of which I am
not convinced but to which I remain open, especially if Samuel, like Saul,
is corporate as well as idiosyncratic.
5. My Plan
The characterization of Saul, both as 'the monarchy' and as a vital and

spacious (though quite flawed) hero, and a rich appropriation of that artistry
requires a set of construction strategies which pick up as sensitively as
possible to the manner in which the language is deployed. Bakhtin's insights, though crafted from and used for literature that is more complicated
than classical Hebrew prose, provide a good way to exploit the intense
interaction of Saul as he brings David into his court, into his household,
and finally into his family and also as he struggles to remove him from
these positions of intimacy. The discourse makes clear the very split and
shifting spaces of Saul's desires. That is, in this chapter I am showing a
process rather than demonstrating a point.
a. YHWH'S Spirit Replaces Saul with David: 1 Samuel 16.1-13
The point here is how to learn of Saul by watching the two narratives
about David, especially as the choosings of David reverbalize or hybridize
both the selection of Saul from chs. 9-10 and his firings in chs. 13 and 15.
That there is here no concern with retrieving actual facts of how David
came to the court of Saul or of how David's anointing actually went, no
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interest in how two apparently logically discrepant pieces can have been
redacted together (16.1-13 with 16.14-23 and/or with ch. 17) needs fresh
emphasis here. Unless we are willing to appreciate the skeins of relations
that can be suggested with hybridized speech, the points are obvious. That
is, if the task is simply to get across information, then the observation that
the narrator and characters talk alike and agree is hardly remarkable. The
narrator obviously orchestrates the characters as he likes. If, however, we
are concerned to cue sensitively to the manner of the telling, then it is
another thing altogether. Insofar as we have a riddle of choice here, particularly as God's own inscrutable seeing lies at the heart of it, we have a
narrative to study closely. The value of the hybridized speech is to make
visible how the narrator- and character-speech collaborate to suggest
relationships we might otherwise miss. I will suggest seven points here, of
various calibers.
First, we hear YHWH in direct discourse confirm what so far we had
only heard from the prophet. That is, the deity validates in 16.1 the words
of the prophet (from 15.23 and 26) or, alternatively, moves to implement
the prophet's words. Though it is not my interest to trace Samuel, others
(Polzin, Miscall) have done so with interesting effect. If we may have
harbored a wish for less clarity on God's part, we must abandon it here, as
YHWH dumps Saul. It may be worth stressing here what should be
obvious: though Saul's ears ought (at 15.23 and 26) to have taken in the
prophet's dismissing words, there is no indication from him that he has
done so, nor is he present or privy to this scene where God moves
Samuel's word to deed. That is, insofar as Saul acts as though he has not
heard that he has been fired, I assume he is pushing that information away
from him, even successfully for a time. Second, and related, is the longer
chain of reject/fire/w 's language we have heard: God has already expressed
the sense that the people in their way of demanding from Samuel a king
have fired the deity (8.7), a point reiterated by Samuel in 10.19. Samuel
has also accused Saul of rejecting God's word, in consequence of which
he is rejected from being king (15.23,26). God now owns up to firing Saul
from kingship (16.1). This word shared in the mouth of deity and prophet
and used in several scenarios suggests a chain effect of accusations: human
rejections of God lead to divine rejections of the human king. Insofar as a
case is being made for the failure of the whole monarchic endeavor, this
reverberation of rejection is at the heart of what has gone wrong. If we
recall the points made by Samuel at 12.14 and 20 (one thing alone needfulpeople and deity must stay in close relation), then the word m 's (reject)
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indicates the opposite trajectory is what has been traversed by all.

Third, there is a subtle agreement audible in all this hybridized speech
that the king is already dead. Fired both dynastically and personally, though
he will hang around for the rest of his life, Saul is a walking dead man.18
The narrator has planted this impression in the summary of Saul's reign
given so early in the book (14.47-51). Similarly, the note at the end of the
episode with Amalek that Saul and his prophet would not meet again until
death (15.35) points ahead to their next and last transaction when Saul
calls Samuel from his afterlife only to hear how Saul is about to enter his
own. The deity also characterizes Samuel as mourning over the rejected
king as if he were already dead. From this moment forward, YHWH also
cuts Saul dead, so to speak, never alluding to him again, let alone interacting with him. The narrator, deity and prophet here all conjoineach
distinctivelyto hint strongly that Saul is dead. A fourth point is related:
not only is Saul 'dead', he is also deadly, or suggested as murderous. That
point is added to the conversation by the direct discourse of Samuel (16.2),
who registers concern that should Saul hear that the anointing of another
has taken place. 'How can I go?', he asks, 'If Saul hears of it he will kill
me'. That is an odd piece, at least in narrative order, since so far Saul is
conspicuous for the opposite trait. Saul did not go after the naysayers
among his own people (10.11-12 [if that episode is construed as negative
critique], 27; 11.12-13; 12.19). He was not able to raise an effective hand
against Jonathan and his supporters who counter the king's sworn word
(14.45), nor did Saul manage to kill the king of the Amalekites (15.8-33
stresses it repeatedly). So far, in fact, the 'scary shoe' seems to be on
the other foot. It is easier to recall Saul afraid of Samuel's ire when Saul
is chastened at chs. 13 and 15 than to imagine the opposite. And yet,
counterintuitively, Samuel now fears Saul.19 A number of insights cluster
around another motif word for this short passage (my point five), that of
seeing.20 YHWH says in direct discourse that he has provided for himself
18. Jobling 1998: 88, is one of few who comments on the odd arrangement of this
so long-lame royal duck, noting that there is never a suggestion that Saul will not finish
out his reign. Jobling's view is that Saul outlives his time, as does Samuel.
19. The shift can be readily explained at the psychological level, but that is not
what I am exploring. Gunn 1980:77, reminds us of the violence surrounding Saul from
ch. 11 onwards. But that the king can kill enemies does not really explain well why the
heretofore dominating Samuel should now be so fearful.
20. A number of scholars identify the importance of the word in this unit (and
earlier): Alter 1999: 95; Edelman 1991: 112 (who also alerts us to concomitant blind-
280
(i.e. seen to) a king (16.1). The next seeing is that of the prophet, who sees
the sons of Jesse pass before his eyes, apparently in birth order. Perhaps it
is more accurate to say that the seeing is the reader's, for we watch Samuel
see, knowing along with him that one of Jesse's sons on site is the choice
of God and that God will make the identity known to the prophet at some
moment. When Samuel sees Eliab, he says to himself, 'Surely YHWH'S
anointed is neged YHWH' (my translation)a nice wordplay with nagid
terminology which hovers around these designated leaders. The prophet
seems to be talking to himself and not to God, musing or exclaiming in
some way. What he sees exactly is less clear than others would have it.
Many see Eliab talland in fact I think we are faked out to suppose that.21
We hear God admonish the prophet lest he look at Eliab's heightbut
everyone has some height. Eliab's real distinction is that he is first and
obvious. God overhears inner speech and responds to it: 'Do not look upon
(nbf) his height and stature'intonating again Hannah's speech at 2.7-8
and the narrator's sketch of Eli in his high post (notably 4.18, where it is
linked with his death). I have rejected him, God sayscriteria again
unclear. Neither narrator nor character quite says that Eliab is rejected for
being tall, granted there are hints of it. The vantage point for God is not
the same as that of humans, God explains directly (16.7)point made
from 15.29humans see 'to the eye' and God 'to the heart'. As the sightings go on, ever more efficiently, more sons are characterized by the
prophet as 'not chosen' (only Eliab is 'rejected'). Samuel does not appear
to make a(nother) false start, and probably we do not either. Hybridized
speech helps us observe that 'see' and 'tall' are topics on the table without
explicitly needing to say that Eliab is rejected for that quality, or was in
danger of being selected for it either. The pattern is much more subtle.
A sixth point arising out of the language of seeing nests within the question of how we are to see Davidand hence God and Saul. David has
been characterized already by Samuel (who clearly does not at the moment
ness); Fokkelman 1986: 114; Miscall 1986: 118; Polzin 1989: 152. Polzin reminds
us to ask who sees and how far in, reminds us how much insight has lacked so far
(p. 153).
21. Alter 1999:96, notes Samuel's 'persistent unreliability as seer'; Bar-Efrat sees
in Eliab's height an allusion to Saul (1989:49). Fokkelman 1986:118-22, emphasizes
this thought of Samuel's as a really grave error, part of the prophet's inability to adjust
or change directions (p. 112). Height is surely a topic, but there is no clear indication
that Eliab is tall, simply that God's warning hints that Samuel might think about it or
that we need to be alerted to it.
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of those speech acts know who the designate is) as a man after God's own
heart (13.14), better than Saul in some aspect (15.28). We have also seen
already that when Samuel indicated to Saul that he would tell him what
was in his heart, it is a series of signs that he gave him (9.19-10.8);22 and
we have been directed by the narrator to remark Saul's height (10.23).
When we finally see the new chosen one of YHWH here (16.12), and see
him seen, we are prepared audially by Jesse to see him as small: he is the
youngest son who cares for the animals rather than being readied for a
sacrifice. Those features were shared by Saul as well, at least in his own
and the narrator's speech: a 'small' Benjaminite in pursuit of strayed animals. When the small shepherd arrives, the narrator characterizes him
from the human anglethe very thing Samuel had just been warned not to
dobeautiful-of-eyes and good-of-seeing. That is, it is ambiguous whether
David looks good or sees well.23 A 'good looker', we might say, borrowing from the apt precision of slang.
Finally (seventh), the larger matrix point to all of these. There is in the
diction of the narrative a great similarity in the selection of Saul and
David, a point remarked by a few commentators (Fokkelman 1986: 11226 or so; Walters 1988: 576-80). If we consider the macro scale, each
narrative unfolding of the king's selection, we can see that in both cases
YHWH has already identified the man (but without disclosing his name).
God next sends the prophet toward the 'candidate' to anoint him, reveals
the identity only as prophet and designe come closer. The context is a
shared sacrifice which is neither fully public nor quite private.24 The other
invited participants wait until the mystery guest has arrived, which happens
in some way a little late, a motif which underscores a bit the unusual
character of the particular event.25 The designation of each candidate is
22. That point was made by Fokkelman 1986:127.1 would add to that basic insight
that as we continue to watch Saul, he will be characterized as craving the sort of listlike certainty that Samuel first provides. What characterizes David will be quite
different.
23. See M. Kessler (1970: 551) for his sense of it, also Polzin (1989: 155), who
toggles between appearance and insight.
24. Fokkelman 1986:119, thinks the sacrificial contexts different, but he does not
amplify the comment.
25. It is common to read God's response to Samuel's fear, the r '/z/see directions
regarding how to proceed, as a subterfuge (e.g. Alter [1999: 95] seems sure exactly
why the elders have trembled when Samuel arrives). But the words make equal sense
as the straightforward directions: Just 'go prepared to sacrifice' is my sense of it, rather
than 'go pretending it is a sacrifice'.
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somewhat unexpected for prophet and onlookers (ourselves included)

which is perhaps simply good storytelling; more importantly, the criteria
for God's choice remain unclear. The 'right' guests have been invited, but
it is not clear at the start exactly who is the designated man. But, as before,
the prophet can rely on a divine nudge at the apt moment. And so it
happens: when God sees his man he points to David, as before with Saul,
and as before Samuel takes David (Iqh of 16.13, picking up from 9.22 and
8.11) and anoints him. And upon that cue, the ruah 'elohim rushes (slh)
David and, the narrator notes in a hinge between this episode and the next,
its helpful agency leaves Saul.
What we have seen, then, by listening to the hybridized language is a set
of assertions about the broken relationship which nonetheless continues to
hold God, king, prophet and people in tension. God's process for choosing
a second king is little modified from its first use. We have moved into an
oddly proleptic situation with Saul, where he is shown both dead and
deadly at the same timean odd blend. How can a defunct ruler manage
to hold onto his throne? Seeing has been made problematic in some way,
how to look good and see well balanced off against failures; if alert, we
may suspect our own deficiencies in this matter.
b. Saul Summons David to Court: 1 Samuel 16.1417.54
Once we have watched God and Samuel see David and have ourselves
seen him chosen king, we are directed next to a passage where the replaced
Saul makes virtually that same choice, granted in a fresh context. The verb
of seeing (r 'h) and in fact the action of a divine spirit (ruah) unify the
passage and bind it to what has just preceded.26 The main point I want to
show, which emerges undeniably as we attend to the ways in which
characters inhabit each others' speech, is that Saul chooses David no less
than God does, again granted a number of important differences between
them. Saul is assisted in the matter as always, since he is chronically
unable to proceed well on his own; and yet he cannot be excused from
responsibility for what he does here, though we may think he comes eventually to rue his choices made here. Let us watch nowor again listento
the collaborative project of bringing the new king to the court of the old.
The narrator has reported on the divine spirit before in relation to Saul:
it rushed him conspicuously at 10.9-12, giving him another heart, making
26. Alter 1999: 100, points out the prominence of seeing; he adds that the root
shared by 'spirit' and 'relief also bind the material, suggesting they share an impersonal expression of breadth or space which removes constraint.
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him a new man, moving him to prophet-like activity, and occasioning

comment from witnesses. The intensity of that experience seems to have
abated (as Saul arises and goes home and about his business) until the next
moment the spirit gives him a shove in the matter of Jabesh Gilead (11.511). There are great difficulties in commenting helpfully upon this God's
spirit phenomenon and a tendency to conflate all of the occurrences of it
(including those from the New Testament). What I wish to assert is that
here the divine ruah is God's agency for rule shared now (whether demonstratively or quietly) with the human king. So at 16.13-14 the spirit-ofYHWH rushes on David from that day on, and the spirit-of-YHWH departs
from Saul, and an evil spirit 'from with YHWH' torments him. As David
becomes that royal figure, the 'widening wind' fills his sails and departs
from those of Saul, which are no longer allied to God's project of rule.27
Simultaneously, concomitantly, the narrator tells us that something shifts
to bad for Saul'goes off, as it wereagain a slang expression applied
to some fresh product like milk helping us see what is available here. As
Fox points out (note particularly the epigraph to this chapter), it is not just
a matter of swapping a good spirit for a bad but of some transposition of
angle. If there is simply one king of YHWH'S choosing and it has ceased
to be Saul and come to be David, then Saul's refusal of this 'new self puts
him at odds with God and renders abrasive what had formerly been an
enhancement.28 Saul tightens up.
We move now to the heart of the matter: the ways in which characters
and narrator discuss the bringing of David to the court of Saul. The
servants of Saul pick up what the narrator has just said and develop it in
direct discourse, addressed confidently and I think sympathetically to the
27. Fox 1999: 81, reminds us that this spirit is not a separate entity but some kind
of supplement. Bar-Efrat 1989:178, remarks the synchronization of its leaving Saul for
David.
28. There are many other views on Saul's 'problem' as it develops from now on. I
do not wish to enter the conversation of whether or not Saul is tragic or tormented (see
Exum 1992:16-42, Chapter 2); Edelman's suggestion (1991:117) that the malevolent
spirit punishes Saul seems poorly observed, as does Brueggeman's suggestion (1990:
11) that it will dismantle Saul. I do not take this as a huge metaphysical or theological
problem but as something more practical: God helps his own man; and Saul, having
lost that position, is not in a position to be assisted any longer. The verb used here by
the narrator and shortly by Saul's servants is a piel and frequentative, suggesting (according to BDB: 129-30) that it startles and terrifies Saul (catching him offguard as it
will seem to do).
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king. 'See now, an evil spirit from God29 is tormenting you...' (16.15).
And they hand the king an utterance to give back to them in linear speech,
which he will do: 'Let our lord now command his servants who attend you
to look for (bqs) someone who is skillful in playing the lyre; and when the
evil spirit from God is upon you, he will play it and you will feel better
(twby (16.15-16). This speech of Saul's servants, in addition to blending
with what the narrator has said, also picks up speech of Samuel (claiming
to speak for God [15.28]) who has promised to replace Saul with a better
(twb) man. Without entering into the question of whether Saul's servants
can be understood as having heard and thus to be consciously quoting (in a
pictorial mode) the prophet's speech, we can at the very least hear some
variance present, as they suggest as a balm what the prophet prescribed as
astringent. Saul, though typically without mentioning (whether to confirm
or deny) the condition of torment that the servants have made explicit,
reworks their speech into his own (linearly) and enjoins them, 'Provide for
me (r'h) someone who can play well (twb) and bring him to me' (16.17).
Here we can see the king's speech reintonating also the language of
God (16.1) who has already 'seen for himself the young David. Edelman
points out that Saul sends someone to do his seeing for him, a trait we can
associate with him.30 Saul here unknowingly abets God's plan. And Saul
for the first but not last time bids his replacement to come near.
As twice before, the decision for a particular candidate proceeds slightly
out of synchrony with the actual identity of the man, at least in the hearing
of the characters. For a young man now speaks up to offer more information.31 The description of the musician-healer candidate is important for a
study of David and less directly for this consideration of Saul.32 More
29. They shift the terminology a bit, using Elohim for YHWH (which I do not find
to be a particularly significant shift). The servants also use a straightforward construct
for the term 'evil spirit-of-God' rather than the nuancing prepositions sometimes
characteristic of the narrator when talking about the evil spirit.
30. Edelman 1991: 118. In fact, she points out that Saul's command to others 'to
espy' a good/skilled man has peculiar resonance with God's description of his own
action in regard to Jesse's sons (16.1, 6-7).
31. Polzin 1989: 156, remarks shrewdly that once again (cf. 9.5-10) a boy knows
more than Saul does.
32. Bar-Efrat (1989: 54-55) notes that what the young man says is verified over
time (including in 17.36, 22.2 and in the speech of Hushai in 2 Sam. 17; it is also
contested, perhaps). Edelman (1991: 118-20) moves off on a path I will not go down,
since she is interested in whether or not Saul's court (including himself) know that
David has been anointed king-designate. Concluding (against the silence of the text on
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interesting to me is the cluster of virtues that are recited to Saul, who will
come to struggle against them all once he begins to compete with their
possessor: skilled as to playing, a warrior of valor, a man of war, wise in
words, a man of appearance, and a man who has YHWH with him. The
Saul I am constructing from all the language of 1 Samuel should start violently at this list of qualities he so struggles to control. Nonetheless, the
plan goes forward. Jobling observes, perhaps more in general than specifically here, that a contrastive logic will develop, where a burden of fault will
be laid upon Saul, who will look wrong and frustrated (1998: 90). It is a
good point, since if we do not watch carefully, Saul will become wrong in
a readerly eye simply because David is different, or David will become
good if we discern Saul to be lacking. Again, my point here is that Saul, in
receipt of this direct information about the yet-unnamed son of Jesse, takes
it in without cavil or response of any kind except passive assent. Fokkelman, lacking Bakhtin's strategies of voicing, well reminds readers that
they must hear all this information with two sets of ears.33
The next place to watch the articulation of this choice of David by Saul
comes at 16.19-22. Saul sends for Jesse's son, naming him and characterizing him as the shepherd son (the narrative is elliptical, obviously,
since we did not hear Saul receive that information). Once again, Bakhtin's alerting us to watch the intersection possibilities of various speech
units shows us Saul's language similar to Jesse's own once it has been
prompted by the prophet (16.11, 19). The language also reintonates what
Samuel said of the king in 8.11-17: he will take sons and property, which
both Samuel and Saul have in effect begun to do. Jesse's utterance to Saul
is also rich, in another language system. For he says no word but rather
responds with gifts sent in the hand of his son: a quantity of bread, a skin
of wine, and a kid; these we have seen 'uttered' before, when Samuel
promised the sight of such gifts to Saul (16.20, thus reusing 10.3-4 [Alter
1999: 99]). The conversation of Jesse and Saul on the topic of'son David'
is not complete, as we shall see ahead.
When David arrives at Saul's presence, there is no language except the
narrator's, who with ambiguity reports that he loved him (16.21).34 Once
the point) that they do, she ascribes motivation for this invitation to David.
33. Fokkelman 1986: 136-39. He also notes that what Saul expected as a bodyguard becomes in fact a Trojan horse (p. 135).
34. The majority of those who remark on it seem certain that it is Saul who loves
David (e.g. Fokkelman 1986: 140; McCarter 1980: 281; Edelman (1991: 122) considers that David loves (is tied to) Saul with a treaty bond. Walters (1988: 554-56)
286
again (v. 22) there is an appeal from the king to the father of David that he
stand in his presence; and once again there is no answer registered. What
the narrator does conclude is that David is made the bearer of Saul's gear,
moving him into line for a number of interesting assertions. And the
narrator returns to the start of the passage and to the middle of the chapter
to suggest that David manages apparently by music to deflect the worst of
Saul's spirit tormentbut not for long.
The long story of Saul and David vs. Goliath, which at first glance and
frequently in the literature seems to give the royal incumbent a minor role,
expands with Bakhtin's insight of character zone and helps us to see the
king's silhouette in some unexpected places. And once we can do so, the
information prompts us back to reconsider the dynastic profiles of Eli and
Agag, whose language lineaments also fill out our sense of Saul. In order
to get at this information efficiently, I will draw information from five sections of ch. 17 and then make some additional suggestions about narrative
material slightly farther afield.
The first information we receive is the narrator's physical positioning of
the Philistine Goliath (17.1-11). The Philistines line up for battle against
the Israelites, the placement of both penetrated into Judah. The description
suggests a symmetrical arrangement on either side of the Valley of Elah,
as though each (but of course Saul for present purposes) is gazing into a
mirror. The size of the Philistine leader is stressed, as has been Saul's.
Goliath's metal-covered body is not only apparently invulnerable but it is
also heavy. The former notation of the Philistine monopoly on ironworking (13.19-22) weighs in here, so to speak, as the king is festooned in the
glut of that activity, which he trusts will protect his person. He has a shield
bearer (ns') to go before him, recalling the young David who has been
(narratively speaking) just given the task of bearing (ns') his leader's gear
(kelim, 16.21). The contrast of the huge giant preceded by a boy carrying a
great shield behind which Goliath may shelter (though ineffectually)
makes tangible and plausible the image of 'a David' carrying the gear
among which Saul tried (ineffectually) to hide at the moment of his being
chosen by lot to be king (10.22). 'Take no notice of his height', Samuel
has just been reminded in an ostensibly other context (Fokkelman 1986:
148), the effect being to draw our attention to this trait. Goliath's words of
17.8-9, given in direct discourse, insulting and contrastive, draw Saul as
thinks David loves Saul. It is, in my view, purposely ambiguous and not quite resolved
by 16.22, where Saul says David has found favor in his sight; that is a valuable datum
but not the same as the narrator's saying he loved him.
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deficient. The charge is that the Israelite king has pointlessly arrayed his
men for a battle they never enjoina description which we can agree is
true. Goliath baits his opponents to choose a man for single combat, with
no direct suggestion that their tallest man might be the obvious one to
engage with the tallest of the Philistines (though by ch. 31, that is what
will happen). Goliath offers the incentive of a victory prize, one which it is
evident is never going to be awarded, though David will deserve ita
sketched detail which will construct Saul to resemble Goliath in ch. 18.
The narrator reports that Saul and the others as well are fearful and dismayed at Goliath's words, their reaction verifying to some extent the
charges hurled by the champion.35 The young challenger emerges in
17.12-23, casting his profile as well across Saul in contrasting ways. That
is, Saul resembles Goliath in some obvious ways, and appears very
different from David now in some other aspects.36 We meet David as one
of eight brothers, three of whom are with Saul; their father is an old man.
The information accords well enough with what we have seen, but from
another angle, as it were. In the first section of ch. 16, David was singled
out from all his family. In the second section, he is eased away from his
father by Saul. Now in ch. 17 the sense of a Jesse household emerges a bit
more clearly, and David is seen as part of it as it will move shortly into
contention with Saul's house. But in any case, the young shepherd, sent
successfully on an errand by his father, carefully stores the items in his
care as assigned.37 His arrival allows the narrator to resume the tale of the
40 days of insulting discourse from Goliath and to suggest that David
35. It is well known that such galvanizing insults are the staple of ancient combat,
at least as described in narrative. My point here is that the ostensibly stock language is
in fact helpfully descriptive of Saul and his men; that they have no rejoinder to hurl
back reinforces the point. Cf. Edelman 1991: 126, who thinks the Philistine talks
ignorantly. See Jobling 1998:214, for a discussion of the Philistines and technology as
well as their contribution to the servitude theme, which Bakhtin would call part of their
character zone. Jobling (p. 215) also reminds us of other instances of single combat
associated with the Philistines: Shamgar (Judg. 3.31), Samson (Judg. 14-16, at least
five separate distinguishable episodes), and Jonathan (1 Sam. 14.1-15, if we rather
rudely count the armor-bearer as part of Jonathan).
36. The 'second' first appearance of David at the court of Saul that has so worried
commentators here serves a wonderful purpose, allowing a number of fresh points to
be suggested by its language. Would that there were more of these episodes of new
arrival.
37. Miscall (1983: 59), suggests there is a sense that the verb 'to abandon' them
suggests a certain finality to the shepherd career of David.
288
hears the words himself. Fokkelman suggests that we take note of David
seeing not so much the scary Goliath in vv. 23-24 as the scared servants of
Saul (1986: 158).
We are now positioned to watch David's reaction, which again makes a
sharp contrast with Saul et al., thus adding to Saul's character zone by
highlighting the differences between these two anointed men. In 17.24-30
David's preoccupation is with the reward for the slayer of the giant.
Whether his first biblical discourse (17.26) is to own credit or not, the
contrast with the fearful Israelitestheir leader includedcould not be
clearer. The chatter of Saul's men gives voice to their concerns. The
boldness of the threat of the single Philistine is serious, enough so that the
men imagineif not knowthat their king will give a triple reward to the
Goliath-slayer: wealth, royal intermarriage, freedman status for his lineage
(underlining again the startling veracity of Goliath's slur of 17.8). David's
words, perhaps boylike, asking to be told something that had just been said
in his hearing, adds significant narrative stress to the position of the king:
desperate to find someone capable of doing the job that we know God had
once assigned to him (9.16). The narrator has signaled us that these words
of rewardwhether actually Saul's or not (so whether pictorially or
linearly used)are being repeated at the battle site. David's fearless
wordssince there is little point is anticipating the reward unless he sees
himself as victoractivate from Saul's men their own condition of fear
since again there is no hint that anyone (in 40 days) has seen himself as
bidding for the triple crown, let alone achieving it. David puts as well a
religious context around the situation, correcting their description of
Philistine defiance of Israel to include reference to God's share in the
matter. The dismissive sneer from Eliab (v. 28), though psychologically
plausible, actually serves to heighten David's responsibility as a shepherd,
contesting as it does the narrative description of David's concern for what
is in his charge. The fraternal exchange is broken off with the result that
David continues querying a third time the details of the reward. It is a
clearly drawn contrast of YHWH'S two anointeds.38
38. Alter 1999: 105-107, makes three helpful points: first, he uses 'patriotic' for
David's language, which I think is more nuanced than 'religious' (while including it);
second, he adds the score of David's queries to three; and third, he points out that as
David chatters, Saul is silent, having nothing to say. Edelman (1991: 128) makes a
contrast between what Saul's men say and his own silence on those points, though she
seems also to conclude that Saul has spoken of the reward, a point I cannot follow
though would like to see. As observed before, since she is assuming that David's
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The fourth unit is the key one, since here we have direct discourse
between the two main characters, Saul and David. They engage directly
surprisingly few times in the 16 chapters which show them in relation to
each other, and so it is a good place to attend carefully. Their character
zones intersect: both anointed, but Saul constructed, as we have seen, by
language of rejection, death, outsizedness, fearmade freshly prominent
by David's bearing the opposite qualities (so far!).39 That David's words
are reported to Saul brings the young man before the king, so different is
his speech of gaining rewards from any other we have (not) heard. Once
again, Saul invites David into his presence in a moment of vulnerability.
Saul's most characteristic and consistent move with David throughout
their (narratively) long acquaintance is to hand him his own responsibility,
albeit unwittingly and indirectly. It is the move we heard him say in 16.17,
19 and 22: 'Provide for me someone who can play well and bring him to
me... Let David remain in my service, for he has found favor in my sight.'
So now a fourth invitation. And they talk. David's words again draw Saul's
fear even while contesting it: 'Let no one's heart fail because of him...'
Saul counters David's claim, remarking not on the size discrepancy
between the boy and the giant but on their ill-matched experience, thus
echoing the viewpoint of the giant Philistine (note vv. 9, 10, 17, 26, 33,
56; Fokkelman 1986: 167). We may think Saul has reason to avoid the
subject of size, but perhaps the question of experience brings them back to
the same point. The taller Saul, the man hired as king to fight, is about to
turn his task over to someone ostensibly less well-suited for it, making
manifest again his own inadequacy to face his menacing 'other'. David's
analogy, perhaps again underlining the contrast with Saul's failed shepherding, in any case debouches again at the language of God's stake in the
battle's outcome and of YHWH'S certain fidelity to Davidand on the
basis of experience: God has already rescued David on more than one
occasion. Saul, again, has nothing to say to counter David's points
apparently no such experience of divine helpbut concedes the argument,
sending him to the Philistines now for the first of several times.40 The
anointing is known, Eliab's charge to his brother partakes of the notion that David has
come to see Saul fail. Fokkelman (1986: 162-63) reminds us that Eliab is not looking
to the heart, just to the appearance; perhaps, but another case could be run there as
well, were the focus here the heart of David.
39. These characteristics of Saul are corporate, not simply personal, and the
Davidic line will inhabit most of them over time.
40. Fokkelman 1986: 166-67, highlights the contest here between these two
warriors, where the language of smiting or slaying (nkh) occurs 12 times.
290
arming scene simply makes more visible the contrast, as Saul clothes
David with royal gearpresumably the very items David had heretofore
been carrying for Saul.41 David accepts this commission from Saul briefly
and then rejects it, again we can see on the basis of inexperience: 'I cannot
walk with these; for I am not used to them' (17.39). Again arming himself
with his familiar shepherd's weapons, he moves toward his opponent.
Goliath (as we move into the last section, 17.40-54), appraising the one
approaching him, is shown by the narrator to see a good-looking young
man42 and by his own direct testimony to see simple weaponry, (both of)
which he finds insulting, underlining once again his similarity to Saul's
expressed viewpoint. The contrast between David and the two leaders is
once again reinforced. The Philistine's taunt that he will render his
opponent to carrion for the animals both inverts David's shepherd identity
and pre-describes the scene at the end of ch. 31, where the house of Saul
will lie uncared for on Gilboa. David's verbal salvos hurled back at
Goliath serve also to color Saul: 'This day YHWH will close you into my
hand...' (my translation) is an utterance that will feature in the chapters
ahead (chs. 23-26). The inadequacy of sword and spear will develop in the
material ahead as a power struggle between Saul and David, with David
dodging Saul's spear and eventually taking it from him. The removal of
the giant's head from his body also picks up the eventual fate of Saul,
though that deed will not be so obviously by the hand of David. The
falling forward of David's opponent here, worrying some,43 foretells in
gesture the falling forward of Saul on his own sword and helping us to see
Goliath as both slain by simple tools and by his own sword. That the
Philistines scatter when their hero is slain will be recapitulated by the
Israelites in ch. 31. The taking of the dead man's head to one place and his
personal items to another also suggests the correlation between the two
41. Again, once we can leave aside the question of how David and Saul really met
for the first time, we can allow them each a number of roles in relation to each other,
the more interesting things to suggest about their relatedness. See Ceresko 1985: 6067, for some good comments on the scene. It would be interesting as well to pursue the
king disguised in battle scenes from 1-2 Kings.
42. Edelman 1991:131-32, points out that we have yet another seeing of the young
David.
43. Edelman 1991: 132-33, notes that Goliath falls as Dagon did. Fox 1999: 76
(crediting Polzin), underlines that Goliath, Saul and Ishbosheth all lose their heads.
Fokkelman's observation (1986: 205) is that Goliath's immobility is, in a real sense,
what does him in.
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slain men. Thus does Saul's character zone fill out in this long narrative
ostensibly about Goliath.
So we have, as if on a split screen, watched Saul eerily resemble God in
his providence for David, ominously recapitulating himself in his military
role. Saul's use of the speech of others helps us to see his own choice of
David strangely congruent with YHWH'S. Saul's verbal echoing of his
own servants makes him anomalously resemble them. In both cases, Saul
invites the man we know will become his opponent into his own court.
Saul remarkably and consistently observes silence about a feature shared
directly by both the narrator and the servants, not to mention as an utterance of God. Though it is evident that a divine-linked spirit is tormenting
Saul, he makes no allusion to it, contributing to his portrait of a man, an
institution, little knowledgeable of himself even in area where others are in
the know. The drawing of Saul emerges again when we meet Goliath:
huge, strangely vulnerable though powerfully armed, talking both with an
odd accuracy but windily as well. The tall man's scornful appraisal of his
adversary, his apparent refusal to see the contest with the Philistines as a
matter of his own royal charge, his lack of self-awareness, have a clear
resemblance to Israel's first king. And contrastively, the figure of David
heightens Saul's similarity to Goliath: under David's lithe prodding, the
giant's size becomes hazardous, his boastful speech boomerangs, his lack
of relationality with YHWH becomes a major deficitand so the big man
falls, only a bit later to die. The character zones and other reuses of language disclose wonderful information.
c. Saul Invites David into his Household and Begins to Rue It: 1 Sam.
17.55-18.16
The third section of this chapter has several seemingly rather jumbled sets
of information I will take there to be five. An amazing thing is now accomplished by the narrator, little commented upon because it is done so deftly.
The whole urgency of the erstwhile Philistine threatnow suddenly
removedmelts away before the question of Saul's survival, specifically,
via Saul's sons. The point I wish to make visible in this first short set of
information (17.55-18.4) which concludes the long Philistine episode is
that the king's preoccupation, audible in his discourse and in the care with
which the narrator folds in language around Saul's speech, becomes the
taking of David, a son from his father. That speech planSaul's insistence
on making David his sonhas already had play in ch. 16 and moves now
to dominate in this scene and arguably as the whole rest of the story
292
develops. Jonathan is shown implicated in that same project though in a

very differentin fact in a contentiousway. The narrator's role is to
distract us from things flamboyantly Philistine and direct our gaze to
dynamics more delicate.
We can review briefly that we have only by wordplay and by utilizing
some of the language strategies suggested by Bakhtin, seen Saul's filial
and dynastic self lurking around the requested and bequested Samuel who
eventually sires his two corrupt sons (1 Sam. 1-3; 8.1-3). Only an unnamed Benjaminite runner witnessed the toppled death of the heavy father
Eli (4.3-18). Saul emerged more directly onto the scene as the son of Kish
(ch. 9), only to have that father disappear as well. Saul's own son Jonathan
became visible only as Saul's grown soldier son in the midst of the
Philistine struggle and just in time to be condemned to death by his
father's own adjuration (14.38-46). Jonathan is reprieved but only just, and
not wholly satisfactorily, since the narrative does not really resolve the
tension between Saul's several oaths that the 'guilty' party should die,
whoever it may be, and the determination of the people (successful) that
Jonathan should not be put to death; the chapter breaks off rather than
resolving the interrupted negotiation.
We have just seen Saul himself terminated by God and Samuel and his
reign prematurely summed up by the narrator, as though Saul, like Jonathan, is living on borrowed time. Though we shall learn that Saul has other
sons, we will meet none of them until they die with him (ch. 31), except
one, of whom we have never heard, survives to sit briefly on his father's
throne (2 Sam. 2-4). The narrator's careful language has shown us a father
and sons killed on the same day (prophetically in 2.34, more immediately
in 4.11,17-18, and of course sounding faintly from ch. 31). We have seen
an Amalekite king surviving his first death sentence with false confidence
only to bereave his mother when he was least expecting it (15.3-33, the
implicationor an inferencebeing that another dynastic line is closed
out). And we have just seen another giant toppled. The other dynastic son
we have just met is David, and it is at this narrative moment that the
narrator braids together the struggle between houses. As just described,
Saul has thrice requisitioned David from Jesse. First, he acts at 16.17, at
the suggestion of his own men. Second, at 16.19, the king has, in direct
discourse, asked Jesse for his son, and a speechless Jesse has sent gifts in
the hand of the desired son, leaving all to guess at his intent. At 16.22
Saul asks for David a third time, based now on the king's own positive
appraisal. However any reader chooses to construe the complexity of
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David's presence in Saul's court, it seems clear that he is both there and
still in his father's household. Logical and tidy it is not, but narratively
suggestive it surely is.
Now, the narrator carefully says: as Saul sees (r'h) David go forth to
fight the giant the king inquires twice, in direct discourse both times, as to
the identitythe sonshipof David (17.55-56); the answer he receives
from the man he asks is vague (for whatever reason44), and so, again when
the young warrior comes back, the gory head of Goliath in his hand, Saul
asks again, 'Whose son are you, young man?', to which David replies, 'I
am the son of your servant Jesse the Bethlehemite' (17.58). There is no
talk of Philistines or headsdespite the fact that David is holding a
Philistine head as this conversation unfoldsor of routing of a dangerous
foe; the subject is sonship. The crucial contest between these two is on in
earnest. If David's language to his king was tactful and deferential in
17.31-39, it may be subtly shifting now. David self-identified earlier as
Saul's servant (17.32, 34, 36); now he calls himself son of Saul's servant
Jesse (17.58).
The narrator's next move is to tell us, over the heads of the characters in
attendance, of the binding of the nepes of Jonathan to that of David, an
action that occurs (narratively speaking) when Jonathan has heard David's
speech. For, we are told, as soon as David had finished speaking (presumably the sentence of 17.58), Jonathan's self is bound (qsr) with David as
though to a self, the narrator describes (with a verb which will become
later problematic as it picks up its connotation of 'conspire'). Saul, a
bystander to this event to which only we (not even quite Jonathan) are
witness,45 makes next his fifth attempt (lumping the three sonship
questions of 17.55-58 as a fourth initiative) to make David his sonthis
time related by the narrator (18.2). No longer will Saul allow David to
return home to his father (a theme we will revisit in ch. 20).46 In this
44. The characters could be argued to speak somewhat conflictedly about the
presence of David at Saul's court, especially once Saul begins to respond with
jealousy. The direct and straightforward advice of 16.16-18 will not repeat. Here,
Abner sounds to me evasive, as if anticipating trouble ahead. Saul, typically, pushes off
onto interlocutors some of the responsibility for what he needs to know, asking them
instead of sorting for himself.
45. There is no narrative or subjective suggestion that Saul sees the bond between
David and Jonathan. It is simply the narrator's toggling arrangement that forces Saul to
have witnessed the external sign of it.
46. Edelman 1991: 136, terms it 'house arrest'.
294
apparently jumbled stretch, with information about Saul and Jonathan

toggling in narratorial speech, and in what is a proleptic summary of time
ahead of the end of the Philistine contest of ch. 17, the narrator intensifies
the problem of fathers and sons. What Saul sees and what Jonathan hears
and what the narrator recounts is the absorption of the two 'sons' into one
and the effort to give them the same father. And then the narrator indicates
the tangible sign of Jonathan's making of David a brother (or even closer):
the gift of clothing. Jonathan's garments and weapons are given to David
who does not refuse them (as he had the father's similar gifts, 1 S.3-4).47 In
the familial context, Jonathan makes David a brother, even a twin, we
might say.48 And he makes the first of several pacts with him, this one general.49 The narrator repeats twice the motive: he loved him as his own self,
hence soldering the gesture to the more intangible bonding.50
A second small piece of this section intrudes (18.5). The narrator,
somewhat confusingly, runs ahead to narrate how Saul simultaneously
makes David prominent in the royal household by setting him to the task
of fighting, and, when successful, he places him over a contingent of men,
with the result that all see and approve.51 Since Saul himself will comment
shortly on this tactic, it is enough to note it here and to point out that for a
man in Saul's position, setting David up to do well where Saul does poorly
will become a torment for the king, eventually. Saul has sons who do his
royal task for him: Jonathan in ch. 14 and now David (Jobling 1998: 99101). Weaving among strands of what Saul sees and says, what Jonathan
hears, what Saul orders, how Jonathan follows up, what Saul commands,
47. There is some sense among commentators that Jonathan cedes his crown
princely position to David here: Alter 1999: 112, says that is what David accepts at
least subliminally; Brueggemann 1993:233; Edelman 1991:136; Jobling 1998:93-99.
See Jobling (pp. 111-15) for his sense of the importance of the father-son surrogacy
theme.
48. Edelman 1991: 143-46, shows how they are made identical.
49. Bakon 1995: 148-49, lists the pacts between the two: 18.3-4; 20.14-15; 23.1617.
50. The act of loving another exactly as a self is a move of which Bakhtin is
critical, thinking it an impossibility. He critiques it when it is urged as a command,
though I am sure he would be impatient with it here as well. The Hebrew Bible is not
thinking in his deeply philosophical sense, and so I will let this opportunity to discuss
the problem go by. The point is that there is a deep bond, at least from one side,
between Jonathan and David which makes the question of sonship fraught.
51. There seems fair agreement that the phraseology of 'going in and coming out'
denotes warrior deeds: e.g. Fox 1999: 94; Klein 1983: 188.
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and how others respondwhat is most obvious is the lack of response

from David. Nor is there any engagement between Saul and Jonathan. We
have, then, two brothers bound together, each with his own father. That
Jonathan makes David a brother does not make David Saul's son. That
Saul takes him from Jesse does not make him Saul's son. Saul's evident
effort to enclose David is about to become a failure, one which he will
convert into hostility. Saul requisitions a son from Jesse, and Jonathan
adopts a brother. David resists neither of them overtly in these moves but
more than that, we are not told.
A third moment of invitation occurs, where Saul gives David a space in
his imagination. After the proleptic military successes and promotion of
David noted succinctly in the preceding scene, we are returned to the fresh
aftermath of the victory, to the homecoming of the heroes after their 40day absence and ordeal (18.6-9). As women greet the warriors in song, we
hear a bit of poetry which will become a refrain in the David story: 'Saul
has killed his thousands, David his ten thousands'.52 The song emerges
succinctly: verb (nkh, 'has slain'), subject (Saul), object (number or unit
killed); no verb (nkh implicitly carries over) subject (David) object (number killed). Interpreters vary as to the intent of the language, with some
holding it to be dismissive of Saul and others not so sure. What is the
construction of the women's utterance? How are they authoring?33 In the
present setting, the song is at least plausibly non-pejorative to Saul,
52. The issues for consideration involve both the general pattern of such songs,
developing with use of parallelism, that are known to us from the Hebrew Bible, and
also this song in its particular context. Michael O'Connor discusses the poem at some
length and with comparative material. He is of the opinion that the direct object nouns
refer to units rather than to numbers and that the terms of the comparison favor David
over Saul, though he also concedes that it is difficult (if desirable) to get equal terms.
He comes down, ultimately, on the undecidability of the valence on the weighting of
the terms (1995: 327-30).
53. A sampling indicates the issues considered: McCarter (1980:311-12) thinks the
women make, in the context, an invidious comparison, causing Saul to become
enviousa construction that looks more his than the narrator's; Edelman (1991:13 8),
who cites additional references, thinks the attributions of credit are balanced. Revell
(1996: 112) suggests that though the women's omission of the king's title may be
conventional, it may also imply a lack of respect for him. Klein (1983: 186) refers to
Ps. 91 where the same terms are used in parallel, without much hint of partisanship.
Fokkelman (1986:214) as well thinks the terms are not inevitably antithetical. Myriad,
or 10,000, is the next named integer after thousand. The point, I think, is to rely
exclusively on a universal meaning but to investigate the contextual intonation as well.
296
assuming that women would not insult the king as he returns from battle.
Or perhaps the women, like Abner (17.55) and the servants in scenes
to come below, are cautious. The song is tactful and spacious in its
generality, since neither king nor boy slew hundreds or myriads. One of
them slew one. But the impact of the refrain, whatever its intent, is beyond
doubt.
Narratively it links both the military role of the king and the question of
the king's intimates, which is the context for the next moves in the story.
But in the story the song activates Saul to speak. First, he rewrites the
short song, setting his version in parodic (at odds) dialogue with that of the
women: 'They have ascribed to David ten thousands, and to me they have
ascribed thousands'. Saul, not unreasonably, has displaced himself as
subject of the verb 'has killed/slain', has placed himself second instead of
first. Saul's rendition of events may be more closely accurate than the song
we have just heard. But in one of his most characteristic moves, Saul
makes the singing, rather than the battle, key. 'They gave', he emphasizes,
subordinating the event to the recital of it, spinning the women's spin. He
quotes them at variance with their own words, if, as is my move, I suggest
that their song need not disrespect the king. Saul's song is a parody of the
women's, reverses their likely or at least plausible intent as he scrambles
their recital. And, perhaps more remarkably, Saul further parodies the long
recital of ch. 17, where we saw the king able to kill no one. Saul contests
the women's phrasing as parsimonious, whereas in fact it is quite generous.
And, more telling yet, he draws from their songor from his ownor
from the (dis)harmonizing voicesan additional inference, rushing ahead
to the end result: 'What more can he have but the kingdom?' Saul's
wording, though brief, implicitly blames the singers and the other subject
of the song, far though he has removed their words from their control. He
has also voiced, if only to himself, the matter that will absorb him for the
rest of the story.54
If we think his conclusion is warranted (knowing the story well), we
may ask whose words come true? Is Saul parrying the song by parodying
it, or is he inhabiting it and giving it life? Why might the women sing as
Saul suspects them to do? Who allowed David to be the giant-slayer? Saul
expresses anger at the messenger and the message while refusing to see his
54. Edelman 1991: 143, poses shrewdly the question, why is Saul so afraid of
losing what he had already been assured is lost? The point for the present reading is not
so much to explore why as to engage the matter that Saul has now freed for general
interpretation.
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own signature on it. We hear him rewrite the song, in his head, releasing it
into the world of his imagination. His construction, hateful to him as it is,
begins to shape reality as it lives, not out in the open, but at least partially
from inside his own head, cut off from communication with others. Since
he now begins to speak to himself, it becomes more difficult for him to
reach others or they him. He utters here the thing we will watch him battle
fiercely: himself not king; but he also here disclaims any responsibility for
such a possibility. That combination brings his construction closer to
accomplishment, Saul hating it all the while. As Fokkelman points out
(1986: 210-14), at a moment of general rejoicing, Saul is angry. His question about what else remains for 'him' but the throne is also a development
of the topic of sonship. The heir has everything but the throne, he says.
Who gave the warrior the king's armor? Who so relentlessly made him a
son? What do sons of kings anticipate, except the kingdom, eventually?
Saul blames others for his own doing, refusing his own share and perhaps
substantially misreading them and thus protracting, enhancing them as he
begins strenuously to resist them. The narrator positions Saul and summarizes his angle of reaction to the song, prior to letting us hear the
transcript: Saul is angry. As he returns from the Goliath incident with
David, as the towns of Israel are filled with the sound of rejoicing, Saul
reacts hotly to the song as he construes it, blaming others for what they did
not quite say. The result of the song Saul has heard is that Saul eyes David
from now on, that is, from this day of the Philistine killing onward. Amid
all the seeing, Saul seems to have been observing carelessly. Others' eyes,
we have just been told, are appraising David as positive; Saul now embarks on a lonely journey to eye him as bad. Starting from his own sense
of himself as king, Saul, having made David an heir, now begins a long
struggle to eliminate him from that role. We may note as well that music is
part of what has set Saul off here (Fokkelman 1986: 260).
Both the sonship motif and the question of Saul's royal survival continue in the next short episode and its aftermath (18.10-11,12-16), both of
which bring back into play language we have already heard and in fact
will hear again in the verses ahead. The narrator also continues the development of the king talking to himself, obviously key for his conflicted
characterization. The scene (our fourth in this section) is set with three
players: the evil spirit-of-God, rushing the king, with the result that he
'acts-the-prophet'. David is fingering his musical instrument as before,
while Saul has his fingers around his spear. Picking up the verb slay (nkh)
from both the narrator's use in the long Goliath episode and from the song
298
of the women, Saul now announces, presumably still to himself, his own
wish/plan/intent and simultaneously the failure of his own objective: 'I
will slay (nkhy (my translation). And his target now is not a lone giant nor
the thousands or myriads of the victory song but David, to be slain against
the wall. A conflicted desire, to be sure.
The narrator has set Saul's short and ineffectual speech, private and
hopefully lethal, against a backdrop of words we do not hear reported,
once again managing primarily the task of showing us what sets the king's
reported words into motion. It is the next day, presumably the one after
Goliath's death has been effected and celebrated. The variance between
the rejoicing of the many and the anger of the one make prominent the fact
that though the present scene may look familiar, much has changed in a
short time between the king and the harp-player. Having seen how the
king has just responded to the music of the women, we have grounds to
imagine he will react to the playing and singing of David. The narrator
draws our eyes to the respective hands and what they hold, perhaps attunes
our ears to the unarticulated words of the two, one raging and one soothing. Saul sees, imagines, David now as quarry, draws himself as hunter, a
very warped portrait for all concerned. Saul's inner speech is the announcement of a resolution, a plan.55 Planning, he draws himself as somewhat
more competent than he actually is, starting on a quest of a prey who will
end up stalking him, scenes we will shortly get in profusion. Saul's inner
speech sets a goal he will never accomplish and so comes to announce a
failure of his power. The narrator adds the detail that Saul misses, twice.
Saul fails as a warrior again, fails to strike, twice. We hear him announce
one attempt; the narrator says David escaped twice. If the king rewrote the
women's song in his head, the hurling of the spear makes more public
Saul's quest for destroying his 'heir'. Saul will not strike David at the
wall, not on the first or second try.
We may note that there is no character response to Saul here: not from
David, nor from anyone else. Saul never apologizes, never explains, never
acknowledges, never reflects directly on his failure, at least in this Deuteronomic authorial construction of his character zone. Saul's spear becomes
from now on a weapon, turned against David but indicting as well Saul's
own ability or power to wield it effectively. To throw and miss (as he will
do until David takes the spear from him at 26.12) marks him as inept.
55. C. Miller notes a number of passages where, though the narrator uses the word
'said', it is clear from the context that it has to be an inner thought (1996: 85, 187-91,
290).
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Saul's selftalk not only makes clear his conflicted desires but it also
deludes him, lets him down. This narrative interlocking of two scenes (this
present one where David's role as evil-sprit-from-God-banisher is anticipated and the earlier one [16.14-23] where Saul himself invites his servants to bring David to court, once they have suggested such a remedy)
reinforces the point being drawn: Saul has made David his son, has made
himself dependent on him, though he now regrets it in at least some (not
necessarily linearly sequential) aspector wishes to reverse it.56
The fifth short piece of text (vv. 12-16) seems also to reuse old material,
in fact to pick up and explain now the note of David's several future
successes offered in 18.5. But again, time has changed everything. No
character talk is reported, but the result of character appraisal is specified,
first by means of the narratorial positioning of our attention, then by
summarizing what we have witnessed and will see unfold below. As
before, the summary is achronous rather than strictly chronological. 'Saul
was afraid of David, because the LORD was with him but had departed
from Saul.' The reported basis of Saul's fear is God's change of position
in regard to both the king and the one he made his son. Neither piece of
information is new or unexpected to us, or arguably to Saul. That Saul is
resisting his pink slip has to be making its way in his imagination and
consciousness in some way, though he will be slow to put it into words.
That YHWH is with David was one of his named qualifications (16.18).
Saul's response to YHWH's departure from him is to 'depart' David from
his own presence. Saul makes him a commander of a unit. Here, again, the
narrator brings for our consideration the points offered proleptically in
18.5. Saul appoints David to fight; David succeeds; Saul sees it and fears
it; Israel and Judah approve and love David. Saul's desires divide him
from effective strategizing. Saul is once again isolated by his reaction to
David's deeds.
What is neither acknowledged verbally by Saul nor said by the narrator
is the datum known to us and to the narrator that David is Saul's replacement. Saul has had two communications from the prophet Samuel, who
has informed him that God has appointed a man in place of Saul's heirs
56. Is it feasible to consider that Saul takes refuge in the alibi of the evil spirit,
cloaks his plan to pin David under his temporary and spirit-induced raving? The
thought is suggested by what we will see David do when he arrives at the royal seat of
Achish of Gath (where the narrator says David feigns madness). What is clearer is that
Saul's ultimate opponent is not just David but God. That the narrator is not drawing
that point outside the reach of Saul's knowledge is a point to be developed below.
300
(13.13-14) and has rejected Saul from being king and has given the kingship to a man better than himself (15.26, 28). So, already knowing that
there is a replacement, and now sensing himself ditched by God in favor
of a still-shadowy figure, Saul deflects his interloping opponent, whom
he himself invitedand will continue to inviteto come near. But Saul's
removal of David gives rise to the success of David, an effect of YHWH'S
presence with him, the narrator suggests to us. That insight is what
Saul shrinks from and does not voice yet, while all Israel and Judah love
David who is doing military deeds among them. Saul fears the son he has
brought into his household and now sends him out, to battle.57 What
seemed reported unambivalently in 18.5 is now made, or shown, complex.
Saul promotes David to work at the task of the king, which is war. With
the setting of this unit, Saul embarks on what will come to be his major
preoccupation (instead of the charges he has been given as king): to slay
'his son'.58
David's success at Saul's royal task (at 8.20 the king is to go out and
come in before the people) serves as a reminder of Saul's rejection, the
very point he is struggling to avoid as he grasps his position in one hand
while letting it slip through the other. Saul's action, prompted by what he
dreads without verbally articulating, hands David successful occasions to
'go out and come in' before those who then approve of him, that is, find
him goodbetter?in their sight. The success clinches for Saul that God
has abandoned him, a piece of information recalling what he was told
when first his heirs and then himself were removed from legitimate rule.
The narrator is making explicit what Saul has occasion to recognize and is
nascently, still wordlessly, reacting to. The short passage also underlines
for us that Saul's reaction is singular and isolating, since all Israel loves
David. But the matter is conflictual as well, since Saul loves him too, and
indeed was first to love him (16.21). This summary recalls the earlier one
where Saul cooperated in making David his son (18.1-5), ramifies it by
showing Saul watch David succeed at the task, adding now the information that Saul sees the reason for David's success: God. Saul's ultimate
opponent in these stories, the opponent with whom he most deeply con57. Edelman 1991: 139, observes that it is possible that Saul sends David forth so
that Saul will not kill him. It is a good reading, contributing to another level of
conflicted desires: Saul, hearing his own selftalk, moves the temptation out of his way,
for self-preservation not least of all.
58. See Pleins 1992:34-36, for a useful discussion of fathers attempting to kill their
sons.
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301
tends, is God, or Saul's best understanding of the deity. The narrator

reports Saul's perception that God has turned from him. Is it also a fact?
Rather a projection? A fear? A grief? That God regretted making Saul
king, wanted to remove him from that position, Saul has been told. Saul's
conclusion is that God has abandoned him, a conclusion the narrator
shares with us without approving it. God has abandoned the project of
Saul's kingship and gone on to the next candidate. Saul's inability to
abandon his reign makes him an opponent in the literal sense of the word:
one who has set himself against the project of God. Saul's energies, as we
see as the story unfolds not only in these hundred verses but to the end of
the book, center on hugging kingship to himself, a project which is largely
destructive.
The impact of these five short and repetitive scenes can be to solidify
the impression of Saul at cross-purposes not only with YHWH and God's
spirit but with people who approve David: men involved in warfare,
women turning battles into song. Saul verbally moves into the category of
son-slayers, as the anomaly of the lots in ch. 14 presents itself for reconsideration. Saul begins now to take aim at his son David, a project which
will increasingly occupy his time, energy and vision. This obsession with
his heir, Jesse's son, is one of the ways in which Saul makes others pay
heavily for kingship.
d. Saul Invites David into his Family and Out Again: 1 Samuel 18.17
19.17
As poorly as Saul may appear to be doing with his 'son David', he is now
shown even more poignant in relation to his own blood offspring. The next
two and a half chapters of material (through to ch. 20), where Saul interacts with (Merab), Michal and Jonathan over David, are in many ways the
best place in the whole book to watch Saul flounder and founder. The
main forward movement of the text is Saul's split project: to bring David
in closer and to simultaneously to remove him. The voicings which comprise these transactions show Saul split in his desires and at cross-purposes
with everyone involved.
Saul's first foray is'spoken in direct discourse at 18.17. He offers his
elder daughter Merab to David with a condition, picking up language of
17.25, where the king's men speculate on the reward for a Goliath slayer.
Saul's proposal also moves in to answer the young David's question of
17.26, where he asked about reward and joins the men's further speculation on the topic, reported indirectly by the narrator in 17.27. As pointed
302
out already, it is not clear whether the men were to be heard as quoting
Saul at 17.25 or simply speculating. But now, as was the case at 16.16-17,
Saul quotes their words, and to the same eager warrior.59 The narrator
moves next to split Saul's inner speech off from what he has just said
aloud: 'For Saul thought, "I will not raise a hand against him; let the
Philistines deal with him'" (18.17). The manner of dealing is vaguely
worded. But perhaps we may suppose Saul to think of the deed his own
hand attempted ineffectually in 18.11 and perhaps as well at 18.5 and 13.
David's rejoinder is a question, as is frequently the case with his speech.
Since I am about to unpack it in greater detail momentarily, let it here
stand as a demurral. And the narrator notes, without further explanation,
that at the time to give Merab to David she was given to another, again
with agency uncertain, testifying to the character zone of Saul and his incapacity to take responsibility.60 And so, it seems briefly, there is an end
to that.
But there is another young woman, Michal, a sister to Merab, daughter
to Saul. And so Saul proposes again (18.20-30). The layers of doubled discourse here, as active as it gets in this long story, pack amazing complexity and nuance into a few verses and a short scene. Though by the end
of the episode Saul is given responsibility for the opening assertion, at the
beginning of this betrothal process, that Michal loves David is reported to
Saul by unnamed and unelaborated 'thems' (18.20).61 It is not difficult to
59. Saul also resuses David's patriotic and religious language of 17.26,36,45-47,
suggesting that the foes David needs to fight valiantly are YHWH's. It may not be
untrue, but we have not heard Saul characterize his foes in that way before (except
perhaps in ch. 11).
60. Fokkelman 1986: 233, notes the passive, as though even here Saul avoids
responsibility for a deed.
61. I have written extensively on this material in Green 2000: 67-134, Chapter 3.
(Material included by kind permission of SBL.) Here I will simply stress the complexity of the king's desires. The assertion that this woman loved this man, a comment
made additionally famous by the notation of Alter (1981: 118; 1999: 115), has two
lives which we need to allow to remain distinct. The narrator says it, but within the
story, where it is an anonymous report. The issue is not simply one of facticity: Did
Michal love David or not. Rather, it is a matter of whose angle is reported and with
what cause, what effect? The narrator says literally, 'they told [it] to Saul'; an unsubstantiated allegation is what gets this scene to move. Michal does not express it; Saul
does not see it; the servants do not take responsibility for it; David does not claim it.
Exum 1993: 43, considers it an expression of Michal's point of view, which I think is
precisely what it is not. It can be a monologic finalizing remark by a narrator who is not
prone to such. Saul himself becomes a holder of this viewpoint by the end of the scene;
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imagine an unsigned allegation at any courteven Saul's famously rude

and simple oneor in any family, especially one so conflicted as is Saul's,
and to gauge the impacts of it. The first of these for us is perhaps to wonder if it is true, then to envision that it may or may not be true. But in any
case, true or not, we watch how it works in the story, note its chain of
reactions. It is rumor that pleases Saul when he hears it, and again, the
reason for his gratification is not wholly clear to us. Why would information pleasing to him be brought to a powerful man by those around him?
Next (v. 2la) the narrator says: 'Saul said, "Let me give her to him that
she may be a snare to him and that the hand of the Philistines may be
against him"'. The utterance seems another instance of selftalk, especially
since it is somewhat at variance with what he says aloud in the second half
of the verse.62 So when Saul talks to himself and appears candid, we can
suppose we have part of what is the case. Selftalk can be more forthright
and unvarnished than our words to others, but what we say to ourselves is
far from being the whole truth and nothing but, since as we probably all
know by now, our own self, in all its multiplicity, is the one we most want
to impress, gratify and convince. So, though Saul ruminates privately and
frankly, quoting his own already ineffective speech of 19.17, we must still
listen critically. Saul draws his daughter Michal as an object to be given,
as a snare to bring someone down, and as an alibi for his own hand, as
well as to be a wife for David. He sets her up to diminish her husband,
though that intended result is not his to manage fully. Simultaneously Saul
talks out a view of himself that shows him clever, innocent, powerful, a
drawing that may not be convincing to us, now or later.
The next utterance of the king (v. 21b) which is paired with what we
just overheard, is at clear variance with its more silent fellow, though they
are linked. The relatedness of both parts of v. 21 (and of v. 22 to follow
but by the time Saul sees the love at the end of this event, it no longer pleases him,
quite the contrary.
62. Polzin sees here more clarity than I do. He writes, 'The narrator lays bare
Saul's mental and emotional life.. .we find out exactly what was in his mind.. .we are
told everything about it...' (1989: 177). My sense is that we see conflict but still have
considerable space to ponder, based on our glimpse of Saul from his own discourse,
and are unable to 'finalize' Saul in any sense. Aside from Saul's deviousness, which I
do not doubt, how can two clear positions, or our construction of them, begin to
exhaust this complex moment? Polzin characterizes the narrator revelations of'Saul's
inner life and evil intentions' and 'Saul's perfidy...here described in unambiguous
terms' as too nearly didactic. I think the narrator's depiction more susceptible to
nuance. The point is important for methodology.
304
shortly) is part of what lets us recognize that we are still dealing with inner
speech here, the same plan customized for its ostensible or eventual audience. Saul can say bluntly what he acknowledges to himself but words
more judiciously and tactfully for what must go to others. This sentence,
'You shall now be my son-in-law', is clearly addressed to David, which is
clear from the pronouns. An odd little word, 'a second time', floats either
inside or outside of the direct speech.63 The narratorif it is his (cf. pp.
172, 173 and 273), which is my choicehas managed to lob into play a
reminder that Saul has, just prior to this present narrative moment, tried
and failed (depending on the point of view from which we appraise) to
betroth his elder daughter Merab to David. Saul's offer excludes reference
to this awkwardness, which is again an important clue to the game that is
being played by these two warriors. Saul can deny the Merab episode by
eliminating the reference to it, perhaps a blindness on his part or possibly a
courtesy to David, who is still a bachelor despite the words we and he
heard at 17.25-27 and at 18.17-19. In any case, the utterance suits Saul's
consistent characterization: to avoid verbal acknowledgment of what is
disadvantageous to him. At the very least it is a promise rather longdeferred. The conversation that goes on between what Saul says to himself
and what he offers an absent David shows him perhaps as purposely
divided (a clean lie) or alternatively as split and indecisive, but in any
case, running two plans. We might say Saul is thinking, 'be my dead sonin-law-apparent'. Saul's rehearsed speech again draws himself powerful,
assigning inferiors to positions. His language shows his power simultaneously abridged, needing his daughter and his opponent to manage
something crucial for him. We can select harsh words for this kind of mismatched languageone thing to ourself and another for public consumption; but even without ascribing motivation, we, visiting the site, can
recognize it, I think, as dangerous. Saul does not let his self join both parts
of his talk.
Saul writes now yet another (18.22) version of the betrothal, which goes
out under his name but without being quite identifiable as a self-quote:
63. The 'a second time', or 'through two', as Alter translates (1999: 116), is not
clearly part of direct discourse or of the reporting speech of the narrator. Alter thinks it
is Saul's word, referring perhaps to two daughters, two conditions, or two reasons;
Fokkelman (1986:242) links it to David's doubling of the brideprice when he brings it,
though he reads it otherwise as well (p. 236). Miscall makes a different sort of point
here, observing that the discussion of the two 'betrothal scenes' between Saul and
David cannot be well considered apart from the words of promise uttered in 17.25. So
this is actually a third reference, not simply a second one (1983: 84).
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'Saul commanded his servants, "Speak to David in private and say, 'See,
the king is delighted with you, and all his servants love you; so now,
become the king's son-in-law"".64 Saul does not this (second) time (cf.
18.17) plan to do the proposing himself. Rather he hands the transaction to
his servants, shaping his utterance for their delivery. The words are at the
surface his own,'.. .become the king's son-in-law...', but they come not
from his own first proposal of Merab but from David's response to that
offer (18.18), and they are infused or confused now with speech of the
servants (which is actually Saul's speech as well). They will speak of the
king in the third person, in his absence, on his errand. The speech remains
Saul's, in that he designs his own words with himself at the center.65 Saul
adds buttressing words, to the effect that David is popular at court with
king and servants. There is part of Saul which is pleased with David, with
some facets of David; and beyond a doubt, the servants love him (reported
by the narrator in 18.5 and 16 and reinforced by characters in several
ways). But there are other dissonant factors in this speech as well, that
Saul is not unconflictedly pleased with David. So it is a complex utterance,
showing a speaker at war with himself. Part of Saul's shrewdness and
blindness is to show David the mirror that suggests he is beloved, an
appealing tactic for most who are the object of it. But though effective in
the short run, it will become lethal for Saul, who hates what he sees, looking over David's shoulder into David's mirror, reflecting back into his
own mirror, as it were. Once again, we miss any mention of Michal's love,
the datum which was said to have prompted Saul on his present trajectory.
Saul once again draws his royal self as powerful (dispatching servants)
though perhaps as vulnerable too, since Saul's expressed jealousy of
David's popularity is running steadily behind the king's public discourse,
even gaining on it, as will be clear ahead. Additionally, we may see, in a
64. This is easy to spot as multi-plied as we 'count envelopes'. Saul hands his
servants a speech to say which encloses his own speech, words that he seems already
to have addressed directly once. Bakhtin's name for this is 'doubled-voiced unidirectional speech' used intentionally with its original intentso it seems. But there is
undertow: I am classifying it as linear (and stylizedwith speakers' uses compatible)
since at least on one level, Saul is using speech he already used and will use of himself
in 18.25 and which is reported roughly in 18.20 (slightly different expression). See
Fokkelman (1986: 238-40) for a close description of how the two scenes (18.7-19 and
20-27) resemble and diverge from each other.
65. Fokkelman 1986:235, alerts us to the fact that the expression 'son-in-law to the
king' occurs five times (Pleins 1992: 34 counts six) and is thus owned by none, used by
several.
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way, Saul seems to overlook, that entrusting this task to others makes the
king tremendously dependent on them for information. He introduces
another player into this tricky game. And Saul says, do this discreetly.
The narrator is so private (18.23) that we do not hear what the perhapsdiscreet servants say to David. There is no reason to doubt that they report
as instructed, but we must recognize that we are excluded from witnessing
it. At court, and in reading, the system of what we know and do not
know is a powerful and complex highway along which we travel, perhaps
scarcely noting what we must bridge in order to arrive somewhere. What
we need to recognize, to acknowledge, is that the servants are now in
charge of this wedding; and neither the two principals, nor the other
characters involved, certainly not ourselves, have any direct access to what
is transpiring on the other side of the green-baize door. We will, we must,
build in assumptions, but they are our own.
Our best information on the conversation we have missed, is quoted as a
question of David to a masculine plural audience (perhaps ostensibly to
only the servants but certainly also to Saul, at 18.23): 'But David said,
"Does it seem to you a little thing to become the king's son-in-law, seeing
that I am a poor man and of no repute?" '66 These words of David are key
for the elder king's construction. As social scientific scholarship assists us
to see, cultural conventions may dictate a self-deprecatory response by
David, if that is what these words imply.67
66. In Bakhtin's technical language, David's response to the servants' speech (the
third character speech for our consideration) which we do not witness is a question,
hurled back at all those asking. It is double-voiced (vari-directional) speech, more
clearly parodic, that is, used at cross-purposes with what it is quoting at 18.23.
67. Commentators are split over the nature of David's question here (and earlier as
well). The first thing to note may be that David's 'who am I...' echoes closely to the
words of those discussing rewards for a single-combat victory against the Philistine at
17.25 (Fokkelman 1986: 232); I understand Fokkelman to be implying that David's
words may remind us that he has already earned the reward Saul continues to dangle.
Miscall 1983: 86, classifies it as perhaps a real question, perhaps a rhetorical question;
if real, it must be queried for sincerity or insincerity (Miscall thinks it invites Saul to
construe David as poor). George Coats, who examined the verse (primarily its formal
features) along with other expressions of self-abasement, concludes (1970:18) that it is
to be taken as formulaic but genuinely expressing a sense of unworthiness. His suggestion that the language must be considered as court-linked is interesting, if perhaps
premature given the state of uncertainty about referential circumstances. Klein 1983:
189, thinks it a show of humility for David, without explicating the nuance of 'show'.
Stansell 1996: 57-59, also thinks it best taken at face value, though it could be ironic.
Edelman usefully csks (1991: 142) why David should want to marry into the Saul
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Without now worrying about David's sense of himself, we can notice a

set of options for how his language characterizes Saul in several ways.
First, David's words are crafted by him arguably to be both formally
courteous and a slap in the king's face, given what happened with Merab.
David, bringing forth words similar to those he just spoke on the earlier
occasion of a royal proposal (18.18), subcutaneously accuses Saul of
dishonoring him and thus acting dishonorably himself. He delivers this
civil salvo by the hand of the king's servants, a further polite disrespecting
of the king. A second layer of that text may be a genuinely-felt grievance
on David's part, these words now registering that first insult now freshly
painful when repeated. So (and this is where tone would help, if we had it)
this second reading presumes that David's words in regard to the Merab
proposal had been merely formal, not intended to change the prospective
father-in-law's mind. I construe this as bitter, to the effect: 'Why are we
going into this again, given what just happened?' Since the king and by
extension his servants are powerful, David's speech registers (plausibly)
the sense of being trifled with here, treated slightingly, toyed with. If Saul
ought to have acknowledged and overridden David's first response but
took it at face value, then a rerun is the more abusive.68 Third, David may
family. The answer may be most uncertain but the question is a valuable reminder for
readers to be explicit about assumptions. McCarter 1980:318-19, not only assumes but
says that to have married into the house of Saul will advance the chances of David's
gaining the northern loyalties later on. A similar excellent question is raised (answered
perhaps less well) by Garsiel, who asks (as the story winds on) who has knowledge of
the anointing of David (1985: 110). We may also wonder who knows that Saul has
been fired. If both are unknowable, at least our assumptions about them need to be
made clear. C. Miller 1996: 280, reminds us that it is narrator ideology, not putative
character feelings, which are controlling the scene; she discusses self-deprecation (pp.
271-81). Another way to put her admonition is that we are attending primarily to
language and utterance here, not constructing character psychology or sociological
customthough, if available, the latter would be invaluable. Similarly, Rosenberg's
assumption (1986: 178), that it is to be assumed that a king would not engage a
challenger but that an aspiring courtier would be pressed into service makes clear to
me that I am assuming the opposite. Regarding this speech of David Fokkelman (1986:
231) notes also that David replies to the marriage aspect but not to the military
component of it. At first glance, the use of doubled speech (two David speeches stuck
together) might seem stylized: David uses his own speech compatibly with his
previous use. But I rather read this second as parodic of his first utterance, primarily
because of the previous occasion where he was offered something honorific (marriage
to a princess) and then dishonored when it was removed without (narrative) ado.
68. McCarter 1980: 317, obviously again working with different reading suppo-
308
also be 'quoting' the reward mentioned (by Saul's men, and implicitly or
inferrably having issued from the king himself) at 17.25-27, which specified the reward of freedom and marriage for any who would or could slay
Goliath, a prize still unclaimed.
Fourth, David's words, picking up his own ancestral recitation of 17.58,
remind Saul of the issue about whether David is Jesse's son rather than
having resigned that lineage in some way when kept at the palace after the
Goliath episode. If, or insofar as, the big issue between these two is
'whose son', David may be construed here to mock Saul, though to the
extent that Saul does not want David for his son, may tease him too. Fifth,
the words echo the language of Saul when he was made the offer of king
by Samuel, a claim which was at least partially overridden by subsequent
events (9.21). On that occasion, Saul reminded all of the dangers of an
outsized king. Sixth, the words David speaks may be loophole language,
his own way of sliding out of being pegged as worthy to be son-in-law to
the king. In this reading, David intends his self-deprecation as an escape
hatch to let him avoid Saul's plan, whatever David may be sensed to think
it is: from son-in-law.. .to dead. In such a reading his 'a little thing' may
be close to truthful. The doubled assertion is that, underneath the selfdeprecation, David means it, wants Saul to hear his 'no' as a no. Here
David quotes the self I accorded him at 18.18, where he said a briefer
thing, self-deprecating with less elaboration of form and content. Or,
seventh, perhaps David's words flatter Saul by implying a mismatch
between powerlessness David claims and the house of Saul. Whatever the
case, the 'loose weave' at Saul's character-center will not respond confidently or productively to all this ambiguity.
Again at 18.24 we have nothing but the report of a report. This is one of
several spots where Bakhtin's heteroglossia can be named. Part of what
becomes audible around Saul, so at court, is a peculiar or distinctive
manner of speech. Familiar already is the habit people have of speaking to
the king in the third person (e.g. 16.16; 17.32, 36). Related is a tendency
of David's men to give out as little direct information as possible (so
Abner at 17.55, cf. Samuel, who is refreshinggly direct). Here the servants
sitions, assumes that David would see the betrothal as a chance to advance at court. It
is a place where strategies can be compared: McCarter, here, is supposing what a likely
David would plausibly think; I am trying to tease out what the words can be understood to say. Stone 1996: 130, reminds us that there is no sense of Adriel the
Meholathite's being placed into contention for the throne simply by being married to
the king's eldest daughter.
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appear to have speech but in fact manage to utter only a summary. It may
be the case that at the social level servants need to be drawn as almost
invisible and inaudible, since they are subalterns; their discretion also
functions to construct this particular royal character, Saul. So as the
narrator sums up their speech, verbatim is one of the possibilities, but only
one among several. Only at 18.25 when we see Saul's response to the
words of the servants, can we begin to discern what that report must have
been, logically has to have been. To put the matter plainly, does Saul take
David's enigmatic question as a red light, a yellow or a green signal?
Related to this is the question: How does Saul wish to be signaled? It
seems to me that the servants report this speech of David back to Saul as a
'yes'. Or, more precisely, they report back 'these things/words' and Saul's
next move suggests he has taken their report or David's words as a green
light rather than as a redor perhaps a yellow (proceed but present an
obstacle [expense]), insofar as Saul does not really want a son-in-law but a
dead son-in-law apparent. Fokkelman thinks that David's mention of
insignificant resources prompts Saul's mention of a particular service for a
brideprice (1986: 238). Whatever their valence, Saul weaves David's
words into his own game, apparently again taking David's claim of being
a poor man at face value and setting a brideprice outside the usual economy.
Saul is trifling with David who, already or shortly, trifles back, rendering
the language parodic. Saul is losing even the control he may think he has,
which perhaps we can see he never had.69 So Saul's speech here (18.25) is
again slipped in an envelope and sent to David, carefully tagged: a request
(or command), a condition, a reason (or purpose). 'Thus shall you say to
David, "The king desires no marriage present except a hundred foreskins
of the Philistines, that he may be avenged on the king's enemies".' Again
we count envelopes: David has saidthe servants have reported David to
have saidor Saul has construed David to have saidand I am interpretingsomething that moves Saul past the offer itself to the means of
achieving it. As was the case the first time we heard of marriage to the
king's daughter, Saul's objective is to be achieved by killing Philistines
(ambiguity intended), a supposed revenge on the enemies of the king. Who
is the enemy he seeks to avenge himself upon? And that the report, the
narrator specifiesis carried to David again distances the negotiating pair
and makes the royal household privy to and powerful in the bartering.
Saul, as is his wont, throws out multiple relationalities to others, most of
69. Pyper 1996: 200, reminds us of the potential value in characters' misreadings.
310
which seem not to serve him very well. Asking, ineffectual inquiry sorties,
as we know from his name, is part of the Saulide DNA. The connectedness
of desires is patent in the discourse.
Again sending his words in care of others (the narrator decides), the
king's language goes into direct discourse: Saul quotes himself in the third
person and names the price. His rhetoric would seem to make light of the
matter: '.. .nothing except...' The subtext is prominent, given that David
has already earned, has already been offered the hand of a royal princess,
to no tangible effect. So these words of Saul are potentially slighting in
another sense. Besides making the price of Michal's hand seem minor, and
simultaneously with that assertion, the king is asking David to earn once
again his right to the daughter. Do we see Saul shrewd here, pushing
David skillfully perhaps to overplay his hand? Or do we rather find him
naive and clueless, adding insult to insult, imagining himself as powerfully
positioned while at the same time simply setting himself up for a famous
fall? At the very least, Saul seems to have allowed othersDavid? servants? ourselves?to see the secret he hugged to himself at v. 21. Does
the king know that his slip is showing?
The narrator moves on to summarize, similar to 16.21, 18.5 and 18.1316 where Saul seems to have lost the round he ought have controlled. The
first of these summarized points (18.25) ensures that we will not overlook
the link we have already been shown: Saul has two plans hoping to pass as
one. What we next learn indirectly (18.26-27) is that David is pleased to
be the king's son-in-law, deems it advantageous for a multiplicity of
possible reasons not sorted in our hearing. And the green light is now
David's, who expeditiously accomplishes his assignment, perhaps double
his charge. Saul's reaction is now covered by the narrator as well (18.2829), and though we have it only in summary, it is obvious that the matter
has not turned out as the king envisioned or wished. Saul has a new sonin-law, has his opponent for his son-in-law, but on terms slightly different
than he has planned. The narrator announces Saul's insight by the end of
the piece. He has been ganged up on or outmaneuvered, by God's spiritwith-David and by his daughter's love for that young man, if not as well
by David's skill. Saul's sense of himself as manager of the snare for David
arguably takes a hit, and Saul is the more afraid by the end of the negotiation. The end of the unit is rhetorically uncertain, but were we to follow it
to the end of the chapter, we would learn two more crucial pieces of
information: first, that the Philistines, far from countering David as Saul
had supposed and planned, are bested by him continuously; that David's
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fame increases (in what is most usually understood as a zero-sum game)

that is, Saul's and David's fame will probably vary inversely (not likely to
be pleasing to Saul). And most important, and not with total clarity, the
narrator says Saul was David's enemy from that day on (v. 29). So a major
corner has been turned as a result of this 'construction project': gain for
some, loss for some, both transactions managed by both players. It is an
amazing gain in Saul's characterization from so brief a unit.
Saul has spoken so far only about his daughters. In the next short scene
(19.1-7) he speaks with his son. His initial words are provided for us in
indirect speech to his son and his servants, 'to kill David'. The goal is not
new but more overt and public than we have seen to date. The English
translation may not give quite adequate attention to the impersonality of
Saul's expression, which is an infinitive construct, not an inflected verb.
Who is to kill David? The responsibility is not made explicit.70 Sandwiched between the narrator's previous note on David's fame as compared
with Saul's other servants (18.30) and a second note on Jonathan's finding
pleasure in David (19.1), we may sense in this juxtaposition of paternal
and filial agendas a narrator indication of Saul's desperation. It is possible
to read in Saul's blunter directive a sensitive, if distorted, intuition of the
likelihood that his son and his servants (like his younger daughter) may
not be quite 'his' after all. The reminder of Jonathan's feeling for David is
reported by the narrator, but whose view is being expressed? It may be
Saul's, so that we read his sense of conflicted or overlapping loyalties
here, made pressing when it is said that Jonathan loves David as a self. Or
are we directed to Jonathan's own understanding of the path on which he
is already traveling, as he acts for both (all) of them when he speaks to
David? Jonathan has not owned the words about his love for David,
though he has enacted them. Saul has not commented directly yet either,
though he was made witness to the enactment and is about to get
additional information here. Jonathan appears to love David more than his
father, or at least to find the two relationships in potential conflict.
Jonathan describes Saul to David. 'My father is seeking...guard yourself; remain in hiding' (my translation). 'Seeking' well describes who his
father is. Jonathan echoes the narrator, characterizing but also feeding and
so constructing his father's plan or desire. Jonathan adds incentive to the
chase that is just commencing in the long Saul-David story. Again,
70. C. Miller 1996:141, indicates that such speech using an infinitival complement
gives us minimal access to the speaker's nuance. The vagueness or lack of answerability suits Saul's characterization well.
312
language is what happens here: another allegation passed on to one of the

players by another without the knowledge of the third. Jonathan instructs
David in his role: guard yourself, remain in hiding, concealed from the
seeker. These are the roles they are about to enact for most of the rest of
their relationship, with the identity and ratio of the hiding and seeking
changing toward the end. Hiding and seeking are good descriptors for
David, whose subjectivity is guarded throughout the narrative linking him
with Saul. Saul's determination to be rid of David is more flushed out now
but is also in the process of being wrested from him in this new phase of
struggles between fathers and sons, kings and heirs.
Jonathan's direct speech to his father shows us his strategy and gives us
Saul in negative space, as it were. Jonathan's plan shows his strategy: to
get Saul to reconsider his quest for the death of David within the hearing
of David, in fact to abandon his quest within the hearing of his 'two sons',
one visible to him, the other not. Saul is also brought away from his house,
where the language of intrigue and destruction seem thick. Jonathan sets
himself, presumably sees and shows himself, as mediator, as advocate for
David to his father and makes Saul unknowingly give witness directly to
David. Jonathan's words to his father are doubled, in at least three senses.71
The words have two intended addressees (Saul and David); they review
and recount past words (Edelman 1991: 145-46); and they plausibly
assuage and trouble simultaneously. Jonathan speaks well of David, the
narrator summarizes. And then we hear direct speech: 'The king should
not sin against his servant David, because he has not sinned against you,
and because his deeds have been of good service to you'. And Jonathan
explains, 'For he took his life in his hand when he struck the Philistine,
and the LORD brought about a great victory for all Israel; you saw it and
rejoiced; why will you sin against an innocent person by killing David
without cause?' (19.4-5).
The frame of the speech is that David has done nothing that Saul should
be avenging. On the contrary: he has done good. Saul is in danger here,
Jonathan implies, as well as David. Jonathan twice uses the expression
'good' for David, employs the word 'sin' twice for Saul. The descriptor
for David echoes Samuel's word choice for the new man YHWH has
chosen as king (15.28), a word that consequently rings differently for Saul
than for Jonathan. Jonathan's apparent candor or naivete serves up a
71. There is a fourth 'doubling' if we count Jonathan's tendency here to speak
court patois to the king who is his father, a choice Michal does not make when she
addresses the king.
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reproach as well as a warning, a confirmation as well as an option. Jonathan is speaking up for both 'sons' as well as for father. That is, what he is
urging has some benefit to each of them. The example of David risking his
life to fight the giant and the result God was able to accomplish are also a
blend of good and bad news to Saul, we can construe from how he reacted
to the earlier celebration of the deed by the rejoicing women. The utterance constructs concisely the relationship between the two. David took his
life in his hand to undertake Saul's kingly charge, and with the help of
God, succeeded. Everyone saw it and rejoiced. Jonathan urges something
we did not seethat Saul was glad. Was Saul glad? He ought to have
been, or Jonathan assumes he must have been, says he appeared to be.
Saul does not react visibly here to any implied or inferable reproach in
Jonathan's words. The narrator tells us what we then hear ourselves: an
oath and an asseverative: '.. .he shall not be put to death'. Saul continues
to speak impersonally about death and David and also to reintonate the
language of 14.45, where the acquittal and reprieve of a royal son came
from the speech of those opposing the royal father.72 The narrator ties off
the scene. Jonathan meets with David and tells him what he presumably
heardall these words. He brings David to Saul and they are as previouslywhatever complicated way that can be reviewed. Saul will fall
back into his older pattern of doubleness and fear, hinting at the power of
the undertow of Jonathan's position in Saul's household. Throughout this
passage there has been no word from David. His discourse with the members of Saul's family is remarkably small. Saul relapses almost at once
(19.8-10). The narrator performs a careful summary of how matters stand,
showing us a virtual rerun of an earlier moment (18.10-11), though of
course by being later in time and by making the total of spear thrusts three,
'the same' scene is quite different. Saul's shift is again set off by the
military success of David (a great slaughter of Philistines) and impelled by
the evil spirit of YHWH.73 The setting is Saul's house, where the narrator
points us once again to the hands of the protagonists: Saul's on his spear,
David's on his lyre. Though Saul does not vocalize his plan this time, he
hurls the spear as before and David escapes as before, but this time into
72. Fokkelman 1986: 257, notes that Saul bungles life and death continuously. He
has also noted (p. 248) that from at least the middle of ch. 18 onwards, Saul seeks (bqs)
David's life. That is true but requires nuance, since Saul also backpedals on the project
consistently. Divided desires.
73. Fokkelman 1986: 240, observes that reports of David's success and popularity
are always linked to his deeds with the Philistines.
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the night, suggesting that he flees out of the house, away from the scene.
The narrator confirms Saul as seeking and moves David beyond hiding to
escaping, a trajectory which will intensify in the chapters ahead. Once is
enough, apparently, this time. It is an analepsiswe have seen it before
and a prolepsis too, since it moves Saul's enmity forward.
Saul's exposed animus against David features in a final scene between
him and his daughter Michal (19.11-17), where once again their discourse
is amenable to Bakhtin's insights. Since in the betrothal scene between
Saul and David Michal was silent if not absent, let me summarize her role
there so we may note something different in this last encounter: Michal
was referenced both in character direct discourse and also by narrator tags
as an exchangeable possession between powerful men, as a token for servants to barter between those men. Michal was implied to be an ally of the
dreaded enemy of her people and assigned explicitly to be a snare to her
husbandalso an opponent of her father, though there is little grounds for
thinking that Saul read it so. Michal was arguably set to be a competitor
with her sister and even possibly with her mother (depending on our interpretation of the datum that David eventually marries an Ahinoam).74 Since
Michal was not present except in the speech of others in the betrothal
scene, she abetted neither the moves of Saul nor David there. Since, if
with Bakhtin we balance and demote the 'omniscient narrator' with our
own readerly scrutiny of the centrifugal interplay of all the language, it
was not her self-confessed love for David that initiated all this action but
the anonymous note left for her father and his acting upon that suggestion
which ignites this passage. There is no basis for any absolute knowledge
that Michal loves David. All subsequent readings which rise from that
taproot, ramified however creatively, must be re-examined and mostly
abandoned. But now she is present as a subject. A short scene, threaded
with five direct discourse utterances, positioned by narratorial words,
comprises the unit. Michal informs a silent David: 'If you do not save your
74. She is implied at the more micro level: every time the 'in-law' phraseology
comes up, on every occasion when Saul's heirs are mentioned, and whenever David's
wives in general are referred to. (See Exum 1993: 43-46, for a clear presentation of
narrator descriptor tags as well as some assessment of Michal's lack of choice. I see
more options for her than does Exum.) Pyper 1996: 84, makes a case for her presence
in Nathan's parable of 2 Sam. 12. A more general comment: Jobling 1998: 160,
suggests that an effect of the monarchy is visible in the DH (or 1 Samuel) texts about
women. The comment is well-taken in a certain sense, though the blame for the text's
androcentrism rests on a broader base than simply one institution.
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life tonight, tomorrow you will be killed' (19.11). She picks up correctly
on what the narrator has just said: Saul has sent messengers to kill David
in the morning. She clearly sides with her husband over her father here,
thwarting the one to save the other, perhaps thwarting herself to save both.
Or does she thwart them both to save herself? Her speech is a variant of
Jonathan's in 19.2, but more succinct. She urges escape instead of hiding,
noting that the morning will bring death, not mediation and reconciliation.
Michal takes the initiative to let David out the window to escape from Saul
et al. Assisting one is to resist the other, commentators allege. But her
action need not be simply one of those or the other; she may have other
motives we can imagine, should we construe her as not in love with David.
Simultaneously she helps him away from her, losing him, or perhaps
loosing him out of her life. Flee tonight or die tomorrow, she says to him,
and he, silent, obeys. Michal is the agent here, and David, though silent
and assisted, is surely active on his own behalf as well, making haste on
foot as she verbally buys time.75
Michal says to Saul's dispatched but wordless messengers (who are
beginning to abound, their presence testifying both to power and failure to
accomplish), 'He is sick'. The effective strategy is delay, as the messengers go back for instructions. Michal is enigmatic and opaque, and her
words are spacious. Saul rejoins, 'Lift him on the bed to me so that he may
die/to kill him' (my translation). As before, the agent of the killing remains unspecified in Saul's mouth. It appears that Michal's deception with
the bedclothes is discovered before the bed is brought to Saul, who instead
of a bedded image receives a report to which we hear only a sentence of
response. Saul says to Michal, 'Why have you deceived me like this, and
let my enemy go, so that he has escaped?' As before with Saul and his
children, he draws them only in relation to his own desire to remain king.
The man in question is 'my enemy', not any of the other descriptors that
might suit the scene from another angle. Sending is the root of this verbal
75. Commentators tend to focus on Michal as caught between the alternatives of
(dis)pleasing father or husband (e.g. Alter 1999: 120-21; Fokkelman 1986: 263).
Edelman 1991: 147-50, characterizes Michal as able to please both; more common is
that she pleases neither. My point is that she may be suiting herself. A slightly different
detail but one I wish to point out below: Jobling 1998: 152, writes that Michal's
whirlwind of activity convinces him of Michal's love for David. Whirlwind overstates
the matter, and to escort someone from one's life seems susceptible of other interpretations besides love. I am not disputing Jobling's right to read it as he would but
calling attention to the skimpy base for it.
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exchange: Saul has sent; he accuses Michal of sending; and she will
shortly attribute to David the same action. The words of Saul ring with the
insight given him at the end of the betrothal passage (so 18.28), where
Saul sees his daughter's love for David. As is typical, Saul does not voice
the fear but speaks blame at the other. Michal says to Saul, 'He said to me,
"Send me. Why should I kill you?"' (my translation). She quotes a threat
we did not hear. She may be making it up, giving truth to Saul's accusation that she has deceived him, if not with a dummy, with language.
Alternatively, he may have said it. Perhaps the causative construction
suggests yet another possibility: 'Why should I be the cause of your
dying?'76 An accusation thus emerges: Saul is drawn as potential killer of
his daughter to get his enemy.
The scene, networked with dialogue, however elliptical or falsely
alleged, is between husband and wife, father and daughter. The narrator
names them now Saul and Michal, not in terms of any shared relationship
(19.11, 12, 14, 15, 17, 18). Indeed Michal does not address Saul in the
heteroglossic language of the court. Each of them directs the same servantmessengers, whose views are hidden as always. The dilemma we may
sense for Michal is not coextensive with her character. That is, though we
recognize that she is seen earlier by Saul as his daughter and here by the
narrator as David's wife, those relationships hardly exhaust her self, granted
that the narrator, who names her independently as the scene progresses,
prompts readers to construct her larger than those two ties. Scholarly
commentary on Michal's part in the scene tends to center on her gesture
with the dummy in the bed and on the quality of her feeling for David,
rather than on her words, which reference neither of those two red
herrings.77 Michal's language, both in the command to David and in the
rejoinder to Saul, though cloudy, is blunt, unnuanced and unpadded with
etiquette. As Revell (1996: 130-31) points out, Michal is the only character who does not speak with terms of respect to the king, though it may
76. I have not found any support for such a translation, but I do not see it as
impossible, simply different from the usual construction. Fokkelman 1986: 263, 267
(among others), reviews the layered quality of Michal's speech, her reuse of the
language of escape and death (which, if fact, trail into 2 Samuel). Fokkelman also
opines that Saul has undervalued the 'love factor' between Michal and David, by
which I think he means of Michal for David (pp. 269-75); I think perhaps it has been
overvalued by interpreters.
77. It is true that the passage recalls Gen. 29-31, filled with the struggle between
husband, wife and her father. But there are many possibilities besides that set.
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be unwise to universalize on the basis of the only exchange to which we

are privy.
What is made visible to us, I think, is Michal's perspicacity and practicality, perhaps in contrast with her brother.78 That the moment for adjudication is past is a reality clearer to Michal than to Jonathan. She may be
communicating back to Saul that he gave her to his enemy, whom he has
discovered that she loves. However, we have not heard that claim from
her. Michal reads Saul's moves precisely, several times: his plan for the
morning, the delay able to be extended as the servants return for consultation, the rejoinder that ends the scene when Saul makes no response.
David is described passively throughout, his ticket scheduled, issued and
justified by Michal. Her 'deceit' is delay, little more. She in fact makes her
ploy quite open, by letting the dummy expose her choice of one person
over the will of the other. What she demonstrates is that she knows Saul
better than he anticipates her, though he had sufficient knowledge to have
moved differently. The strategy is more important than the details of it,
reminiscent though it is of other daughters choosing self and husband over
father. The more interesting thing is her last comment, which is actually a
hypothetical quotation, a question directed presumably by David to her
which she now redirects to Saul. In the service of doubled speech,
Michal's act and discourse may also be read as saving Saul, similar to the
scenario Jonathan urges his father to avoid. To shed innocent blood is
what she has prevented him from doing here, though she does not say it.
Perhaps some of the blood she saves is her own.
The unit, when added up, makes visible Saul's frustrating if intense
engagement with his children over David, with David in regard to Merab,
Michal and Jonathan. Saul is as divided within himself, his inner and outer
speech testifying to his conflicting desires. Saul's kingship is piling up
now around his private agendaprivate in the sense of personal rather
than public and in the sense of secret rather than wholly open. The cost of
this kingship is beginning to become visible, in ways perhaps we did not
78. In addition to the discussion of Berlin (1983: 24-25), Edelman (1991: 147-49)
comments on the scene as well, drawing Michal as conflicted. Though one can imagine
that a character could be torn in such a circumstances, I see no sign of it in her speech.
For a very different discussion and a good critique of Berlin, see Exum (1992: 71-95;
1993: 51 -60) who shows the gender constructions of both Michal and Jonathan. Fewell
and Gunn (1993: 148-50) sketch the possibilities of reading Jonathan and David's
relationship as homosexual.
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sense when Samuel spoke of it in ch. 8. The kingship will cost the king his
own sons and daughters as well as taking the children of others.
e. YHWH'S Spirit Deflects Saul: 1 Samuel 19.18-24
The last short section gives us another piece of 'reused text' (cf. 10.5-13).
It balances off the scene with which we began this whole chapter, where
the divine abandonment of Saul in favor of David was made visible. Not
only the deity and the divine spirit but also God's prophet now disregards
Saul to see David. The scene sums up the intermittent struggle between the
spirit of God which torments Saul, who is determined to stay king, and we
may now suspect its presence confusing the old king when he fingers his
spear while his successor plays the harp (18.10-11 and 19.8-10). The spirit
evidently follows David when he flees Saul's court, interposing itself
between the young king and his pursuers. By its resonance with the scene
of Saul's anointing and subsequent spirit-rush, the spirit's thwarting of
Saul is implied. At best, the spirit of YHWH seems a bucking bronco for
Saul, who can scarcely cope with it. By the end of this unit, it has thrown
him completely.
While capping off Saul's ever-more overt ordering of servants and
sending of messengers to kill David (so at 19.1, 11, 14, 15, 20, 21) the
passage is in some other ways anomalous, and not so much for content as
for position of narrating.79 That there is no inner angle is important. The
difference in narrative technique, in position, signals for me the presence
of a character not to be penetrated: God's spirit, which, in this story of
Saul, is God's failed (though we may feel hardly commenced) project of
communication with him and the briefly shared and now turned sour
agency of kingship.80 The juxtaposition of Samuel and the anointed
king(s) effects once again the presence of the spirit of God (10.9; 11.6;
16.13-16; 18.10; 19.9). God's spirit here is God's presence with Saul,
positive before he has been fired and negative afterwards. That is to say,
once Saul has set his own intent against that described to him as God's, the
79. A number of scholars comment on the narrative shift here: Fokkelman 1986:
276, on its extreme repetitiveness and its participation in an overarching seeking/not
finding motif (p. 281); Polzin 1989: 181, on its stylized character.
80. As my construction of the scene hints, I see no way to understand this spirit
except from within the text. It obviously fits poorly within general biblical systematic
reflection upon God, nor can it be equated readily with the social phenomenon of
prophecy. Klein 1983: 198, characterizes the spirit of God as haunting rather than
helping Saul.
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spirit contends with Saul, troubles him. It casts him into a prophetic state,
whatever that may be (not the same as making him a prophet). While in
the spirit's grip Saul can either perform his kingship well (10.9; 11.6) or
badly (other occasions). What it does to him is not clear, nor how it works;
but what is shown to us is that he and it are not compatible once he has
been fired from reigning and David appointed and anointed in his place.
The spirit is like a valence, once Samuel and David are there, representing
the powerful assertion that Saul is no longer God's approved choice for
king. It casts Saul wholly out of himself this timea depiction more
extreme in both narratorial expression and gesture than when he tries
ineffectually to pin his successor to the wall. In this instance he turns on
his own identity rather than David's. Saul strips off his clothes (as had
Jonathan in 18.4) and lies naked.81 That character or aspect of God-withSaul remains opaque within the narrator's representation, nor does Saul
give much access (except in negative space, here or elsewhere) to the
entity Saul-with-God. There is an encounter noted and minimally described, but we learn little of its nature. The narrator does not pin down
God's spirit in much detail nor draw it from an inner consciousness. What
we see, we see from the outside. But how Saul constructs God is relevant
(as is how Samuel does so in earlier parts of the story). Exum well notes
that there is no discussion of Saul's characterization that excludes God.82
Saul here, minimally, opposes what he has been advised by Samuel as
being God's decision. Saul bends his energies to resist vacating his royal
post. If, as has been suggested, the kingship has a function, its 'one thing
needful'the sustaining of the YHWH-Israel relationshipthen Saul's
failure to manage that need makes him redundant. Insofar as we allow
81. Naked is at very least shaming, implies Klein 1983: 199.Polzin 1989:182-83,
observes that throughout this portion of text (chs. 16-19, but most literally in this last
unit) Saul is laid bare while David remains hidden.
82. How the dynamics of that determination work out before us (or how we
participate in authoring it) is crucial for our own insight. Exum is game to take on the
evil side of God, God contending with a Saul who is more guilty than wicked, she says,
and who is rejected with no forgiveness, as though God can be diagnosed apart from
Saul's sense of the deity. She (1992: 22, 28, 35) describes God as ambivalent, even
uncomfortably ambiguous, dark, and so forth. The problem I have with her line of
thought is how to understand God construed apart from the techniques of representation with which we are dealing. She writes perceptively in chapter 2 (pp. 16-42)
on Saul as tragic and notes a number of other studies which aim toward the same idea.
I am not interested in the genre issue right here, nor on the larger issues of what is
'wrong' with Saul, but on my own cueing from all the language.
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Moses' words in Deuteronomy to press God's case for the importance of

the bond, Saul's refusal to move aside when he fails at the charge is a
major utterance. God remains inscrutable to characters, to narrator, to
readers; there is no omniscience for anybiblical and scriptural genre
notwithstanding. But as God is crucial for Saul's characterization, so is
Saul for God's. What is obvious now, viewed from either end, is that the
YHWH-Saul partnership is defunct, risking now the YHWH-Israel pact.
The only direct speech in the piece comprises a pair of questions and
their answers: inquiries into the presence of David, David and Samuel;
information about his and their whereabouts at Naioth of Ramah. Reused
is the enigmatic, formulaic utterance: 'Is even/also Saul among the
prophets?' All else is either summarized or described. Narrative technique
is such that David is positioned by means of one of his key words
escapebut to a place perhaps unexpected: with Samuel, to whom he is
said to tell all that Saul has done to him. That report is not given in direct
discourse. That the two meet and speak is evidently more important than
what is said, beyond the general. Saul's combined power and powerlessness are simultaneously evoked as he sends three contingents of messengers (part of the royal [dynastic] character zone) who are three times
overcome into acting-the-prophet when they arrive, with the result that
Saul himself comes to accomplish his own goal. Saul, once again asking
(as is his primary authorial characterization) inquires about direction when
he is near. The description stresses not Saul's job but his being controlled
by God's spirit like Samuel and others were wont to be. It need not be
insight-provoking but rather deictic. What goes on with Saul and God's
spirit all that day and night is not made clear; the episode comes to a dead
end but makes no change for the better in regard to Saul's acceptance of
his firing and marks no letup in his pursuit of Davidto the contrary. The
spirit of God is God's communication with Saul, which he is now
resisting. If Saul's garments in some aspect signal kingship, though he
casts them off here he presumably dons them again and resumes his kingly
role when the spirit recedes. Part of what is being drawn of Saul over these
chapters is that his increasing isolation (a result of making David his
enemy) equals resistance to God, which drives him all the more. Saul is
described like a man going deaf: the conversation continues around him,
but he hears less and less of it and is more and more cut off, no matter how
many surround him and how distinctly they talk.
Before concluding the whole piece, we can revisit the seven points
offered in terms of 16.1-13 and see them reinforced here. First, the firing
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of Saul could not be clearer. Though YHWH'S speech has yielded its time
to the spirit, the choice is made brutally clear. Saul's pursuit of David is
thrice and then a fourth time ineffectual. Information does not help him
this time, for even when he is close to his opponent, there is no access for
him. All of Saul's messengers and finally his royal self fall before the
spirit and the prophet with David. Second, though the chain of repudiation
is not yet completed, there are fresh links in it. If the firing has touched on
not simply Saul but also his dynasty, it is clearer than before that the
Saulides have little chance to regain their position, given the strength and
commitment of the spirit of God. The sonship issue is activated as
bystanders speak of Saul with the prophets, redirecting us to the scene
when Saul's paternity was remarked previously. In fact, the use of the
adverb gam/even or also, used with whatever specific nuance at 10.11-12
is spoken eight times within w. 20-24 to highlight the oddity and prominence of what is being witnessed: even the servants of Saul fell into a
trance, even the next seteven they, even Saul, even he... Saul is bound
up in, incapacitated by the chains of his firing or rejection. Third, the king
is shown dead, supine and naked for a day and a night. Fourth, since he
rises and returns home, he continues to be shown deadly, a charge which
has become more believable by the end of ch. 19 than it was at the outset
of ch. 16. The motif word of seeing binds this passage as it did the unit
which related David's choosing, as does the root ngd which sums up the
role of David as king-designate and of Saul as puzzle/communication.
Sixth, David's relationship with God throws into dark relief all that Saul
has never enjoyed, making visible the main difference between them.
What we may have trouble seeing clearly (seventh) is God's purposes and
impressions, which remain shadowed though not wholly invisible.
7. Conclusions
It is not difficult to summarize even this long chapter, since its main task
has been to show the frayed texture of Saul's relating self. These chapters
(16-19)arguably in all of 1 Samuelare the best place to attend to the
discourse of Saul's conflicted desires. Bakhtin's schema of interlocking
language allows us to see the varied nature of the representation of Saul
the monarchy and Saul the human being. The ways in which narrator and
characters, characters with each other, and Saul within himself are shown
interlinked to co-operate and to contest each other are varied but clear.
Saul's early invitations, issues to Jesse's son and bidding him into the
royal household, are retracted; Saul's actions prompt David's flight. But
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in between David's being bidden near and sent forth, Saul backtracks,
dithers, reverses, repentsof everything. Saul's invitations to David
boomerang, not simply in terms of David but for Saul as well. If Saul was
the first of his household to love David, he is not the last. Saul's own
people, his fighting men, his children, his prophet, his God all appear now
to choose for David when Saul forces the issue. David is about to go on
the run, but in a certain sense, Saul is on the defensive now as well. Saul
continues to ask but he refuses to listen.
The groundwork has been laid for the next two major chunks of material,
which show David fleeing, Saul pursuing; Saul pushes all of his people
away and makes more poignant and wasteful his solitary sovereignty. Saul
shows kingship an institution not viable; too greedy, it consumes all
resources in pursuit of narrow ends, abandoning and neglecting its main
purposes. Though David appears more innocent than Saul, in fact the kingship being drawn behind the visage of Saul is David's as well. It is clearer
here, I think, than anywhere else, that each interpreter is, as Bakhtin notes,
working to some extent with self as he or she authors Saul and his others.
The diversity of viewpoint on the character of the king, and the way in
which the king and the deity are shown to intersect, emerges largely in
terms of prior interests. It is evident to me that Saul's project of struggling
to stay king is at utter odds with God; not simply silence is the problem
now but an active resistance of Saul, matched by a certain strong-armed
tendency on God's part. Saul's task of fighting for the people has become
terribly distorted, and of his charge to guard the YHWHIsrael relationship
there is no trace at all: to the contrary. It is clear to me that my sense of
God, drawn from biblical pages but as enriched from other engagements,
prompts from me a different construction of God than is offered by other
commentators. God's silence, the divine aloofness, seem to me to be a
clear invitation to Saul to examine his own self-disclosure carefully. That
he does not get to that project very apparently makes more insistent the
interpreters's own engagement in the project.
Chapter 6
'ONLY I AM LEFT TO TELL THE TALE' :

PURSUIT AND ESCAPE, SURPLUS AND SURVIVAL (1 SAMUEL 20-23)
What shall we think about a text that can do its work only by making its
central character insane? Is it kingship itself that is insane?
David Jobling (1998: 91)
Indeed, the entire section comprising chapters 20-23 constitutes a meditation on the various effects of knowledge or the lack of it upon character and
reader alike.
Robert Polzin( 1989: 200)
1. Point of Entry
As the previous chapter of this book was drawn together, we had a

portraitor better, a transcriptof Saul's conflicting and contradictory
desires. We listened to his language, in its various venues, cross and tangle, puff up and pontificate a self we may have had trouble recognizing.
One of my ways of positioning the pattern is to talk in terms of Saul's
edges: ragged and raveled, unable to catch in healthful ways with the
contours of the many others with whom he interacts. Saul seems isolated
rather than interdepending, vulnerable as he violates others and is violated
by them in turn.
In this chapter we will see a related piece, perhaps a corollary of that
awkward autonomy. The most efficient name for it is 'entrapment', known
to us from the realms of crime and law enforcement. If police are determined to ferret out drug dealers, for example, one of their strategies is to
send a likely looking seller/buyer to flush out a suspect by making some
sort of approach to a sale. The suspect is, of course, technically innocent
until he or she actually strikes a deal, or responds to the one proffered. But
first the plan and then the approach of the covert law agent to the suspect
organizes an occasion liable to generate a crime. We may suppose that the
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habits of those the police approach determine, largely, to whom such overtures are made; perhaps, though, we know better than to rely on it. How
does one get another to do what he or she presumably wants to do, is
prone to do and yet is unlikely to do without our initiation? Who 'starts'
such a transaction? Who needs to take responsibility for the crime of the
particular sale: the agent who offers or the villain who agrees? Entrapment
has two sides, as does pursuit, which is the dynamic we shall watch unfolded for the next seven chapters of 1 Samuel. One flees, another chases;
or one goes out ahead, knowing and intending that the other will be drawn
along behind. Who is the cause and who the effect? It is not unambiguously clear, cannot really be separated into clean roles. We may know
that the procedures for 'stings' are rigid, so that entrapment cannot be
claimed. And yet those very rules have been clarified because on occasion
people have been unjustly entrapped by those who lay bait. The possibilities for mutual miscuing are great. It is clearly a reader issue, not simply a matter of plotting characters. As Saul failed to catch well with his
interlocutors in the previous set of material, here he will begin to be dragged
along both by others' manipulation and by his own refusal to answer.
A second and related matter to ponder is raised in the title of this
chapter, drawn, of course, from the book of Job. A single witness escapes
each of the disasters that fall upon Job's goods and gasps out the tragedies'
particulars. We evidently must believe such a one, since we have no
alternative. But does a solitary survival insure a truthful tale? In the
section under consideration here, there are several such lone rangers whom
we must query (Jonathan, David, Doeg, Abiathar). One of their functions
is to call attention to the whole topic of reader acceptance of character
assertions and to raise the issue of how what we know contributes to what
we are able to hear. Most commentators who have stayed with Saul to date
have a tendency now (if not before) to write him off as irrational.1 And yet
my sense of things is that Saul speaks more truthfully on occasion than
David does. When David self-incriminates, we may tend to excuse him
from the results of his actions. But readers can, if we choose to do so, as
1. A maj or factor in differentiating readers comes with the assumption (explicit or
implicit) about who in the story knows what. Whether David's anointment is known
(to whom it is known) and whether Saul's firing from kingship is known (to whom it is
known) affect the dynamics of interpretation substantially. Yet remarkably few
scholars call attention to these matters. There is no definitive way to know what the
author has in mind, so readers do well to diagnose their own sense of matters,
remembering again that we are not pondering facts but representation.
6. 'Only I Am Left to Tell the Tale'
325
readily point out where Saul is correct and David duplicitous, or where
Saul correctly names behavior that David owns, when we compare their
statements with other information we have. Why is Saul labeled the crazy
one? It is not simply a matter of lemming-like readers; a discernible
authoring sets up the pattern which readers may choose to counter or not.
We appraise truthfulness partly in terms of information we have but as
well in terms of our interests and wider experience. One gain available, I
think, is to make more visible our own reader's choices and not be sleightof-handed into conclusions we cannot track or answer for. Saul is, of
course, a participant in the several 'stings' that will be organized for him,
and his speech is redolent of self-deception as well as other denominations
of less-than-truth. The larger implications on Saul's slide into unreliability
will be developed below.
This may be a good time to recall that, at least in my construction, the
DH is working within two genres, is drawing a portrait that has two related
referents and purposes. The first is the riddle or parable, propounding a
reflection on the failure of monarchic Israel/Judah, where the 'first king'
encodes a cipher for certain characteristic dynamics which brought about
the fall of the monarchic enterprise. As I have urged, 1 Samuel is not a
video of the life and times of an eleventh-century monarch and must not
be read as though it were. We have in the riddle the identification of kings
and sons, the demonstrations that sons have proved nonviable, several
explanations of why they are inadequate; we are moving now toward the
question of how the king(ship) can be 'unhorsed' so that a successor can
begin to do the job he was given to do in ch. 16, before he ever met
Saul. (The Davidic phase of monarchy will come to grief as well itself in
the longer narrative following Saul's portion of the story.2) The second
genre helping the recital of monarchy's failures is the casting of a credible
human being who struggles against a fair number of the weaknesses of
human nature, jealousy and isolation prominent among them. Starting at
least in the material presently under scrutiny (chs. 20-23), in place of the
common view that Saul is pursuing David, I will maintain that David is
actually directing their interaction. Saul is clearly reactive to David, hence
easy to manipulate. Unlike many scholars working currently on these
narratives, I cannot find it in me to grow angry at the character David for
2. The story of Israel's kings is (un)packed like Chinese boxes or Russian dolls in
reverse. The narratives get larger rather than smaller. The gnomic story of Gideon and
Abimelech (Judg. 9) is smaller than the story of Saul. Saul's narrative is, in certain
ways, a miniaturized version of Davidic monarchy.
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his excesses, which are many. He is not the prime subject of my interest
here, in any case. But my singling him out here is not to vilify him (or to
valorize Saul) but simply to suggest that David is by far the more skilled
player in the game upon which the two of them are now embarked.
Neither of them is wanting to kill the otherin fact, each resists it carefully. Each man is intent, however, upon disabling his opponent. And we
know how the story ends. Miscall calls part of this story an exercise in
restraint, more than of power (1986: 147-55). The point is well-made for
the delicacy of the dynamic shared between these two which is offered
here for our construction. The section of text unfolds in four movements:
Jonathan-and-David's activating Saul (ch. 20); the further baiting of the
trap that will lure Saul out after David (21.1-22.5); Saul's massacre of his
priests with the escape of one to David (22.6-19); and the first scenes of
the chase (ch. 23) which will intensify into our next section.3
A final preliminary point to be ploughed in (or not) as our reading
proceeds is offered by Diane Ackerman. In a work in which she discusses
endangered species, she reminds us, first, that what survives is not single
thingsso not the horse alonebut relationshipsthe horse and its niche.
She says, 'As Gregory Bateson points out in Sacred Unity: Further Steps
to an Ecology of the Mind: "The horse isn't the thing that evolved.
What evolved actually was a relationship between horse and grass... It's
an entire interlocking business of species'" (D. Ackerman 1995: xv). A
second point she makes while discussing the dangers facing monk seals:
What is a genuine assist to .them, and what is a lethal if well-intentioned
boost? Often, she notes, as seals haul themselves onto a beach to give
birth, human bathers try to force them back into the water, no doubt
having heard of animals who back themselves into desiccating trouble; but
actually the efforts of 'helpers' to push the birthing seals into shallow
water make newborn seal pups easier for predatory sharks to get at.'.. .All
the monk seal wants is to continue living in the ancient seas for which it's
designed. But those waters are gone now' (p. 5). The choices of the
3. It is not terribly obvious how to split this set of four chapters. In an earlier work
(Green 2000: 67-134, Chapter 3), I took as a set the chapters comprising David's stay
in Saul's household, which included ch. 20, which revolves around the expectation that
David be at Saul's table for a feast. In this present work, I have placed ch. 20 with what
follows. Similarly, the pattern of mutual and interlocked pursuit of Saul and David that
is so clear in chs. 24-26 can also include ch. 23, which is in some ways more like them
than it is like the set with which I have placed it here. But the convention of reading
24-26 as its own unit prompted me to make a set of ch. 20-23.
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ancient and now almost vanished animals may seem unlikely to us, the
refuges they select not good ones; but we may not be looking with their
eyes. Ackerman writes, 'Perhaps we are confused about what a refuge
really isnot a place as much as a willingness' (p. 15). In the material we
are about to explore, David accumulates helpers and gets crucial
information; Saul sheds allies and lacks important data. How survivors are
treated by characters and readers will repay attention.
2. Bakhtin on Surplus of Seeing
Given the need to make effective use of the dialogical and utterance-linked
aspects of entrapment and pursuit, and in view of our need for a good way
to talk about ways in which survivors construct their positions of advantage and benefit on the events that only they can tell, Bakhtin's concept
of surplus of seeing is useful. This aspect of Bakhtin's thought is related to
larger (or more comprehensive and foundational) ideas already set out in
some detail: the dialogical nature of all reality but language in particular,
authoring strategies, and polyphony. In order to get surplus into workable
shape for the present purposes, it is necessarily only to locate it in its
matrix, to review quickly what has already been said, and to add some
specificity. Bakhtin discusses surplus in his early philosophical discussion
of authoring and then brings it to us again when talking later about authoring a polyphonic hero (Bakhtin 1990b: 22-99; 1984:47-77, Chapter 2).
In his earlier discussion, Bakhtin usefully characterizes surplus of seeing
as that which an author can see of a hero who is being drawn but which
remains inaccessible to that character, specified in shorthand as the space
behind the hero's head. Another way to put the same concept is that when
an author works, or when a subject sees and interrelates with an other, the
hero (or the other) is part of the author's horizon, whereas the hero sees
that same field as an environment in which he or she does not perceive the
self. Bakhtin's earlier work stresses the importance of distinguishing the
two separate angles, noting (as we saw) that authoring relies both on a
capacity to enter the space of another as fully as possible but as well on the
author's capacity to retreat, enriched by standing 'empathetically'4 with
the other, but ultimately dissociating and reclaiming the distinctive authorial space. The author thus gains from standing as near the hero as possible
4. 'Empathetically' is my shorthand for Bakhtin's sense of 'sympathetic coexperientially'; he did not like the word empathy in this context, and yet I find it comes
closer to what he is after than does 'sympathy'.
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but compounds that insight by returning to the distinctive authorial position. The author takes advantage of his or her surplus in relation to the
hero, draws upon that which the hero is unable to see, but neither swamps
nor is swamped in the process. An author can 'feel with' a hero, but that is
never quite the same as how a hero will feel (should we have access to
such a moment); and how an author later 'feels' is also not equivalent to
the hero's feeling. These viewpoints remain distinct.
Bakhtin's later writings do not, if I understand him correctly, so much
deny that facet of authoring as pick up the topic more explicitly from the
hero's angle. That is, while maintaining that author and hero in many ways
remain separate centers of consciousness, Bakhtin becomes more interested in how a hero can make some moves from a surplus that the author
has not anticipated, does not wholly control, and will not articulate summatively. To put it slightly differently: an author can renounce the right or
habit of exploiting surplus and allow the character some space to articulate
his or her consciousness from that character's own angle more fully. An
author can finalize a hero from the surplus of seeing, or perhaps more to
the point, a narrator can attempt it or seem to do so. In more monologic
writing, a reader can count on the reliability of such finalizing explanations. But in polyphonic works (and moves which approach that sort of
creation) such certainty diminishesor can do if we read appropriately.
The surplus does not disappear, given Bakhtin's insistence on the pivotal
insight that each of us stands in at least a slightly different position from
every other; but authorial surplus becomes less the place from which the
author or narrator operates. Morson and Emerson break surplus into three
kinds to make this distinction more handy: essential surplus (which is what
Bakhtin talks about in his early work), information-bearing surplus (which
is inevitable to get a story told, the sort of connections the narrator must
provide so that the details of the narrative remain comprehensible)5, and
addressive surplus, which they fill in from what Bakhtin did not quite say.6
It is essential surplus that the 'polyphonic author' renounces when drawing a character who will be able to escape authorial control, to at least
some extent. At the practical level, that means that the narrator and even
the other characters will not explain the hero, will not seek to finalize him
5. Morson and Emerson 1997: 260, characterize information-bearing surplus as
'the power to set up some dialogues or provoke incidents'.
6. Morson and Emerson 1990: 231-68, Chapter 6, specifically on pp. 241-46.
Emerson's 1997:172-305, Chapter 5 (particularly pp. 220-42) also bears on this point,
though in a slightly different context.
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but will allow all that composes the character zone to make its own
expression.
When they make their case for addressive surplus, Morson and Emerson
correlate it with 'good listening', the capacity of one to attend as willingly
and skillfully as possible to the presence of another (1990: 242). This
addressive surplus uses outsidedness not to finalize a character but to ask
good questions and invite the other to greater self-knowledge, growth,
transformation. It does not stand on its own superiority derived from a
higher lookout or broader experience but allows the hero to work with his
own awareness, granted it may lead their 'owner' along a maddeningly
circuitous pathway. Morson and Emerson clarify that it is not simply an
author who manages addressive surplus but characters may do it as well.
And, to circle back a bit, even a polyphonic hero (or a hero whose drawing
relies on some of the techniques and stances of that creative mode) will
still not have immediate or utter access to everything about the self. When
such a character provides us with information, it is not complete and must
not be taken as though it were. The hero cannot see the self as others see
him. Each of us lives at T, say Clark and Holquist (1984: 92-93), and the
gate is at the edge where self and non-self meet.
How does this concept help us with the reading of Saul? I think it
encourages us to see a set of interrelated spectrums for clarifying the
representation of consciousness. That we have spectrums, and in fact usually several, cautions us against presuming facticity, reliability, truthfulness, certainty, or the like. We will have to construe in a more complex
way. The narrating voice will take a surplus-related stance to each character. A central hero (like Saul) will, even in the comparatively simple biblical discourse, make a variety of moves in relation to clarifying their own
sense of things, as will various characters in relation to each other. Their
surpluses and blindspots will signify in multiple ways. A careful reader
will recognize, will struggle to discern her own surplus in regard to the
characters and surely her own blindspot (the place behind her head, among
others) which will play a central role in her reading choices. Though we
are both constrained and free to read 'from our own place', responsible
reading must be alert to lots of other spaces as well, take careful account
of the factors of authoring and 'heroing' which compose the text. A
second important gift we may carry away from surplus is a new set of
strategies for reading the character God. To an amazing degree God's
biblical actions are read monologically, with no distinctions made in
relation to the divine surplus. The drawing of God in this long story of
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Saul, distinct from though not unrelated to other places where the divine
character appears, requires consideration of both horizons and environments of the deity. In fact, God's seeings and others' sightings of them are
a major player in this tale. Once we acknowledge surplus as a powerful
factor (of one kind or another) in authoring, we must admiteven
happilythe inadequacy of our own constructions, however able they
may be insofar as they go.
3. Polzin 's Contribution
Polzin contributes to the present reading seven observations about the unit
under considerationmoves both thematic and methodological. He starts,
first, with the apparently anomalous characterizations of Jonathan, Saul,
and David, who all may seem at first to be acting against expectation here.
Jonathan seems naive beyond belief, Saul unrealistically oblivious of
recent events, David foolish to wager that Saul might change. But rather
than assuming that the problem is in the text, Polzin finds coherence in a
careful rereading: Jonathan consistently views matters in a straightforward
and uncomplicated way, unless carrying out the other's plan. Saul's
outbursts are credible, given David's provocation and the stakes involved.
Polzin finds David hardest to recharacterize, a result of the narrator's
tendency to withhold David's inner view, leaving me a path for making
him intent on provoking Saul to chase him (Polzin 1989:187-90). Polzin's
second point is this: the double-voicing of the covenant language is
obvious, its emotional tone, vehement urgency, and participation in political and personal realms carrying those involved (our reading selves
included) into multiple pools and their deep waters. David induces Jonathan to use duplicitously this language which pledges mutual fidelitycan
such contradictory assertions be relied upon (1989: 190-94)? Polzin asks,
third: who needs, is set up to learn new information about Saul? Jonathan
may seem to be helping David gain clarity, but Polzin prefers that David is
assisting Jonathan to see a reality about his father that the son has
heretofore resisted to accept. In this context, the arrow code, shared out
among three participants (and ourselves reading) and somewhat observed
at the end of the 'lesson', signifies what to whom? Polzin suggests that the
arrow flurry at the end of ch. 20 serves a DH goal of making language
self-conscious (1989: 191-94).
Double-voicing continues as David speaks to Ahimelech (Polzin's
fourth observation): David's plan is hidden, to be sure, and his communi-
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cation false at the literal and surface level; but his assertions are not
wholly wrong, especially his claim of having been sent, which resonates
with a number of places earlier in the text where that is clearly the case.
David's being both chosen and sent are known to readers, Polzin reminds
us, claiming as a consequence that this fugitive's articulations are
deceptively simple rather than simply deceptive. Additionally, as David
proceeds, his character zone begins to fill in with some of the language
that composes Saulgranted only readers will be able to see the similarity
and appreciate the possibilities in David's referring to 'the king' (1989:
194-98). Fifth, Polzin, like many others, is intrigued by the skulking Doeg,
and finds the pattern of interrupted foreshadowing which works the Doeg
character to be a device typically used by DH (1989: 198). A resonance
links Saul's slaughter of the priests with the events involving Jonathan's
breach of fast in ch. 14 (Polzin's sixth point), notably, the refusal of each
victim to exonerate himself; the main inversion of the scene is that though
people spoke up for Jonathan, no one makes such a move for the priests.
And Polzin warns us not to finalize our sense of the lone survivor's
identity (2.36), simply because we have met Abiathar (1989: 198-200).
Finally, seventh, Polzin observes that the whole of ch. 23 (as well as the
whole section chs. 20-23) is really about knowing: who knows, who does
not, who knows that the other does not know; who has information from
what type of source (reliable or not, prophetic knowledge in particular
[1989:200-204]). It is with that pervasive point most in mind that we turn
to examine the narrative of chs. 20-23 with its surpluses, survivors,
entrappers and entrappeds.
4. My Thesis
The issue being approached here is how the monarchy is to terminate. The
Saul narrative has already raised the question of whether sonskings
are an adequate form of leadership. The answer has been 'no': in 'parable'
form in the early chapters of 1 Samuel and then more directly as the
inadequacies of Saul have become apparent. The monarch, epitomizing the
monarchy, has been shown unwilling to or incapable of managing the main
responsibility given and in fact has set himself at cross-purposes with God.
Saul's incapacity for answerability and his inadequacy for relationships
have made the texture of the problem clear. So if monarchy is not the
option to choose, what about the institutionhow will it go? In this section, though we start with the sense that Saul is dangerous for David, by
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the end we see that David is tracking Saul. The section moves in terms of
surplus, or information that certain characters see while others lack it. Our
angle of seeing works in somewhat the same way.
a. Overview
There are two things to explore. First, how do the two characters Saul and
David split apart, how is that transaction represented for and by us? And
second, once their breach is clearly in the open, how can we track their
continued and intensive interaction primarily from the Saul angle? The
question that will emerge is 'Who is the chased? Who the chaser? Who is
tracking, who tracked?' The dialogue is managed around that issue, with
speakers and readers taking advantage of surplus of seeing. It is far from
my interest to put either Saul or David in the wrong; the story is not really
about that. The reason for tracing the tracking is to get at the story's
dynamic, which is the catastrophe of monarchy. Saul's ongoing situation
suggests he sees himself as king. He hints at no alternative imaginable, no
viable situation where he is not-king. He consumes his personal energy
and his corporate resources deflecting David, who represents the Saul-notking realm (as Saul has signaled inchoately and will articulate here two
times). Being king seems Saul's total field, the sum of his perception from
within; there is no non-coincidence between his self and the role. The role
has taken him over, or he has climbed so wholly into it that there is
nothing hanging over. In that perception he is at odds with several, most
clearly David and YHWH. Others, at least the no-longer-present Samuel,
YHWH, David, Jonathan (and probably ourselves) can see a possibility
Saul is loathe to admit into his language. Saul is a solitarythat is his root
problem (nice pun in English, resonates with the play in Hebrew which
makes him asking). In both sets of imagery he is a raveled edge, a raw
wound, which is not well met by any other self. He flails in order to
remedy that lack, but always ineffectually. The role takes over his self.
The pattern we just explored was Saul's inviting David closer, only to
reverse and send him away. Saul invites in his opponent, who then
captivates or even plunders Saul's domain. Saul's autonomy and dependencies are both extreme. David's project consists in unseating Saul from
his role, since David has been told that the royal role is his. Saul resists
David's efforts to unseat him. Dynastic kingship is what traps him and
consumes him, takes over his kingship. The story is showing the futility of
333
that and urging an alternative. My reading is that David, not Saul, is the
prime mover here, a case established by attending carefully to the speech
of characters and narrator. David's surplus on Saul, his taking advantage
of what Saul (and Jonathan) cannot see, sets the terms.
b. Speech of David, Jonathan, Saul: I Samuel 20.1-42
The event of ch. 20 unfolds longitudinally and in great detail.7 To name it
seems simple at first: Saul reinforces his opposition to David, such that
David must flee the court definitively. But it is also possible to characterize the chapter as detailing a manipulation of Saul by David and Jonathan (or of both king and prince by David), such that by the conclusion
Saul himself must go more decisively on the defensive in order to survive
as king. My reading will press toward the second of these alternatives.
Languagedirect discourse and double-voiced language in particularis
the means used to draw this scenario. Especially in the front part of the
story (20.1 -23) there is little narrator direction but the minimum (information-bearing surplus) needed for the clear arranging of the scene. The
place to focus our attention is on the language shared as the characters
struggle to engage each other: to set traps and spring them; alternatively,
to detect danger and escape it. The clearest way to move through the long
narrative seems to be by taking utterances, Bakhtin's fundamental unit.
Here it comes to be a matter of exchanges (usually verbal). There are 15
pairs of utterances, some very simple (even non-verbal), others more
complex: four of David (to Jonathan, who responds); two of Jonathan (to
David, who responds); four of Saul (to himself and to Jonathan, who counters); and finally five apparently very one-sided ones between Jonathan
and 'the boy' in the field (which are actually as response-shaped as any of
the others). If DH had turned in the piece to a writing class, no doubt he
would have been advised to revise it, tighten it up, eliminate what seems to
be needless repetition, extraneous detail; but since our project is to watch
the workings of language as the characters talk, the fullness of the chapter
is a boon.
(1) David and Jonathan's first six utterance pairs: 20.1-23. The whole of
this unit flows from David's initial question, 'What is my guilt...my sin
7. Fokkelman 1986: 295-351, gives many excellent insights and offers several
charts that are visually clarifying. Edelman 1991: 153-91, has helpful observations of
the ways in which language echoes what has been said earlier. Readers may want to
consult McCarter's six closely-packed pages of textual comments (1980: 335-41).
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against your father that he is seeking to take my life (nepes)T% A question,

of course, may be pursued independent of the intent which we may presume underlies it. So, David's asking what he has done (itself a repeat of
language he used to make a rejoinder to his brother Eliab in 17.29, where
he deflects critique of his own aim, arguably without total honesty),
prompts me, at least, to review from the angle of Saul what in fact David
has done that makes Saul at least plausibly long for him dead or disabled
(e.g. 18.17,21; 19.2,10,11). There are, however, two deeper levels to the
question, which we can revisit in terms of David. The first is the problem
of the old king's alienation from YHWH'S favor, made tangible by YHWH'S
spirit leaving Saul and resting with David (16.13-14). Though this information comes from the narrator, it is also stated (with a less cosmic scope)
by Saul's servants, who observe candidly that an evil spirit is troubling
their lord and that remediation is available, a prescription which is not
fully wrong (18.15-23). But though David is a sometime-cure for Saul's
spirit-induced suffering, he is also a cause of pain to Saul, as the narrator
discloses to us (18.10-12; 19.9-10, 20-24). Mixed right in with that language of God's spirit is something more 'horizontal'. The pattern that persistently evokes Saul's hostility to David is his registering (rightly or
wrongly) other people being drawn to the young man. We have watched
Saul react to the response to David of Saul's son Jonathan (18.1-4; 19.17), Saul's people in general (18.12-16, 29), the women (18.6-9), Saul's
younger daughter Michal (18.20-29; 19.11-18), perhaps even Saul's prophet Samuel (19.19-24). It is not possible to disentangle these two problemsthe one more vertical and the other more horizontal, but it is
important not to collapse them into each other. The short name for Saul's
condition is, of course, fearful jealousy; but since Saul himself was drawn
to David (16.21), to consider this a simple problem is impossible. In the
six utterance rounds here, David will in fact set up the same entrapping
dynamic to which Saul has already reacted.
So in the first exchange (round 1,20.1 -3), each young man sketches his
sense of the king. David assays most obviously that Saul is mistaken in his
pursuit of David and that he himself is unaware of his own guilt or sin,
hence the similarity of his claim to Jonathan's assertion of 19.2. But the
alternative, also subtly proffered, is that Saul hunts David without rational
8. Craig 1994:224, quotes approvingly research of Klaus Koch which makes the
verb 'sin' technical offense against one with whom one is in an institutional and communal relationship. It seems that once again words which may also be personal have
larger nuances as well.
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cause, perhaps with malicious intent. And yet we also have seen Saul turn
back from the project of David's death at Jonathan's intervention (19.6)
and apparently abandon pursuit of David when thrown into prophetic
behavior (as ch. 19 ends). Saul seeks David's life intermittently at most.
Perhaps, though, that is enough to make David fear. It is also enough to
suppose an alternate path for the handling of the king. David's language
has also hinted that Saul seeks to kill Jonathan as well, since their lives are
intertwined (18.3).9 That point is not made explicit by David but remains
implicit though clear to the reader who picks up on the doubled speech.
Since the present purpose is not to explore David (or Jonathan) but Saul,
whether David's self-portrait (innocence) is specious is not relevant. That
his sketch of Saul is partly right (seeking characterizes Saul, and the life of
the sons is his objective), but also off the mark is to some extent evident.
Saul is reactive to many impulses, not excluding David's actions (whether
of guilt or sin) but not limited to David's qualities. That Saul has dismissed such concerns verbally to Jonathan in 19.1-7 does not mean he
banished them, as the rest of ch. 19 has shown. But the initiative here is
David's, the seeking partly his as well. Whom and what does David seek?
Still within this first utterance Jonathan makes five rebuttals to David's
initial three questions, his view of his father differing from David's, in a
number of particulars. Jonathan verbalizes Saul as confiding all his
purposes and plans to his son, from great to small. That Jonathan does not
know of a plan to kill David, he reasons, means it cannot be so. The
narrator leaves the question hanging by apparently omitting Jonathan from
Saul's struggles in the whole of ch. 18. But Jonathan's portrait of Saul,
which Jonathan urges on David, overlooks a lot to draw this unity between
them and reactivates the question of the singleness of life shared between
David and Jonathan. Jonathan must parry here as well the idea of his
father stalking him, whether he takes it on consciously or not. Though a
reader is be able to catalogue times and places where Saul has hurled a
spear or urged his people to kill David or sent messengers to take him,
nonetheless Jonathan is committed to the sense that such are not Saul's
current thoughts. That Jonathan can overlook these moments suggests that
his father may be able, driven, to do so too. Is Saul fundamentally just but
mistaken? Or is he determined and duplicitous? Perhaps scattered and
9. In the material ahead, Saul will speak about the pact between Jonathan and
David: 20.30; 22.8. It is my reading that the narrator's positioning Saul's reaction in
the midst of the early bonding of the sons (18.2 between vv. 1 and 3-4) makes Saul a
witness to it. Saul will only by degrees bring his experience forth into language.
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selective? But toward the end of his strong denial Jonathan poses to
David's lead question the query that moves the whole chapter forward:
Why might Saul hide such a thing from his son? By asking that question,
Jonathan admits the possibility that David's charge may be true. Saul may
be seeking David's life without David's deserving it and without Jonathan's knowing it. Though there is a push on the part of commentators to
resolve the complexity of Saul's intent in favor of single-minded pursuit of
David by Saul, in fact that is not quite so simply the case. Jonathan's
defense of Saul, though it will be overrun, is not wholly without merit.
In 20.3-4 (round 2) David responds less to Jonathan's denials of his
father's deeds than to his question of his father's motive and mode of
secrecy. He explains away that portrait of Saul who confides in his son by
suggesting that Saul is unwilling to split Jonathan's feelings by making
him choose between his father and 'brother': 'Do not let Jonathan know
this, or he will be grieved', is how David explains Saul's inner process
(note the hypothetical quoted direct discourse). David thus offers Jonathan
an intensified sense of the closeness of the father and son but denies it
simultaneously, draws a different conclusion from that bond than had
Jonathan.
Whether Jonathan is at the heart of what Saul is doing remains uncertain; whose potential grief is being offset is unclear. Jonathan seems convinced by what David has said, abandoning (readily?) his picture of a
father who would not hide plans from a son for what David has urged, a
sketch which draws the father concerned for his son. Jonathan consequently
offers David a blank check: 'Whatever you say, I will do for you'. The
phrasing is key: 'What you(rself) (nepes) say(s), I will do for you'. The
sentence begins Jonathan's direct and doubled discourse on the topic of his
bond with David (for which the narrator primed us at the start of ch. 18).
The language here picks up as well on the exchange between Jonathan and
his armor-bearer (14.7), a pregnant allusion in terms of the exchange with
the weapon-bearing boy at the end of this chapter. There is a series of
minor, unnamed and untextured helper figures throughout this book, pointing to something in their consistency and homology. Jonathan's armorbearer accompanied him obediently and faithfully, assisting him in his
victory over the Philistines (14.1-15). David begins as armor-bearer to
Saul (16.21), then accepts the weapons of Jonathan (18.4). From this
moment Jonathan acts for his friend rather than for his father and to
some extent acts against his father, thus tripping, trapping, Saul into the
murderous pursuit of David. Who is the hunter here, and who the quarry?
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The next lineaments of the royal portrait (round 3, found in 20.5-9) are
supplied by David, though they shrewdly capitalize both on Jonathan's
claims to intimacy with his father's plans and on the closeness between the
two 'sons'. David first sketches the king's table on the morrow (a feast)
and then situates himself in hiding rather than at tablea summary sketch,
in fact, of the whole scenario to follow. Picking up on a technique we saw
with Saul and servants in the marriage negotiations of ch. 18, David hands
his own words to Jonathan for him to recite at the proper time. David
proposes a small drama that will scrutinize the issue that is most fraught
between himself and Saul: the question of sonship. Whose son is David:
Saul's or Jesse's? Whose servant: Saul's or Jonathan's? David is now in
some ways also altering the father-son bond shared by Saul and Jonathan.
At a feast, when David is missing from Saul's table (note that Saul's
failure to remark David's absence is not contemplated), they count on his
reacting. We note also that the plan presumes that Saul expects David at
his table (their rift being not total yet10), and makes diagnostic Saul's
reaction when he learns David has gone to Bethlehem with Jonathan's
permission. David calls Saul both 'the king' and 'your father'. He avoids
referencing his own father clearly, saying rather 'his city', 'the family'.
David similarly crafts for Saul two utterances: either 'Good', which will
approve David's return to his father, or a wordless anger, which will
signify the opposite.11 David again draws Saul clearly either able to
approve or to grow angry. And yet it seems that Jonathan's very presence
in the experiment will affect how his father responds, a Heisenbergian
factor that seems to surprise Jonathan when it happens. David builds in
time for Saul to watch and wonder and seems to bank on the fact that, by a
second festal meal, Saul will react. David delicately does not detail to
Jonathan what Saul might say besides 'Good'. David's portrait of Saul
shows him seeking something between David and himself that he will not
10. The scenario here, described by David, anticipates the complex relationship
later to be articulated between King David and Mephibosheth, grandson of Saul, whom
David will summon to his own table and fence with in a series of moves related also to
loyalty (2 Sam. 9,16,19); to discuss the passages would take us too far afield here, but
the reference is significant in terms of David's own plannings and testings when he sits
at the royal table's head. The point I am building is that there is more than one hunter
in the chs. 20-26.
11. Polzin 1989: 188, queries why the two (or either of them) should continue to
trust Saul's expressions of good will toward David. He thinks (p. 192) that Jonathan
rather consistently misses the negative undertow of persons and situations, despite
David's direction that he be more duplicitous or at least suspicious.
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find and finding in its place the bond between David and Jonathan to
which Saul is so minimally invited. The plan implicates Jonathan, makes
Jonathan the reason David is not at table, since he will have known and
approved David's plan, whether Saul likes it or does not. Again, it is not
too soon to ask who is tracking whom here. Though David's moves seem
reactive to Saul's earlier ones, it is also patent that David is closing in on
Saul here, closing down his options to two, from which the king will select
one. The positive response, 'Good!', owned by all its speakers, is a loaded
word in this narrative, tasting bitterly of the occasion when Saul was fired
from kingship and a better man appointed in his place (15.28). Though it
has been made obvious to the reader who that man is, Saul's information
on the identity is far less direct. The word 'good' has hovered around
David in the appraisal and even in the words of Jonathan about David. Is
it likely that Saul will be able to use this word wholeheartedly of his
protege? David here has drawn a feature of Saul that the king will be
unlikely to manage. David seems certain of his quarry, and indeed he is
not wrong in his plottings. To explore David's own articulations would
take us too far afield here, but we can hear David reminding Saul (as well
as Jonathan and ourselves) that the two 'sons' are one, and that they deal
with each other apart from him. David is also making that bond one strand
thicker by his plan here. More than a test of Saulthough framed as
showing what is set or established, this is an experiment precipitating new
outcomes as well as reinforcing old ones, since it implicates Jonathan and
forces awareness of their collusion onto Saul. More than a test, it is arguably an entrapment, whether that awareness is shown as David's or not.
The plan envisions one of two reactions but does not push the anger into
its next stage, though it spends most of its time envisioning the negative
scenario. Does the situation reveal or cause Saul's reaction? David also
prescribes for Jonathan a conclusion and an implicative order: 'If I am to
be killed, you do it; why let your father do it?' Is this 'simply' a rhetorical
question? Is David pretty safe in asking Jonathan to kill him? Jonathan's
response is to deny the possibility of filial complicity, with strong language and with a loaded question anticipating David's assent: 'If I knew
that it was decided by my father that evil should come upon you, would I
not tell you?' David has extracted a choice from Jonathan now.
In 20.10-11 (round 4} the conversation moves from what will happen to
how the king's response can be communicated. David asks that detail,
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prompting Jonathan to propose a change of venue.12 They go out to the

field, the site where the rest of their planning and communication will take
place. It is, perhaps, a reminder that the court is unsafe for David (to some
extent a fugitive), or that the court is unsafe for the conversation the two
are holding. It also prompts the question of why their talk is dangerous for
them. Is the court dangerous for Saul, simply dangerous? The point will be
revisited when Saul addresses his men in ch. 22.
Jonathan takes the initiative in 20.12-17 (round 5) in the field, rehearsing the communication of the information, making three complicated,
condition- and oath-laden assertions. The first sentence involves the reconnaissance and communication of each alternative Saul may take, depending on Saul's dispositions. A second sentence voices an oath that Jonathan
will send David away safely if Saul is not well-disposed toward him. The
third pronounces a blessing for David with a proviso for David's reciprocal commitment to survivors of Jonathan's house. The detail of the king's
possible anger is elaborated ominously. Jonathan's emotional reaction can
scarcely be missed within this very strong utterance. Jonathan binds David
to himself and his own life to David again, recommitting them to the
matters begungranted one-sidedly and non-verballyin 18.1-5. Jonathan's language locks all three principalsGod as wellin the roles just
evolved in the exchanges set up here by David. Jonathan will assist David,
who is in turn and in time to reciprocate to Jonathan or his seed. David
does not utter, but the narrator implies (by verb form) that David completes his own oath as urged by Jonathan and reminds us of the significance of what we have just heard: Jonathan loves David as himself.
Whether Jonathan sketches his own father as the opponent so dangerous to
David whom YHWH is to cut off is unclear but not impossible, at least to a
reader. Part of the trap here is this strong language of Jonathan about
David's enemies, one of whom, the narrator has told us (18.29), is Saul.
Jonathan's words intensify the enmity, anticipated as they are before Saul
has had his chance to choose an option. We are again reminded of the
language between Jonathan and his armor-bearer in ch. 14, where Saul is
again the eventual if unintended fall guy of his son's speech. His own
awareness of the import of his words uncertain. It is not important to ask
12. Fokkelman 1986: 308-309, calls the field the antipole of the court and a
different place as well from the field in which David hid when Jonathan successfully
urged reconciliation to his father; Fokkelman names Saul's court as the intersection of
all the quests of this whole unit (p. 294). Pleins suggests (1992: 34), that the field (and
David's other venues) take him outside the circle of Saul's realm.
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whether Jonathan intends to set his father up here by oath; his words effect
it for us. Jonathan aligns himself against those who see David as enemy
and curses them.
The final planning utterance (round 6, 20.18-23) opens with Jonathan
now echoing antiphonally David's speech of 20.5-8, envisioning both the
king's table and the missing David, whose position Jonathan specifies in
detail, sending David as the two rehearsed but now not to Bethlehem but
to hide in the field nearby. Jonathan reiterates the particulars of the table,
never quite filling in the moment of denouement, and promises informationwhich is the point for him, I think. He then moves on to respond
more specifically to the question David proposed in 20.10: Who will
communicate the bad news and how? (Presumably the difficulty will not
arise if the king turns out to say, 'Good!') The plan he crafts seems perhaps overly complex, but for our purposes it can be classed as another
doubled speech, in that it is rehearsed here for a later use and will be
directed to a boy with one ostensible referent and to the hidden man with
another (see Fokkelman 1986: 319-51 for comment). The heft of the
communication of the arrows is on the 'flee danger' option, as before. That
the system will break down in the event does not mean it is not sensible
when set up. Is Saul well-disposed toward David or not, and what can
David expect? Jonathan, with God-language, promises fidelity to David
and heirs.
To sum up this planning session: surplus and blindspots have let us see
David controlling the scene from his first query, which draws Saul as seeking him either baselessly (and so malevolently) or irrationally (and so
problematically). David's self-portrait of innocence ('what have I done?')
has, however, its own doubled effect. Either we will concur that David is
innocent or else look to see what he has done. The latter track, which is
my choice, opens the space for Saul's point of view. And what we have
seen to date, I think, is that Saul has gone after David when he 'makes'
people love him, of which group Saul was arguably the first (actually, it is
YHWH at 13.14). Saul reacts jealously, when the women, or the people, or
his daughter, or his son speak of David in some way that could seem to
diminish Saul's stature or cut him out. Saul opposes David most clearly
when others react well to him, a trap in which he has himself been caught
in from the start. David draws, or I as reader/author underline David's construction of Saul, from a surplus of seeing. David reproduces exactly that
already-tested and effective maneuver here. He splits Jonathan away from
his father, Jonathan who feels closely akin to his father as the chapter
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begins but by the end of the planning session has committed himself
preferentially to David and has in effect cursed David's foes. David has
shown to Jonathan a side of his father whomas enemy to DavidJonathan must oppose. Notably, Jonathan does not envision what actually is
about to happen, which is to say he does not acknowledge except hypothetically Saul as a danger to either himself or David. But the possibility
reverberates in his utterance, given his resolves. David makes no audible
response here to this Jonathan-utterance but obeys as he has prompted
Jonathan to command. One implication and impact of all the planning is
that it renders additional attempts at reconciliation impossible. That is, this
plan drives David from Saul's presence definitively. Saul has been made
incorrigible, at least by David and Jonathan whose oaths have asked God's
participation as well. Whether such will be the case is to be demonstrated.
But a resisting reader may recall that though Saul is undeniably lethal on
occasion, there are swings away as well. Though she may sympathize with
David's decision here to force Saul's hand and precipitate a clear choice,
with Jonathan as witness and indeed as accomplice, David looks the
trapper here more than the trapped. The uneven information of the four
characters (king, sons, deity) blend. God has no direct speech, and yet the
oaths seem to anticipate, commandeer, factor in divine participation.
(2) Saul and Jonathan's four utterance pairs: 20.24-34. The narrator
intrudes in 20.24-26 (round 7) suddenly, but still primarily to position us
for viewing, to cue us to what Saul is about to witness. The time is the
feast of which David and Jonathan have just spoken, and the place is the
king's table. Saul is seated, Jonathan and Abner attend, David's place is
noticeably empty, since the narrator situates him in terms of language used
of him recently: hiding, hidden.13 David, hiding from Saul orand
David hidden as a lure for the king. Saul will soon be hunting David, and
David will be repositioning himself to draw Saul forth in pursuit. There is,
in a sense, no audible utterance here; Saul as before crafts one for himself.
But we have been prepared to intuit the question Saul is likely to ponder
(to ask and to answer) in the presence of David's empty place. In fact, the
answer reveals the question, querying the reason for David's absence from
the table: '...he is not clean, surely he is not clean...' The dialogical
quality of the rumination suggests the intensity of the soliloquy. Saul asks
about and accounts for David's absence, pictures David as present except
13. Using the language of the two 'sons' in 20.6. The narrator is conspiring with
the two.
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for a disqualifying technicality. The flawed and solipsistic misconstrual

gives clear access to Saul's consciousness, arguably to his first choice:
David would be there except for a matter beyond his control. What other
possibilities Saul may be foreclosing to himself are hinted at but not
developed, for the moment. Saul's emphatic inner announcement, his insecurity doubling it, crowds out other reasons for David's absence, but not
before he can be glimpsed slamming the door of imagination upon them.
The pressure to explain David's absencethe slight to Saul?is on. The
unevenness of the positions is interesting here. Saul watches, with no hint
to us that he is so carefully watched by Jonathan nearby and by David at a
farther remove. The king's inner speech reveals to us, at least, his anxiety,
though perhaps not its most specific cause.
The next moment (20.27-29, round 8) is one of the many 'doublets'
comprising this long narrative. But time has moved on, though the place
repeats: it is the next day, and Saul cannot contain his speech within him
any longer and poses his question to his son Jonathanthe narrator's tag
again reminding us of the paternal-filial agenda. Calling David (three
times here) Jesse's son, Saul requests, demands, to know where he is. His
question now, flushed from the underbrush of his selftalk, reveals the
inadequacy of his own previous effort to convince himself that it must be
temporary uncleanness, since he backs up to the absence of the previous
day. That he is correct to doubt the excuse offered does not alter much the
portrait of the king, chased by his own fears into the thicket of testing
woven by David and Jonathan. That Saul calls David by his patronym
(disparagingly in the view of most commentators) names his failure to
make David his own son and retraces the pattern of Saul's unhappiness
when any third party engages David, even here his natural father. The
language brings forward the verbal struggles of this pair of protagonists
from just after the Goliath slaying (17.55-58), from the two betrothals
which also redirect us to the Goliath contest which put the boy and the
king into competition (compare 17.25-27 as well as 18.18,23). Whether or
not it has been David's intention to activate Saul's jealousy, it is surely the
effect. Whether David can be said to have first observed and then
reintroduced the pattern, it is clear enough to a reader to see that Saul has
fallen into the trap devised for him.
Jonathan's response to his father, echoing David's words (v. 6) but ringing some crucial changes, starts in a sort of reporting mode: 'David urgently asked leave of me to go to Bethlehem...'; then switching into direct
discourse, Jonathan amplifies: 'He said, "Let me go; for our family is
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holding a sacrifice in the city; and my brother commanded me to be there;

so now, if I have found favor in your eyes, let me get away and see my
brothers'". Jonathan then drops his quasi-direct quoting and resumes the
more indirect mode, rounding out the explanation: Tor this reason he has
not come to the king's table'. Jonathan first mixes his own language with
David's and David's with his, making prominent their collaboration in this
matter. Jonathan's changes, whether deliberate or not (and discernible only
to ourselves and him, not to David or Sauleach of whom misses either
the rehearsal or the performance), highlight some issues we already have
seen to be sensitive to Saul: the father-son bond triangulating David, Saul
and Jesse as well as David, Saul and Jonathan; the favor that David finds
in the eyes of diverse appraisers; the escape of David at the hands of
Michal; and now also the matter of brothers, which Saul picks up on
shortly (Fokkelman 1986: 332-33). Jonathan places around Saul the
scenario he and David have co-authored. Saul has preformed as anticipated, has responded as prodded to do. It is not my contention that he is
being forced outside of his regular patterns, made to do something untoward. But he is being finalized, manipulated to act by at least one who
takes advantage of a surplus of seeing. It may not be unfair, but it is
domineering and disrespectful, making less likely Saul's forbearance here
or generosity to David down the road. It is a place for some readerly
resistance, especially if the reader can construct Saul against a background
other than the one provided here by the character David. That is, though
Saul clearly has it in him to go after David, he also has the capacity to
back away from that response when approached differently. Here only one
of those moves is made, by David and by Jonathan as well.
In 20.30-34 (round 9) we come to the heart of the whole section under
discussion here, the place where Saul is most explicit about his understanding of himself. The narrator simply confirms both what we know to
expect from the previous places where Saul is thwarted in the matter of
David and also what is so clearly anticipated by the two characters at 20.8,
who have planned much more in terms of the angry response than the
mellow one. Saul's anger, directed not unsuitably against Jonathan, slurs
him and, indirectly, his birth.14 In one of his most candid reflections, Saul
14. Fokkelman 1986: 334, suggests the slur is not directed against Jonathan's
mother per se but conveys the notion that the son is congenitally flawed. Alter 1999:
128, translates the expression as 'perverse and wayward'. Fokkelman may be technically correct, though contemporary feminist theory will not so easily overlook the
manner of derogation, nor will a Bakhtinian reader miss the positioning of the old
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tells Jonathan that he knows that the son is choosing Jesse's son over
against his own lineage (and his mother's nakedness). Avoiding, for the
most part, to make explicit his own interest, Saul charges Jonathan with
acting for David to the hurt of his own (i.e. Jonathan's) kingship. Of
course, from another angle, the reference to 'Jonathan's kingdom' denies
the information Saul was given so unequivocally by Samuel in 13.13-14
and 15.26. There is to be no kingdom for Jonathan, no matter the efforts of
any. So Saul's candor here, even if sincere, is nonetheless unreal. Then, as
if his blunt detailing of realities might convince his son, Saul once again
demands that Jonathan send Davidnot to his father's table (v. 29)but
to Saul to be killed. Jonathan's response to the paternal outburst defies that
fatherly expectation and echoes both his own and David's earlier language
(19.4; 20.1): 'Why should he be put to death? What has he done?' If
previously (19.4-7), this intervention of Jonathan dissuaded Saul from
pursuit of David, now the effect seems the opposite.
Saul's response, a nonverbal utterance (round 10\ is to confirm what he
hates, the conflation of the two 'sons', as he hurls the spear formerly
aimed at David now at Jonathan. Saul's action belies his own verbal utterance and makes manifest his frustration and irrationality on the matter of
his son and the kingdom. The narrator ties off the scene, having showed us
the basis on which Jonathan seems now convinced that Saul is intent on
David's death. The long arc, rising when we learned that Jonathan loved
David as another self, descends now with the spear of Saul hurling toward
Jonathan. The two sons are as one even in the eyes of their father. Now not
one but two sons are conspicuously missing from the table, as Jonathan
leaves, grieving for David, according to words of David in 20.3; the
narrator, with clever ambiguity, says his father had shamed him.15
A summary is once again in order: Saul has been assessed accurately, to
some extent, by David. Saul acts as anticipated, as programmed, calling
once again for the death of David. It is a formidable, if not quite definitive,
conflict of sons and their parentage. For a more gender-sensitive interpretation, consult
Jobling 1998:178. The disparaging expression also breathes life into the suggestion of
Jon Levenson (1978) that the Ahinoam who becomes David's wife in 25.43 may be the
same as Saul's wife. See also Stansell 1996: 59-61.
15. Stansell 1996: 59-61, bringing to bear categories of Mediterranean honor and
shame, makes the case that it is Jonathan, not David, who has been shamed (David has
been threatened, not shamed). That may be so, but the larger issue of the confusion of
'sons' and the king's disparate hopes for each of them makes the ambiguity of phrasing
effective.
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move. And yet, just the previous day, Saul was looking to excuse David,
granted even if we think primarily to save his own face, to reassure
himself of his control over his household. Saul has shown himself capable
of forbearance with David when handled appropriatelyand in fact we
must recall, over against the tide of much commentarySaul does not kill
David even when in a position to do so. David's surplus on Saul is not so
complete, the path along which he propels the king not so inevitable. It is
difficult to make the case that Jonathan can have anticipated the outcome
of the scenes just completed, had coincided very closely with David's
angle on his father. Jonathan's narrative experience (19.1 -7) instructs him
and us that there may have been another route to take. But Saul has clearly
now stated his priority, which is to leave his son Jonathan to rule, a goal
unable to be accomplished while David survives. It is a subset of Saul's
main drive, which is to remain king. Saul sets the problem in terms of
Jonathan's shaming his mother and names David as the obstacle. Saul
avoids saying that Jonathan's actions shame him and that he has been told
that the obstacle to Jonathan's rule isthanks to the king's own deeds
of chs. 13 and 15now God's preference. Even at his most forthright
moment, Saul leaves a great deal submerged. Blaming at very least
Jonathan and David, Saul refuses still to acknowledge his own role for
what it is. David's life on the earth is a threat to Saul's rule as well as
Jonathan's, a situation Saul has been acting on for several scenes. That his
own actions have obviated his goal he does not acknowledge. To throw a
spear at his son is to admit, by gesture, that the quest is hopeless. It is a
startling moment in the story of Saul, a moment of great vulnerability for
him. Saul the king overrules Saul the father.16 Faced by his son with the
question of David's innocence, Saul hurls the spear. Jonathan's persistent
tack, which is to appeal to his father for justice for an innocent David,
shows Saul incapable of that move.
(3) Jonathan's Five utterances to 'the boy': 20.35-42. The last five verbal
utterances are Jonathan's, spoken both to his boy who bears his armor and
to 'his brother' who accepted his armor some time back; David is also
named as Saul's armor bearer (16.21)not the last to fill that role (see
31.4). These phrasings also are double, in that they rerun language already
16. Pleins 1992: 33, suggests a reading of the Saul and Jonathan situation in
reference to the relation of Abraham and Isaac. The strategy is helpful, though Pleins
undercuts it by assuming that the narrative needs to solve the problem of how the
dynasty shifted from Saul to David. I think the dynamics are far more complex.
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rehearsed between Jonathan and David (vv. 20-23), now in fresh circumstances. Though most commentators are understandably impatient with
this fake flurry of arrows shot in accordance with an earlier plan in a scene
which no longer seems to call for such elaborate subterfuge, the narrator's
choice to spend time on it suggests it needs scrutiny.17
To mine it for doubled speech repays effort, the point again being to
focus upon Saul, not these two young men. So Jonathan bids the boy
(round 11, vv. 35-36) to run: 'to run' is the permission David requested in
v. 6. And the boy ran, comments the narrator, in lieu of the character's
verbal response.
When in round 12, 20.37, the boy has come to the place of the arrows
which Jonathan had instructed, Jonathan calls, 'Is not the arrow behind
you?' (i.e. farther on). The wording suggests the boy has turned to face his
master, awaiting further cue. The other waiting figure has been instructed
in 20.22 to read such a cue as: 'YHWH sends you away'. In that scenario
envisioned days before, Saul is not the one demanding that Jonathan send
David to him, but God is sending him away. Saul is at cross-purposes with
God, pointlessly, it seems, as always. The response to this utterance is not
clear at first, but we can see almost at once that it is delay, or hesitation.
'Hurry, be quick, do not linger', is consequently the next command
(20.38-39, round 13) observed well by the one boy, prompting the other as
well. And the narrator assists us, points our vision: the one knew, the other
did not.
'Jonathan gave his weapons to the boy and said, "Go, carry them to
the city'" (20.40, round 14). A reprise of the transfer of armor in 18.4,
matched there by a narratorial comment that David was successful
wherever Saul sent him. Saul's fingerprints are pressed upon this scene.
Saul collaborating with God, whether the king knows it or not?
The last utterance (round 15, 20.41-42) is again Jonathan's alone, but
blends the former oaths of covenant partners with the presence of YHWH's
protection and guarantee, reiterating his own words of 20.12-16, which
Jonathan exacted from David too. David is wordless here, his prostrations
and tears impossible to read with precision. After the narrator provides,
finally, assurances of mutuality between David and Jonathan, the next
17. For example, Campbell (1989: 80-82) insists that the ritual is not properly
observed; Fokkelman 1986: 318-51, at the other extreme, spends pages excavating its
possible layers of signification. It is my hope to take a middle path. It is important but
not endlessly mysterious.
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'swing' verse (21.1/720.45) indicates that David rose and left and Jonathan
went into the city, after the boy.
Since its seems obvious that this portion of the narrative is not really
'needed', which is to say it renders little new information, it must be
scrutinized rather for its mode and object of representation. It might seem,
at first, that the point of the scene is for David to learn of his fate. That is
true, but in fact little is made of David's learning except to register his
strong emotion. At the level of David's reaction, the scene is all but
wasted. David has in fact temporarily receded, both in terms of plot, as
Jonathan seems to direct events, and in narration, as Jonathan inhabits
David's discourse. David is primarily now an object: sent, as he was asked
by Saul, by Jonathan, by YHWH, and of course by his own devising. The
verbal code which cues him is made otiose as we look on. Once the arrows
have been arranged, the two planners interact directly, as indeed they can
have done in any case. The code, then, is for us, directs our attention back
to ch. 14, where Jonathan and the armor bearer plan and succeed,
evidently with God's approval, at the expense of Saul's position and at the
apparent risk of Jonathan's life. And the arrow scene directs us ahead to
ch. 31, where both king and prince are thwarted in their rule, a royal armor
bearer in attendance but not acting, and where the deity again seems to
abet the human machinations. David appears, by the end of ch. 20, to have
made unmistakable the wedge between father and son: between his royal
patron and himself and between Saul and Jonathan. And yet, counterintuitively, the split is not final, in either case. Jonathan is not parted from
Saul (as we shall see in ch. 31 and as David himself will affirm in 2 Sam.
1.23); the young king will remain locked together with the old for some
time ahead. The main impact, I believe, is to alienate Saul a bit in the
esteem of all: Jonathan, David, readersif commentators are any
indication. Saul is more isolated than before, seems to have driven from
him various others he presumably loves and certainly needs. But he is as
clearly as much the driven and the driver, the pursued as pursuer. The
deity seems to condone all that is done, or such is the residue of this
particular narration.
C. David Runs Ahead of Saul: 1 Samuel 21.1-22.5 (20.42-22.5/8
(1) David and the priest Ahimelech: 21.1-9 (20.42-21.8). As the join
between chs. 20 and 21 tells us, David goes on the run, the only one to tell
18. The Hebrew and English versification go off here by one; I will cite the Hebrew
number with the English in parentheses.
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the tale, bidden by his own plan, fleeing the king or flying from the sound
of the trap he himself has successfully tripped. He arrives first to the Elide
priests at the shrine of Nob. Since he is not immediately pursued, David
intensifies the lure, whether consciously or not is impossible to tell. In any
case, the point is moot: David's action at Nob has consequences which are
his to own, and which he accepts only minimally, as we shall see. As
before, the aim here is to watch Saul primarily, using David's moves for
that purpose. The priest Ahimelech, whose fuller position we will review
when Saul scrutinizes it shortly, exhibits anxiety physically and verbally
when he sees David alone. David's words, which are both clearly false and
arguably true, reassure the priest to some extent, temporary though the
reprieve will be.19 David denies that he is alone and by referring
ambivalently to orders, sendings, and matters of 'the king' (whether his
mental referent is himself or even the deity). He may avoid a technical lie,
at least in some readers' ears though plainly not in those of the priest.
David contrives direct discourse for 'the king', selecting language which
bonds the hypothetical sender and sent together secretly, with none other
privy. It is a situation that seems never to occur for Saul but suits the
David character well, so typically authored to hold his cards close. But
more key to note here is that David extracts from the priest two things: the
bread and the sword.
First, the fleeing man asks for provisions: 'Five loaves of bread, or
whatever is here' (21.4-7 [3-6]). At the level of realism, it beggars the
imagination to envision a cupboard utterly bare, save for the bread of
presence (Fokkelman 1986: 352). Perhaps the fact that the Synoptic
Gospels have called the attention of readers to the scene and have made
central David's worthiness to ask for the bread and to receive it and to
have read the scene 'rabbinically' as a question of what is legitimate in
legal praxis, distracts us from weighing precisely what we actually witness. David's request is in fact extraordinary, made manageable for the
priest only by David's claiming that he is on the king's errand and by his
19. Alter(1999:70-72) and Berlin (1983:100-101) raise the question about whether
character speech is stylized (Alter) or more mimetic (Berlin). That is, would a fugitive
say 'such and such a place' or is that a narrator's shorthand? Given my sense that
mimesis ought not be the default assumption, my sense is that the issue could go either
way; the present narrative has a good deal of geographic specificity (at least to the point
of naming names), but the scene here exudes secrecy, and so to have David refer to 'a
certain place' suits as well. What is important is to remember that our operative assumptions affect reading. Edelman 1991: 163, notes the ambiguity of David's words.
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affirming that the recipients of the bread are not technically disqualified
from eating it. They (their kelim)20 have been constrained in regard to
women, he says. The resonance between the issue of eligibility to eat the
bread which is kept before YHWH and to eat at the king's table (20.24-26)
can scarcely be accidental. But still, the bread is, I think, in this narrative a
red herring.21 Once the priest has handed it over trustingly, David makes
his next request, offhand in a similar way as before, namely: 'Is there
some extra spear or sword around here? I seem to have rushed off without
one...' And sure enough, it turns out, contrary to what we last heard
(17.54, where David put the giant's armor in his own tentodd though
that seemed for the commuter David appeared for the moment to be),
Goliath's sword happens to be at Nob and is also the only one of the
species available for which David asks. There is narrative detail here,
worth noting.22 The sword, Ahimelech tells David, is wrapped in a cloth
behind the ephod. Presumably in order to get the sword, the priest handles
the ephod. The priest invites David to take it, and David requests to be
given it. The stress seems calculated by the narrator, if not the character.
David, seeming offhand and disingenuous, asks for food and for arms, and
is given a privileged portion of both, bread of presence, sword of Goliath.
It is impossible and unnecessary to know that David came for those two
items or even to say definitively why he asks for them. But in the context
of trapping Saul into pursuit of him, which is David's project as I construct it here, the effect of David's speech will be as desired, possibly as
anticipated. But in the event, even the sword is also a red herring, unless
its acquisition is simply to make a power statement against the king: David
gets the sword of his victim, having first taken it from Goliath and now out
the reach of Saul.23
20. Alter 1999:132, classifies the Hebrew kelim as weapons, clothing, vessels; that
is, they are gear.
21. Edelman 1991:164, reminds us that we have seen bread at 10.4; 14.27; 16.20;
17.17.
22. Fokkelman 1986: 353-56, supposes that to place the famous sword at Nob has
to have been a royal choice, and that its placement and the trembling of the priest make
visible the power of Saul in the land. David's getting the weapon challenges the king.
Fokkelman also notes that David brought five loaves (the same number under
negotiation here) to the king's forces in ch. 17 and now in effect takes it back; an
equivalent case may be made for the sword. Edelman 1991: 164, who also thinks the
focus of the unit is on the sword and not the food, notes the similarity of the phrasing
to 10.4.
23. Fokkelman 1986: 360. He also supposes that David will not have taken that
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For in between those two requests made and granted (21.8 [7]), we
glimpse a glimpser, Doeg the Edomite, whom the narrator characterizes as
a man from the servants of Saul, on that day restrained ('sr) before YHWH,
chief of the runners of Saul (shortly to be called the king's chief
herdsman). There is nothing reported except his identityname and three
(eventually four) aspects. His 'citizenship ethnicity' marks him as foreign.
The specific herder task, unclear though its exact nuance is, makes him
one of Saul's men. And the description of him as constrained that day
before YHWH signifies as well, associatively. The connotation of 'constrained' is not obvious,24 but the word is used three times in the Saul narrative. Besides Doeg's constrained situation at the shrine and that of the
hypothetical young men whom David has just assured the priest are held
in a condition of purity to eat the consecrated bread, Saul was also charged
by God into the ear of Samuel (9.17) to constrain the people. The context
blend is in each case war and cult, but more than that is difficult to say.
Doeg's main narrative function is to report what he has seen, and though
he may be able to bear more signification, it is not very clear to contemporary readers.
(2) David and the KingAchish: 21.9-14. In any case, by carrying off the
bread and the sword while a witness lurks and looks on, David continues
his journey, which is both flight and lure. And for the present purposes
(the construction of Saul), we may see that David intersects with two other
kings: Achish of Gath25 and the unnamed ruler of Moab (just ahead at
22.3), also of course linked constantly if indirectly with Saul. If David is
taunting or baiting Saul by taking the bread and the sword (not to mention,
yet, the matter of the priest and the ephod), his going to the Philistines is
similarly provocative. Saul's charge as king has been rooted in his
ongoing and not wholly successful struggle with that foe (8.20; 9.16; 10.5,
13-14,17; 18.17; 19.5, 8). David already has been victorious with Goliath
and 200 Philistines specifically and in war more generally (chs. 17-18).
sword to Gath. Fokkelman thinks that the contiguity with the ephod marks a note of
God's approval; I don't see that but will suggest shortly the function of the ephod.
24. See Klein (1983: 213), McCarter (1980: 349-50), and Miscall (1986: 132) for
some suggestions. But they concede as well that there is little access to the present
context of the word.
25. Klein 1983:216, notes that it is unusual to call a Philistine leader a melek rather
than the more specific seren. In the present context, it underlines the unusual presence
of five kings in a small space of reference.
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David's stopping at Gath is consequently provocative, in and outside the

story. It is a brief confrontation of kingsDavid and Achishone established in power and the other apparently seeking a place with him. And yet
the direct discourse suggests something different. David, upon arriving, is
recognized by the men of King Achish and reported to their lord as king of
the land, subject of victory songs (which the Philistines themselves recite);
the title ('king of the land') calls attention to the same double-reference of
'the king' David used with Abimelech, and the reprise of the song makes
freshly present for us the jealousy Saul felt, correctly or not, as Saul's and
David's deed against Goliath was celebrated. The Judean upstart is
brought in by the servants of the Philistine incumbent and praised for his
deeds, words too close to the bone that ring danger and strike fear into the
new man's heart.
But the clue to the representation of David's attempt at refuge is clearest
in his own response to the words of Achish's men. David, hearing them,
becomes fearful and changes his behavior to counter the inference of royal
power to a pretense of madness in the king's presence, scrabbling or
scribbling and drooling in some manner that provokes Achish to comment
pejoratively. David acts madtakes on a role when in the presence of the
king's menan act which seems effective, a play within a play.26 Achish
views the performance, reuses the narrator's verb to describe the behaviorto play the madmanoccasioning the suspicion in me, at least, that
he knows it is an act. That king diagnoses the madness in 'the king of the
land' and questions his own need for another such subject.27 Achish credits
the diagnosis to his men:'.. .you see that the man is mad...' and ends with
a double question: 'have I need for more madmen, that this one comes into
my house?' Hence as a result of his drama of madness, David makes his
escapeor is driven out. Again the initiator is himself, granted the activator seems to be Achish. David's dissimulation seems to put Achish offguard, and so Davidwho is not madcan slip out. Is madness a
loophole for Saul, or a further trap? Is monarchy mad? Commentators pick
up, rightly, on the shock of David's service with the enemy of his people.
But more, this little episode raises the question of who fools whom, who
baits whom, who sees through whom. It is, I think, another mise-enabyme, the stand off of two kings: one of them feigning madness, one of
them misreading it; one of them is shrewd, one clueless; one powerful, one
26. Gunn 1980: 86: 'David controls madness. Madness controls Saul.'
27. Of this particular encounter between David and Achish, Jobling (1998: 241)
says that Achish is made gullible here so we will think that of him later.
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wily. But who plays each of those roles in our more central drama is for
the reader to sort. In any case, David flees the presence of the king who
only seems to see through him. Achish is a cipher, a proxy, for Saul
(himself a cipher for kingship itself), whom David taunts by his presence
though slips away, having baited his trap.
(3) David and the King ofMoab: 22.1-5. Having attracted to himself his
own brothers and others of his father's house, as well as those with
grievances of one sort or another (against Saul?), David becomes their
'captain'. And David interacts as well with the king of Moab, seeking
sanctuary in that transjordan land for his parents, while he himself is
advised by his prophet Gad to go back to a stronghold in the land of Judah.
David is laying a wide and obvious trailto which Saul has not yet visibly
reacted.28
d. Saul and the Priests: 1 Samuel 22.6-23
(1) Massacre of the many: 22.6-19. We leave one brief 'mad king'
moment only to enter another: the scene of Saul and the priests, a most
ominous moment in this long narrative of royal rule. The storyline, which
has followed David (and left Saul at his table, spear wastefully hurled
away from him), reconnects to Saul when he hears that David's location
(back inside 'bounds') is known. It may be simply a note of simultaneity,
but it is rather, I think, the beginning of a series of approaches and retreats
which connect Saul and David, a game of tag based on scraps of information known and withheld. Saul will now begin to react more extensively to
David's actions. David has certain advantages in his own territory, but
Saul will not lack information as to his whereabouts (as he might, were
David in Philistia or Moab). Saul most prominently has not pursued David
to Gath or to Moab. But once the young man is back within reconnaissance, Saul will indeed go after him, several times. But whose move is
first? The episodes (which will extend through ch. 26) are filled with
information, with rumor, with double agency, with crossed loyalties.
Another way to put it is that David positions himself such that Saul can
28. DH reuses this motif of a young man biding his time with the enemies of his
erstwhile lord, returning eventually to consolidate rebellion (e.g., in 2 Sam. 13-14;
1 Kgs 11-12). So my seeing it as a provocation to David's erstwhile lord is not so
farfetched. It is difficult to see how this Moab moment functions, except to pick up
resonance and strength from the later episodes against the power of Davidides. Garsiel
(1985: 121-22) understands thus: As David picks up people, Saul loses them.
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find and track him. But before the geographic pursuit begins, we have the
scene where Saul kills the priests, a deed which is to my mind on a par
with his deeds in chs. 13 and 15. However, this time there is no prophet to
make the case, an absence which simply adds weight to the problem of the
king's isolation.
The episode runs from 22.6-19, loosing as well a vital trailer telling of
the single priest who gets away alive (22.20-23). The scene opens with
Saul presiding, seated under a tamarisk tree, spear in hand once again,
surrounded by his servants.29 The language that sketches Saul's character
zone recalls the ever-seated Eli (seated until he falls dead). It also evokes
the king's grasping his spear on four occasions, so far, when he has hurled
it, missing his target in each case; another motif of failure. Under a
tamarisk tree is to be the eventual site of Saul's burial, so we are given
another suggestion of royal demise. Saul's direct discourse here shows,
additionally, a deterioration in the relationship with his men from what we
saw in chs. 16 and even 18, when his servants showed concern for Saul's
welfare and seemed to carry out his wishes (granted, their concern brought
David to court!). This present picture recalls more closely the atmosphere
of chs. 19-21 when the court is more obviously at odds, splitting over
David. Saul's words (22.7-8), addressed specifically to his men as fellow
tribesmen, accuse or envision circumstances where the son of Jesse will
distribute valuable property and commissions to Saul's men.30 As is often
the case with accusations, this one emerges confusedly but nonetheless
eventually requires our attention. Saul pictures these (hypothetical) bribes
as payments for his own men's conspiracy (qsr) of silence, silence
specifically about the pact between Jonathan and David. He also charges
his men with not being distressed on the king's behalf, a feeling Saul
opines might have led them to disclose to him information Saul says has
resulted in Jonathan's stirring David to lie in wait ('rb), as Saul charges he
is doing today. The accusation is rambling and complex, with the main
elements being the bribed and conspiratorial silence of his own men that
prevents them from telling the king that Davidthanks to Jonathanlies
in wait for the king. The circuitous accusation, which generates verbal
29. McCarter 1980: 363, reports that a king seated in council under a sacred tree is
a stock scene in Northwest Semitic art. Fokkelman 1986: 377, raises the excellent
question of why the episode of Saul and the priests is positioned where it is.
30. Or, as McCarter argues (1980: 363-64), Saul is saying that his men have
nothing to anticipate from a such a Judahite. Campbell 1989: 79-80, counters that as
readers, we ought to have known of the disloyalty and do not, a point I will contest.
354
response from none except a foreigner (to whom it was not addressed), is
aimed primarily to Benjaminites (including Jonathan). It brings forward
from 1 Samuel 8 the way or justice of the king spoken out by the prophet
Samuel when the people asked for a king (8.10-18, specifically vv. 12 and
14), a way here which is clearly linked to rewards for loyal service. But
the issue here of who is distributing the rewards is less crucial than to
whom, for what services and with what result. Saul's words here evoke the
victory song of the women, which both he and the Philistines interpreted
to his disadvantage. And it resurfaces and respeaks also the complex dealings between David and Jonathan in ch. 20 (as well as in 18.1 -5 and 19.17), speech which flushed Saul's signature sensitivity out into language: his
reaction when others link with David to Saul's perceived disadvantage.
Whether there is evidence yet of David bestowing fields, vineyards, and
commissions is dubious. Yet shortly he will be providing booty and
payment for those who have gathered around him (chs. 25; 27; 29; 30).
But Saul's basic charge is, we know, true. Jonathan and David have indeed
made a pact, more than once, with another ahead (20.12-17, 20-23, 42).
Who has told Saul of the pact between David and Jonathan? He says it
was none of his men, and yet clearly he knows of it. Saul is desperate to
know. Has he imagined collusion and complicity? If so, again he is not
incorrect. David does lie in wait for Saul, thanks to the collaboration of
Jonathan and the silence of his own menwhich Saul calls, perhaps
harshly, 'conspiracy'. The narrator has used that word for the JonathanDavid bond, though arguably without the same nuance. Though Saul
sounds paranoid to many in this outburstan impression reinforced by his
subsequent action regarding the prieststhe charge is in fact not so
obviously untrue. The charge of qsr hangs in the air between Saul and his
'two sons'. Saul talks with old vocabulary of disclosure, used in 8.21;
9.15; 20.2 (Edelman 1991: 174). And if David can be handed some
responsibility for provoking Saul, as my construction is suggesting, then
the charge against David at least is truethat he lies in wait for Saul,
with Jonathan made complicit in some aspect. Saul accuses his fellow
Benjaminites of not sympathizing with (literally, 'be sickened over') his
state of affairs. That claim, as well, seems true at this point. Silence,
especially when speech is demanded, suggests resistance. Their sympathy
with him seems reduced if not vanished, as has that of many readers of the
story. And yet Saul is not wrong in what he supposes.
In any case, the only verbal response to Saul is from Edomite Doeg,
who, reusing Saul's language, reports that 'ben Jesse' came to the priest
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Ahimelech at Nob, and that the priest inquired for him, gave him provisions, and the sword of Goliath (22.9-10). Since the narrator positioned
Doeg for us between the food and weapons transactions, we can reasonably, strategically, understand that it was to witness those events. Unlike
Jonathan (in ch. 14) and Ahimelech (just below) who resist Saul, Doeg
slides easily along the groove of what the king is wanting to hear, using
the disparaging patronym for David and exposing the deed of the priest.
Since a good deal will hang on the inquiry charge, it needs more attention.
That Doeg is quick to please the king seems patent, especially over against
the silence of the Benjaminites. That part of what he says is factually true
is also clear. Even the inquiry charge is plausibly a report of what he saw.
And yet Doeg looks bad here because of his willingness to provide
information which will shortly be lethal.
Once the foreigner has spoken, Saul summons not only the one priest
but the whole lineElides, we can see by their names. Why they are at
Nob rather than at Shiloh does not matter, I think, for the present purposes.
Saul addresses the priest in the same non-respectful and accusatory way
that he refers to David, underscoring as well by the patronym the dynastic
elements of the story being told. The charge is similar to what we heard
above, except that to the pile of conspirators (David, Jonathan, Saul's
men) is added Ahimelech. The mode is specified: the priest's giving bread
and a weapon, and his conducting an inquiry, have allowed David to lie in
wait for Saul ('rb). That is, Saul takes Doeg's three pieces of information
and resets them in a larger context, makes the priest culpable of conspiracy
by provisioning and inquiring for the fugitive, additionally for failing to
notify the king of the young man's flightSaul's words reinforcing the
same result as before: David lies in wait for Saul (v. 13). Saul feels conspired against, besiegedor stalkedby David, he has now said, twice.
Part of what is being wrestled over here is who is pursuing whom. The
strained silence of the Benjaminites, the eager loquacity of the Edomite,
and the naive objections of the Elidenot to mention Saul's outrageous
revengeconspire themselves, I think, to mute the impact of Saul's
insight on readers. But he has said clearly what is the case.
Ahimelech answers (22.14-15) somewhat in the mode of Jonathan in
19.1-7, saying exactly the wrong thing in the situation. The priest praises
David as faithful, characterizes him as the king's son-in-law, who turns
aside for Saul and is honored in Saul's house. Some scholars worry about
why the priest does not know that David is out of favor, finding it unrealistic. What strikes me, rather, is that we, reading, do not more readily
356
notice that the encomium of the priest does not fit its object any longer.
David's behavior with the priest (at least) has undermined that set of
compliments, even if we sympathize with David's situation. More faithful
than all, turning aside to do Saul's work, honored in Saul's housethese
words bespeak exactly praise David no longer deserves. Since the narrator
is not necessarily straining after verisimilitude, the priest's role here is to
exhibit no knowledge of David's fall from favor. Earlier Ahimelech
trembled to find David alone, but that concern was put to rest by David's
cleverly doubled language. However the reaction fits in with our sense of
rumors at court, I think we must concede that there is no indication of
anything other than a sincere answer here. That the sketch of David is
vastly at odds with the construction Saul has just rendered is not a good
sign, though of course the priest has no way of knowing the recent 'conversation' between Saul and his men.
As the king and the priest stand against each other in opposition, the
food and the sword seem ceded without comment; they are not the main
point. But the inquiry is a different matter. The priest, again disingenuously,
does not answer directly the charge of inquiring for David.31 Saul, as we
have seen consistently, has a weakness here, in that he is unable frequently
to get unequivocal information from God, and of course is not willing to
accept the information that does come to him bluntly. More than conspiracy, the inquiry charge strikes at a weakness of Saulwhose very
name is to inquire. The priest imprecisely and foolishly says if he inquired,
it is not the first time. Did he inquire? We have only Doeg's word for it,
Doeg whom we watched see the priest move the ephod to get at the sword.
Can a foreigner have mistaken such a move for an inquiry, or claim such
an interpretation on a technicality? In any case, Saul waits for no further
information but calls for the death of not only Ahimelech but the whole
house of Elide priests. The slaughter distracts somewhat from the other
issue at hand. This is a very serious matterSaul's elimination of not
simply one priest but all of them. The royal command, when given
ineffectually to those standing around him, goes back to the more general
charge of disloyalty to Saul evinced by acting for David and failure to
disclose to Saul information about David's flight. It is worth recalling how
31. Commentators split over whether or not Ahimelech did or did not consult, and
over whether he does or does not say so. The point, rather, is that though the priest is a
doomed witness whose information is at odds with other things that we know, readers
easily miss the impact of his mistaken sincerity here and disbelieve Saul. And yet, Saul
is not wrong in what he supposes.
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many people have so far helped David escape Saul: Michal, Jonathan,
Samuel, Benjaminites, Ahimelech, now again Benjaminites. Saul in some
ways attacks the least close of these (Miscall 1986: 138). If his own men
do not obey Saul's order to kill the priests, neither do any of those in
attendance stop the Edomite from his task (nor, apparently, do the Elides
resist). That his men refuse the order underlines its egregiousness and
Saul's inability to command his men. Only Doeg is willing to obey, and
he, the narrator says using the language of the ban, executed 85 priests,
plus women, children, and domesticated animals. If, as Edelman notes
(1991:165), Doeg as a herdsman is a figure of David and Saul, we can see
here that the peculiar character of monarchy is to be dangerous to the
priesthood.
That the narrative connects to a prophecy delivered by a man of God
(2.27-36), one which will be 'filled full' incrementally as the story
proceeds, does not excuse Saul from what he did. Saul executes the priests
not for the sins decried by the Man of God but for appearing to side with
David over against Saul. The episode also recalls Saul's own failure to
execute the Amalekites when charged to do so, such that someone had to
complete that task for him as well. And here, as there, the slaughter does
not undo the failure to which it reacts. Saul has also compounded his
isolation from God, by closing down inquiry which has been serving him
(such as it did) and by allowing a lone survivor to escape into the camp of
David. So Saul's action here, whatever else must be said about it, is
counterproductive. What he most needs, he destroys; what he most fears,
he engenders. Saul will be shrunk ever smaller in his quest to get the information he needs. Pyper (1996: 18-27) has shown that David (in 2 Sam. 1)
kills the messenger before he can in fact deliver all of his information.
Something similar is operative here. Ahimelech has not responded to the
satisfaction of all, and yet he is quickly mowed down rather than questioned at greater length.
(2) Survival of the one: 22.20-23. The scene is partially reprised in the
report of the last of the Elide priests, Abiathar (son of Ahimelech, heir of
Phinehas and of Eli), who flees to David and reports. But we do not hear
his words, simply those of David. This tiny scene is crucial for our insight
into David, who confirms that he saw Doeg at the shrine and knew his
presence will be reported to the king. David's language here goes back to
the plays on nagid/hagged: the priest is ngdto David, as David says Doeg
is nagid/hagged to Saul. David takes some responsibility for the death of
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the priests, but not enough, really. His words suggest that he knew Doeg
would report to Saul; and knowing itperhaps even knowing that Doeg
was 'constrained' at NobDavid acted there in a way guaranteed to
provoke Saul, when he should hear of it. So David's words seem to me not
the compunction of a man who figured out something too late to stop it.
David's apology to the surviving Abiathar sounds like a remorse for
something that 'just had to be'. For the whole matter of luring the king to
pursue him, we hear no claim of responsibility. Indeed, David reassures
him that their foe is common and that the priest will be safe with himan
odd comment in view of the circumstances.32 It is a key and underseen
moment: when David says candidly, 'I knew...that he would surely tell
Saul' he lays bare a willingness to activate Saul, at whatever cost, and yet
Abiathar (among others) seems to readily excuse him for it, or at least to
put his safety in David's hands as bidden. David's last words are perhaps
truer still: Abiathar has joined himself to one whose life is now sought, to
one who has set himself and the priests as bait.
By way of summary: David makes plain what he did, almost blatantly
accepting his use of Doeg to tell Saul how things looked between Saul's
fugitive and Saul's priest at Nob. To provoke Saul rather than to endanger
the priests seems to have been David's intent. But both happened. Readers
tend, like Abiathar, to stick with David despite his deed and its consequences. Saul comes out worst. His deed is not undeserving of horror
this royal slaughter of priests, carried out by the hand of the foreigner.
Saul complains that no one tells him what is happening, and what is
happening is conspiracy. No character confirms his appraisal; none denies
it. Saul knows nonethelessDoeg being one conduit to the king. That
David and Jonathan conspire is true, and that David is lying in wait for
Saul is also true. The trail David lays is wide, stretching from Nob to Gath
to Moab and then settling into a stronghold of the southern desert region,
32. Jobling 1998: 91, contrasts Saul the slaughterer of priests with David their
friend, but I think he overlooks a lot to rest comfortably with that polarity. He also
(p. 251) thinks the episode establishes Saul's guilt unambiguously, which is not false
but seems inadequate to the complexity of the situation. Jobling's assertion (p. 285)
that YHWH stirs up Saul against David is over-read, in my view. Miscall 1986: 134,
urges that Saul continues to misvalue the sacral; Miscall also chides the king for
heeding too little the bread, too much the priest, and not at all the sword. He also
concludes (p. 136) that Saul was kinder to Amalek than to Israel, but I am not sure the
comparison makes sense. Fokkelman 1986: 385-86, describes Saul as oscillating
between self-pity and malice toward others; perhaps.
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with its many escape hatches and hiding places. What has David to gain
from lying in wait for Saul: David, minimally, needs to wear Saul down as
king, to diminish him in some way that shrinks his claim to leave room for
David's own rule. He is not unjustified in so doing, really; he will not
resort to violence except imaginatively; he can assume that Jonathan
will not be a threat to his rule. Saul, thus hedged in by David on three
sides, cannot fail to act. He, also with less blame than some would assign
(especially insofar as the genre aims to propound the riddle of failed
monarchy), will have to defend what is his, or what he is determined upon:
his own rule and that of his son Jonathan. David calls Saul bqs; Saul calls
David 'rb. David will, as we shall see shortly, have help with his project.
Saul has much less assistance. In fact, Saul's main adversary is not David
but God's change of mind about Saul's rule. It is God that Saul keeps running up against, in addition to or behind his other opponents. God is not
Saul's enemy; Saul has put himself opposing God by his refusal to vacate
the throne. Is Saul mad? I do not see it. Tragic? Not that either, really. He
is set along a path that is hostile to him and finds the going difficult.
e. Saul Comes After David: 1 Samuel 23
(1) To Keilah: 23.1-14. As suggested at the beginning of the present
chapter of this study, these two pursuit sections can as well be seen in
relation to their three fellows in chs. 24-26. But in this present arrangement, they complete the plan of David to get Saul to pursue him, and they
as well complete the story of David and Jonathan's interaction. Again, the
point for me is not to discuss David except in relation to Saul. David here
becomes a sort of judge (or so we might say if we did not know that such a
term is really never applied to him). That is, he does the sort of rescue job
that Gideon diddefending the threshing floor of a city from marauders.
These raiders, however, are not the Amalekites of Judg. 6 but the Philistines, who are Saul's royal charge. David (apparently without assistance
or apparatus) poses the Keilah project to God, who assents to it. When
David's men point out the danger, David is prompted to ask a more
specific question about the outcome of the project, which he and we now
learn is to be success. And so it turns out. David inflicts a defeat on the
Philistines, takes some of their cattle, and liberates Keilah from the threat.
In addition to being a judge-like deed, it is also a provocation for Saul,
who can scarcely not react when David takes on the charge of fighting
against Philistine depredations. David is prodding Saul to pursue him. At
this moment in the story (not sooner) the narrator backs up to the arrival of
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the priest Abiathar at David's camp and indicates that the place of their
meeting was Keilah. That is, whatever construction we may place on the
events of ch. 22, Saul's alienating the last priest with his ephod conspicuously facilitates David's communication with God. The ephod, brought
by the priest whom Saul has alienated, helps David to anticipate the
outcomes of his plans. It is an edge Saul has never had, not from the
priests, not from his prophet Samuel, not from God, not from any.
Saul, correspondingly priestless and ephodless, picks up accurate information in some manner not specified for us that David is at Keilah. Saul
links David's entry to a small space with his being trapped, and equates
such a trap with God's giving David into Saul's hand. Saul says, 'God has
given him into my hand, for he has shut himself in, by entering a town that
has gates and bars' (23.7). The contrast is clear: Saul thinks David is
trapped, and by God; but David is more trapping than trapped. David is
able to make truthful assertions about God, while Saul's are mostly ineffectual wishes. Saul seems willing to assault a city in order to get at
David, who has just freed it from Philistine oppression.33 David knows,
can see Saul's machinations against him (hrs), and Saul can only await
information and outcomes. Saul's isolation grows more marked. He
summons his people to besiege David and his men, caught as he supposes
them to be in the Keilah trap by YHWH and his own foolishness. David,
however, hearing that Saul is plotting against him, inquires directly of God
what the outcome is to be. Again in stages, David learns that Saul will
come, and that the people of Keilah will turn David over to Saul. With that
advance intent known, David and his men leave Keilah and wander. The
narrator remarks that Saul abandons the quest of Keilah but not the search
for David, who is refugeeing before him in the wilderness of Ziph. Where
David leads, Saul follows. Saul is, as is his wont, destroying what is
dearest to him, most desired by him, in this behavior of his toward Keilah.
(2) Jonathan comes to David: 23.15-18. A Jonathan interlude occurs,
splitting the two Saul-in-pursuit episodes, coinciding with David's hearing
that Saul is seeking his life at Horesh, itself a pun on what he had just
heardSaul devising (hrs) evil against him. Horesh is a place and a plan.
Jonathan, whom the narrator pointedly tags here as Saul's son, meets him
33. Edelman 1991: 186, asks if Keilah is an Israelite city, and what it means that
Saul would attack it. Gunn 1980: 89, suggests that Saul is acting like a Philistine. Fox
1999: 114, crediting Greenberg, translates that Saul exults that God has 'alienated'
David like a piece of property.
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and reassures himstrengthens his hand in God, the narrator says. Jonathan's words about God's plans, like Saul's, miss the mark to some extent,
again stressing the difference in knowledge between the Saulides and
David. Jonathan says, 'Do not be afraid, for the hand of my father Saul
shall not find you; you shall be king over Israel, and I shall be second to
you; my father Saul also knows that this is so'. Jonathan's language speaks
the survival not so much of Davidthat seems beyond question to
Jonathanbut of his own survival: 'I will be second'. Jonathan asserts
here that Saul knows that David is destined to rule rather than Jonathan, a
point the king will concede soon but has not yet said in our hearing. 'And
they made', the narrator says, 'a pact before YHWH'. 'And David stayed at
Horesh and Jonathan went to his house'. Is Saul paranoid that David and
Jonathan are conspiring against him?
(3) To Horesh: 23.19-29. But Ziphites, like the people of Keilah,
apparently prefer Saul to David, and they reveal David's specific location
at Horesh to Saul in Gibeah: 'David is hiding among us in the strongholds
of Horesh... Now, O King, whenever you wish to come down, do so; our
part will be to surrender him into the king's hand'. Called 'king' Saul is
promised an open ticket on David: whenever the king comes, the men of
Horesh will hand David over. Saul, sounding almost excessively grateful
that someone has given him information, blesses them by YHWH for
sparing him, though sending them back to double check their information,
to learn the neighborhoodafter which Saul will come.34 'I am told that
he is very cunning indeed', Saul remarks, sounding as though this
information as well came to him second hand. Is the caution a result of the
Keilah episode, where David slipped Saul's grasp? Is it an effort to test
further the quality of his intelligence? But in any case, so these men go to
do. As Saul (searching, pursuing, closing in [v. 25]) draws near, David
again learns of it and drops farther south (hurrying to escape Saul and his
men, who are closing in and about to capture David (v. 27). But now only
a mountain remains finally between them, separating their men. But just as
the end looks near (what end is not so clear), a messenger arrives for Saul,
telling of a Philistine raid, begging the king's presence. So Saul breaks off
pursuit of David, giving the name to the place: Rock of Portions. From
there David goes up as well, after Saul, to the strongholds of En Gedi,
34. Miscall 1986:143, remarks upon the odd language here, Saul'slavish gratitude
for being spared fromwhat? Perhaps the silence of those who know but will not tell
him? The risk of David's lying in wait for him?
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where Saul will shortly track him again. Do we trust the single messenger,
who arrives with news? Do we, perhaps, sense conspiracy here, knowing
that if Jonathan is in some way involved in it, the men of Ziph may be as
well? Is it too early for Saul and David to meet up? Who is controlling the
pace of the chase? What is the aim of the chase? Who is the pursuer, who
the pursued?
6. Conclusions
My major points have been two: to suggest that though ostensibly Saul is
driving David out and going after him, it is possible to see that David is
also laying a trace along which Saul follows. The patterns will be made
even clearer in the next three chapters of the narrative. And I have also
worked to make use of Polzin's point about inequity of information,
combined with Bakhtin's notion of surplus of seeing. Virtually every verse
of these chapters has to do with Saul's being in the dark, out of the loop,
disadvantaged by others' knowledge, cut off from information in one way
or another. That is reinforced as his defining characteristic: Saul is on his
own without sufficient access to what he needs to know for his competent
performance of his role, for his own peace of mind. It is frequently and
helpfully noted that David's plans remain mostly private and Saul's
greatly exposed. I would expand that to suggest that David knows that he
has been anointed and hence that Saul and his heirs are to some extent
redundant. David can, based on what we hear from that father-son pair,
intuit that they do not share all his information. Hence he sees the backs of
their heads, so to speak, information of which they are unaware, by their
own verbal admissions. We have heard Saul be told that he and his heirs
are not destined to rule and that they have been replaced. But we do not
hear Saul act as if he has heard that information. His blind spotdeaf
spotSaul's refusal to imagine himself as not kingaffects his view of
David, again all this by the discourse of the narrative (direct and indirect).
That resistance to self-knowledge blocks Saul from seeing David as his
replacement, though we have been long accustomed to see it. Saul, in my
reading, is still holding the information at bay and dealing with David as
with a usurper (a point also to be enhanced in the telling and reading of
chs. 24-26). Let me sum up the texture of this reading in eight points.
First, in the long unit of ch. 20, that Saul is not privy to information
does not need to be redetailed. What emerges new, perhaps, is Saul's
growing sense of being held out against. He blurts in anger to Jonathan in
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20.30-31:'.. .Do I not know that you have chosen the son of Jesse to your
own shame... [A] s long as the son of Jesse lives upon the earth, neither
you nor your kingdom shall be established...' Saul articulates a sense of
what Jonathan is up to, but given the narrative context around his outburst,
we can guess that he has only an edge of it. Saul's admission here, as
noted above, also chooses to disregard information he has been given in
13.13-14 and 15.23. So he refuses what he does know and claims only to
distort what he suspects and dreads. He also here overlooks his own part in
the 'ben Jesse' choosing, blaming Jonathan for something that includes a
number of others, most notably God (16.6-12, though Saul does not know
that) and himself (starting from 16.21, though he does not admit it into
language there). All Saul gets back from his question to Jonathan is Jonathan's reintonation of David's question of 20.2 (itself a reprise of an old
conversation between father and son in 19.1-7). To have Jonathan put
forward David's persistent query cannot please Saul. Saul's frantic asking
does him no practical good.
Second, when David goes to Nob he very clearly runs a play of which
Saul has no knowledge, using the king's title and habit to gain at least two
things he wants: food and weapon. That Saul is taken advantage of
egregiously, made a party to it by David's assigning speech to him, is an
offense doubled, since (besides betraying the Saul-David relationship,
even if understandably), it sacrifices whatever relationship had pertained
between king and Elide priests. That David comes actually on his own but
speaking with purported royal authority makes it virtually impossible for
the priest not to believe him. David's cleverness with the sword behind the
ephod (or the narrator's cleverness or perhaps just mine!) seeds the
moment which closes off the avenue of priestly divination from Saul. By
this massive feint David will deprive Saul of a whole channel of access to
God. David disables Saul, who manages it badly.
Third, the two episodes where David visits foreign kings remove him, I
believe, from Saul's reconnaissance. That is, since Saul resumes pursuit
when David's whereabouts are known in the southern desert suggests to
me that information about his whereabouts is not available to Saul when
David is in Gath and Moab. But once David is back from those kings'
lands, his tracks will demand attention from the king. The few verses of
David with Achish (21.10-15) function also for us as a mise-en-abyme
of David's presence with Saul. David comes naive (carrying the sword of
Goliath), scents danger when others credit him with jealousy- and fearprovoking deeds; and so he simulates madness and fakes out the king, who
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lets him go, for the moment. Achish's misreading of David reinforces the
theme of Saul's ignorance while the possibility of jealousy plays in the
background. In Moab (22.1-5) the contrast of kings works differently.
While we ponder in review all the struggles we have seen among Saul,
Samuel and people, we watch people rally to David, who becomes their
leader, and is advised directly and unproblematically by his prophet as to
what he needs to do.
The fourth point, gathered from the several moments of the scene
involving the priests, is arguably Saul's most forthright exposure (so far)
of his own inner process. The pathos of the scene, as suggested above, is
that he is on target with a good deal of what he fears. Addressing his own
men, Saul calls them conspirators for their silence. He scolds them for
anticipating bribes (from David) to pay for their complicity (or implies
they have not deserved well the payments he has already doled out to
them). Saul's sense is that the David-Jonathan doings have the sympathy
of Saul's own men, such that they share responsibility for David's stalking
of him. Saul knows of the David-Jonathan pacts, though he claims the
Benjaminites did not tell him. Hence he cannot rest with what he knows,
since those who ought to have told him have not done so. Both Doeg, who
affirms in detail what Saul suspects, and the Benjaminites, who neither
affirm nor deny when Saul anticipates that they could give information,
plausibly reinforce Saul's uneasiness. Once again, what Saul does not
give any evidence of seeing is his own role in the problem. That is, the
accusation he shapesgiving out property and commissions for service, is
exactly what Saul has done with David, starting at ch. 18 once the women's
song has infected Saul. The 'ben Jesse' Saul so resents is substantially his
own creation. It is a fear-laden mode of dealing that has made Saul an
enemy to David, or so the narrator told us as early as 18.29. And yet Saul
is not wholly absorbed in David's death, since he has and will again resist
that temptation when offered it. Saul registers none of this insight, that I
can see. Nor has he a prophet, or a priest, or a God to help him here.
Fifth, Doeg the foreigner gives Saul information, three pieces of it
which are at least partly true. And in fact, my sense is that Doeg's claim
that the priest inquired (s 'I) makes sense, given his observation of the two
figures in consultation at the shrine, one eventually handling the ephod and
giving the other the sword. But the information does not help Saulthe
reverse. Saul's prime deficiency, the place where his name was born and
lives, explodes when Doeg says, however innocently (or not) that the
priest inquired of God for David. As Saul reads the death sentence out, the
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charge is again the same as in the case of his men: conspiracy by failing to
reveal David's flightas well as provisioning him and inquiring for him.
So, information, when presented, does not help Saul. Again, if he were
wholly wrong about David and Jonathan, it would be one thing; that he is
right to suspect their collusionand at very least the silence of others
adds a desperation to the scene. As before, the tactless, disingenuous, or
injudicious words of the priest underline Saul's own complicity in the
scene that so angers him. Ahimelech details that what has gone on is
standard operating procedure; but Saul cannot tolerate hearing it. That a
priest and an ephodthe last of their kind, we are led to supposeslip
away from Saul and into the hand of his opponent (whether Saul knows it
or does not) is part of the same fabric. That David may deserve the confidence of an Elide priest not much more than does Saul does not change
the point. It is not my claim that David knows all of this, simply that Saul
can be shown reactive to his own blindspot which David can see.
Sixth is the almost ludicrous contrast of information available to David
and to Saul in regard to Keilah (23.1-14). David, first on his own and then
able to employ the ephod, gets amazingly clear, specific and correct information about what he is to do, what God supports, what will happen. Saul,
on the other hand 'is informed' that David is plotting evil against him.
Saul misconstrues what he does hear, and rather than noting that David has
liberated the citizens of Keilah from Philistines, Saul concludes that God's
design and David's choices have backed him up into a cul-de-sac. David,
again with the best technology available, learns remarkably what 'would
happen if he does not leave the place, and so does, hence drawing Saul's
animosity from the place as well as that of the Philistines.
A seventh point (23.15-18) is this: another meeting and pactindeed
another 'strengthening' of David by Jonathan (note the language of Saul's
accusations in 22.8) occurs, whether known to Saul or not, suspected by
him or not, anticipatorily feared or not. The fact of it aside, Jonathan
speaks right to the point. He first of all assures David that Saul will not
find him (which is true enough, so far as it goes; Saul will never run David
to earth). Second, Jonathan says that David will rule, with Jonathan as his
lieutenant. That, as we know, will be true in its first aspect but not in the
second. Jonathan here sounds as if he is thinking of survival, which he
envisions (as their words before have clarified) even when David succeeds
to the throne of Saul. It is a poignant moment, our hearing Jonathan
envision something that he will not actually experience. It also sets up for
the problem of leftover royals once the dynasty is over, as Ishbosheth and
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Mephibosheth will do as well (to anticipate the situation of Jehoiachin's

heirs). Jonathan's words confirm the ones Saul hated to say in 20.30:
Jonathan is handing his position to David. But next Jonathan says that
Saul knows (yd', a rare word for Saul, who is not so often credited with
that verb) that these words of Jonathan (v. 17) are true. Does Saul know it?
We know that David will rule, having been at his anointment in ch. 16. We
heard Saul anticipate such an outcome in 18.8, though not graciously:
'What more for him but the kingdom... ?' But so far as Saul having really
let that information become part of his consciousness, I think not yet,
though the moment lies ahead. So once again, David and Jonathan have
the jump on Saul, to his disadvantage, since were Saul to accept the
inevitability of David's rule rather than Jonathan's, he might spend his
time differently.
The eighth point, drawn from the events of the Horesh chase (23.19-29),
also mocks Saul's efforts to know. Once again Saul is made a present of
information about David, data which we know to be truthful (whether
offered in sincerity is another point). In a chase, time counts. Poor Saul,
who besides giving fulsome thanks to those who would enclose David in
his hand, sends them to recheck what they have already verified and
blathers needlessly and tellingly about his own plans. No matter where
David might hide, Saul indicates he will ferret him out (cf. Jonathan's
confident assertion that his father will not find David, 23.17). Saul, in what
is perhaps his most disingenuous utterance of his whole career (in which
there will be some close competitors), says, 'They tell me he is pretty
crafty!' But in the event, all the plotting and pontificating notwithstanding,
a Philistine raidif we can believe the information brought by a lone
messengerprovides a loophole for Saul, for David, and for DH. And so
there is more of this pursuit to come. To three more scenes of it we now
turn, where the balance between these two kings will shift decisively.
Chapter 7
SLUNG FROM THE HOLLOW OF A SLING:
LOOPHOLE LANGUAGE AND THE STALKING OF SAUL (1 SAMUEL 24-26)
The inclusion of the two versions of the story shows that the narrator himself no longer knows how to portray Saul.
David Jobling( 1998: 92)
But now that the end of Saul's reign draws near, we begin to see that false
start and providential delay are simply two ways of expressing the inexpressible mystery of God's dealings with Israel, and that the abortive reign
of Saul is but a prefiguring of that abortion of God's rule which is kingship
itself.
Robert Polzin (1989: 213)
1. Point of Entry
The long narrative, moving now steadily toward the death of Saul, sorts
here with great intensity though still without resolution the question of
how it is to happen. In fact, chs. 24-26 make clearest what is not to be the
manner of the king's death, preparatory to showing us what will happen in
the final section of 1 Samuel. That readers and a few characters understand
that Saul has been fired and David anointed gets us little purchase on the
question of how to move forward, since Saul has refused to vacate and
God has failed so far to dislodge him. The presence of a reigning king (and
sons) is a deterrent to the active rule of another one, as is an alternative to
monarchy unthinkable while powerful kings lead, at least in the ethos of
this story and its stipulated exilic context. An escape is what is wanted, a
way out for all of those concerned, from the various kinds of surplusshaped and finalizing traps they set each other and into which they are
prone to fall themselves: for Saul, David, and YHWH; for Saul's household, David's men, for the narrator, for readers. Though the two royal protagonists will engage each other directly, the same unevenness of information which we explored in the last chapter will continue to have its effect.
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The death of Samuel will remove prophets from having a role to play, and
there is no suggestion that the surviving priest is to be involved. In the
three episodes of pursuitstalkingabout to be unfolded, it becomes
clearer who is dangerous to whom and why, the question of the king's
death is dealt with in a number of ways, on a number of levels: ideological, thematic, formal, and discourse.
As suggested in my last chapter, there is no very clear divide between
these three present episodes of pursuit and those that occurred in ch. 23.
The phraseology of the latest sighting of David at En-gedi (23.29) is
picked up at 24.1 (2)1 (and following). The similarity between the first
information brought to Saul by the men of Ziphthat David was to be
found at 'Horesh on the hill of Hachilah, which is south of Jeshimon'
(23.19)and the follow-up (23.20-29) is rerun, so to speak, at 26.1 and its
episode developed. Pursuit and escape, formulated in an entrapment mode,
is the main plot line, as indeed it has arguably been since 19.10. Carried
forward from the last section and freshly developed is the conundrum of
who is pursuer and who pursued?2 How does each of the players escape
the trap of being caught, pinned, fixed, speared by those who aim to do it?
What genres do we need to recognize here, in ch. 25 especially, but in all
the details of near-escapes that comprise the episodes? What can we say of
the character God, certainly as presented by the other characters in the
story, but in terms of narrator assertion and readerly construction as well?
2. Bakhtin on Loophole
Like surplus, Bakhtin's loophole can be discussed as a relatively small
part of a set of concepts we have already explored. Since the loophole is a
construction not particularly useful in 1 Samuel until now, it can be situated in a relatively straightforward way here. Bakhtin defines the loophole
when discussing technically the speech of the polyphonic hero: 'A loophole is the retention for oneself of the possibility for altering the ultimate,
final meaning of one's own word' (1984: 233, discussed until 278). He
describes this specialized quality of discourse by suggesting that a word's
loophole accompanies it like a shadow, a vivid image which is not directly
useful here, since even I cannot construe Saul as a polyphonic hero. In a
1. The versification in ch. 24 again varies between the Hebrew and English. I will
cite both numbers, the Hebrew first and the English in parentheses.
2. Fokkelman 1986: 452, notes this reversal. See his chart on p. 533 which establishes the point.
7. Slung from the Hollow of a Sling
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broader context, Bakhtin makes clear that the loophole is linked to

unfinalizability in general, so that while appreciating that the side-glancing
discourse of Dostoevsky's heroes as they try to avoid efforts of others to
pin them down may be loophole's finest moment, we may also draw on
the propensities of the loophole in other parts of language. A loophole
allows one to avoid finalization threatened by anyone who brings essential
surplus to bear. Analogy from the art of knot-tying is directly useful, as we
think about the sorts of hitches (slippery or slipped half-hitches) which can
both secure an item as needed or release it, with a deft pull on the right end
of the line. When discussing the authoring of a hero in his earlier works,
Bakhtin clarifies that the opposite of the loophole is the 'rhythm' conveyed
to a hero by an author who uses essential surplus to finalize a character.
Loopholes become possible when essential surplus is waived. Rhythm is
Bakhtin's word for the closure of the present moment in the way that a
loophole is its openness (Bakhtin 1990b: 112-32). It is this second, more
general facet of the loophole that is useful for the narrative of Saul.
In his work on narrative and time, Bakhtin scholar Gary Saul Morson
develops a concept he calls sideshadowing, which I will classify as temporal loopholing. Sideshadowing can be readily understood in reference to
the more familiar concept of foreshadowing, where an author makes clear
that certain events are bound to happen, have already been set, and are
foreordained and foretold in various ways by events which precede them.
In 1 Samuel, as suggested, there is a persistence in the tendency of the
high and the tall to fall, which (after Polzin) I think foretellsshows as
inevitablethe collapse of the monarchy those figures emblematize. That
the kingship will fail is foreshadowed and cannot be altered (and, in the
argument I am developing, is in the process of happening in the lives of
the intended readers). Sideshadowing, on the contrary, opens and follows
an aperture of time into an alternative present moment of a narrative, thus
showing that the future or some aspect of it remains open and can be envisioned to proceed in alternate ways. Morson says, 'Aperture encourages us
to read with such expectations so that we become practiced in assessing
events free of foreshadowing' (1999: 178, emphasis original). The sideshadow (or temporal loophole) allows an author, narrator or character to
make visible a pathway which might be taken though ultimately is not.
The prominently artificial nature of the almost monotonously repeating
plot of these chapters (24-26) offers hospitable space to read a sideshadow.
That is, since the story of Saul and David moves in the present section of
narrative ever more resolutely into a series of search and find, hide and be
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disclosed episodes which are reinforced in the way the characters talk, in
the chronotopes, and in the 'alternate reality' genre, it is in those 'foothills'
that we will use the loophole concept rather than simply in the High Sierras
of polyphonic composition.3 The episode involving David and the household of Nabal and Abigail will offer a sideshadow to the chases of chs. 24
and 26, a road contemplated in discourse but ultimately not taken in plot.
A bit more explanation will be useful. Bakhtin's sense of loophole and
Morson's temporal development of it can be seen against the Russian's
more general thought. Bakhtin consistently contested the grand systems
of modernity that reductively exclude freedom, choice, answerability and
disallowthe creative shaping of what is given, whether from the side of
determinism or chaos (Morson 1999:171 -75). He was interested in calling
attention rather to the particular: 'All ethical situations, at the most prosaic
moments of life, contain untranscribable surplus, and therefore manifest
eventness and preclude an alibi' (Morson 1999:175). The loophole, whether verbal, plot-based, or temporal, is not simply the absence of finalization.
Morson and Emerson refer to a 'battle' able to be sensed as the loophole is
activated; they insist that the loophole must be discernible (1990: 159-61).
Sue Vice is helpful here, instancing the construction of Spielberg's version
oiSchindler 's List. She points out how the film's toggling of time between
present and past and then ahead to future presents to viewers narrative
moments when the future is still open (1997: 108 n. 87). Her reference to
time and choice provides the occasion to comment further on Morson's
'tempics'. Time, Morson suggests, is one of the ways of showing the reality of alternatives: '...ethical choice is truly momentous...it cannot be
decided in advance' (1999:174-75; emphasis original). One of the tasks of
criticism, he urges, and also of reading, is to get at the 'surplus' of wisdom
beyond what has been and can be transcribed. He stresses that to read with
sideshadowing in mind is a readerly move, a discipline that helps us avoid
deciding that endings are inevitable and signification set for all time.4
3. Saul' s blurted assertions, his miniature ruminations, rare though they are and so
seemingly at odds with the tremendous energy of his actions, will be assessed in terms
of loophole as well. His brief self-disclosures do not coincide very well with the self he
is hurling after his prey, but nor are those forays particularly condign with the Saul I am
authoring, however respectfully I may be trying to proceed. We may be in a position to
hypothesize that he lacks the external position to do a very full representation of his felt
self, but he does not (yet) lack the impulse to avoid finalization. Ayers 1999: 82-85, was
helpful to me here, granted her project is very different from mine.
4. Morson 1999: 178. See his Chapters 1 and 2 of his 1994 book, specifically pp.
371
Whether the immediate medium is voice or incident, Morson asserts that

the author works to show non-fmalization and non-coincidence. Loopholes
allow for the presentness of time and for the actual significance of the
moment of choice.
My move, not for the first time, is going to be to nuance the Bakhtin and
Morson insights for the present purposes. As Morson talks about time and
especially about how the 'mind of God' and prophecy work, his categories
about freedom and determinism are not useful.5 What I would like to suggest is that the narrative of 1 Samuel clearly uses 'foreshadowing moments'
to suggest that a future is already decided (e.g. the now familiar toppling
over of Eli to make visual the collapse of dynasticity). Why or in what particulars monarchy fails is explored cumulatively as Saul's story unfolds.
But what can still move sideways is the smaller characteral action which
makes discernible the 'how' of the death of the king and kingship which
Saul represents. The repeated depiction of escape and pursuit, somewhat
unimaginative at the level of plotting, can, if asked, contribute some lateral
moves when Saul (or God and David) might wriggle freer of what becomes
their future, showing us as they almost do so why what happened ultimately occurred and inviting a reflection on the truly-open present of
readers. That is, the plot's tendency to keep repositioning Saul, David and
God at loggerheads in a chase gives themand their authors and readers
an opportunity to continue to ponder their trajectories and try some alternates. As the two royal characters are locked in pursuit and in the verbal
games we shall shortly see, it may be that they will negotiate a plan for
change of leadership: Saul may eliminate David or David disable Saul. The
almost unthinkable, that David will kill Saul and with YHWH'S approval
and assistance, will be rehearsed and made feasible at the practical level
before being eschewed. That it almost happens, blatantly in ch. 25 and in
miniature in chs. 24 and 26, helps us see it as the road not to be taken.
43-47, for foreshadowing and surplus. He develops sideshadowing in Ch. 3 and then
into Pt. II.
5. See Chapters 2-3 of his 1994 work for some assertions about prophetic time and
God's angle that seem quite flat. Morson is not the only Bakhtin scholar to hesitate to
use Bakhtin's ideas on a sacred (canonical) text, or perhaps even to assume that there is
no relevance. So, though I am borrowing Morson's useful concept of sideshadowing, I
do it conscious that he would probably disagree with the particular way I plan to work
with it.
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Polzin's observations on chs. 24-26 are as perspicacious, though perhaps

more general, than usual. For the present purposes, I will arrange them
into four. First, he urges against heavily redactional theories, that the three
chapters be taken not as variants of each other but as a narrative unit.6 His
positive point is that the obvious repetition be negotiated as artistically
significant. He observes as well that the evaluative tone of the chapters,
'overly didactic' and 'conspicuously' artificial as he names it (in counterdistinction to the realistic or mimetic), constrains our reading.7 Second, he
reviews the many and varied ways in which the three chapters interlace
not simply at the thematic level but in terms of ideology and various formal features as well, linking not only to each other but also to other places
in 1 Samuel (1989: 205-12). A third point, drawn really from the preceding, makes specific observations about the resonances of language in the
book of 1 Samuel: the ubiquity of the word bqs, the complexity of one king
sparing another and the language employed to discuss it which dominates
these chapters and permeates ch. 15 as well, and the ways in which Saul
and Nabal are cognate (1989: 206, 209-13). Though Polzin asserts and
grounds rather than develops the relations does not diminish their value.
Fourth, and most usefully, he discusses in terms of the whole book, even
the whole DH, the matter of 'providential delays', among which he includes the slow elimination of Saul. Though it is a problem with which the
book has been occupied for a number of chapters now, Polzin suggests
that it is not simply or even primarily a matter of Saul himself but of other
delays as well, starting with Hannah's deferring to bring the young Samuel
to Shiloh; but perhaps the pattern or motif is discernible as early as Hannah's deferral to conceive him until we have heard her ask. Polzin reminds
us that' [w]ell over half the book of 1 Samuel finds Saul sitting among the
ashes of his kingship' (1989: 213). The delays, insofar as we judge them
6. Polzin 1989: 205. He summarizes some of the historical-critical work which
explores redactional relations among the three chapters in a long note on pp. 266-68.
7. Polzin 1989 (207-208) calls attention to the exaggerated way in which YHWH
protects David, which is spoken of by various players, even eventually by Saul and to
David's too obvious means (taking and then brandishing the cloak fragment, the spear
and water) of bringing his opponent to heel. Polzin urges our consideration of the
'rhetorical' nature of the dialogue, where characters urge each other by frequent 'and
so now's, with urgent 'see's, with 'unnecessary' orfaux questions. His point regarding
ch. 25 (1989: 210 and n. 10 on p. 268) is especially important, lest we read ch. 25
'straight' instead of slant.
373
theologically providential, caution us against the triumphalism of claims

made in this part of the story by characters who speak of things beyond
what they can know.8 The delay, Polzin suggests, concerns Israel as well
as its first king.
Though I will include finer detail of his work as called for below, I take
his main contribution about responsible and appropriate reading strategies:
How do we read a 'too didactic' text, cope with characters who talk beyond their ken, weigh the question of God's permissiveness and alleged
will, parse the double standards which seem to apply to Saul and David? It
seems best, following Polzin, to acknowledge the intensely rhetorical
nature of these chapters, the fact that they are framed with characters struggling to present viewpoints to each other convincingly. With that 'genre'
in mind, we are cautioned to attend critically as we ourselves traverse the
warrens of their talk. Everyone need not be right, and not everyone's assertions can be accepted at face value as authoritative. And amid these various character urgings are some 25 statements about what God has done, is
doing, will do, needs to do. It is not as though we have not heard such language before, but here, as we approach and circle the question of the transition between reigns of kings, the manner in which David's future will
interlink with Saul's collapse, we must pick up the question of God's
agency as the human characters and the narrator expatiate upon it. We may
feel the need for a reader's loophole ourselves.
The three chapters detailing David's pursuit of Saul function as a tight

narrative unit. The two framing chapters, quite similar to each other in
structure and theme, allow their relation to ch. 25 to be seen as well. The
story of Nabal, Abigail, and David is a sideshadow of the event(s) of chs.
24 and 26, rehearsing an alternative to their action. The whole unit is
discussing the manner of the death of the king, the termination of the monarchy, how it can be managed suitably. The final 'how' will become visible
only at the end of 1 Samuel. Here, the stress is on how the monarch(y) will
not end. David names the four options, and the narratives move to consider them all and to reject them.
My plan here, not so different from other commentators, is first to show
how similar to each other are chs. 24 and 26. There is progress, to be sure,
8. Gathering from throughout Chapter 7 of Polzin's 1989 study, these points are
brought together on pp. 212-15.
374
between the two, especially once we will have discussed the dynamics of
ch. 25. In fact ch. 26 is the last encounter Saul and David will have. So
though there is a doubling, there is also a clear advance. Second, I will
bring into that dance the narrative of ch. 25. It also bears clear relationship
to the material that surrounds it but moves in a quite inverted way as well.
Hence it throws into relief some of the dynamics more muted in chs. 24
and 26. Another way to say that is that ch. 25's shouting of certain things
makes clearer what is being whispered in chs. 24 and 26. Recognizing the
cacophony assists reading the unit. In the discussion of both sets of text, I
will highlight the question of loopholes which provide the characters with
escape from finalizations about them. The loopholes range from the obvious (e.g. the wilderness, a cave, deep sleep, a reprieve) to the more subtle
(double-voiced discourse, ambiguous gestures) to the question of whether
key narrative assertions (God killed Nabal) are reliable for the reader, or
need to be negotiated in some other way.
a. Stalking and Loopholes: 1 Samuel 24 and 26
As others have noticed, there is substantial structural similarity between the
two episodes contained in chs. 24 and 26. 9 1 offer six moments: first, in
each chapter, Saul learns of David's whereabouts and goes to seek him
with 3000 select men (24.2-3 [1-2]; 26.1-2). Second, Saul's initial advantage turns quickly to disadvantage, as the quarry spots the hunter before the
seeker finds the sought (24.4 [3]; 26.3-7). While David has thus a surplus
on Saulsees what Saul cannot see, sees Saul without being seen back
there is conversation between David and his men about how to maximize
the supposed gift of the moment (the third similarity): in each case a verbal
suggestion from David's mena quotation by them of speech which is
new to us, or a distortion of what we have been privy tourges that David
act (or authorize action) against Saul (24.5 [4]; 26.8-9). Fourth, David, taking in the suggestion, ultimately parries it each time (24.7-8 [6-7]; 26.1011) but not without first performing an action that is symbolically as violent
as the suggestion of his men had been (24.5-6 [4-5]; 26.11-12). Once that
action is complete, David engages Saul in conversation (the fifth similarity)
about the pursuit of the king (24.9-16 [8-15]; 26.13-16, 18-20, 22-24),
9. With divergent assumptions, purposes, and results, several scholars discuss the
relationship between chs. 24 and 26. The most complete can be found in Edenburg 1998:
74-83; Fokkelman 1986: 451-73, 529-17; Gordon 1980: 41-43; Klein 1983: 235-36.
375
putting a rather different slant on his own recent gesture. And Saul concedes
David's viewpoint (24.17-22 [16-21]; 26.17, 21, 25a), bringing each episode to an end (24.23 [22]; 26.25b). The gain on the similar actions in ch.
23 can be seen: in both these present episodes Saul comes closer to David
than beforebut David successfully turns and confronts his pursuer rather
than simply escaping as he had done in ch. 23. Though a change in the
relative positions of the two is clear enough by the end of both chs. 24 and
26, not so very much will come from the progress. That is, the story's ultimate resolution of the problem of kingship is not very dependent upon
the actual outcomes of verbal negotiations held in these chaptersstrange
though that seems, given the radical nature of Saul's concessions. Saul's
agreeing that David will rule makes little practical difference in progress on
that front. More important than plot action or even negotiated content, both
in this actual narrative and in Bakhtin's theory, is how the two heroes talk
and are spoken with. It is at such discourse that we will now look carefully,
again with particular attention to loopholes.
The points I wish to demonstrate are the following seven. First, at the
thematic level, it is clear that a game of hide and seek is in progress. One
of its aspects is that it is not clear to the players, or perhaps to spectators,
who is 'it'. The reader must ultimately decide on that question, which is
far from obvious. Second, what the plot action shows is that though Saul is
tracking David, David is also hunting Saul and twice lets him go, after conspicuously clipping him on both occasions. Saul twice aborts his pursuit of
David as well, though 'lets him go' does not quite fit the power dynamic
of the passages. Third, what David talks about is how Saul is chasing him,
endangering him. But it is David who has the advantage on Saul, first in a
cave, and then in a deep sleep, approaching Saul in both of these vulnerable places without Saul's knowing David is near. Though Saul has blustered and threatened, has thrown spears, soldiers and speech at David, the
king never comes so near to his opponent as David does to the king in
these chapters. Fourth, there is danger to David, but not so much from
Saul, who here and elsewhere can be talked (if temporarily) out of his antipathy. The risk is what David will do, may do, is at some level tempted to
doand in fact, does do symbolically in these passages. To 'send forth'
his hand against the anointed of YHWH is to make David guilty, make
him appear guilty, and set him up for reprisal, putting at risk his own royal
self. No one has more invested in the sanctity of YHWH's anointed than
does the long line of Davidides. The initial steps David manages down the
path of harm are diagnostic for some of his later journeys to the same
place.
376
Next, fifth, David's language is crucial, as it mixes and dances with all
that Saul has said: David accuses Saul of risking David's life; not false, it
is not the main point. David disclaims that he is after Saul, urges that the
king not credit any who says David is seeking Saul's harm; this strains
credulity at the very least, since David moves in on Saul harmfully here, at
least symbolically (assuming that symbols are an intense mode of reality).
David also uses God language of several types and credits that sort of
rhetoric from his men. David's use of oaths to supplement his own hopes
and fears, his calling on God to arbitrate justice between himself and Saul,
his entrusting his ultimate good to God all testify, in my opinion, to
David's intensity and possible, plausible sincerity. Part of what has to be
arbitrated by characters and readers is whether the characteral assertions
about God are credible or not, healthy or not. David sorts that matter in
one way, and readers may do in another. The same holds with the narrator
assertions about God. Sixth, Saul accedes to David's presentation, I think
somewhat against expectation. That is, after all this time, Saul's elastic
capacity for reversing notwithstanding, that he 'caves' so readily in chs. 24
and 26 needs scrutiny. Does Saul mean what he says, and can he be counted upon to stand by his words? How is this shift accounted for in terms of
what has gone before? Finally, seventh, the narrator language requires careful appraisal as well. That voice, relating David's acquiescence to the temptations proposed by his men, stresses David's later construction of his
actions rather than the actions themselves. Nor is the narrator here very
directly helpful in our understanding Saul. So we must do some extra footwork here if we are to appropriate responsibly the language of the narrator.
(1) Chapter 24. Saul's quest in ch. 24, set off by a rumor and assisted by
3000 of his men, gives way almost immediately to Saul on his own, in a
cave, in a position of vulnerability. Saul is watched without himself either
seeing his opponent or imagining that he is seen by others. In fact, it is not
difficult to suppose that, under the narrative circumstances, Saul enters the
cave to avoid being seen. Does Saul track David to the cave, or does
David chance upon or arrange this position of advantage to himself?10
There is no sign of such skill on Saul's part, but David's men press the
matter in the second direction, when they remark: 'Here is the day of
10. Gunn's sense (1980: 91) that fate gives David good cards and Saul poor ones
does not actually get us too far. He thinks it impossible for Saul to win, over against
David's Tightness. I think this is the sort of reading where we construe bad cards
because Saul seems to be losing.
377
which the LORD said to you, "I will give your enemy into your hand, and
you shall do to him as seems good to you"' (24.5 [4]). It is a charge we
have not heard: not at David's anointing in ch. 16, not even when David
inquires about Saul's pursuit of David in 23.10-12; however, it rings similar to elements of David's speech at 17.34-37 and to Jonathan's at 20.16. It
is language that Saul struggles unsuccessfully to populate in his empty
boast at 23.7. The equation of Saul as David's enemy has been made by
the narrator explicitly in 18.29 (after a series of moves that are adversarial
on Saul's part, at least) and implicitly on other occasions when Saul speaks
or acts in a hostile manner toward David.
Though we can suppose that these unfamiliar divine words were uttered
outside of our hearing, that does not solve the fundamental problem. Hence
the conversation concerns not so much God's actions as claims about
God's plans and intent. His men's theology provides David with a loophole from restraint that we can see is attractive to him. If, as I suggested in
the last chapter and assume here, David is inviting Saul's pursuit of him
for some particular reason or with some effect that we may provide (e.g. to
wear him out, to demonstrate his incompetence), then any moment to capitalize definitively on their respective positions may tempt David to strike.
The huge and ever-popular loophole offered David herepresumably by
men who know him well and sympathize with his projectsis that a
human plan intensely desired is in fact sanctioned by God. That David's
men bring forth such an utterance herethat in fact these three chapters
work substantially in terms of such a possibilityunderlines its importance. What has been, is, and is to be God's role in the problem of the two
kings? To indicate that some action coincides with the will of God is to
shrink, to some extent, the agent's responsibility for doing it. For a speaker
to make such a claim seems a speech act that needs particular labeling. To
put it in Bakhtin's terms, the utterer, not God, must sign such a claim. It
may be right or wrong, spoken with sincerity or duplicity, but the fact of
the assertion does not get any of the players (ourselves included) very far
simply by being said. Such language is actually akin to oaths, in that in
both cases a human being contracts to make God party to a particular path
of action, with what effect in the divine realm we can only speculate. Such
speech wants care and demands responsibility. In the present case, David's
men are arguing that YHWH has provided a moment for which the deity
also gave prior directions, in fact, a blank check. All David needs to do,
his men urge, is match the presence of the unknowing, solitary and unguarded king with the moment anticipated in the quoted divine speech; to
378
decide what is best for the 'enemy' is in their leader's hand. It is a replayed
and for us hypothetical direct discourse, this supposed divine permission
of one of these men to slay the other, if such a move would seem good in
David's eyes.
David's response to his men's urging is to act on it. Still unseen, he
approaches Saul and cuts from the royal garment a swatch (24.5 [4]). Commentators love the moment, and it is well-discussed from several angles.11
It is arguably, a breach of the king's person, whether we choose to see it as
a symbolic castration, an assassination, a political/military coup, or a disrespecting of some smaller currency. I think all those readings are possible,
having in common the aggressive move David makes against Saul's person and office. It can be related to other retailorings of clothing: that of the
young priest and prophet Samuel (3.19), the tearing of the robe of either
Samuel or Saul (15.27), to Jonathan's divestiture of clothing (18.4), to
Saul's removal of his own clothing (19.24), and to the disguise he is about
to effect in 28.8and more widely as well in DH and beyond. It is claimed
as cognate with ancient Near Eastern gestures, not implausibly.12 That
David actually makes his cut as a response to the suggestion of his men
needs to remain in our minds, even when he repudiates the gesture which
happens almost at once and is developed subsequently as David talks with
his lord.
The narrator takes first responsibility for describing the moment of
11. A sampling: for a discussion of what is implied by the term 'anointed', see
Sawyer 1965. Edelman(1991: 193-94) thinks an ancient Near Eastern audience would
know and understand divine inviolability, which she sees as linked to the presence with
the king of God's spirit, a specific point with which McCarter (1980: 384) agrees. Fokkelman (1986: 455) seems nearer the point, emphasizing that the inviolability is mentioned numerous times (three times here, twice in ch. 26, in 2 Samuel, and so forth).
McCarter (p. 386) says: 'David is portrayed as innocent and pious in the extreme', cf.
Saul's depiction which is 'completely degrading'. Fokkelman (1986:457-59) urges that
the knife penetrates the sphere of the holy but not the body and sees here a clear equivalence between the cutting of the clothing and the rejection of Saul. Gunn (1980: 93
and 153 n. 4) links the cutting to the matter of heirs; Saul's line is cut off, via Michal, at
least. That is, promises notwithstanding, David in some way cuts off Saul's seed. I
think, actually, Saul's removal of Michal from David plays a role in the cutting as
wellSaul as usual having a key role in his own downfall.
12. For a fairly comprehensive discussion, see Prouser (1996: 28-30) who argues
that David takes clothing and Saul loses it, in an equation that privileges clothing
against nakedness not only in the Old Testament but in the general ancient Near East.
It is the sort of claim I have learned to distrust, but Prouser's consultation is as wide as
any I found and the context would support the claim he makes.
379
David's retraction (though not explaining it very fully) just before David
articulates it. 'Afterward David was stricken to the heart because he had
cut off a corner of Saul's cloak', we are told (24.4 [3]). To learn that
David has a strong and instinctual moment of rethought or regret for his
action does not tell us precisely why.13 Nor do we have full disclosure
when we hear the owner of the smitten heart speak: 'The LORD forbid that
I should do this thing to my lord, to the LORD'S anointed, to raise my hand
against him; for he is the LORD'S anointed' (24.6-8 [5-7]). The match
between character and narrator speech is not exact. The narrator is clearer
about the referent of the target of violence, naming him as Saul; David's
speech leaves the anointed unnamed, the referent clearly enough Saul here
but more ambivalent elsewhere when these words will repeat. David's
expressed concern is to some extent and appropriately self-preserving, a
care to keep conspicuously clean hands, lest perhaps he have hands raised
against him. David, like his men, claims divine sanction for an action he
wants to do, begs or prays or exclaims to God to prevent him from or to
sustain him in sending a hostile hand against YHWH'S anointed. That is,
David both uses and avoids the loophole his men offer but also crafts one
akin to theirs while scolding them for what they have offered. That the
narrator comes back in again to summarize that David addressed his men
to restrain them from rising against Saul occludes the moment of his own
temptation but does not cover it up completely. Perhaps, in fact, the narrator's allusion to David's visceral recoiling makes the depth of his reaction
visible though still not utterly clear. When urged by his men to make a
violent move, David in fact complies, choosing an action that presumably
seems 'good in his eyes' as he does it, moving stealthily against his opponent in some tangible way when that one is otherwise occupied. Only once
the deed is done do he and the narrator re-evaluate both the utterance of
the men and David's swift obedience to it. That the action might have
been worse is not the whole point, though it is the scenario David will
develop with Saul shortly. David's words in the cave leave us the space to
consider that once he has escaped restraint and performed his act, he sees
it as harmful to his anointed opponent and to himself. He scolds both himself and his men on both accounts. Again, it is important to let his words
sink in to our awareness here, since once David begins to read his own gesture, he will reinterpret it. In the cave, David acts as prompted by his men
to deal with Saul as though handed his opportunity by God.
13. The comment may take us back to 13.14, where the replacement for Saul was
to be a man after YHWH'S own heart.
380
David next, restraining his men from going out after Saul, himself rises
to follow the king from the cave, quarry after hunter most obviously here,
and calls to him formally: 'My lord the king', to which he adds a bow
once Saul has turned to see him (24.9-10 [8-9]).14 David's speech is one
familiar to them and to us, a variation of his 'what have I done?' question
articulated by himself and Jonathan at 17.29; 20.1, 32. David this time
asks why Saul listens to those who say, 'David seeks to do you harm',
provoking our review of who those voices may be. Aside from Doeg and
perhaps Michal, Saul is primarily the one we have heard claim that David
seeks the king's harm. It is, perhaps, a more gracious way to put the king's
own propensity before him without accusing him directly. But for readers,
the narrator has made a similar use of the notion of David seeking Saul.
That is, David here warns Saul to disbelieve those who say, 'here is David
seeking/Zx^ evil against you' (24.10 [9]). Do we, reading, believe David
when he urges Saul to less credulity and obedience to such voices? Here is
one of the subtler loopholes: a character warns us against the narrator. And
perhaps David's mode of argumentation puts us on guard additionally, his
revision of an action which disquieted him when he did it.
For next David makes Saul a witness to exactly what he did not see and
in fact rereads what we did see, asking us to change our sense of it. That
is, David urges Saul: 'Listen instead to what you did not hear: how some
urged me to kill you'though we must note that none of his men used
such blunt language, nor did the narrator. So David has made a particular
construction of the more general suggestion: 'do what seems good'
becomes 'kill'. The proof of David's self-interpreted and self-proclaimed
forbearance, then, becomes not what Saul neither heard or sensed but in
fact the severed edge of his garment, which testifies rather to a set of possibilities. The construction David lays upon it'it could have been worse,
I spared you'is not more likely than its inverse'it was pretty bad, I
clipped the lord's anointed'.15 So though many read this cutting an edge of
14. Fokkelman 1986: 460, neatly catalogues that David bows only here to Saul,
though thrice to Jonathan and twice to YHWH. Gunn 1980:91, has noted that this is the
first time David makes his protestation of innocence to Saul directly; it reminds me
how little conversation has actually passed between the two men in the whole story.
15. Commentators tend to go with David's version of the matter. Edelman 1991:
194-96, also makes the link to the robe ripping scene in 15.27-28, where the kingdom
is given to a man 'better than' David. Klein 1983: 235, says to have cut merely the
robe was a sign of respect for YHWH'S anointed. Fokkelman 1986: 461-64, thinks
David's words attest to his innocence.
381
garment as an act of mercy or restraint, I see the utterance as doubled, as

both a loophole and an alibi, as simultaneously a forbearance and a violation, reassurance and a threat, a confession and an under-representation.
David's heart is his own first witness to us, granted via the narrator, and
his words to both self and men were additional testimony that in fact the
deed has ominous overtones, opens dangerous paths. David's words to
Saul mark another stage in his crafting of a loophole for the garment slice
he is carrying. David continues along with his explanation. Disclaiming
evil rebellion and sin (24.12 [11]), he repopulates Saul's language to
charge the contrary: 'You are hunting me to take my life'. David's argument'I could have done worse'he suggests as proof that there is no
treason in him'though you are hunting me to take my life'. David turns
against Saul the words we (not David) have heard the king utter against his
erstwhile son and protege: 'David is lying in wait for me' (22.8,13). Using
words for sin and calling God to judge between them, David claims both
justice and innocence (24.13 [12]). His words are key: 'May the LORD [the
LORD will] judge between me and you; may the LORD [the LORD will]
avenge (nqm) me over you; but my hand shall not be against you'. Adding
to the torn fragment David brings forth a piece of proverb: 'Out of the
wicked comes forth wickedness', also of course doubly aimedor arrivingto exonerate himself and place blame on Saul (24.14-16 [13-15]).
David compounds that image with another accusation of disadvantageous
pursuit: Why should a king so determinedly pursue a dead dog, even a
single flea (on the dead dog, one assumes)? Again, David concludes asking
for God's judgment between the two of them.16
David's speech is busy and adroit, asking Saul to witness what was done
behind his back, while David hides behind those whohe said, with none
but us to contradict himurged him 'to kill' the king. David reconstrues
the action which he at once regretted as being now more positive; and he
makes YHWH judge between his and Saul's pursuits, confident as he
twice asserts, that YHWH will vindicate himthough he assures Saul that
still he will not take advantage. David's proverb and metaphor hint to
underline the unfairness of the searchan evil deed bespeaking an evil
source, the absence of the evil deed exonerating the source; a mighty king
bothering with a tiny opponentcorpse and vermin whom, we can simul16. Edelman 1991: 199-201, who has a tendency to look for structures and institutions, thinks this scene represents a mock trial scene between the two protagonists,
where Saul, acting as judge against himself, pronounces two verdicts at vv. 18-19 and
20. She also makes associations between 24.22 and 20.31, as well as 16.18 and 13.13.
382
taneously hear, the big king has not yet been able to cornerto the contrary, as the flea takes a stand and faces its opponent. A mighty one pursues
a powerless one: How are we to label the participants? Do we accept
David's version of matters? Again David seems to minimize his own
position as he pictures himself as a little flea on the hop before a mighty
hunter. I do not see David and Saul coinciding with the roles David assigns
here. David's rearrangings are not necessarily malevolent; in fact, loopholes are precisely ways in which we avoid finalizing judgments of others
on ourselves. But sincerity does not insure truthfulness. So in a certain
sense, David distances himself from his men who we may sense to discern
insightfully that David is ready for a suggestion of taking the matter of
Saul's ongoing kingship into his own hands, even violently (granted, it is
likely to be their desire as well). It is a portrait he resists repeatedly in the
pages ahead (except in the sideshadowing ch. 25). David's rereading may
in fact be his own clarification of what he is not willing to do. That is, having made one cut, he learned it was one step too far. But the question is:
Does the self he glimpses, the portrait he chalks, lead him toward selfknowledge and answerability or toward projection, blame and alibi?
David's claiming as God's angle the justification of his own actions is
certainly what he urges upon Saul and any others listening. And yet to
invoke God as witness and judge also presumes some degree of confidence
in the truthfulness of one's own claim. So his words distance him from
what he did before appraising it. But given all that has gone on, David's
words to Saul are tendentious at best.
Saul, however, is evidently more credulous than this reader. Recognizing, naming the speaker as his son David even as he asks for confirmation
of it, Saul weepsan utterance that seems far from the verbal cleverness
of his interlocutor. Why does Saul weep, we need to ask. His words, which
may or may not coincide very fully with his tears, concede the right to
David, on what basis we must ask, after all these chapters of their contending. Saul, whose assertions of harm from David go back at least to 18.8-9
(where he muttered about David's creeping relation to Saul's kingdom,
occasioning the narrator to remark that Saul eyed David from then on) and
have been steady if not constant, seems now too suddenly, too easily, to
accept what David has said, even to rearticulate it from his own angle:
'You have the right on your side, you have repaid me good whereas I repay
you evil'.17 That is, Saul accepts both the construction of David about
17. See Fokkelman 1986: 468-72, for his sense of syntax and structure here: three
ki clauses surrounded by a frame acknowledging David's view followed by two
383
David's own forbearance and the theology of David's men, who claim
David tells Saul but we heard it as wellthat the moment when David can
have slain Saul easily was a moment given him by God. How is this
moment explicable, given the long and careful recital of Saul's fear and
antipathy?
To dismiss him by labeling Saul as deluded, paranoid, tragic is one way
out. But that seems a shame in a story that spends its detail about this figure
with considerable care. What we may note is that this is the first time
David has pleaded his innocence to Saul directly (compared to fencing
with him in chs. 17 and 18, dodging his spear and fleeing his presence in
chs. 18-19, manipulating him via Jonathan in chs. 19 and 20, putting the
prophet or priest between them in chs. 21 and 22, before laying a trail for
Saul to follow in ch. 23). Is it too simple to say that Saul responds to
David's own voice here ('is that your voice my son David?') better than he
has to David's other mouthings and mouthpieces? Jobling (1998: 92) is of
the opinion that Saul is tired of being king. I cannot come to that conclusion with him, either with his reasoning or result. But it is an interesting
point. Does Saul himself need a loophole, which David has provided?
Does Saul need to hear these words of innocence from Davidinstead of
from so many others? Is that your voice, my son David?18 A loophole for
Saul in his being lured by David to go after him: David's own insistence
that he does not wish Saul harm so Saul can back off or retire gracefully.
Do we believe Saul when he claims to believe David? Again, like David, I
construe Saul as saying what gives him an out from those who would pin
him into absolute clarityin and outside the story. Does Saul accept
David's construction about himself: 'hunting me to take my life'? If so, he
is about to back off. Do we believe David's construction of Saul?
Saul's rejoining question of 24.20 (19) sounds proverbial itself: 'Who
has ever found an enemy and yet sent that one safely away?' A question,
as noted before, invites more answers than the one most obviously implied.
conclusions. Fokkelman also notes that by reusing the sgr word here Saul abandons his
wish or hope from 23.7. In emulating Jonathan (23.17-18) Saul now finally becomes a
lame duckand the death of Samuel is noted. I do not think matters are so clear to
Saul yet.
18. Polzin 1989:206-207, notes that questions are sometimes asked 'rhetorically',
that is, somewhat unnecessarily. Of course Saul knows whom he is talking with. And
yet, a question may be a way of reflecting, of taking stock, of verifying something
unexpected. Part of the richness of these utterances is to allow them as much scope as
possible.
384
Like David's language, this word of Saul has a doubled referent. Not only
is it David who has let Saul slip awaywith only a piece of royal robe
sacrificed, butinsofar as Saul has been pursuing an enemy (a charge he
mostly does not accept but he and we may see has some truth to it), he is
going to let David slip away as well. How do we construe the characters to
read the vague and consequently flexible proverb? The narrator has named
Saul as David's enemy (18.29). Loopholes for one and all. And Saul, as
has David already done, turns the settling of the account over to YHWH
and begs good for Davidthe very words rehearsed for him in ch. 20 by
David and Jonathanwhich we may note is the opposite of what David
asked for Saul! Who finds an enemy and lets him slip away? But there is
more.
The chapter concludes with two more admissions from Saul: 'Now I
know that you shall surely be king and that the kingdom of Israel will be
established in your hand' (24.21-23 [20-22]). This is an admission we
have not heard from Saul up to this pointexcept in his exclamation of
18.8, where it was probably more 'rhetorical' than literal, more dreaded
than thought, sanctioning an early permission for Saul to move against
David. Jonathan has indicated (23.17) that Saul knowsJonathan who
once claimed that his father did nothing that was not known to the son.
Jonathan himself has claimed the same insightstarting perhaps with his
gesture of 18.1-5, compounded by his words of commitment to David in
ch. 20 and reinforced most recently by the understanding that he would be
David's second (23.17). Saul indicates no such specific expectation here
to the contrary; the heirs of Saul are in danger as David accedes to the
throne. Saul's concluding plea for the life of his heirs (echoing Jonathan's
of 20.14-17 and 23.17), his name and his house makes stark the danger
that he knows his kin are in (well borne out as the story winds into 2 Samuel). Can Saul trust the man who has just cut his royal garment secretively
to not cut off the Saulide line? Again in this episode most often seen as
Saul's pursuit of David, by the ending the shoe is on quite the other foot.
The two depart, Saul to his home and David to his stronghold.
2. Chapter 26. As already suggested, the episode of this chapter is verbally
linked with the moment in ch. 23 when the men of Ziph inform Saul of
David's precise whereabouts. Their report is that David is hiding in their
region; and their words bring Saul forth once again to seek David (26.1-2).
Read 'straight', which is not to deny the possibility of redactional seams
here, this is their second (possibly third, if we note also 23.22-23) scouting
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out of David to report to Saul and Saul's fourth attempt (at least) to stalk
David. If, as I will do, the reader choice is to construe the repetition as
artistic and meaningful rather than as somewhat artlessly cobbled and unimaginative reusing of the same plotline, then we must take seriously the
impact of the repetition, perhaps especially in view of the verbal exchanges
between the two anointeds and Saul's tendency to give way. Whether it is
one episode with a different narrative slant or a second attempt by the same
informants to bring hunter and hunted together, the narrative fact remains.
We have a rerun of some kind but intensification as well. I will treat it as a
discrete and later happening of ch. 23's episode, where this time Saul (less
cautious? more reckless?) does not delay by having the Ziphites recheck
their information and where in fact an actual encounter is facilitated by the
news given to Saul.19 As before, Saul goes after David attended by 3000
chosen men, and again to a confrontation in which their numbers become
irrelevant.20 Saul encamps opposite the spot where David is; that is,
drawing near to David's supposed place, Saul then stops for the night.
David's counter-reconnaissance gives him access to the arrival of Saul. As
at ch. 24 (and not so clearly at either of the chases of ch. 23), David looks
back through the fat end of Saul's telescope, so to speak, and locates the
man seeking him without that one's awareness of it (26.3-5). Whereas last
time Saul backed into David's dwelling place, this time David, with some
prior knowledge from his scouts, approaches Saul's camping space.
Talk begins. Once he has arrived at the camp, David inquires for companions to go closer still and is accompanied by Abishai, one of the sons
of Zeruiah (who features prominently in the early part of 2 Samuel). The
narrator provides the scene from the angle of those who approach by
degrees to the hill, the camp, the place where Saul lies prone, his spear
marking the place of his head. The impact of what the intruders see is registered by the exclamatory utterance of Abishai, who reintonates (in 26.8)
the words addressed to David in 24.5 (4): 'God has given your enemy into
your hand today...' Abishai actually uses language borrowed from Saul at
23.7: God has given him into my hand, for he has shut (himself) in. On that
occasion it became clear that Saul was wrong on both counts: YHWH'S
19. I find McCarter's maps (1980) a help here, notably the one on pp. 352-53.
Though like many precise reconstructions, they may rely on internal textual co-ordinates
as well as on archeological investigation, still they remove the scenario from geographyless abstraction or from vagueness.
20. Fokkelman 1986: 531, nicely observes that Saul also ineffectually had 3000 in
ch. 13, which reduced to 600, the number David has here.
386
purposes (as we listened to God and David converse) were otherwise, and
David had not shut himself into a tight spot. Saul, in fact, will pick up on
that same issue shortly. Loophole language as before: YHWH intends the
very thing you have in mind to do.
But on this occasion, rather than urging David to act against 'his enemy'
(as though recalling the earlier episode where David was adamant in his
eventual repudiation of such a deed) Abishai volunteers to do the job himself, to pin the king to the ground with a single thrust of the spearone
only needed, Abishai promises, recalling for us (and presumably for David)
Saul's several less effective hurlings. Abishai here also evokes the confident young David, volunteering to his lord to go against the tall man who
opposes him (17.32-37) and also the decapitation of Goliath by the giant's
own sword which had been useless to him. The sight of the vulnerable
quarry seems to activate Abishai's hunter instincts. Are we to think he is
speaking for his lord as well? That is, has Abishai wholly missed the point
of David's previous abjurations of harm to the anointed, or has he rather
picked up skillfully on the points that David has made: 'not my hand'? Is
Abishai offering David a loophole: ''notyour hand, but mine'?
But David verbally parries the suggestion much as before, bringing forth
at 26.9-11 his language of 24.7 (6), also reinterpreted by David to Saul at
24.10-13 (9-12). This time David names while forbidding Abishai to do
what David names as 'destroying21 the anointed of YHWH' (unnamed as
is David's persistent tendency when speaking of Saul), reminding his companion and himself (and any others listening) that to raise a hand against
that one is not a guiltless act. Then David ruminates further, unusual for
him as characterized in 1 Samuel. The rumination is crucial for exposing
the deepest concern of this whole section. Clearly enough pondering the
likely circumstances of Saul's deathshowing it to be on his mind even
as he distances himself from itDavid generates three, even four scenarios
about the manner of Saul's death: 'As the LORD lives the LORD will strike
him down (ngp); or his day will come to die; or he will go down into battle
and [be swept away]. The LORD forbid that I should raise my hand against
the LORD'S anointed...'22 That David is anticipating Saul's death seems
21. McCarter 1980: 407 notes that the word is not simply 'kill' but 'destroy'as
used of trees in Deut. 20.19. With the book's sustained imagery of the collapse of the
king in mind, I would suggest the nuance of 'fell': Saul is not to be toppled by Abishai
like an old tree, David maintains.
22. Gunn 1980: 102, sees David's words over the sleeping king as a sort of spell,
given Saul's ultimate fate.
387
clear. He envisions three modes of it, and that he wants to stay clear of its
agency is also clear, buttressed by oaths. The options David spins are interesting: God may strike him, though what David imagines that to look like
is not immediately clear. It is perhaps here primarily a matter of responsibility, since he is contrasting all three of these modes with a deed by his
own hand. God has not yet struck Saul dead is all we can say. Saul's day
may come, naturally in the course of thingssimilar to what will in fact
be the manner of David's own death. Or he may go down to battle and be
swept away, which comes closer to what will happenand 'the enemy'
will be primarily responsible, specifically, the convenient Philistines.23
Here David reuses the prophetic language of Samuel, instructing the people about the one thing needful as they 'renew' the monarchy in 1 Sam.
12. David's reflection ends in his announcement that whatever the case
may be, he will not be the agent of Saul's death; he says he will avoid raising a hand himself. Again, though these chapters are often seen primarily
in terms of what David fears from Saul, prominent as well is what David
must struggle to resist doing to Saul, namely, raising his hand against him
for harm. Again, as we reflect back to David's insistence that those who
say David seeks harm to the king are not to be heeded, he has just given
(us) more substance in his reflection. He has not put forth his hand to
effect his opponent's death, yet.
Next, as before, David's action somewhat belies or undercutsor better,
contends withhis words. For he concludes his reverie,'.. .now take the
spear that is at his head and the water jar, and let us go'. To whom is
David speaking here (26.11)? It seems like the words address and command Abishai, but in fact David carries out his own bidding, for the narrator sums up that David himself takes the king's spear and his water jar.
This is selftalk on David's part, so presumably not crafted for practical
consumption of others. It need not be reliable, since selftalk is crafted
to persuade its speaker; but it is not packaged for the appraisal of an outsider. The narrator moves on to emphasize the secretness of the deedno
one saw, no one knew, no one awoke from the deep sleep (tardema) of
23. Swept away is the fate with which Samuel closes his address to the people of
Israel in 12.25, if they do evil, a fate to be shared by them and their king. It seems one
of the ways in which the narrator may intend but the reader may surely construe that
Saul stands for something larger than himself, kingship in general (Polzin 1989: 21315), or the monarchic mode of relationship between God and people would be my way
of saying it.
388
YHWH24 that had fallen upon themin fact, we must again persist to note
that David's taking the water supply from a man in the southern wilderness
is a lethal act.25 To urge, with practicality, that others of the 3000 would
willingly share water with the king, is to miss the point. David, despite
what has just averred about his own hands, has just performed a deed
analogous to the cutting of the royal robe that we saw in 24.5 (4) and
arguably a more aggressive act. Nor, we may note, is there any immediate
moral kickback for David this time, no regret registered by the narrator or
himself at his own deed. Change as well as repetition as we move from ch.
24 to ch. 26. David's capacity to hold moral opposites seems greater, the
deed he does is more dangerous to Saul, and no regret registers. A loophole from his own promise to himself: not destroy him, but show him that
it would be possible?
Next (26.14-25 as at 24.9-22 [8-21]), comes the verbal tussle between
the two main protagonists. The scenario described pulls forward for our
comparison and scrutiny some narrative detail of the David-Goliath encounter, the vaunting of a foe across a valley that engages while avoiding
an immediate encounter. David's opening salvo is more combative than
were his first words to Saul outside the cave (24.9-16 [8-15]). David addresses not the king but his companion Abner. To speak about someone
(here the king) within that person's own hearing is a peculiar sort of utterance, easily implying a number of things. It is here plausibly somewhat of
an insult to Saul, and will eventually precipitate from the king his own
initiative to address David without having been addressed yet himself.
Arguably it allows a blunt issue to be positioned to a servant in a way that
might be unseemly to a king. David's address to Abner, which calls him
by name and activates the response revealing that Abner has no idea who
is addressing him so loudly or what the circumstances might be, immediately charges and testifies to the truth that Saul's man has neglected his
24. It is an interesting word choice by the narrator in this passage where there are
many allegations of YHWH'S agency (or magic: Gunn 1980: 102). Miscall, among
others (1986:159) points out that the expression's measure can be a superlative as well
as a special effect from God. Edelman 1991: 226, poses the interesting question of
whether the tardemd is a test of David. Fokkelman 1986: 539, wonders if Saul really
wants to catch David. So we can wonder what the narrator is actually sayingis he
talking about the source of the sleep or the size of it; we can wonder how the sleep is
entered by Saul and is appraised by David.
25. Fokkelman 1986: 537, calculates the need of a person to replenish five liters of
water a day to avoid dehydration. Specific numbers aside, the main insight seems
correct.
389
charge of guarding the king. David draws Saul as vulnerable to assault

from any one of the people, implying that it is not only possible but likely
that anyone might be ready to destroy Saulthe same thing David just
forbade his own Abishai to do. The double charge is clear enough: against
Abner for serious neglect that would admit an enemy to the king's sleeping place and against Saul for being such a king that someone might wish
to assassinate him. David, as is his wont in this section, not only accuses
but metes out justice, and with an oath:'.. .you deserve to die because you
have not kept watch over your lord, the LORD'S anointed...' (26.14-16a).26
In David's address the onus is on the man who did not prevent such a
breach and on the near-victim, with little room to accuse the one who in
fact threatens it. David next verbally draws their attention to the missing
spear and water jar. To risk the life by failing to guard the anointed of
YHWH is a capital offense, David says, again with the ambiguity of reference he always manages by not quite naming the king. We can as well
hear the double address of the words, aimed to Abner and then past him to
Saul himself. David's final query (26.16b) manages to shift the blame of
the missing spear and water jar from the one who took them to the one
who did not prevent it. It is a clever opener. As before, David utilizes what
his men said, stands behind them and points to their language to make it
enhance his own restraint.
As possibly intended and in any case as now described here, the reply to
that utterance comes not from Abner but from Saul himself (26.17), who
asks once again (as in 24.17 [16]), 'Is that your voice, my son David?'
David replies, 'It is my voice, my lord king',27 moving on (with no prostration this time) to his now familiar 'what have I done' question: 'What
guilt is on my hand?' (literally) 'What in my hand is evil?' Giving Saul no
chance now to answer, and disregarding or failing to acknowledge the two
items his hand has just removed from the sleeping king, David proposes
two of the various possibilities of agency: 'If it is the LORD who has stirred
you up against me, may he accept an offering; but if it is mortals, may they
be cursed before the LORD for they have driven me out from my share of
the heritage of the LORD...' Is a third possibility that David himself has
some responsibility for the situation? In any case, David spends little time
developing the possibility that YHWH has stirred up Saul (though some
26. Pyper 1996:162, prefers the understanding that David is not prescribing a death
sentence but describing that the king has been placed in danger of death himself.
27. Miscall 1986: 161, hears scorn intonated by David here; cf. Fokkelman 1986:
467, who thinks Saul now confronts the real David instead of his own fantasy of him.
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commentators agree that the story suggests it). He borrows language we

have heard from Saul, when Saul accused Jonathan of stirring up David to
lie in wait for Saul (22.8), corroborated by the narrator in ch. 20. Insofar as
David is laying a trace for Saul and then tracking him along it as well,
David confuses that trail by accusing Saul of tracking him. Not only in the
deed but in language David turns against Saul the weapons the king
himself would wield against David. David, as before (24.15 [14]) draws
himself as quarry, as infinitesimal (a lone partridge this time), as hounded
by a mighty royal.
Saul accedes to the rhetoric if not the truth of what David has said,
backing away from harm to David as we have seen him do several times
(18.21; 19.7; 20.27; 23.28; 24.21 [20]) amid the many moments where he
lunges after him in one way or another. Saul's resistance to David's power
seems strongest when David is not in his presence. Faced with David, Saul
tends to bend toward him. The king says, 'I have done wrong; come back
my son David, for I will never harm you again because my life was precious in your sight today; I have been a fool (ski) and have made a great
mistake...'(26.21, similar to 24.18-20 [17-19]).28 Saul's language is general but bears the inference that David once again has had Saul in his
sight(s) and then let him go unharmed. Polzin (1989: 207) sees the two
gestures of cutting the robe and taking the provisions as a sort of perfect
rejoinder to Saul's treatment of David, well-designed to bring Saul to contrition; various others see them as gentle deeds. I think they are more complex than that, double-voiced assaults on Saul's power, not very gracious
in any real sense at all. Perhaps the words describing it are threat enough;
but what Saul does not suggeston either occasionis that David's
'sparing' act (cutting the garment edge and removing the spear and water)
approach very near to harming the king. That is, Saul accepts (makes
persuasive to himself) David's words on the matter of their relationship.
But amid the language setting Saul up as a threat against himlanguage
which Saul is now eager to escapeI see the opposite; David is far more
dangerous to Saul than is Saul to David. In fact, David is dangerous to
David. How will he escape his own strength and temptation in this matter?
David, disregards the king's words and moves again onto the offensive
even as he holds the king's spear and water jug. Again he accuses others
28. Again Edelman (1991:228) senses a stylized trial scene, where David petitions,
Saul judges. Polzin 1989: 210, develops the analogy between Saul's refusal to slay a
king when commanded to do so (ch. 15)and the language with which he articulates
his sin, and this moment where David forebears, correctly, to slay another king.
7. Slung from the Hollow o
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of deeds that are primarily his own, loophole language. That is, David
makes himself the endangered onewhich we must read over against the
fact that we have never seen Saul close in on David himself very proximately. I do not deny that the king is powerful or that we have heard and
seen him lethal in his pursuit of David; but I am remembering and reminding that we have never seen David 'winged' by SaulDavid is always (to
reroute his own language from 20.3) a step away. David hides his own
deed against Saul under cover of 'one of the people' sneaking in to do
harm. He toys, arguably, with divine or human others who have stirred
Saul up, when in both cases 'he is the man'. The dynamic, if correctly
glimpsed here, is not a new one and will trip David up again in his future.
Part of David's pursuit is to make Saul look like the aggressor. It is not a
wholly false move, but it leaves Saul bearing more of the blame than is
quite accurate to the saga we have seen. It misleads us slightly as we look
back at the king. David's rhetoric is convincing both within and without
the storyline. Whether this is interpreted as a conscious strategy on David's
part is not clear, nor need such a move be malevolent. It is part of David's
need to escape from Saul, to counter Saul's refusal to cede the rule in
some way to David. David, we must recall, has only heard once (23.17)
from Jonathannot the best exegete of his fatherand once (24.20) from
Saulnot the steadiest of speakersthat the old king understands that
David is to succeed him. Part of what activates David into whatever strategy we may discern for him is his resistance to Saul's refusal to quit his
post.
Only after Saul has spokenwords to which David makes no direct
replydoes David tell the king (better, Abner, since the phraseological
tone is not very respectful) to send someone to retrieve the king's items.
Though we know David has been in Saul's camp, this information cannot
have been welcome to the Saulides. David concludes with a speech, again
oddly impersonal, with specific referents obscured except in terms of the
case he has been sketching: 'The LORD rewards everyone for his righteousness and faithfulness...' And David now moves in to claim the construction of his men (24.5 [4]; 26.8, arguably of Saul himself at 26.21): '...for
the LORD gave you into my hand today, but I would not raise my hand
against the LORD'S anointed'. David concludes by blessing himself on the
basis of his restraint: as he, David, guarded the king's life today, so may
YHWH guard David's life and spare him from tribulation. David does not,
now or ever again, ask mercy from Saul but from YHWH. He puts himself
under debt to the deity, not to the king. And Saul, in what are his final
39
the Mighty Fallen?
words to David, blesses his general undertakingsan odd, sort of 'have a

nice day' comment.29 And so the two part from each other for the last time.
Their language has played out for them some length of line. David's discourse has put Saul in the wrong for his pursuit, has permitted Saul to back
off from it. And David's language, evidently compelling for others and for
himself, has made him innocent of evil in regard to his king but also
underlined the risk David takes in stalking Saul. But David slips out of the
loophole as well.
b. Stalking and Loopholes: 1 Samuel 25
(1) Positioning Chapter 25. Having demonstrated the loophole dynamics
which thread chs. 24 and 26, and having made visible not only the similarities between those two units but also the way in which change happens
as we move from ch. 24 to ch. 26, we come to the question of ch. 25. That
it is similar in a number of ways to chs. 24 and 26 has been amply demonstrated by scholars and will be rehearsed in terms of my own argument
shortly.30 At the same time, a good case has been mounted that Nabal is in
some way a stand-in for Saul, which I think is a legitimate and important
way to read the chapter.31 The pressing question is precisely how to exploit
those two aspects in terms of the issues under discussion, specifically the
loophole dynamic and the question of how monarchy will/not terminate.
That is, to use Polzin's expression: What happens if we read ch. 25 as part
29. Jobling 1998: 92, is one of few who does not see insincerity in Saul but indecision; Saul does not really know what he wants as regards David. Fokkelman 1986:
551, concludes that Saul's last words to David are to bless him.
30. The most systematic exposition of the material is by Gordon (1980: 41-64),
whose criteria and results cover many items others note as well. See also Edenburg
(1998: 79-85), who also notes the resonances with 1 Sam. 23. Polzin (1989: 205-10)
also makes the case in several clear categories.
31. The scholars who discuss ch. 25 in terms of analogy are the ones who develop
the ways for seeing Nabal and Saul (others as well) as cognate: Gordon 1980: 43-51;
Levenson 1978: 13-20; Polzin 1989:211-13;Edelman 1991:204-19; Jobling 1998:9293. Their comments range along a number of factors: manner of narrator characterization of Nabal, his own discourse, the responses other characters make to his actions,
and the concern borne by the story about the matter of retaliatory violence. Dissenting
views on the relatedness of Saul and Nabal may be found in the work of Fokkleman
(1986: 476) and Nichol (1998: 135-36), who says: 'Nabal is no cipher for Saul; he is
the subject who must choose between Saul and David and chooses badly'. Whether it
is apt to talk in terms of analogy, cipher, effigy seems less important to me than to
begin to note the various ways in which the discourse unites the characters between ch.
25 and the rest of the book.
393
of a narrative that is surrounded by two portions similar to it, but with

which it differs sharply as well, so that we can see the storyline progress?
And what is to be made of a story of a man who is at one level clearly notSaul but who is drawn by the author in such a way that the analogy with
the king is difficult to miss, even begs to be taken up? How can the angle
of representation be identified so that its play within the chapter can be
appreciated?
My contention is that, thanks to its frame, we may see ch. 25 as a sideshadow of the more dominant plotline of chs. 24 and 26, as partaking of a
dreamlike or fantasy genre, and as offering the main characters (Saul,
David, and God) loopholes for the death of the king. The bases for such a
reading are several. The points I am about to marshal do not prove my
supposition but render it more plausible. My first point concerns the position of the piece. That the episode of ch. 25 goes lateral is suggested by the
syntax, which moves disjunctively. A less subtle way to say the same
thing is that the story of David's interaction with two characters new to the
story is oddly inserted. Its task it to make slightly more obvious the unthinkable, which is the slaying of the reigning king, especially by his successor. So its primary topic is the changing of the royal guard, which is
linked now (if not sooner) to the manner of the death of Saul. Related: a
notice of the death of the prophet Samuel follows the end of ch. 24 and
introducesor intervenes before the start ofch. 25. Since that potentially
highly narratable moment is not exploited (and the death note will be
repeated later when the death becomes freshly relevant to the narrative),
my instinct is to look for its significance here. My suggestion is that the
death of the prophet eliminates for Saul and David (and ourselves) any
likelihood that the prophet will intervene between these two whom he
anointed king. That is, if Saul and or David had supposed that Samuel
would make clear the way forward for themor for one of themhe is
now not able to do that.32 Second, there seems a shift in characterization in
ch. 25, occasionally noted in commentary though without explanation. The
tone is more allegorical than the surrounding frame, the three main characters made flatter than usual as they execute their dance of tacit collusion.
32. Edelman 1991: 204, thinks the obituary is tripped off by the confrontation in
ch. 24, Samuel being David's most important supporter (a point she fails to develop,
since that role would seem rather to be Jonathan's). She also notes that Saul is now free
to go after David without prophetic interference (but there has been none in any case).
Miscall's way of saying it (1986: 149) is that it comes after both Jonathan and Saul
have certified David's accession.
394
We are, perhaps, closer again to 1 Sam. 1-3 and 4-6 than to later material,
thus crossing back toward the genre Polzin called 'parabolic'. But since
this episode is not prefatorial to the story of the first king and his adventures but comes in the midst of them, I will call it a sideshadow, not so
much a foreshadow or backshadow but an alternative rehearsed imaginatively that might have but does not actually happen.
Third, the case for its being a dream rests on several factors. The episode of ch. 25 immediately precedes a moment where a tardemd or 'deep
sleep'either from God or of divine-sized depthfalls upon the whole
entourage of Saul. The episode which finds Saul and the others asleep is
itself a rerun of ch. 23, as already noted. That is, the effort of the men of
Ziph to hand David into the custody of Saul failed when it was first tried;
now in another dimension, it is rerun with a greater hope of success. The
key moment of ch. 26 is David's uncharacteristic reverie, where he generates a set of options for the death of Saul. Working with wholly different
interests and methods from mine, two commentators make provocative
and insightful points. Fokkelman (who likes to be psychological) raises the
possibility that the deep sleep is linked to Saul's resistance to continue
pursuit of David; Saul falls asleep rather that persist in his chase (1986:
539). Edelman wonders if finding his opponent in such a state offers a test
to David (1991: 226). So the dream catches, narratively speaking, some
edge of what each is struggling to do or avoid doing. In fact, we need not
simply infer their inner struggles; Saul and David have each, to some
extent, made audible their concerns. Fourth, the event of ch. 25 is held in
place by two discourse pivots: Saul's concession (24.21-22 [20-21]) of
David's legitimate succession, and David's rumination and conclusion
about the manner of Saul's death (26.10-11). So a sideshadowing dream
which presents the characters with what they most need to avoid.
As I work with the story segment, there are seven main points I wish to
argue. First, the material of ch. 25 is the dream of Saul in both senses of
that syntax: he dreams it and others act in it in relation to him. It is pieced
together from the character zones of himself, his household, David,
David's men, and the absence of prophetic or priestly access to God.
Second, the 'owner' of this dream is not so much a single character as it is
three of them (Saul, David and Saul's householdwhich we can most
easily name Jonathan). Of course it is primarily an authorial statement,
linking elements in the wider story of 1 Samuel in order to suggest relationships for readerly construction rather than to the characters themselves.
Third, it parodies much of what we have seen to date, resembling but then
395
also oddly inverting the familiar, as perhaps a nightmare can do. Fourth,
the dream concerns the question of how the old king will dieand how he
will not die, a matter that includes the 'new king' as well. Though Saul is
the one pictured as asleep, in the same time/space comes David's reverie
of 26.10-11. Fifth, the dream device allows Saul to wake up different from
how he went to sleep, though he may not, indeed does not, register any
awareness of what has 'happened' to him. The changed dynamic between
the main characters registers the impact of the dream. Sixth, the question
of YHWH'S responsibility continues to be pressed here, though not very
directly. But the fact that YHWH is accused of smiting Nabal and simultaneously exonerated helps us navigate our more 'straight' storyline.
A long seventh piece picks up the structure of the pursuit stories. As
argued above, chs. 24 and 26 share a clear structure (laid bare as points 16; see pp. 378-79 above). The episode of ch. 25 shuffles for reuse, or
grotesquely inverts, those six elements to make its alternate reality visible.
So: (1) David (not Saul) learns the whereabouts of his quarry and sends to
negotiate with him (25.4-9); (2) the initial relatedness turns sour, as the
'superior' violently repudiates the message of the petitioner (rather than
readily acceding, 25.10-12); (4) outside the knowledge of the master, the
upstart urges his men to move against their adversary, which; (3) they do
without cavil (whereas before, the men urged David who made some show
of resisting: 25.13). But what enters here (5) is a mediating figure, if that is
the word for it, who acts ostensibly against the interests of the character
Nabal though purportedly for the good of the household and lineage (the
estate or kingdom, we might say), all of which have been threatened by
David (by gesture of arming) and later as he talks (at 25.21-22 and 33-34).
The conversation of negotiation occurs not between the main characters
but between David and a surrogate, and it is she, not he, who urges the
dangers associated with bloodguilt (25.14-31). The gesture of violence,
having gotten out of its cage, is thus intercepted and then repudiated,
point; and (6) but it is also made redundant since someone from the household hands over the goods that are under question, or at least a down payment on them, with the suggestion that more may come later (v. 31, picked
up in 25.39-42). The character whose goods are plundered by his own intimate has a heart episode when he learns of it, which he does shortly after
his celebrating his acquisitions and achievements. He dies a bit later, and
then more of his goodsallpass into the hands of his opponent (25.3638).
396
(2) Chapter 25. We meet Nabal in 25.2-4, where, as has already been
suggested, he has an address linked to Saul sites (Carmel at 15.12, Maon at
23.24). Like Saul, he also has command of 3000but sheep and goats.
Nabal shares the royal shepherd identity. His names are the subject of multiple plays on words, as has Saul's been. In fact, as Abigail eventually says,
his names characterizes him aptly, a point I have been at pains to show for
Saul as well.33 The contrast with his wife Abigail is clear enoughher
status drawn quickly as opposite to his. So 'the Nabal' (as I will call him, to
preserve his individuality but also to call attention to him as a complex construct; I will the same for 'the Abigail' and 'the David') is a mighty man of
substantial means, a shepherd, with a southern address, who is not wellmatched by his wife, the disadvantage being his; though he does not register the imbalance, everyone else seems to do so.
In 25.5-13 the Nabal becomes the partner in a negotiation, in some way
oddly-timed (at least from his angle), with a man from the southern wilderness who hears that the sheep are being sheared. That very moment of
success and simultaneous vulnerability activates a request, which we hear
as it is being handed to the young men who will deliver it. The matter
under discussion has occurred offscreen for us, so we can never be quite
sure what occurred and what did not. That is, the lips from which we hear
the words are 'the David's' own, a narrative choice which also allows use
of the very s 'I/to ask. The request is triply framed in terms of peace (slm),
that is, it purports to be and may well be understood as framed as a pacific
utterance. The content of the messagewith several usages of the 7
33. Of the various suggested criteria for seeing Nabal and Saul related, the wordplays on names are among the most intriguing. For detail consult Nichol (1998: 132)
and Garsiel (1985: 72-75). Plays on Nabal's name range in several directions: the
fool/wineskin/corpse chain is one, balanced by the association of 6//wanton with
ski/fool and its opposite: wise. The klb/Caleb possibilities go in the direction of dead
dogs but also in terms of words associated with heart, especially if preceded by the
preposition Mike, able to access a range of commentary about main characters and
their hearts. Levenson 1978: 13-20, refers us to Isa. 32.6 (and to other wisdom texts)
where a nbl is one who refuses food and drink to the hungry. As Pyper (1998: 176-79)
notes, David comes overtime to have nbl associations himself, as do some of his sons;
his character is drawn to some extent in terms of foolishness/indecency with women.
That David characterizes himself as a dog (24.14) allows the possibility here that
Nabal is not just the person Saul but the king(ship) itself, the point Polzin shows us is
related (1989: 213-15). In Bakhtinian terms, even just the language around the name
makes clear that none of these characters is a self except insofar as sharing walls, so to
speak, with others.
397
wordasks payment for services rendered. That is, while the sheep are
being sheared the David presents a case that he deserves a wage at the
celebration of the woolclip, the rationale being that he and his men provided protection during some phase of the Carmel shepherding.34 The
request is, we may note, grounded negatively: nothing missed while the
protectors were protecting, no harm come to those so guarded. And as if
anticipating the difficulty of claiming credit for what did not but might
have happened, the David urges, 'ask your own people if such is not the
case'. The message is signed by 'your son David', a complimentary close
that some find oddnot to say 'heavy'in the circumstances. The message is presented by the bearers (also outside of our hearing) who await a
response. When the Nabal responds, it a total repudiation of the message.
The one who styled himself as 'your son David' is dismissed as 'ben
Jesse', the use of the patromyn seen typically as dismissive in most of its
contexts and surely pejorative here. The Nabal disclaims all knowledge of
'David ben Jesse', appears not to be able to distinguish one runaway slave
from anothersurely a slur. The Nabal refuses to share 'his' goodsprepared for his own young menwith this claimant, whose origins and services he denies any knowledge of. And he conspicuously refuses to consult
those of his household, as had been suggested in the message.
It is not difficult to see our familiar Saul and David here, most recently
in chs. 24 and 26 but more broadly as well. Saul is indebted to David for
services rendered competently in the past (chs. 16-19 at least), though that
David has never overtly laid claim to payment but has married the king's
daughter and received goods from the king's son (chs. 18-19). The issues
of sonship are contested between the two from the end of ch. 17 onwards,
an old argument used successfully to anger Saul when David claims to
prefer his own ancestral table to the king's at the feast (ch. 20). Though
Saul commandeers David from his father Jesse (17.58) and can call David
'my son', David tends to avoid the reciprocal. Saul has a tendency to lose
control when others intervene between himself and David. The tone, as
has been argued of David's words in both in ch. 18 and also at 24 and 26,
is duplex: Is this the humble presentation of a bill, or is it an extortionate
demand for payment which had better not be refused? When David
34. Stansell's article on the honor and shame aspects of these negotiations is
valuable. I am a bit more dubious than he is about the factoring of the exact dynamics,
but what he underlines is the likely social context for the relations between the players.
The narrative seems to anticipate them in one way or another if not in every detail that
Stansell argues (1996: 61-64).
398
addresses Saul in the pursuit scenes just reviewed, is his language and are
his gestures merciful or threatening? Both... eitherit is difficult to distinguish, reallyall of the peace stickers on the envelope may seem ironic.35
'Nothing taken''carefully guarded' are claims already contested between
Saul and David, as far back as when Saul thinks David already has all but
the throne (18.8); they were rehearsed recently when the robe fringe and
the king's water supply and weapon were pressed into service of David's
forbearance. The implication (26.8) that the mighty man may possibly have
little knowledge of these things himself and so need to ask his household if
they can vouch for the young man's reliability seems again a point of extreme sensitivity for Saul, who has accused his whole household of siding
with David (22.7-8). The message's implied charge, that the leader is out
of touch with what is happening, seems on the way to being legitimated in
the refusal of the master to even ask. The blatant rudeness of the older
man, his protectiveness of the rights of his own men, his suspicions of the
origins of his interlocutora runaway slaveall characterize the relations
between Saul and David (chs. 19-23). What is inverted here is the response
of the Nabal, contrasted with the ease in which David wins Saul over in
both chs. 24 and 26. From the 'dream perspective', it is as if Saul said,
'suppose I "just say no" to what David is demanding, what will happen?'
The Nabal here acts in a way uncharacteristic of the framing exchanges,
where Saul gives way at once to David.
The David goes out of control as well. As the news reaches him, he calls
his men to arms, a moment noted three times in the unit (25.12-13) and
moves with 400 against the Nabal. The reported refusal seems all the occasion or pretext the David wants to plunge into action against his erstwhile
patron. It seems clear that the David has presented publicly to the Nabal a
situation to which the older man cannot avoid responding. The tone reversal is quickfrom the request from 'son David' to the aiming of armed
men at the patron's home. Is the action hasty? Is it extreme? Is it justifiable? There is no cavil registered among those preparing to strike, no heart
murmur to slow matters down. But before examining that response in
more detail when it is verbalized below, we can see what is happening
simultaneouslyat Maon. In 25.14-22 the request and its denial are referred to 'the Abigail' for her interpretation and response. Both the referral
35. Rosenberg 1986:150-52, characterizes David as ordinarily scrupulously observant of detail, usually eloquent, until he flies off the handle here and persists in vulgarities when speaking to Abigail. David certainly maintains control better than Saul
does, and so the figure presented here is in fact an inverse of what we usually have.
399
and her response need scrutiny. One of the young men of the household
summarizes for her: 'David sent messengers.. .to greet our master peaceably. . .but he blasted them'. The servant then goes on to quote the terms of
the claim, validating it as the David had suggested the Nabal's shepherds
were likely to do, elaborating the points (so v. 15 reiterates v. 7: 'We
missed nothing, we suffered no harm'). He puts his master additionally in
the wrong, going beyond speech we already heard to offer a positive
claim: a wall of protection by night and by day. He concludes by posing to
the Abigail the problem shared now by the whole household: what to do
now, since 'evil has been decided against our master and against all his
house...', and concluding that the ill-nature of the master precludes appeal
to him. The Nabal has endangered his whole unit. The gap between the
Nabal and his own is verified, his isolation made manifest. The 'decider'
of the evil is not made clearcannot be since the young man does not
know exactly what will come about; perhaps it is shared among the participants, perhaps a divine passive. We hold the scene up against the words
of David to Saul in 24.10 (9): 'Why do you listen...to those who say
"David seeks to do you harm?"' And yet we can hear 400 armed men
hurrying toward the Nabal estate and will shortly hear the threat against
not just the man but the whole household in just a moment. So more
urgent, perhaps, than the truth of the specific question of the justice of the
claim and its refusal in the 'dream' is the larger question of'the evil determined' it refracts: Does the David wish, even contrive, a pretext for riding
against the Nabal, and has his extortionate utterance in fact created it? If
that is so, we have yet another angle on the pursuit of Saul by David,
wrapped as it is in the alleged injustice of the king against the dog, the
flea, the lone partridge.36
But we now watch the Abigail swing into action (25.18-20).37 Her
36. The tangle of assertions that Saul seeks David's life is listed by Polzin 1989:
206 and 268. He includes 19.2, 10; 20.1; 22.23; 23.10, 14, 15, 28; 24.3; 25.29; 26.2,
20-21; 27.1.
37. There is considerable scholarly attention paid to both the servant and the
Abigail. Pertinent points include the following: some hold that what they do to their lord
is unprecedented in culture and in literature, that their disrespect for him is exceptional
(Alter 1999:157-58; Brenner 1985:40; Jobling 1998:155-63). Among those who speak
well of Abigail are: Alter 1981: 120-21; Berlin 1983: 31; Levenson 1978: 19. Miscall
(1986: 151-57) sees her speech as both persuasive and obsequious, relying on a key
word, 'adon, whose referent is unclear; he also discusses its repetitive nature. The key
question, I think, is what role she plays and how it works out. What their combined
attention points out to me is the oddness of her role, from the point of view of culture or
400
actions, described by the narrator, consist in her decisive and competent

preparation of the Nabal's goods as demanded by the David, a sort of
tithing of them. Though the David's request had not specified exact items
to be exchanged for protection offered, had left it up to the Nabal, the
Abigail here makes her offering quickly: bread, wine, sheep, grain, raisins,
figsin generous amounts, loaded onto donkeys and sent ahead, with
herself coming behind also upon a donkey, approaching to meet those
drawing toward her.38 That she intervenes for the David side against the
Nabal is clear enough, even if a case can be made for their common good.
The narrator clarifies that she did not tell her husband what she was doing,
nor is there the tiniest hint that he suspects it. His isolation from his household, even his danger to it, is stressed here. The Abigail gives from the
stores of the Nabal what the David had asked: generously, easily, quickly,
not arguing out the matter of entitlement at all. She not only divests him
(and I am stressing the goods as 'his' since that seems to be his claim of
them, even though we might be prepared to see them in a more communal
way), and she undercuts the 'no' he has just thundered by the 'yes' of the
donkeyloads of payment hurrying now toward the claimant. Might a more
conciliatory Nabal have chosen more frugally? Perhaps so, but he has
lost that option. Details of the numbers aside, the Nabal's possessions
claimed as his due by the one seen by the prosperous shepherd as an upstartare in fact handed over to the David against the master's will, outside (so far) of his knowledge, and with the active participation of those of
his householda young man and the 'owner's' wife.
It seems clear enough that the role played by the Abigail is that of
Jonathan, the intimate of the master, who without hesitation, question, or
grudge hands over what is 'his' as though it were theirs, as indeed we
might think it is. Starting from the moment he sees David after the Goliath
slaying, Jonathan divests his 'royal self of goods to clothe David (18.1 -5).
When the strife between Saul and David increases, Jonathan makes himself
literature. That is, in an honor shame culture, a woman would not speak and act thus
the egregiousness of her husband's boorishness notwithstanding. That sheand the
narratorare so blunt demands our scrutiny and has a function, since it is not simply a
mimetic detail. The whole scene is unreal, surreal even. Nichol (1998:132) counts that
Abigail mentions YHWH seven times; that is, God is made present in this part of the
story as charactersand the narratoropine about God's will and purposes, even
deeds. Gunn (1980:96-100) discerns the threats as Abigail speaks, slippery rhetoric (my
master, good and evil).
38. Is this the levy of the king, referred to in 8.10-17?
7, Slung from the Hollow of a Sling
401
an intermediary, once with some success (19.1-7), but then with the effect
of hardening of his father's resolve against David (ch. 20). Jonathan seems
quick, eager, perhaps naive about spending the patrimony of his father's
house on an outsider. Though in 23.17 he envisions a place for himself
when David is king, in all their conversations Jonathan seems more intent
on securing the safety of his own kin (20.14-15, 42). The father has a
sense, expressed several times (20.30-34; 22.7-8, 13) that the collusion
between the two 'sons' is known to others who refuse to tell him of it and
that it is a threat to his good (22.7-8,13). A reader would scarcely be in a
position to disagree. The complexity of both the Abigail and of Jonathan
must be weighed here. Our sympathies aside, whatever they may beand
the story leaves nothing sympathetic about the Nabalwe must ask
whether this is a good move on the part of the intimate. That it will save
the household, we will shortly be assured; but it takes the life of the old
man, as we will see soon as well.39 It is a self-interested move, which is to
say that the Abigail/Jonathan seems to gain by it. Its ethics could be
defended if we were dealing with an actual situation rather than a reverie,
as is the case in ch. 25, where the Abigail will seem to gain her objectives
competently (cf. Jonathan at 31.2).
As the donkeys of payment and the one who arranged them are crossing
from their old owner to their new one, the narrator returns us to the scene
of the David's learning of the Nabal's response to his claims. The David is
reiterating as he pounds toward Maon, 'Surely it was in vain that I protected all that this fellow had so that nothing was missed...but he has
returned me evil for good... (25.21)' The David intensifies his words with
an oath of destruction to include the whole line of males of his enemy's
household. Not only has the David repudiated his former loyalty to the
Nabal but in fact reversed it. Far from guarding all that the man had so that
nothing goes missing or sustains harm, the David, accompanied by his 400
armed men, now vows extirpation of the whole lineage. We are back to
chs. 2, 11, 14, 15 and 22, but with roles somewhat reversed: not Saul but
the David now threatens whole groups. And we are prompted to reconsider
the several times David has sworn both to Jonathan and to Saul that he
will not avenge himself against their line (e.g. 20.14-15,42), to the several
39. Jobling's broadly developed point about abdication is apt here, though again
not perhaps quite as he develops it (1998: 91-100). He also comments shrewdly in
terms of the fate of 'the Abigail', supposing (on the basis of textual and social matters)
that her move does not in the long run bring her any substantial benefit, other
commentators to the contrary (p. 184).
402
occasions where evil and good are keywords in discourse. This is David
out of control, David not stopping with a swatch of royal cloth or the temporary removal of what his opponent needs to survive in the southern
desert. Though the commentators tend to stress the bloodguilt issue here,
and no doubt correctly, there is a matter of honor here as well. Perhaps the
best we can say is that the David may not be unjustified in his retaliation
but extreme in the nature of it: to wipe out a whole line is disproportionate
to what has happened; I am not sure. The point, I think, is the David's
utter lack of restraint against the man he once served but now sees as his
opponent.
When finally the David and the Abigail encounter each other (25.2335), we have more occasion to sort the subtexts of their discourse. The
Abigail takes the initiative, dismounting, prostrating herself before the
David (with all the overtones of that action: desperation, acknowledgment
of his status, strong emotion, and so forth) and speaking. Her words,
clearly framed as to a superior, begging a moment for speech as over
against the urgency of the mission of revenge, urge the David to transfer to
her (from the Nabal) the guilt of the refusal. 'Pray let not my lord pay
(any) mind to this worthless man, to Naval, for as his name is, so is he:
Naval/vile-One is his name, and vileness is with him...' (25.25; translation
by Fox 1999:125). She addswhether to account for her 'guilt' or to subvert it'I, your servant, did not see the young men of my lord whom you
sent' (25.25). Which lord? Who is her lord? As is well noted, she moves
both to exonerate and also to further ensnare her husband in the deed. To
suggest, as she does, that he is incapable of a better response by his nature,
reinforcing what he has done and labeling it foolish, with all the overtones
of that word in this narrative, does not move much onus from him, though
it may add some texture to her. She then moves ahead to construct her
argument less in terms of the original context/pretext than as if for a larger
stage. She most clearly resembles the men of David in both 24.5 (4) and
26.8, urging onto a human action a divine agency. Her words need to be
strong, since they must contend with the David's oath. The content of her
urging is the opposite'spare a man rather than do your will against
him'though the theologizing is the same. As was the case with the
Nabal/Saul and the David/David, the Abigail inverts 'her' position in the
larger narrative. Far from promoting, the Abigail pre-empts the action
David was about to do, has vowed to do, naming instead a deed of restraint
and crediting it to YHWH. But she buttresses her argument, saying, 'Let
your enemies and those who seek evil to my lord be like Nabal', and
403
alluding to the gifts she has brought (25.26). Before scrutinizing the rest of
her speech, let us ask what it means to be 'like Nabal'. The Nabal has been
stripped of what he clung to, whether he likes it or not, knows it or not.
The Nabal is not dislodged from his home, even has a little time remaining
in his position, will enjoy a last meal on the night before his sentence falls
on him. But fall it will. The Nabal will not see his line wiped out, but he
will know that those on whose loyalty he presumed to count have gone
over to his disdained (if perhaps justified) opponent. His own clueless
belligerence must bear the brunt of the blame, the efforts of the Abigail to
transfer it to herself hardly making a dent in it; perhaps we may feel the
same about the narrator's attempt. The 'like Nabal', signifying perhaps
more to readers than to the David, actually renders the David's intervention needless.
Her next words are key as well. In 25.28-31 she goes on to speak about
what is going to come about for the David, thanks to God's agency:'.. .the
LORD will certainly make my lord a sure house, because my lord is
fighting the battles of the LORD; and evil shall not be found in you so long
as you live...' That is surely a blessing that ill-suits the story we know lies
ahead. The Abigail here sounds like Hannah of 1 Sam. 2, proclaiming
reversals in a triumphant mode, but speaking of things that will in some
ways not come to pass at all. As Polzin asks (1989: 214), given the end of
the DH story, what is a sure house? Not every assertion about God is
reliable in this rhetorically intense portion of story. The Abigail's next
image is telling, however. She draws God's role as opponents rise against
the David:'.. .the life of my lord will be bound in the bundle of the living
under the care of the LORD your God; but the lives of your enemies [the
LORD] will sling out as from the hollow of a sling...' (25.29).40 She then
returns to the more obvious of her points to commend the David here for
avoiding grief or pangs of conscience for shedding blood wronglya deed
that YHWH will look favorably upon. Her words repeat much of what we
have heard David say in chs. 24 and 26but in those scenes David's
words were undercut by his violent gestures. The Abigail's words of
restraint are similarly nuanced here, since their subtext suggests that the
deed on which the David is hellbent is already taken care of by a divine
40. As noted, the image evokes the young David, contesting both the giant Philistine
and undermining in a fundamental but not yet (at the moment) seen way the tall Benjaminite. As David talks in that scene, glibly, naively, or piously, of God's agency, so
does Abigail here. The slung stone that fells the foreign giant will bring other opponents
of David down as well.
404
hand. She concludes with a request to be remembered when YHWH will

have dealt well with David, wording not quite the same as Jonathan's in
chs. 20 and 23, but close.
The David's response to her assertions and petitions comes in 25.32-35,
and is, as some have noted, slightly odd in its context, inviting us to read
its artificiality.41 The David blesses her and YHWH for the deed they have
collaborated to do, which he accepts as she has named it: restraining him
from bloodshed (rather than urging him onto it). He reiterates what his
intent had been, and already put into motion and enhanced with an oath:
extirpation of the whole line of the Nabal. It is the deed he needs someone
to do for him, getting him the goods he wished without having raised his
own hand in violence. The David accepts the payment she has brought
gaining from her without violence the heritage of the Nabaland he
blesses her, indicating that she go in peace with her petition granted. It is a
rather general 'yes' to quite a stundle of requests she has made. And
though we are not told so, David deflects his journey. Though ready to
take the last steps along the path to violence, he can stop now, as he has
gained his objective symbolically, or in an installment. He has been
assured of more to come.
Two more pieces need to fall into place for us to be able to see the
whole 'dream' transaction. First (25.36-38), the Abigail returns to the
Nabal and finds him in splendid isolation, feasting mightily, his heart
merry with wine. He seems at the pinnacle of success in his shepherding.
She forbears to speak to him about alternate realities. Only in the morning,
when the wine has ebbed from him, does she tell him 'any thing, great or
small' (25.36).42 The impact of the news she impartswhatever 'any
thing' may beis that his heart dies, becomes like a stoneslung from a
sling, we may suppose. Some ten days later, the narrator tells, us, 'the
YHWH' strikes (pg') the Nabal and he dies. Of what does the Nabal die,
by degrees, deferrals, and providential delays?43 Is the YHWH reliably the
41. Jobling 1998: 155, is one who notes that David's response in some ways ill
suits the immediate context. That is, he seems to be responding to something else,
comes to deal with Abigail as though she were a 'simple' petitioner. Miscall 1986:153
characterizes, David's speech as pompous and solipsistic. Fokkelman 1986: 511-12,
finds David concerned with the woman.
42. See Leithart 2001 for further suggestions about the negative construction of
Nabal's character, the aptness of the language that constructs the zone of his character,
and the sly implication that the David bears at the level of wordplay some responsibility for his opponent's death.
43. Boyle 2001:403-405, reviews the likely literal cause of the literary death. More
405
agent of the Nabal's death? How does the powerful man meet his end?
How can it come about, be discussed, be understood?
And, in 25.39-44, come more aftermaths, again we may wonder, told
out of sequence? The David rejoices to learn of the death of the Nabal,
blesses YHWH for judging between them well, blaming the Nabal for the
sins which redounded to his own head. He then woos the Abigail and she
accedes to him, messengers again being part of the scenario. The Abigail,
once wife of the Nabal, becomes David's wife. The narrator chooses this
moment to add: 'so does Ahinoam of Jezreel become a wife to David'
(25.43). Saulwe learn at this narrative momenttakes Michal from
David and gives her to another. As is well-known by now, Levenson suggests we see Ahinoam as Saul's own wife, and so this story of powerful
men arguing over rights and obligations ends with the exchange of womenproperty as well.44 Has the narrator forgotten of whom we are speaking, as
he shifts from Nabal to Saul without a misstep?
6. Conclusions
Let me distill these observations into three compound conclusions. First,
the context of the ambiguous note of the release of the last legitimate king,
Jehoiachin, from some degree of incarceration, complicated by the presence of his putative heirs, Sheshbazzar and Zerubabbel, drives this piece
of the Saul narrative, makes relevant some of its detail. The whole Saul
story has been building in such a way as to suggest that Saul's monarchy
(and symbolically monarchy itself, which Saul epitomizes) is about to fall.
useful is her intertextual foray (pp. 412-27) around the character zone of Nabal and its
resonances in biblical literature, wisdom, and law in particular. Nabal's heart failure is
moral and culpable, its most prominent analogue being the heart of Pharaoh in Exod.
811. Boyle concludes, 'Nabal of the stony heart dies for grave lawlessness' (p. 427).
44. On the Ahinoam point offered by Jon Levenson and Baruch Halpern: in the
1980 article they track the names and geography via the genealogies in Chronicles and
build a case for the importance and presence elsewhere of doing power politics by marriage alliances, including with near kin if necessary. It is not the sort of argumentation
that interests me, but it is provocative and shows Levenson's 1978 point to be more
solid than some thought. The argument is countered by others: Klein 1983: 252, on the
basis of geography; McCarter 1980:400; Fokkelman 1986: 511-13, though he concedes
the narrator has left a loose thread. Those who agree that Ahinoam suggests Saul's wife
include Fox 1999: 128, who sees a power play, and Jobling 1998: 160, who sees a
strong polygynous element in David's rise to power. The topic is reviewed by J. Kessler
2000: 409-15, who tends to follow Jobling's line of thought.
406
Hove Are the Mighty Fallen?
In retrospect it is clear that kings are not to be post-exilic leaders. The

question being worked out, at the story level in Saul's life, at the sideshadowing reverie level in the Nabal demise, and in the later sixth-century context, is how kingship will terminate, specifically here how it will not end
(since the resolution of the problem occurs only in 1 Sam. 31). My way of
setting this problem has been to talk in terms of loopholes, which, as noted
earlier, give a character a way out from the efforts of others to finalize him
or her. At the level of plot we can see there have been multiple efforts by
Saul and David both to entrap and to escape each other. Saul wantscan
be seen to createa loophole from having been fired by God, from what
the king sees as David's moves on his position, and from David's accusations against Saul's hostility and unjustifiable pursuit of him. Saul resists
David's reach for the throne by driving him out, by then following him,
and eventually by being tracked by his rival. David, king anointed, wants
contrivesa loophole from the charge that he is moving illegitimately
against Saul's throne. He both presses his claim with veiled violence and
resists allegations of being a threat to Saul by struggling to demonstrate
his good will and lack of malevolence toward the king. By the end of this
unit Saul has shifted so that he has reduced his objective to the survival of
his heirs. David has shrunk his options from violence against Saul to waiting for a resolution from some other source, whatever it may be. But before
considering that other source, let us review what has been avoided or
discarded about the manner of the monarchy's demise.
So, the second conclusion: the possibilities rehearsed throughout are the
four options placed into contention by David (as he ruminates in 26.9-11)
and one 'elephant left standing in the living room' by default, not discussed
but prominent. I will call them options 'a-e'. Of those options, a and b are
easily dismissed. Saul will not die of natural causes. It seems a ludicrous
possibility in the story as it has developed, but if we think of the sixthcentury scenario and the old king, it is not so far-fetched and so must be at
least named. Nor is the king dispatched by an external foe. We know that
the Philistines will press to kill Saul but, in the end, they are not the ones
who succeed. Babylonians (who do kill some of the David line) will not
slay Jehoiachin.
The next two possibilities are more difficult, more weighted. Option 'c':
David will not kill Saul, but he comes perilously close to doing so, much
closer than I think has been commonly acknowledged. We have seen three
intense moments amid the general situations of David's pursuit of Saul. In
each case, if we were watching a film version of these events with the
7. Slung from the Hollow of a Sling407
sound turned off, we would see David disable Saul's garment (ch. 24),
remove the king's water and weapon (ch. 26), and after tangling with the
Saul surrogate, gallop determinedly toward him with armed men to slay
him and his whole household (ch. 25). We would see some restraint in the
garment scene, since clothes do not make the man, and the water and
weapon are returned. But in the middle scene, the David figure is far more
out of control and must be brought to heel by the intervention of another
figure rather than getting ahold of himself as before. In this imaginative,
dreamlike, sidewinding rumination of what does not happen though might
have, the David is ready to liquidate his rival, has every intention of doing
so, has conceivably engineered a scenario where he is justified, and in any
case is racing toward his opponent breathing threats of slaughter. Any
reining-in visible in chs. 24 and 26, minimal though it may have been, is
absent. If we turned the sound back onor better, read transcripts of the
scene after watching itI think we might be more likely to weight the
nearness of the violence rather than the inevitability of the restraint. David
double-voices and even misspeaks when discussing what he avoided to do,
stressing that the glass of violence against the anointed of YHWH is nearly
empty rather than almost full. The mad gallop toward the royal surogate
the sideshadowis what sheds a more realistic light on the realities of
David's character zone. David loses it in ch. 25 but is kept from the worst
by help from another quarter.
The remaining option articulated for the downfall of Saul and monarchy
(keeping in mind, please, that there is another elephant still in the living
room) is by divine action, option 'd'. This time if we turn off the video and
listen to a radio play of chs. 24-26, God sounds prominent. But of course,
God is wholly silent and only talked about by others. Of the some 25 assertions made about God in the 91 verses of chs. 24-26, most are rendered
dubious in some way. My point is not that the characters or the narrator
mean to lie; simply what they say of God is less reliable than it seems
purported to be. David has speculated that God may strike Saul down, a
point the narrator confirms in the case of the Saul surrogate, Nabal. Most
of the suggestions made about God come down to God's role in either
sanctioning or restraining David from violence against Saul. David, his
men, and Abigail all rely on such hermeneutics, consistently. David contemplates the possibility that it is YHWH who has stirred Saul up against
him and even mentions an antidote if that is the casea point not developed by the story as we have it (remaining as perhaps a baby elephant in
the guest room). The characters' theology in chs. 24 and 26 is roughly
408
parallel: when David has a jump on Saul, David's men allege that such a
circumstance is God's doing and that God has indicated David should take
advantage (24.5 [4]; 26.8). David verbally denies that assertion and disavows by God's help that he would move against the king (24.6 [5]; 26.9).
But when David confronts Saul, he brings forward his men's theological
allegationthat God gave his lord into his vassal's handwhile insisting
that he nevertheless has not taken full advantage of it, simply a token or
partial claimgranted others had urged him or set him up to do worse in
some way (24.11 [10]; 26.16, 23). David then invokes YHWH as judge
between himself and Saul, presumably confident that the justice will be
decided in his favor (24.13,16 [12,15]; 26.23-24). Saul appears easily to
accede to the construction David has offered him about all of these doings:
what God has done, what others have assisted in their way, what David
has not done. Saul owns that David is justified in his claims (24.21 [20];
26.25though Saul does not invoke God explicitly it seems implicit to
me).
In ch. 25 those same elements are on the table but worked in quite a different way. This time 'David' does not need or have his men to articulate
his secret desire or to tempt him with their own longings. He, rehearsing
his justification, is racing after his opponent to destroy not only him but
his entire household. The God language in this part of the story is David's
oath to eliminate the line of 'Nabal', a project in which he thereby makes
God a partner (25.22). Reverence for position and status has been wholly
abandoned. The counter theology comes from the Abigail/Jonathan character, who makes an assertion similar to that of David's men in form but
with opposite content. She says, in effect, God has prevented you from
going after your enemy, has placed me (not him) in your path this day to
prevent your doing what seemed justifiable to you in regard to him (25.22).
In this sideshadow the David does not quite manage to say that himself
when tempted, so 'Abigail' articulates it to him when she meets him en
route to accomplish his oath of extirpation. And she makes a number of
statements about God's capacity to judge between 'David' and his opponent, likening all of'David's' opponents, first, to the one he faces in their
present circumstances (who is about to be informed of things of which he
had no knowledge, struck by YHWH, and then die some time later). And
second, she characterizes such foes as cast out of a sling rather than being
bound up in the bundle of the living with YHWH (25.26, 28-29). She
speaks rather extensively about the collaboration between YHWH'S projects and 'David's' wars, between YHWH'S plans and 'David's' future,
409
placing all of these goods as contingent upon David's lack of guilt in the
matter of his enemy (25.28-31). That is, she uses these promises of divine
reward as incentive for 'David' to desist his retaliatory ride. Like Jonathan, whose character she resembles and whose role she (partially) inhabits, she envisions and asks for herself a place when 'David' should
come into his kingdom, its specific nature left up to her lord. She speaks a
path for 'David', provides him a loophole through which he may slip, since
his goal has been accomplished from another quarter.
When he speaks in response, 'David' accepts her construction about
God's purposes, giving also some space to the Abigail's own participation
in them. That is, 'David' accepts and hides behind her theology, agreeing
that God sent her to urge restraint and lack of bloodshedand that without
her words (and gifts, perhaps) the matter would have gone in a wholly
different way. It is his 'could have been worse/you're lucky I did not do all
I might have done' speech, though it is delivered not to his opponent, as
before, but to his helper. The move is not dissimilar from David's when he
speaks to Sauljust a bit more straightforwardly expressed, since there is
no need to persuade her of anything. 'David's' last words on the matter
(25.39) come when he hears of the death of his opponent. 'David' accepts
that news as confirmation of what Abigail had said (presumably those of
25.26-29) and reiterates his close call from having evil rebound on his own
head as he says happened in the case of the Nabal, blessing God (and
rewarding the Abigail and himself 25.39-42). The circularity of the reasoning seems clear, not bad, necessarily, since circles may be all we have
in the silence of God. When the narrator makes his comment here, it is of a
similar sort: what is visible is that Abigail chooses her moment for telling
Nabal 'these things', and he has a major heart episode'like a stone', the
narrator says, reintonating Abigail's language of 25.29. 'God struck him'
is the narrator's own theological explanatory epitaph for the death of the
man. But we have been shown matters a little more widely than that, and
by our same storyteller. 'Struck by God' omits to claim Nabal responsible
for the whole string of events which culminate in the shock he receives
when he hears what has happenedevents we have been carefully told.
The narrator is not serious about the epitaph and in fact removes it from
contention. God will not intervene to topple the monarchy.
A third set of conclusions to begin to braid. The wild card in the deck,
of the joker in the game, is God: what God wants, what God will do. It is, I
think, established in 1 Samuel that God agreed to try out kingship and selected Saul to be the first king. That God fired first his heirs and then Saul
410
himself from being king also seems, cleargranted the imperfect agent
was the prophet Samuel, whose specific communiques may be faulted in
various ways. Concomitantly, God has selected another man from another
lineage to be king, and the prophet has duly anointed him. God has never
spoken directly to Saul and the means for indirect communication are not
only dwindling but changing sides. God does communicate with David,
and David has both a prophet (granted, with only one piece of advice so
far) and a priest with an ephod. What God thinks on the manner of shifting
kings God has not said and will not ever in this book say. Nor is there prophetic or priestly utterance on the enigma, even from Samuel. So characters move into that silence and speak for God, constructing confidently
what God has done, urging what God should and will do, making God's
willingness to assist part of their prayers and pleas, oaths and exclamations. They draw eagerly for the joker as the game proceeds. It is not a bad
thing to do, but it is an uncertain procedure, as our chapters (and previous
ones) have demonstrated. Talk about God is what happens in these chapters, talk about how God is dealing with the two anointeds. Human language about God does not force God's hand, does not finalize God. Human
language about God's will is always loophole language for God (for speakers too!), and these three chapters make it manifest. God says 'kill him',
God says 'hold off. The narrator affirms that God struck the Nabal and he
died. But the absoluteness of the sentence is undercut by the characterization of the isolated and harm-drawing man himself. The narrator has spent
far more time drawing the Nabal as self-destructive, as obsessive in his
own choices, as cut off from the assistance and eventually good will of
those around him. When galloped against, when undermined from within
for the reasons it happens, after his last happy royal meal, the Nabal expires of it all. That 'God did it' is a red herring, making clear, if we cue
to it, the final piece of information we need about the death of the monarch (y). Saul goes to his last battle still wearing the crown. At his penultimate moment, he begs another to be the agent of the royal death. How will
the king die? Option 'e': of his own deed, by his own answerability.
Chapter 8
How THE MIGHTY FELL: THE DEATH OF KING SAUL
AND THE ARCHITECTONICS OF HIS
CHARACTERIZATION (1 SAMUEL 27-2 SAMUEL 1)
To read chapter 31 is to reread previous texts, indeed all of 1 Samuel and
beyond, with new information and from new perspectives.
Peter Miscall (1986: 184)
There now, Saul crawled
into the nice lady's lap,
and he let her stroke his head
with her long, milky fingers
while he unloaded
his heavy heart like a suitcase
filled with rotting candy.
Carrie Rehak (unpublished)
At some point, one asks, 'Toward what end is my life lived?' A great freedom comes from being able to answer that question... Sleepers.. .need at
some point to rise and take their turn in morning watch, for the sake of the
planet, but also for their own sake, for the enrichment of their lives.
Diane Ackerman (1995: xi)
1. Point of Entry
As we come to the final scenes in the life of Saul, the urgent question of
the manner of the king's death presses all the more insistently. The three
scenes of our last chapter traced certain possibilities, primarily in negative
space. The danger that David is to be involved somehow in Saul's death
has been underlined and will continue to hover in the narrative. David's
rumination on Saul's death, a rare insight into his inner process, suggested
that Saul might die by natural causes, be slain by God, or be felled in
battle by his foes (26.10). That triadand its buttress that David is not to
be the agent of Saul's fallcontinues to contribute to the present agenda.
How shall the king die, and why thus? How will monarchy terminate, and
412
why will that particular means of resolution be satisfactory? The larger

contextual circumstances of war attending Saul's final fall (chs. 27; 2930), weaving around the two scenes which comprise the death itself
(1 Sam. 28; 31.1-6), give way at once to character claims and constructions of the royal demise (31.7 into 2 Sam. 1). Saul falls in a particular
moment of battle which is part of a larger setting. And once Saul is dead,
the question of the meaning and significance of his death continue to be
the focus of the narrative, granted, in a new way. Though there is need and
occasion for me as well to sketch the larger significance of the death of
Saul for the whole DH, my main purpose here is to look backward over
the double characterization of Saulas riddle and as human beingfrom
the angle of his death. The book of 1 Samuel itself now strains forward to
the story of David, but in these six chapters he still functions in an ancillary role for the last time. The question is: How does the death of Saul
allow a fresh look at his life and reign? How is his death able to shed fresh
light on the aspect of his character as a riddle for the presumed readers, to
make clearer certain things about his kingship and about kingshipdynastic leadershipin general? And what remains, needs to be said about
this particular reading of 1 Samuel?
2. Bakhtin on Architectonics
This final concept which will help us review the represented life of Saul
from the angle of his death derives most obviously from the early years of
Bakhtin's writings. Though he seems to stop talking about architectonics
directly in his later decades, there is no evidence that he ceased to consider
it important. It is a global concept like the first few we examined, and, like
them, not so easy to understand or to appropriate. Bakhtin defines the
word: 'Architectonicsas the intuitionally necessary, nonfortuitous disposition and integration of concrete, unique parts and moments into a consummated wholecan only exist around a given human being as a hero'
(1990b: 209). Clark and Holquist clarify that it is '.. .the activity of forming
connections between disparate materials' (1984: 84). Morson and Emerson
translate, quoting and characterizing as paradoxical what Bakhtin says
about the term:'... a focused and indispensable, non-arbitrary distribution
and linkage of concrete, singular parts and aspects into a finished whole
[something that is] possible only around a given human being as a whole'.1
Architectonics is a matter of constructing relationships.
1.
Morson and Emerson 1989:21-22 and 1990: 70, in both cases instancing Bakh-
8. How the Mighty Fell
413
The clarification of the concept proceeds, both in Bakhtin's own writings

and in the commentary of other scholars. Bakhtin talks of'the architectonic
[points] of the actual world of the performed act or deed', of 'an answerable, emotional-volitional, concrete center of the concrete manifoldness of
the world.. .my centrality for myself (1993: 54, 57). Clark and Holquist
add that architectonics specifies the point around which one groups the
play of factors, the unity of relationalities constantly worked at and ultimately produced by the subjectwho is a perceiving human being. Architectonics gives rise to that subject's answerability, which will be distinct
for each participating subject (Clark and Holquist 1984: 8, 55-66). Vitalii
Makhlin approves the language of 'architectonics of answerability' and
'social ontology of participation' and speaks himself of going beyond theory to responsibility, active understanding, participation beyond the edges
of oneself, a philosophy of participative freedom, unity-in-plurality. He
maintains that'.. .the first programmatic step in Bakhtin's thought is understood as postulating neither an ideally 'organic' nor a materially 'functional' unity of elements in a system, but something altogether different'
(Makhlin 1997: 46-48).
The architectonic center actually experienced by a human being is not
an abstraction. It comprises lived experience, rises from a place from
which a self participates in Being. 'The world is arranged around a concrete value-center, which is seen and loved and thought...' says Bakhtin
(1993:61). The center is the place and process from which we do relations
among the self and others, the site for the contrapositioning of the self
with others.2 Efforts to clarify what is involved in such intermeshed 'being' falter somewhat. Liapunov reminds us that architectonics has the character of an event, structures the world as an event, is both something given
and something to be accomplished.3 Makhlin characterizes:'.. .the problem
of the relation (or interrelation) of elements, in a systematic 'whole', a
whole in which these elements are neither 'systematic' nor 'non-systematic', but are rather participatively free, 'participatively outside' the whole
to which they belong' (1997:49). Valerii Tiupa talks in terms of dialogical
tin 1993: 139. The standard English translation has no p. 139. 1 think Morson and
Emerson are quoting the same place Clark and Holquist are, and I include both to hint
at the problem of understanding what the Bakhtin is trying to say!
2. Clark and Holquist (1984: 63-94) in their third chapter make architectonics of
answerability Bakhtin's life quest.
3. Liapunov provides explanatory notes to Bakhtin 1993: nn. 150 and 152 on
p. 98 and 172 on p. 100.
414
answerability before the other (1998: 96). Kelly speaks of moral creativity
as an agenda, not simply a theory. We shape a moral deed architectonically, in the midst of changing relationships between ourselves and others,
ourselves and the environment (1999:206-207). Koczanowicz says, 'The
highest architectonic principle of the actual world of the performed act or
deed is the concrete and architectonically valid or operative composition
of/and the other', with all value centers maintained (2000: 66, emphasis
original). Holquist, who draws out well the materiality, corporeality, and
bodiliness of this center, uses scientific concepts to clarify his thought. He
speaks of the systemic linkages which is called 'complexity' in science,
'elements locked into such ramifying connectedness', interacting across a
hierarchy of levels, and of course, inevitably unfinished, since the factors
change constantly in themselves and as affected by each other (1997:21522). Holquist, introducing into English Bakhtin's earliest writing, speaks
of architectonics as linked to how something is put together, a process
alert to activity, dynamic tension, process, invisible relatedness, the simultaneity of relations among otherwise disparate factors.4 Part of the challenge of description here comes from the participation of the non-unified
self.
Most of these theorists, as they struggle to articulate the richness of
Bakhtin's rather minimally developed insight, use either contrastive language or imagery. So, architectonics is to be understood in contradistinction from system, from formalist structures, from anything sealed off into
a lack of relationality, from the finalized. Bakhtin himself uses (more than
once) Pushkin's poem 'Parting' to illustrate what he means, and refers as
well to the architectonics of Dante's world (1993: 65-72 for the Pushkin
poem, p. 54 for the Dante reference). Clark and Holquist remind us that
the term comes from philosophythe science of systematizing knowledge, and also from the science of building, where it has to do with actual
measurements and fit between real stones and timber, the huge number of
things to be calculated and adjusted as a complex edifice takes shape
(1984: 8). The visualization of an example will be helpful at this point.
I have friends who are planning to rebuild their home on a piece of
property in the southern Marin County (California) town of Ross. Ross
cherishes its small-town character. The lots are large and the homes wellspaced from one another. Lofty trees and mature vegetation screen homes
from each other and provide spacious gardens for residents. Roads winding
4. Holquist makes the comment in his introductory notes to Bakhtin 1990:
xxiii-xxiv.
415
through neighborhoods are narrow and tree-edged. My friends, the DeRuffs, have chosen Country Italian architecture for their home, a style
appearing frequently in Ross. They have selected an architect who will
strive for authenticity in the shaping of a basic rectangular farmhouse to
which a wing will be added, faced with rough-hewn stones as characterizes
many Italian homes. The materials will be new but look old, the frame will
be seismically safe, and all the details of the dwelling built to current
codes, as is ethically and legally necessary. The hoped-for effect will be a
classic structure, but hiding a maze of substructure for plumbing, electrical
wiring, heating and air conditioning systems in a setting where they would
not have originally existed. There must be an authentic relationship between the interior of the structure and the exterior; soil types, slope, tree
roots, and even animal habitats must be taken into account as the new
home takes shape. But the planning of the actual house is only a small
piece of the whole. The DeRuffs have negotiated extensively in terms of
the complex and changeable needs of their family, two boys and a girl in
addition to the parents. So there is to be room for company, play area for
children, private workspace for adults. In Ross there are many constituencies to be consulted, and co-ordination and consent are far from easy.
There are neighbors, town regulations, a Town Council, a Town Planner, a
local Historical Society. Involved necessarily are landscaping and primary
architects, soils and structural engineers, contractors and subcontractors,
each to have a say without rendering the whole project to look as though
managed by a committee. The architectonics must calculate and maintain a
point or stance from which all of this complex, shifting and intermeshed
detail is coherent. And as the political struggles within the small town intensify, with longtime residents able to secure their aims in various ways,
the DeRuffs are determined to conduct their case in accordance with their
ethical values, to remain gracious to their opponents, feeling strongly that
a house built with resentment and anger will not in any way suit the life
they wish to live there.5 The architectonics of this house is complex, interactive among diverse levels, fluid, socially and ethically responsive. There
is a center, but its complex character makes it difficult to name with precise constancy.
The need here is not to talk abstractly but to take seriously Bakhtin's
sense that a perceiving subject centers and shapes architectonics. My aim
is to use the conceptremembering that it rises from the myriad of
5. I am indebted to Betsy and David DeRuff for this example and appreciate
Dave's shaping the details of it into prose.
416
relations which an architect must imagine and co-ordinate as a building is

taking shapeto talk about the character Saul's final moments, the center
from which he becomes answerable, if that is what happens, in the last
moments of his life. Kelly talks about the importance of Bakhtin's apparent refusal to use moral norms or even God as a prop, a guarantee, a certainty in terms to count on. She does not say that he refuses morality of
God, simply that he does not reify God in terms of anything absolute
(1999:213-15).
Before making Bakhtin's architectonics practical for this denouement of
monarchy, it is timely to consider once again the contributions of Polzin to
my reading of Saul. Polzin's points have been drawn from the final chapter
of his book on 1 Samuel (1989which has focused on the prophet Samuel) and the opening of his volume on 2 Samuel (1993centered on
David). Polzin's points, which will again need to be rerouted for focal consideration of Saul, can, for the present purposes, be counted as ten. First,
the unit chs. 27-31 continues to stress, especially as it opens, the contiguity
of Saul and David despite the need for David to remain safe from all that
touches Saul, from any accusation in regard to Saul. As we hear David
negotiate cleverly and double-voicedly with the Philistine king Achish
(27.5-28.2), the possibility of his duplicity elsewhere re-emerges (Polzin
1989:216-17). Second, Polzin, like Fokkelman, notes the unusual narrative
temporal flow here, a problem I will leave to the inventiveness of Fokkelman, who has demonstrated the synchronicity of the protagonists' 'calendars'.6 Third, Polzin stresses the continuous intermeshing of character
6. The oddness of the narrative order (discourse order, we may call itthe order in
which the events are narrated, as distinct from story orderthe sequence in which events
happen to the characters) needs scrutiny. Simply put, the question is what is the impact
of the discourse sequence in terms of the story level chronology? The posing of this
question makes a contribution, I think, to the architectonics issue with which Bakhtin is
helping. How are the events' timing ordered? Fokkelman's careful reading helps us
understand the events of 1 Sam. 27-2 Sam. 1 in terms of a single calendar (1986: 55594, concluding with the chart I have modified and present here). He points out that there
are three stories of David and the Philistines (chs. 27,29, 30) and three of Saul and the
same foe (chs. 28, 31 and 2 Sam. 1). He moves on to redistribute the same material as
follows into a synchronized chart which, simplified, shows the following: Eleven days,
so named, on which we may locate Saul, David, and runners between them.
417
zones of Saul and Samuel, which connect finallyand unexpectedly

again in this unit (1989:217-21). Though I have not been convinced by his
suggestion that Saul inappropriately mixes kingship and prophecy, I think
Polzin senses well that DH makes an important representation about the
king's reaction to being thwarted, step by step, in his capacity to interact
with God, a problem exacerbated after Samuel departs finally from Saul
over the Amalekite debacle. That Saul is finally reduced to necromancy is
a problem related to but larger than the issue of king and prophet. That, or
if, the encounter between king and the illicit realm is successful is highly
provocative in DH. Fourth, the ubiquitous robe which assists in the identification of Samuel is named by Polzin as a mark of royalty (1989: 218). I
would say, rather, the prophet's robe and even Saul's royal garments make
present dynastic entitlement represented by monarchy and by the prophet's
participation in that venture, and as Polzin notes, here the robe becomes a
shroud for that manner of relating the two men and the institutions they
represent.7
In a fifth and broader point, Polzin points out that many elements of the
last chapters bring us back to the 'parables' of chs. 1-3 and 4-6: false starts
and providential delays, night visions, foretellings of death of dynastic
heirs, Philistine foes, journeys out of the land into captivity, destructive
guest are all motifs reused in 1 Sam. 27-2 Sam. 1. Though it is my sense
that we have also had a genre shift in ch. 25, it also strikes me that the
1. Raiding party sets out (30.13); David is called north and begins his march with
Achish (28.12); 2. David's march continues; 3. David arrives in Aphek; 4. the plunder
of Ziklag occurs (30.1); David is rejected by Philistines and turns south (29.1-11); 5. the
Egyptian is abandoned after the Ziklag raid: day 1; David marches back to Ziklag: day
1; 6. day two for the abandoned Egyptian and for David's march; 7. day three for both;
David arrives at Ziklag, finds devastation goes out; finds the Egyptian (30.11); Saul sees
the Philistines amassing, goes to Endor, precipitates the events of Endor (28); 8. David
attacks the Amalekite raiders (30.17); the Gilboa defeat occurs (31); 9. David marches
back to Ziklag: day 1; Saul's corpse is defiled; the Amalekite marches from Gilboa
toward David: day 1; 10. David remains in place; Saul's corpse is rescued andburied;
day two of the Amalekite's journey; 11. day three: the Amalekite arrives to David.
Fokkelman assesses that the weight is in David's favor, since David's stories of
destroying his foes outweigh, overbalance, those of Saul's being destroyed by his
enemies. Why the narrator should tell them in the order we havefor example, to
separate Saul's last night from the last day that follows itis not so clear.
7. 1989: 217-21. Saul will be stripped by his foes when he lies dead; there is no
name given to his garments, but the imagery is clear enough.
418
whole of the book of 1 Samuel is richly and allusively representational,

thoroughly riddling, throughout. Polzin also points out, sixth, wider resonances between the book's closing scenes and the larger DH. The legislation regarding prophets in Deut. 18.10-11 makes a clear link to exile from
the land, and the final feeding of the last king at the table of his host evokes
2 Kgs 25(1989:219-21). Related is the seventh point: Polzin remarks the
strong resonances between the attack on David's city of Ziklag and
David's response to it and the collapse of Jerusalem and exile to Babylon.
When a group goes, where a group remains, whether being left behind
puts one outside the group or not are issues rehearsed rather deliberately
and obviously in the story of the raid on Ziklag. David's leadership resolves all these matters, grumbling and opposition notwithstanding (1989:
221 -23). Such is the role of leadership. And the death of Saul, which Polzin
sees as the abhorrent self-destruction of monarchy, recalls the sweeping
away of king and people spoken of by Samuel at 8.20 and 12.25 (point
eight). The words emerge as not simply a prophecy to be inevitably fulfilled but a genuine choice to be resisted or taken, a dynamism for players
to embrace or reject many times over (1989: 222-23).
When speaking of the story which opens 2 Samuel, Polzin's chief insight, well-ramified, is his showing various ways in which the representation of the Amalekite as a David double (point nine) makes far more
complex the familiar question of the guilt and innocence of Saul's key
opponent. The simpler queries usually voiced by commentators shift under
Polzin's point. What is truthful about the Amalekite's communication?
How, or from what particular vantage point does news delivered become
good or evil? How is it possible to discern David's cards from the moves
he makes in the game? Questions dominate the exchange between the doubles, as does the gesture of taking emblematic tokens from the king (Polzin
1993: 1-10). Finally (tenth), Polzin returns to aspects of double-voicing to
remind us to consider as fully as possible the various contexts in which the
lament of David over Saul and Jonathan can be heard and the various
voices that contend as the assertions which form it are sung (1993:10-25).
I have summarized Polzin's main insight here in another place (Green
2000: 172-84) and will be drawing out different points below.
My plan here is to comment quickly on the portion of the narrative which
removes David from Saul's dying (chs. 27, 29, 30), then to spend more
419
time on the eve of Saul's death when he visits the spirit wife8 at Endor (ch.
28), on his death and that of his sons on Gilboa (ch. 31), and finally on the
significance of the confusion that attends the royal death when it is reported
variously and then sung by David (1 Sam. 31 and 2 Sam. 1). Fokkelman
makes two particularly helpful global observations. He remarks that the
direct discourse, which shows characters talking about the same topics
repeatedly, unifies the story across its broad terrain. And he points out that
part of the apparent chronological disarray of the six chapters does not
quite obscure the fact that the various textual units narrate the same overlapping time cycles for David and for Saul, thus suggesting the links
between their sets of actions while at the same time distancing the two
players from each other (1986: 555-57, 569, 579). That is, the obvious
effort to remove David from the events of the Gilboa battle is undercut by
the intersection of spatial and temporal details which make the events in
the two kings' lives contiguous. Hence the hint of David's involvement in
the death of Saul lingers provocatively but undecidably around the narrated and constructed events.
The architectonic center for reconsideration of the figure of Saul is the
moment of his death. That moment is constructed by a triad of vectors,
each operating in tandem with the others. We must consider first the way
in which DH arranges the collapse of monarch and monarchy, a riddle
which has been on the table throughout 1 Samuel. Second, we can look at
the character himself, particularly his most human traits, as he approaches
his final moments of life. And finally the question of myself as reader
needs explicit consideration, more than it has received to date. Let me
factor this complex equation a bit more. These centers are distinct but overlapping, in the same way that the DeRuff s house has a center of consideration that is ecological (considering soil, slope, trees, animals, and so forth),
one that is electronic (some master map of computer circuitry), and one
that is political (the arcane web of human relations that make [impossible
the process of building at all). The three centers can be, even must often
be, dealt with separately; but if there is no center for all of them the project
will fail.
First is the DH, whom I have not distinguished substantially from the
narrator of this portion of the long story of monarchy. How does DH
8. Readers will appreciate the difficulty of translating the noun that denotes the
woman's role. 'Medium' is misleading and 'witch' seems irretrievably pejorative. The
neologism 'spirit wife', analogous with midwife, suggesting one who brings spirits into
the world, is suggested by Angert-Quilter and Wall 2001: 60.
420
continue to make Saul a cipher for kingship, an embodiment of the

Davidic monarchy and Israel's kingship experience in general? What does
the 'old king' need to face in fresh and final circumstances? My
suggestion has been that four options for the manner of the king's death
have been shown unlikely. Saul will not die naturally in the course of
things, norappearances to the contrarywill his foreign adversaries
dispatch him. God will not strike the king down, nor will David's hand be
the one to manage the task. In the final scenes, the narrator continues to
flirt with these possibilities, but primarily to render the participants
guiltless, ultimately. The way out for king and kingship must be something
else. Saul's fall has been positioned carefully for us in another sense. It
comes between the collapse of one dynastic father who dies on the same
day as his sons, leaving only a weak heir (1 Sam. 4) and the narrative of
the release of the last king from captivity, his uncles dead, his sons in a
position of weakness (2 Kgs 25). Similarly, the death scene and the words
composing it are anticipated and followed by resonating words. We have
heard the song of Hannah proclaiming the fall of the tall, may recall the
words of the unnamed man of God telling of the collapse of father and
sons on the same day (1 Sam. 2). We will, beyond the scope of this present
book on Saul, watch the ineffectual Ishbosheth sit briefly in his father's
chair, watch the lame Saulide Mephibosheth juggle his heritage in various
ways before disappearing from the story. In many ways, the DH story is
like Russian dolls or Chinese boxes, in reverse. From a small one emerges
a larger one. If the story of kingship started with Gideon and Abimelech
(Judg. 6-9), moved to the Elides, then to Saul, it still has the whole David
story to tell. But David's line, like Saul's, will diminish to the death of
Josiah and sonsall but a grandsonas the sands drop steadily through
the hourglass. How to bring the sure house to an end is the subtext here for
DH, and how to do it with moral legitimacy. As DH offers us yet another
mise-en-abyme, how is the end of monarchy miniaturized? The king will
fall, yes, but how does the king collapse? How are the mighty to fall? Like
Eli, overbalanced by weight/honor, in fear and dishonor? Like Jehoiachin,
accorded some faint honor in his last moments?
That question brings us to the character himself, not so much the institutional cipher and riddle but the human being Saul. How does the Saul we
have been attending manage his death? We have, from the start, seen him
characterized by ineffectual asking: sometimes wanting too much, often
demanding too little. He sometimes moves in terms of a wrong answer, or
with no response at all. As our final journey with him begins, his isolation,
421
growing throughout the book of 1 Samuel, will be intensified and summarized. Saul is all but alone, more desperately than before, perhaps. Saul has
heretofore, at least in my sketch of him, been read to resist assimilating
what he does not wish to take on. The time for that ploy is running out.
Saul has bent his energies toward hanging on to what has been withdrawn
from him. The identity of his primary opponent remains, I think, opaque to
him, or at very least, verbally unacknowledged by him. Saul will have two
key moments for his dying: one on the eve of it and another at the actual
moment of it. How will he meet death? Will he continue to refuse and
resist what is not pleasing to him? Will he ask ineffectually in some way,
perhaps miscue from the response he draws? Can Saul become relational
with anyone, have what might seem to be a healthy intersubjectivity? If
not, then what prevents it? Who helps him and who does not? Will Saul
alibi as has been his wont, or be a pretender (in Bakhtin's sense), hiding
behind roles, rules, and procedures, swathed in disguises and rubrics? Will
he blame others for what he is unable to shoulder himself? Will he hand
off his responsibility to another, as he has done before, most recently in
letting David pursue him? Or will he become answerable in some suitable
way? Such is the challenge the character faces.
Finally, what has driven my reading of Saul, and what can be made
clearer about my interests as I construct these final scenes? I will reserve
most of what I want to say for the Conclusion, bring together the question
of Saul and God for contemporary readers. But since Saul and God have
done so poorly to date, according to my lights, is there anything salvific in
the final moments of his life? And how can I make it plausible? My sense
is that the final moment of Saul's life makes deeply coherent the portrait
we have watched taking shape for some time.9
My thesis is that Saul takes responsibility for his own collapse, late to
be sure, but in sufficient time. No one can do Saul's death for him, wish it
though he will do, try to get a helper as he will struggle for in his last
speech. The monarchy ends at the choice of its last legitimate king. The
man Saul learns something that enables such a gesture, and myI hope
ourglimpsing him, recognizing him in that moment, is our one thing
needful. The Saulide leadership is almost but not quite terminated by its
dread and external enemy, is not struck down by God, who may appear to
have abandoned it. Nor is it eliminated by its successor. On the mountain
9. Carleen Mandolfo notes that Saul has been killing himself the whole while
(private communication). The monarchy is persistently 'self-destructive, lethal for the
community comprising God and Israel.
422
Saul does well: facing his enemies until he alone is left of his family,
tempted to get someone else to finish his life off for him, he does it himself. Though pressured by other agents, the monarchy delivers its own
coup de grace, a deed not obscured by the fact that a weak son survives,
though propped up by stronger players.
a. David's Removal from the Death of Saul: 1 Samuel 27.29-30
This last set of material starts counterintuitively, a point which we must
mine. Against what we have just heard as David confronts Saul and Saul
disavows ill intent against Davidconfirmed at 23.28; 24.23 (22); 26.25;
symbolically at 25.38-39, and shortly to be repeated at 27.4David
registers fear of his death at Saul's hand. What he says to himself ('I shall
now perish [be swept away/sweep myself away] one day by the hand of
Saul...') is also a complex utterance for us. The verb sph/sweep away is
one David used for Saul's fate when David reflected upon the manner of
the death of the king (26.10), and it brings back as well the prophecy of
Samuel at 12.25, as he talked about one likely scenario for the disaster
facing king and people.10 The deep topic, then, is not simply the death
of one king or another but the removal of the enterprise of monarchy,
that peculiar institution unitingand estrangingdeity, king and people.
David's effort to escape here, his refugeeing as far from Saul as he can
seem to do (to the Philistine Achish of Gath, where it seems clear Saul will
be most disinclined to follow) signals danger. Since the point at issue is
not so much realism as representation (so not how David can make such
a counter-intuitive remark, but what is the overwhelming risk to which
David's doubled language draws attention), we need to think about his
flight here (27.1) to Achish, where of course he has been before. That
David expresses a sense of being endangered by Saul's hand and acts upon
that claim is the main thing, whether we think it justified or not. Saul's
royal self remains dangerous, no matter the disclaimers of any.
10. Jobling 1998: 233-34, suggests that David may be deceiving himself here, and
perhaps more usefully, he reminds readers to be leery about thinking the chain of motivational relatedness obvious. Jobling also spins some alternate scenarios (pp. 234-38)
which make some of the factors of David's position more explicit. It is his point that
Achish may be less taken in by David that many suppose and may in fact be read as
content enough to go along with David, who is accomplishing the Philistine king's purposes. It is also germane that Saul's words and actions in the matter of pursuit of David
are not consistent or reliable.
423
The Philistines will feature heavily, if penultimately, in the matter of the

king's death, as in fact they have done since the days of his asking, most
prominently in chs. 13-14 where battle with them occasioned the dismissal
of Saul's dynasty. Jobling makes prominent the role accorded to this foe in
1 Samuel.11 The Philistines, emerging in the days of Samson and Eli (decisively from Judg. 16-21 and 1 Sam. 4-6), engaging Saul who has contended with them both successfully and unsuccessfully, will serve now to
bring Saul down and will themselves be brought down by David (1 Sam.
1.27 until 2 Sam. 5). The Philistines will be replaced, of course, by other
future menacing foes. It is not difficult to see that even here, at least at the
surface, David does better with the Philistines than Saul does, and that this
foe provides David with an alibi for the battle of Gilboa. The narrating of
these important relations is more subtle than this summary can develop,
but, since we are finishing Saul's story rather than beginning with David's,
a fuller elaboration will remain at least partly underdeveloped.12 What is
important is that the Philistines serve as the loophole for everyone here:
For Saul, they provide the stage for his death and a impetus for answerability; for David, they provide an apparent alibi; for God, they bring to a
climax and end what has become a standoff between an unbending deity
and a stubborn and stuck human being; and for the narrator, they serve to
cast at least a shadow of suspicion on David for the demise of the monarchic enterprise. Their other feature which seems increasingly obvious is
that they function less as their historical selves than they do as a cipher for
the implacable foe that brings down the monarchy: Babylon.
The other thing we can note, especially as David interacts with Achish
(called again here 'king' though his fellows are called by the more usual
Philistine name for leaders), is that the Philistine shares the lineaments of
Saulor better still, traits of both monarchs collapse to contribute to the
portrait of a royal leader. Achish is credulous where Saul has been suspicious, though recently less so; Achish is naive and non-alert in regard to
11. Jobling 1998: 212-13 (and Chapter 10 in general) asserts that Philistines are
singularly prominent in 1 Samuel (a factor paralleled only in Genesis). Gordon 1994:
257-59, raises several key points. He concedes the problem of making them the cause
of everything but still wants to stress their importance. He suspects they are made emigrants, indigenized Canaanites (sharing certain other features with ancients, e.g., the
giant link), those who contest the same land as do the Israelites (which is part of the
role they play in Genesis as well).
12. See Miscall 1986: 173, for some contrasts between Saul and David. He also
suggests (pp. 164-65) that David's serving Achish is a counterpoint to his serving Saul,
and that Achish, like Nabal, underestimates David to his own detriment.
424
David where Saul has toggled wildly between welcoming and repudiating
his guest. Achish sees no duplicity in his servant though the narrator makes
it clear it would have been better for him had he done so; the same case
might be made for Saul. The artistry brings David's two royal masters
closer together: David is able to use Achish's lack of shrewdness for his
own purposes, which are plausibly three. David carries on raids against
enemies of the southern peoples, he knows the Philistine plans in regard to
Jezreel, and he gets himself dismissed from participationwithout losing
any esteem with Achish.13 As the Philistines are mustering their whole
force to go to Jezreel (28.1; 29.1) the lords of the Philistines recognize a
familiar campaigner leading Hebrews at the end of Achish's troops. Identified by Achish as David, servant of Saul, he is called by certain other Philistines in terms reminiscent of the battle against Goliath (29.3-5 reintonates
18.7-8 and 21.11, as well as the whole Goliath battle more generally). The
Philistines insist that David, with his potential to be an adversary, not be
part of the Philistine entourage. Achish's maintaining that he has found no
fault with his servant since he fell to him does not dissuade them from
their view that David is not reliable.14 When Achish meets David to tell
him the decision of the others, David's now familiar question'but what
have I done?' (29.8)helps us re-evaluate every other occasion where he
has uttered it. Even Achish's oath by YHWH to David does not change
things, so David once again moves off toward Philistiadismissedin the
opposite direction from where Saul is gathered with his people (29.11),
presumably completing his objective of 27.1, to distance himself from
Saul. As Gunn notes, David's disguise works here (cf. what we will shortly
see of Saul [Gunn 1980: 109-11]).
The last pericope of our unit (ch. 30) moves rather obviously back into
'parabolic style' to tell of the destruction and burning of David's city (Ziklag) by the ancient foe (Amalek15), the taking captive all of the women and
childreneven David's wives (always called 'Ahinoam the Jezreelite' and
'Abigail wife of NabaP). David, though in danger from a faction of his
people bitter over the raid, strengthens himself in God and then calls for
13. Alter 1999: xvii, thinks the whole long story is about discrepancy in knowledge
between Saul and David: David consistently knows more than Saul does.
14. See Brueggemann 1989 for an interesting speculation on authorial or redactional
intent here, layered in any case. He also shows how this section of narrative fits in with
other parts of the story where David is linked with suspicious deaths of his opponents.
15. Called by Fokkelman (1986: 588) 'an ineradicable weed'. Miscall 1986: 175,
usefully suggests that the episode shows 'holy war' from the victims' perspective.
425
the priest and the ephod.16 Asking and receiving clear guidance, he moves
to respond to the raid, leaving part of his men at some remove from the
scene of confrontation itself. Finding another remaindered ancient foe
in the wilderness, this time a lone Egyptian who had been servant to the
Amalekites but was abandoned when his usefulness failed, David feeds
and revives him and learns from him more details of the raid and the
whereabouts of the Amalekites (having first promised to save the Egyptian's life). David's deft handling of the matter is borne out as he and his
men find both captors and captives, the latter unharmed. As a result of the
ensuing military encounter, not only are all of David's people and property
recovered but more is gained as well. And, the narrator announces, no
Amalekite got awayexcept 400 who loped off on camels (30.17).17 As
the scene nears its end, there is a problem raised about membership in the
group and right to the spoils. Is there one group or two? Does it matter
where or when one acted and what one did, or is group membership more
basic than task or spatio-temporal location? David, taking the side against
evil and worthless men, enunciates that there is only one credential needed;
to be among the baggage is the same as to fight. And thus distribution is
made widely instead of narrowly, thanks again to the wisdom of David.
The portrait of leadership is far from virtually anything we have seen of
Saul. David's capacity to choose a path even against opposition and stick
to it, grounded in God and advised by the priestly (Elide) access to God
not to say assisted by an emphatic narratorall conduce to his competence. That his words implicate his own role as one who benefits from afar
will not remain unnoticed by those who know the fate of David's royal
house in the chapters of DH falling outside this study.
b. Saul Prepares for Death: 1 Samuel 28
The context for this most important narrative in the story is the massing of
the Philistines (28.1, 4; 29.1) and the absence of David from that muster
(known to readers but not to Saul, so far as can be ascertained). So, in fact,
the one context has two performances: the main one as the kingship is destroyed (ch. 31), and the sideshow miming the exile of captives and the
effective leadership of a new man (ch. 30). But our main focus is on what
16. David's distress (srr} links him in some ways with Saul, who is undergoing the
same verb (Edelman 1991: 246, traces the language).
17. The narrator's spin on the escape of a mere 400 Amalekites from David, compared with the recital we were spun when Saul saves many fewer in ch. 15, makes a
clear illustration of the narrator's unevenness in dealing with characters.
426
Saul will do while David refrains from doing his tempted deed, taking the
life of God's anointed into his own hands (chs. 27,29). The other muster
of familiars includes the silence of God, the lack of access Saul has managed to retain to God: nothing direct, no prophet since Samuel (not replaced, so far as we can see, since the end of ch. 15), no spirit (since ch.
16) no dreams (after ch. 25), no priestly assistance (since the slaughter and
flight of Elides at ch. 22), no devices for Saul to work (since the ephod
was carried to David at ch. 23).18 These have fallen away from him, one
by one. In fact, he has driven them from him and arguably never used them
well when he had them. We learn now, as well, that Saul had also abolished from the land mediums and wizards. Though we can make the connection to Deut. 18.15-22 and perhaps approve this 'zeal for YHWH' on
Saul's part, the narrator is surprisingly noncommittal on the topic of this
double link to paralegal religion. That is, the narrator neither praises Saul
for having attempted to banish the mediums and wizards nor signals overt
disapproval when the king backs off from the reform, driven by his own
desperation. The topic of legitimate (Yahwistic) worship in DH, which
must be read in relation to terms of the retrieval of likely actual practice
contributed recently by biblical scholars, is huge, complex, and uncertain.
That the death of the king occurs in the midst of a relapse surely signifies,
even though idolatry per se has not been one of Saul's most visible difficulties. Saul's disobedience to God's word has, however, been characterized
by prophetic language using terms of worship violations (15.22-23). So it
seems best to remain with that cardinal refusal to hear/heed, rather than
with the particulars of practice, at this point.19
The question demanding our attention here is what Saul wishes to hear,
to learn, to know. That he sees the Philistines massing is clear, so it is not
information about his enemy's plans or placement that he needs. Saul's
lack seems no longer now to be about David's whereabouts, which in the
past have been of great interest to him. But he evidences no concern about
that now. That Saul is fearful in his heart about the sight of the Philistines
seems to reduce the question to a matter of what will happen to Israel and
himself when the battle occurs.20 That he can see in general what seems
18. Craig's useful article on questions (1994:226-27) points out similarities between
1 Sam. 28 and 14, the two instances where questions are answered by God with silence;
they share the context of Philistine war.
19. Exum 1992: 22-23, sees no evidence that Saul was not a faithful Yahwist.
20. Fokkelman 1986: 598-99, reminds us of YHWH'S heart, and of Saul's growing
inability to tolerate the Gottesfinsternis. Fokkleman thinks the refusal of it here is
427
likely to happen is not quite the same as knowing what he needs to do,
which is the question he will settle on once he sees Samuel. At the level of
realism it may seem odd that he does not seek out a living prophet to
consult, though in the representation of the death throes of the monarchy,
it makes sense. Saul's sense appears to be that he needs advice from the
deadfrom Samuelnot perhaps because he has done so well via that
particular channel before, but because the link between prophet and king is
important to DH. Whether Samuel is the only available prophetic link for
Saul is less clear than that he is the last prophetic word for Saul, whose ruling will shortly (again) be exposed as having been hollow for some time. I
think here the stress is not on the illegality of the means Saul must use to
gain access to Samuel, but on the fact that the king is so bereft that only
the dead can now advise him. As several have noted, Saul's ineffectual
leadership is demonstrated as he violates his own law and makes evident
that others have done so as well, his own men included.
Saul's disguise (28.8) is one of the most interesting features of this scene,
and comments upon it vary. It is clear enough that Saul does not wish to
be seen or recognized while he is consulting at Endor, so he goes at night
and goes disguised. From whom is Saul disguising himself, and what
means does he select? Commentators speculating on the targets of his hiding suggest, variously: the Philistines (Klein 1983:271); Saul's own fighting men (Jobling 1998:186); the woman herself (Reis 1997:6-7, who notes
the pun between 'garments' and 'deceive'). Richard Coggins's parsing of
the verb used is interesting: he notes that the verb used is the hithpael of
seek (hps), such that the concept suggested is that Saul makes himself an
enigma.21 What strikes me in his role is that, by removing his accustomed
garb, Saul adopts the guise of a 'not king', the very role to which God has
been persuading him presumably, though it has registered with Saul as
silence. It is surely the role Samuel had urged upon him at the end of the
Amalekite episode (ch. 15) and will do again shortly. For whom is that a
disguise? Notably, from himself, though it may also provide him an
another disobedience. Gunn 1980: 108, thinks Saul here cannot tolerate ambiguity,
though perhaps it is we who have to find out clearer information. Consult Exum (1992:
22) for six characterizations of Saul's feelings here.
21. Coggins is interested to compare the DH uses of the disguised king: 1 Sam. 28;
1 Kgs 20 and 22 (he excludes 1 Kgs 14); his relevant discussion for this passages is
1991: 55-57; Fokkelman 1986:600-601 sees the disguise as an act of obedience to God
by Saul. Coggins concludes that the three DH uses share that the story moves at the
expense of the king; an unacceptable line is condemned in each case and the king dies.
428
opportunity to rehearse imaginatively for the gesture we will see him make
at the moment of his death. So Saul takes the role he has been resisting so
assiduously to acknowledge and goes to listen to his old prophet. Saul's
disguise is actually his unkingly self, now the one most able to hear what
he needs to learn.
When Saul and his two companions arrive at their destination and ask
the woman to consult, her first response is that all mediums have been cut
off from the land and that to ask her to do the forbidden thing must be to
snare her and risk her life as well (28.9-10). She does not say she cannot
do it but that it is dangerous for her to do it. She associates the venture
with heavy words: trap, snare, death. Saul dismisses her concern and promises on oath by YHWH that no punishment will come to her as a result of
her role. Are Saul's oaths reliable? Can YHWH be made partner to the content of this oath? Is the king able to make such a promise? But Saul's
request is guarded as well, for he commands her, in effect, to issue him a
blank check, to bring up anyone he should name, before specifying whom
he wants to contact.
She is evidently convinced by his reply, however we may feel, is at least
sure enough to ask him for further direction, which she seems to receive
without surprise. That is, her reaction, when it comes, is not to the name
'Samuel' given out by her fleshly visitor but to the moment when she succeeds at her task and sees the spirit she has raised. Commentators are interested in the narrative logic of the sequence. She knows the name of the
one she is summoning but the sight of him, called up, exposes the identity
of her visitor as the king (see Beuken 1978: 9-11; Reis 1997: 11-12). And
she accuses him of deceiving22 her: 'You are Saul!', she discerns and announces.
Before going ahead with Saul's reaction, let us rehearse some of the
implied possibilitities. The utterance itself may be key, since this woman
present near the death of Saul makes an inclusio of sorts with Hannah's
'hu' sa 'ul/he is given [i.e. bequested]' (1.28). The spirit wife's accusation
about deception seems plausibly linked with her fears of being entrapped
to do what the king has made illegal. But why does seeing the prophet
prompt her to identify her customer? How does Samuel give away Saul's
identity? Does whatever power the woman taps into help her see more
deeply into identities, disguises? She sees Samuel but identifies Saul
22. There is wordplay here: bgd is the root for 'deceive' and for the garments Saul
has donned. Similarly, pst serves double purposes, when it is both a verb for raid and
the word used for stripping off garments.
429
perhaps her discourse (as distinct from her psychology), trading off the
same equivalence chs. 1-3 worked to establish between the two, but to
what end? Is the verbalizing of the link more important than the logic? Is
the logic linked to the workings of necromancy? Who is the Saul she identifies: not the king but the man? All these options contribute to the representation of the king's whole life on this last night of it, both to him and to
us. The woman's bluntness is also not the usual careful verbal approach to
a royal figure.
But whatever the specifics, Saul's interest is not on what the woman says
to him but on the figure she sees. As several have observed, the woman
seems only to see and Saul only to hear. Whether he can see the apparition
of the prophet is not indicated, nor is it evident that the medium hears the
conversation of her two famous guests (Beuken 1978: 7). The king (distractedly?) urges that she have no fear and asks her to name what she sees.
She complies: 'elohim coming up out of the ground. When pressed by the
king for more detail about the shape, she provides it: an old man, wrapped
in a robe (28.13-14). That specification assures Saul that it is indeed Samuel that she sees, whom she has raised. And Saul prostrates before the
presence of the dead prophet; the tall falls.
Next comes the conversation between dead prophet and soon-to-die king
(28.15-19), which would seem to be the heart of the chapter. The narrator
draws back here and the characters discuss these old matters directlyin
fact, by an exchange of questions.23 'Why have you disturbed me by bringing me up?', the prophet asks. Though commentary tends to focus on the
implications of his question for reconstructing Israelite understanding of
the realm and fate of the dead, I think the weight of the question falls,
rather, in terms of 'what do you want? Why am I here?' And indeed that is
the edge of the query Saul answers: 'I am in great distress, for the Philistines are warring against me, and God has turned away from me and
answers me no more, either by prophets or dreams; so I have summoned
you to tell me what I should do' (28.15). It is a moment of great intensity
in this long narrative, and I think Saul's most exposed, most honest, moment. Saul's conclusion, or his implication, is that only a dead prophet, his
prophet, dead, can breach the gap and tell him what he needs to do. 'About
what?', we may wish Samuel had asked him. It is about more than the
Philistines that Saul has registered concern. What is Saul going to do about
the silence of God? And who can advise him on that topic? The use of
23. Fokkelman charts the exchanges, 1986: 601.
430
distress (srr) connects to 13.6, where the narrator uses the verb of Saul at
Samuel's failure to appear and allows for Samuel's wordplay on swr/turn
away (Edelman 1991: 246-47). That the Philistines are against him is not
the heart of it, since that has been the case intermittently and is even at the
moment not fresh news. They may be massing in huger numbers, but even
that matter only brings to a head what seems to be Saul's focal anguish.
He is cut off in every aspect from guidancethis inveterate asker of
othersgets no answer from God through any channels.
Samuel's response to Saul reverts to cover old ground, as though since
they last spoke, there is nothing new to say, nothing remaining relevant to
say. Saul has already been told at some length by Samuel (15.22-23) that
the cause of his firing was his disobedience in the matter of Amalek. Samuel, as before, makes a clear link between Saul's refusal to heed at that
time and God's rejecting of him from being king. That is, Samuel here first
reiterates what Saul has been told and what we have long known. Saul's
refusal to obey, definitively in the matter of the Amalekites when the matter was both primordial and as unequivocal as possible, has cost him heavily with God, who first served him a dismissal notice and then went (more)
silent on him. Since that moment as described in ch. 15, we have seen other
slaughters by Saul and by David. We have had careful fencing around the
question of whether the anointed of YHWH can be slain by a fellow.
Though it is tempting to try to organize the moral thicketto line up what
is legitimate and what is not in terms of slaying kings or eliminating whole
housesI think the Amalekite matter is of its own type and that Saul's
refusal to complete the ban as ordered by God through the prophet is not
explainable, cannot be rationalized by analogy. That is, Saul is fired from
being king because of his refusal to extirpate Amalek, the ancient foe. That
David is (narratively speaking) about to let 400 of them get away is not
directly relevant to what Saul did. Even when confronted, Saul still avoids
the task, so that the killing of the king Agag is left to Samuel. The Amalekite episode remains pivotal for everything that has happened.24
24. Beuken 1978: 5, thinks that Samuel refuses consultation. That is not entirely
true, since he does not refuse to engage. That he says nothing new is not even quite the
case. The naming of David is new and perhaps useful to Saul. Craig 1994:234, points
out Saul's earlier 'amnesia' moments: 13.13-14; 22.18; 23.6, 8-12. But given the resistance of Saul to hear the information he nonetheless has been given several times,
amnesia is not the correct word. Reis 1997: 11, adds that the exchange gives Saul new
information about the time of his death and about the catastrophes for his people that
go along with it.
431
Though it is distressing to modern sensibilities to hang the whole issue

of obedience to God on such a matter of genocide, the DH seems clear
about the seriousness of the episode. Saul's refusal to put Amalekites under
the ban is cardinaland ramified through many alibis and pretendings, as
we recall from the discussion between prophet and king. The context was
also linked to worship, with Saul claiming that his intent was to offer the
best of the Amalekite goods to God, an equation which Samuel denounced
as well. So here, there is nothing new. Miscall says: 'Samuel condenses the
entire narrative of 1 Sam. 16-27 and even chapter 28 into the fulfillment
of his denunciation in 1 Sam. 13.13-14 and 1 Sam. 15.22-29' (1986:169).
Refusal to obey, Saul's resistance to acknowledging his disobedience fully,
exposes the royal incapacity and unfitness for guarding the relationship
between YHWH and Israel. That many disobedient kings will follow him is
again not the pointor perhaps it is, as monarchy persists to trash its
heritage. Who is Amalek, the ancient enemy that had troubled the people
on their way out of Egypt? The point is not who literally were such people
but whom they represent in the story of kings. And my supposition is that
Amalek is 'Mesopotamian power', not dealt with definitively or well. The
result is the massing of an even stronger enemy at his flank. And so the
death sentence is made clear. The Philistines will triumph tomorrow
God's agency or will assisting, andin words so like those prophetic
words of 1 Sam. 2: the man and his sons will die on the same day and the
army be given into the hands of the Philistines (28.19).
What is also new is the language of enemy, of divine opposition to Saul
and partisanship with David. God becomes an enemy (28.16): 'Why do
you ask (s'/) me, since the LORD has turned from you (swr) and become
your opponent ('ar)T And then Samuel goes on to say in plain terms something we have not heard said to Saul before. Not only has the kingdom
been torn from Saul's hand but 'the LORD...has given [the kingdom] to
your neighbor David'. What comes fresh to Saul, and comes in such a way
as to topple him once again before the withdrawing prophet (28.20), is the
identity of his opponent.25 Though readers have been assisted with behindthe-scenes information about God's spirit, the divine selection and prophetic ratification of David, the various modes of communication between
God and the secretly-anointed, none of these has been known to Saul,
who, on the contrary, has shown himself adept at disregarding even what
is patent. Not David but YHWH has opposed Saul; Saul's continuing to
25. Beuken 1987: 5, counts that Samuel brings YHWH'S name seven times into the
dialogue whereas Saul says it not at all.
432
reign has been a husk only. Only as Saul, disguised as his lay self, can he
perhaps begin to confront the cost of his opposition to God's decision
regarding his kingshipgreat distress at the lack of any communication
from Goddoes he learn the deepest cause of it. Comments Brettler (1996:
80): 'The abandonment of YHWH by Saul is mirrored by YHWH'S abandonment of Saul'.
The result of these words of prophet to priest is that Saul again falls
prostrate. The narrator suggests that, far from reassuring the king, the
words of the prophet have deeply shocked him, even intensified his fear.
Does Samuel's naming of David force reappraisal of all that Saul has bent
his energies to do in recent episodes? Rationally, nosince we have seen
Saul suspect David is his successor (18.8) and have even heard him
concede it to Jonathan (20.31) and to David himself (24.20). But to learn
that YHWH has been backing David, and that Saul's opponent has been
God, casts matters in a new light. Nor, we may note, has Samuel told him
what to do. To say what will happen is not the same as saying what to do.
And then the narrator clarifies that in addition to the words of Samuel
toppling the king, his lack of physical resources was a factor too, since he
had been fasting (28.20). Why he had fasted seems not the point, though
scholars speculate upon it. It seems rather that we are redirected back to
the heavy Eli and his fall (4.18), to the fasting/feasting Hannah and her
prayer (1.15-16; 2.5), to the banquet which initiates Saul's kingship (9.2224), perhaps to the festive table become divisive (ch. 20). In any case,
twice in this scene now has Saul rehearsed for his ultimate falling which is
to come soon on Mt Gilboa.
The last event at Endor seems anti-climactic to some but strikes me as
of key importance.26 When the spirit wife sees Saul's second fall and his
terror, she bargains with him. She approaches him in terms of quid pro
quo: 'I risked my life to heed you; now you must.. .heed me, your life on
the line'. Does Saul risk his life to be fed by the woman, or grasp it in
some way as a result of accepting her gesture? Is this just a simple act of
hospitality, an act of kindness by a woman to a man, a gesture of return by
a proscribed subject to a king? 'Be strengthened', is what the spirit wife
26. Reis, who thinks the witch has cast a spell over biblical commentators, reviews
what the results of such scholarship have been (1997: 3-4). Her argument is that the
woman acts, and competently, from motives of self-preservation rather than kindness.
Reis supposes that the shared meal is a mantic sacrifice to the dead which illegally but
effectively binds the woman and the king and drives Saul to suicide. I cannot follow
her conclusions but appreciate her fresh and critical look at the passage.
43 3
seems to proffer. The sharing of food makes a link to the final scene of the
book of Kings, where the last king, his actual rule long since terminated
even if some vestiage of it remains, emerges from prison, changes his
clothes, eats his ration at his host's table. Here the woman insists that he
eat, against Saul's first demur, which so typically for him is worn down,
reversed, routed by her determination and purpose. Another intertextual
cue comes as we watch her slaughter a fatted calf and bake unleavened
bread for the man, who had arisen from the floor to sit on her bed. At the
level of simple kindness, we have seen nothing like it in the whole narrative. That is not an adequate explanation for her deed, but it is noteworthy
that even if only a gracious gesture, it is just about unique.271 see it, additionally, as a grace in a deeper sense. Amid various explanations offered, it
seems best to me to consider the woman as a wisdom figure, who, though
she does not preach at length, has supplicated those in need of her care and
prepared a meal for those who listen to her. To feed and strengthen the
king is her contribution.28 Wisdom, as God's tangible emissary and ancient
intimate, consort and advisor of kings, has tendered to the man before her
a word he can finally obey. It is a reconciliation of sorts with the divine
realm, offered subtly, help 'from another quarter', as Mordecai will later
advise Esther (Est. 4.14). Like Saul's prophet, the spirit wife has also
avoided telling him what to do. But she has strengthened him to, perhaps
finally, make that decision for himself. No one can tell Saul what he needs
to do. Were someone to do so, there is no guarantee it would be right when
27. Gunn 1980: 109, sees the scene as restoring Saul's dignity after he faintedthe
interpretive logic seeming to be that he did not really faint from fear but hunger. It is,
for Gunn atoken gesture. Reis 1997:14, doubts she would overcome the mortal enmity
Saul has laid upon her to feed him, over against other commentators who have no
trouble with the possibility.
28. Reis 1997: 13, picks up on the sexual nuance of the verb bw '/come and sees an
attempt at seduction here, abandoned when Saul fails to respond. Angert-Quilter and
Wall summarize a view I prefer: the woman is not in any way associated with evil
realms; she is readily accessible (not skulking), not eager to disregard the law, 'caring,
healing, wise, generous', more likely to be harmed by her visitor than to do harm, she
deceives none. They affirm the wisdom link (2001: 62, 71), also make the connection
to 1 Sam. 9 and to Prov. 9.1-6. For a brief summary of the material of Prov. 1-9, see
Brenner 1985: 41-42. Claudia Camp offers a recent and comprehensive article on the
broad functioning of Wisdom in the Bible and in its wider matrix cultures (1997). That
the figure Sophia, with consturctions similar to those exhibited by the spirit wife, eventually becomes a way of speaking of the deity gives some strength to what is otherwise
a rather bold and unexpected suggestion on my part.
434
the moment came, or that Saul could comply. So, strength is the best gift
the king can be given. And having eaten, Saul and his servants melt away
into the night.
c. How Saul Dies: 1 Samuel 31.1-7
The end, when it finally arrives, is quickly told. The long-threatening Philistines mount their attack. Many Israelites flee, and many fall slain on Mt
Gilboa. The narrator focuses briefly on Saul and his three sons, reporting
without detail except to name the three the Philistines slay: Jonathan, Abinadab, Malchishua. And so the Philistine archers and we ourselves focus
on the king, who is attended now by only his armor-bearer. Our first introduction to Saul was with similar companionship. Saul's first words in the
story were to persuade his young attendant that they should turn back from
their questwhich, as we recall, the young man countered with the suggestion that led Saul to Samuel and to kingship. So, in the shadow of this
last boy stands the first one and perhaps the other young man who served
as the king's armor-bearer as well: David (16.21). And as the death of Saul
comes closer, we can see that it comes not by God's striking him, nor
simply from old age (as David had speculated in 26.10-11); nor is David's
hand stretched out against Saul overtly here. Rather, Saul is to be swept
away in battle, taking many with him as Samuel had warned (12.25). But
still open is the question of precisely how Saul will meet his death.
The narrator spends careful words here for Saul: 'The battle pressed hard
upon Saul; the archers found him and he was badly wounded'. Edelman
comments on the tremendous semantic depth of these homophonous words:
/z///wounded, hlh/sick, entreating, /zw//writhing.29 Saul's last words, to his
armor-bearer, are his final request: 'Draw your sword and thrust me
through with it, so that these uncircumcised may not come and thrust me
through, and make sport of me'. 'Do my death for me' (31.4), Saul asks,
pushing as he has consistently done the responsibility from himself in the
hope that someone will get it right for him. His request to the boy, Saul's
final asking, makes evident what he dreads: ignominious death at the hands
of his foes. As pictured here (realism aside, for we know that others surviveeven Abner, as Gunn points out [1980: 87]), there is only one left
for Saul to ask to act for him. But that one, the narrator says, refuses wordlessly, so great is his fear? Fear of what, we may wonder: most likely it is
fear of the battle and, its circumstances, and in this particular story, fear of
29. Edelman 1991: 282-83. Alter 1999: 189, translates: 'he quaked with fear'.
435
the enormity of killing God's anointed. David's words of 24.6 and 26.11
hover around this nameless, featureless, wordless young man. And so, lacking his usual tendency to alibi or blame, and evidently no longer able or
willing to pretend, Saul dies his own death, falls on his sword rather than
allowing someone to act for him. How does Saul die? As late as the night
before his death, we heard Saul tell Samuel that he had him raised from
the dead 'so that you will tell me what to do'. Samuel can tell him that his
death will be on the morrow and in a battle with the Philistines. But Samuel cannot tell Saul how to die. Nor, so far as we can see, does God help
Saul with it. Long silent, God seems to offer no opening to Saul at the end.
At least there is no evidence of it. Whether Saul is strengthened by his last
advice and meal is a reader's call. Even in that exchange, as we just saw,
the woman's offer of food is first refused by Saul, but she overcomes his
'no' and he eats at her table. He falls, as has been suggested as inevitable
from before we met him (2.3-10; 4.18; 10.11,22; 19.24; 28.14, 20). But
how does he fall? Ultimately, with a moment of answerability. Discussions of how the Israelites (or others since) look upon suicide seem out of
place here. In this representation of the collapse and end of Saul's reign,
and insofar as his reign is a paradigm for that of all other kings, Saul acts
decisively on his own, something he has struggled to do throughout, brings
his reign to a conclusion by his own deed.
d. How Saul's Dying is Contested: 1 Samuel 31.8-2 Samuel 1
There are, at once, four responses to, interpretations of Saul's death
detailed within the narrative itself.30 Though in some ways death can be
said to finalize a character, in other ways loopholes continue to be offered
for readers, if not heroes, to slip through. The first pair of reactions is the
simplest. The Philistines construe the death of Saul as a matter of great
rejoicing for their people and their gods. When the Philistines find Saul's
body the next day, they strip it and dishonor it, sending his armor to adorn
and honor the shrines of gods rivaling YHWH and the king's beheaded
corpse to rejoice the citizens of Beth-shan. Among his foes, both gods and
citizens are anticipated to rejoice at the death of the king (31.8-10). It is, of
course, a tribute to him as well as a defilement, so a complex utterance.
But the people of Jabesh, whom Saul had served well in their time of need
30. Commentators vary on their views of the particular manner of death. To sample
a bit: Polzin finds it utterly ignominious, 'a final abhorrent act of self-destruction'
(1989: 224). Exum 1992: 25-26, speaks in terms of Saul's 'last desperate attempt to
wrest from his destiny its final memory'.
436
(1 Sam. 11) immediately contest the Philistine statement and travel by

night, urgently and secretly, we may suppose, to remove the bodies of Saul
and his sons from the city walls and to burn and then bury the remains
under a tamarisk tree at Jabesh (31.11-13). Those who mourn Saul match,
even cancel out the joy of the Philistines, with a period of fasting. This
construction also and more directly credits Saul.
The last two constructions of the king's death are more complex, more
commented upon, and require here more attention from us. The first of
those is the report of the Amalekite to David (2 Sam. 1.1-16). Scholarly
attention has moved from resolving the differences between that account
and the one in 1 Sam. 31.1 -7 by 'old literary criticism' to sorting the issues
in terms of 'new literary' theory. That is, a generation ago commentary
tended to hypothesize sources or readactional layers to cope with the obvious differences between the two accounts; but more recently studies have
investigated the critical problems of narrative strategy,31 of narrator vs.
character reliability (e.g. Fokkelman 1986: 596-622,631-47), and of character construction (how David reads the Amalekite and he David).32 What
I wish to focus upon, rather than David, is the question of how the mighty
have fallen, how the king will be seen and said to have died. That is, since
I have worked throughout this book to position the characterization of Saul
as a political riddle, I wish here to probe its features one last time. In the
conclusion to this study I will draw together my sense of Saul as a human
construct. The stress on the 'how?' question in the last chapter makes it a
legitimate question to continue to examine. And given my supposition that
Saulliving and deadrepresents in some way the experience of monarchy in Israel and that not only DH but 1 Samuel in particular poses a
challenge, we need to understand what the question is. That the literary
Saul has died does not terminate the question of how the whole monarchic
project has been enacted and offered for appropriation. So we have at the
beginning of 2 Samuel another set of sketches of the death event, including a sideshadow of what must be floated but then not be allowed to stand.
31. Meir Malul 1996, whose stated aim is to implicate David more heavily in
Saul's death than do most readers, argues like a lawyer laying out a case of plausible or
probable (though circumstantial) guilt of a defendant. His reading is thorough and
certainly legitimate but the nature of his project takes him out onto various limbs.
32. Hugh Pyper's study of the scenes (1996: 14-27 and elsewhere throughout his
book) bring new insights forth. He observes, for example, that if the Amalekite is lying,
then David executes him for something he did not do, and executes him so quickly that
more information will not be forthcoming.
437
As before, the second undermines the first, though literally without erasing
its predecessor.
As the first two interpretations of the king's death struggle over the
question of death dishonorable (31.8-10) or honorable (vv. 11-13), so do
these next two. The Amalekite's story begins with a narrative note that the
Gilboa events involving Saul and Israel overlap in time with the Ziklag
events involving David and his people (2 Sam. 1.1). Those events, as we
recall, terminated in David's retaliation against the Amalekites for their
raid on Ziklag, a reprisal which returned all of the people and property to
David et al. with the escape of (only!) 400 Amalekites. The arrival now of
one of their fellows on the scene demands scrutiny.33 The scene is much
like that of 1 Sam. 4.12-18, where a lone runner from the battle arrives to
communicate by word and gesture the outcome of the fighting. The exchange between the arrival-in-mourning and David goes according to form.
When the runner arrives in disarray and David asks the news of the battle,
the man reportsmuch like the messenger of 1 Sam. Athat many are fled
and many dead, including Saul and Jonathan (2 Sam. 1.2-4). What verges
differently (both from 1 Sam. 4 and from later scenes in 2 Samuel where
messengers will report) is that David questions the man about the basis of
his information: 'How do you know that Jonathan and his son died?' The
focus becomes the witness rather than the eventgranted they are closely
linked.
As Fokkelman suggests (1986: 634), no character poses questions to the
Benjaminite survivor who reported on the catastrophe at Ebenezer. Eli
toppled to his own death at once, and the unnamed woman giving birth to
Ichabod had other closer concerns as well. Readers already witnessed the
event, and presumably Eli had advance warning as well (2.34). It does not
seem a place either where readers and commentators have tarried either,
perhaps because the information matches what the narrator already recounted at 4.10-11 and what was anticipated in prophecy at 2.34. We,
33. Edelman(1991:299),Polzin(1993:l-10),andKleven(1989:60-61)arethree
who draw our attention to this link. I think the point is not so much that the Amalekite
is to be seen as one whom David let get away. Both Edelman (in her languagestressing that David is also a 'resident' mercenary) and Polzin rather sketch the way in
which the Amalekite overlaps the character /one of David. I would add that David
receiving grim news here also evokes Eli, father of dynastic sons (see Alter 1999:195).
The characters are more than their individual selves. Another thing we may again mark
here is the unevenness of the narrator, who has left us little sympathy with Saul and his
Amalekite debacle but who slides quickly over the fact that David allows a whole set
to escape, presumably one of whom claims to have killed Saul.
438
unlike David, are already privy to the events of ch. 31, are likely to have
set them in the default position. But I think David's question is not for his
'realistic' self; instead, it is a repositioning of the key question: What was,
is, the manner of the king's death, the monarchy's demise? The question
drives the Amalekite's story. How the king died is the crucial piece to
examine, the architectonic of the whole representation of the king. And so
his story, picked over suspiciously and fruitfully now by a number of commentators, comes forth. Though it surely has odd elements to ite.g. 'I
chanced to be on Gilboa in the midst of a huge battle and ran into Saul, in
extremis'the crucial part is the dialogue: 'And [Saul] said to me, "Who
are you?" I answered him, "I am an Amalekite"' (2 Sam. 1.8). Saul's next
(putative) words are quoted by the Amalekite (making his own Saul's final
words): 'Come stand over me and kill me for convulsions have seized me,
and yet my life lingers' (2 Sam. 1.9). And the Amalekite relates that he did
what was asked, based on his stated conclusion that the king could not
survive in any case. Then the messenger moves to present his proofs as
asked by David: items he has brought from the scene of battle to David
(2 Sam. 1.6-10). Crucial to the account is Saul's verification that the man
he asks to dispatch him is an Amalekite and the fact that, knowing it, the
king asks him to assist regardless. The burden of this representation is as
much to slur Saul's dying as to implicate the foreigner or David. In this
moment when he might confront his culpability, to accept it rather than
evade it, how will Saul die? Will he prefer to be slain by an Amalekite to
all alternatives? Can it be honorable to choose such a death? I think not,
for a variety of reasons.
First, for Saul to be killed byto be said to be killed byan (equivocating) Amalekite calls attention to the king's own inability to be truthful
about letting one such man (Agag) escape his own hand (ch. 15). That no
less a personage than God had ordered Saul to put the whole group under
the ban for ancient and malevolent reasons is not to the credit of that
group. Again, the point is not realism: if Saul and Samuel have finally gotten rid of all of them as implied by the end of ch. 15, how does this man
and the group David just (ch. 30) attacked manage to survive? The point is
a narrative one: an ancient foe, whether a liar or not, discredits the king in
a way worse than the Philistines do, making Saul complicit with the project. That is, 'Saul of Israel asked me, an Amalekite, to terminate his life
and rule; and so I did, having decided his death was imminent and inevitable'. That Saul's final words, commanding someone to take responsibility
for his last breath, are first overtaken by the enemy and then obeyed rather
439
than disregarded, does not improve the situation substantially. Like the
sideshadow in ch. 25, this possibility must be faced but cannot be allowed
to stand. It has already been rehearsed by David in his speculation of 26.10.
Made conscious and possible, it is rejected.
As scholars have well observed, both Saul and David question the man
as to his identity, invite his response before proceeding. The Amalekite
identity is not in doubt, nor eventually his claim to his own words. David's
reaction to the verification that the messenger produces, which is how I
construe the proffering of Saul's crown and armlet, is a formal gesture of
grief and mourning whose sincerity may, though need not, be doubted.
The fact that the king's crown is no longer with the king can only signify
some huge catastrophe. There is something truthful about the Amalekite's
communication. The mourning pictured is not only David's and not simply
for the king or crown prince but for the death, defeat, and sweeping away
of so many. David's second questioning (2 Sam. 1.13-16) evokes and positions again the man's identity as not only an Amalekite but also a foreign
sojourner who by his own admission dispatched the king, or in David's
words 'did not fear to stretch out his hand against YHWH'S anointed'.
Like Saul querying David's identity afresh on the other side of his killing
Goliath (1 Sam. 17.55-58), David asks again who this man is. And David
now articulates his own dread, as we saw in chs. 24-26, that to stretch out
a hand against YHWH'S anointed cannot be a guiltless act. David confronts
his double (Polzin 1993:2-8), the doer of the deed that tempted David and
that he rehearsed doing. David next eliminates the man who both did and
said the 'regicidal' act with impunity, puts between that man and himself
the ultimate distance: death. But the horses have left the bam, the words
are out. David ought to have acted sooner or somewhat later, either
preventing such words from escaping into the open or delaying until they
might have been refuted. His handling of the story gives it 'legs'. Was
Saul slain by an enemy? How does the king die, the story continues to
ponder, and to refuse the option that one of his own people would be the
agent of it.34 So Pyper (1996: 24-25) is right to notice that David executes
a man for what in fact he did not do but claimed to do. I would say that
David executes a man for voicing aloud a claim that he did what David
34. Not everyone agrees on whether a 'resident alien' would be obligated to the
mores of his host group (e.g. Fokkelman 1986: 637, thinks not). The Doeg situation
offers itself for comparison (1 Sam. 21-22), but I think in both cases it would be difficult to mount a credible case that it is justifiable morally or legally for a resident foreigner to kill the king and the priests.
440
has already struggled (not) to do. David makes that deed both articulate
and misspokennot to mention unrewardableand then offers the antidote in the lament that follows.
The final and most powerful recital of how the mighty have fallen is
David's lament, to my mind the most beautiful stretch of language in the
Bible. Its poetic features have been pointed out, reconstructed, analyzed,
reconstructed in terms of ancient Semitic poetry, and mapped by others
(Freedman 1980; George 1997; Holladay 1970; O'Connor 1980: 230-33,
468-71, 555-56; Shea 1986; Yee 1988: 569-73, 582-83). My aim is not to
go over that ground in detail but to bring to bear Bakhtin's categories for
the piece and examine how it is an utterance (that is, with whom and in
what circumstances it is a dialogue), how its very double-voiced language
manages to bring not only the events specific to Saul's death forward but
orchestrate larger DH themes as well, and finally to suggest how it answers its own awed refrain about the falling of the mighty. This fourth version of the death of the king casts the others into a minor key by its power.
The lament, as included in 2 Sam. 1, is intoned by David and ordered to be
taught to the people and inscribed in the book of Yashar/the just. That is,
narratively speaking, and probably in the history of reception, this version
of the event becomes normative and privileged due to its origin, its stability, and surely in the tremendous power of its language to suggest so many
things so compactly. Polzin's discussion of how the character zones of
David and the Amalekite blend has already rendered too simple the question of whether any mourning by David can be sincere or not. The event of
Saul's death, bringing in its wake the end of his line of descent (except for
one weak scion) and sweeping into exile many in Israel, can be catastrophic enough to offer genuine lamentation space for anyone involved. The
question is not so much about David's sincerity as his manner of discourse, not about his hypothetical consciousness as he speaks (which is off
limits to us except as he speaks) but about his language, which we may
mustread.
How is the lament (2 Sam. 1.19-27) shaped as an utterance? As suggested, it takes shape with, counterpoints the Amalekite's assertion that
Saul died ignominiously by commanding and allowing an ancient foe
whom he could not quite kill to slay him. So, just as the people of Jabesh
of Gilead contest the reaction of the Philistines to Saul's death and rescue
his body from further degradation, David here does a similar thing by
taking down from the 'walls of Amalek' the memory and significance of
the death of the Saulides. As has been noted already, David does not
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discredit directly what the Amalekite messenger said but kills him, cutting
off further information that might confirm or deny what the man said. The
story remains, with all its wider resonances to the death of the (other)
proto-king, Abimelech in Judg. 9, that prior story of monarchy born out of
time. So David's response to the Amalekite is to reposition the event by
talking of it in wholly different terms. David does not so much dispute the
former report as rise above it, overlay it. David trumps the Amalekite.
David addresses several entities in the brief lament: Israel, the Gilboa
mountains, the daughters of Israel, Jonathan. And David's voice is also in
dialogue with the narrator of the events of ch. 31. Let us see how that
works out. 'Your glory, O Israel, lies slain upon the high places' (2 Sam.
1.19), the poem begins. Whether the reference is specifically tied to Jonathan as a gazelle (see Polzin 1993:10-12,18-20, for the links to Jonathan's
character zone), it catches more widely the glory of the people as well. All
of the house of Saul (minus the strangely emergent Ishbosheth [2 Sam. 2])
and many of the warriors of the people fell in the battle, which has led to a
complete rout of not only the fighters but the citizens as well (31.7). The
high places are a doubled expression,35 a complex chronotope, ranging as
they do from the place where Saul is affirmed by Samuel to the place of
ultimate and constant violation by Israel of the relationship with God. The
rising and falling king is thus associated with sin and disaster, also with
beauty and promise. Lying slain is the whole Saulide enterprise, crashed
down altogether. Was it a glory? Perhaps now that it is down there is no
reason not to say so. So David calls the people to weep for their own loss.
The mighty fallen, the valiant slain, are not only Saul and his sons but
many others as well. The address to Israel falls, perhaps, on absent ears,
since, narratively speaking, Philistines are dwelling in Israelite places.
David next warns against telling the news out in Philistiaimagining
while interdicting the voices to proclaim the news in Philistine Gath and
Ashkelon. But again his timing is off. It is too late for such a ploy. The
Philistine conquerors themselves have already sent the news to their people and their gods and have displayed the bodies of the royal father and
sons in Beth-shan. This is not the first news that David does not want told
in Gath. The rejoicing voices of Philistine women that David wishes to
silence join a chorus of Israelite women celebrating the death of a tall hero
(18.7; 21.11; 29.5), their song echoing throughout the narrative to unsettle
35. High places are the scene of Saul's anointment (1 Sam. 9.18-26). For references
to them as the classic scenes for Israel's perfidy against YHWH see Polzin 1993: 1-25,
Chapter 1). It is a favorite DH theme.
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not just the Philistines but ultimately others as well. David's hope to thwart
the glad daughters of the uncircumcised picks up Saul's dread of death at
Philistine hands (31.4). David's words to deny these reactions of gladness
to Saul's death serve perhaps to intensify them here. In any case, these
words, as well, fall on heedless ears. This unit is a place where David's
voice contends with the narrator, who has already told us that the news is
already spread abroad.
In 2 Sam. 1.21 David addresses the mountain cluster of Gilboa itself,
calling to a halt the water processes within and without, from below and
above, that generate its fruitfulness. No 'surgings of the watery deeps' (Fox
1999: 151, crediting Edward Greenstein), no rain from the heavens are to
bring fertility to this place where the battle has raged. And the scene where
fertility is forbidden is described. The shield of the mighty, neglected and
begrimed connotes, as suggested variously, Saul or YHWH,36 and again
perhaps better (like the ark), the disastrous blend of their destinies and battling of their wills that has held this long story in tension even more than
has the relationship between Saul and David. Insofar as Saul's royal responsibility was to be guardian for and servant of the bond holding YHWH
and Israel in place, the neglected shield marks Saul's signal failure. That
the monarchic project lies in ruin and desolation on Gilboa is the deed to
be taken in and lamented and not at once overgrown with new fertility.
From that characterization David shifts (in v. 22) to describe the slaughter
as well as the slaying. The weapons of Saul and Jonathan do damage to
their foes before being countered, spill the blood and entrails of others
before giving way. It is a facet of the battle with which the prose narrator
does not trouble in ch. 31. Saul finishes up among the 7fw/gear, as he had
mimed at the start of his reign (1 Sam. 10.22). Apparently addressing the
mountains still, David praises Saul and Jonathan with three pairs of common and inclusive designations: 'beloved and lovely, swifter than eagles
and stronger than lions' (v. 23). Though some find odd the sentence in the
middle of this Gilboa description that makes the two inseparable in life
and in death, it must be remembered that Jonathan dies with Saul rather
than surviving with David, and that the father and son came to agree upon
the importance of David guaranteeing the survival of the Saulide line when
he should become king (1 Sam. 20.14-17, 42; 24.20-22). So the six descriptors which include father and son fit well, I think, and credit the bond
between them, honor their valor as these mighty are slain.
36. Alter 1999: 191, sees the shield as a metonymy for Saul, and Polzin (1993:2324) reminds us how frequently the shield is the presence of YHWH.
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David next treats each of them separately as well. His words of Saul (v.
24) are couched in an address to the daughters of Israel, who are called,
like the Philistine women, to reverse their joy into grief. Saul is praised to
the women as the one who provided beauty and luxury for them, clothed
them in crimson and gold. As many have noted, David's most delicate
challenge is how to speak well of his longtime opponent, and the adage of
speaking only good of the dead finds its way into much commentary. The
question, of course, is what good to say? David's choice to salute Saul
through the voices of women, and to give him accolades for his economic
achievements is at the very least odd, damning with faint praise. It is an
accomplishment of Saul's with which we have not been presented, a theoretically positive gain to the people from having a successful king at their
head. Perhaps the reference is to booty from war rather than prosperity
from trade, the same ambiguity that attends the poem in Judg. 5. But in
any case, David offers this aspect of Saul's reign from the angle of others
and, in so doing, reminds us of the song of Israel's women once again
(18.7; 21.11; 29.5). Though David's praise of Saul is at the surface a
complimentary description, its presence as David's single way to sum up
the royal achievement strikes me as provocatively shallow and implicitly
critical. These words, too, are buttressed by the refrain about the manner in
which the mighty fall, that central question being posed architectonically.
The words specific to Jonathan, by contrast, are addressed to him and
come most clearly from the singer's own perspective. 'Beloved and lovely',
spoken of both men but then picked up again in the words for Jonathan
seem to give the common descriptor to him afresh. After appositioning
Jonathan with the glory of v. 19 (Jonathan/glory slain upon the high places)
David speaks to his beloved: 'I am distressed (srr) for you my brother
Jonathan, greatly beloved were you to me; your love to me was wonderful,
passing the love of women' (v. 26). Though the TzMove root catches covenantal (and so political) as well as personal commitment, both here and
more broadly in other contexts, as Fewell and Gunn have demonstrated
(1993:148-57), the sexual element is strong as well. What strikes me here,
however, is that Jonathan, like Saul, is oddly praised, since what is omitted
is perhaps most obvious in the story: Jonathan's unceasing efforts on behalf
of David. Those may well be the referent of David's wordsor rather they
are surely one of the referentsbut David here talks primarily of his own
distress and less directly of Jonathan himself. David's words about Jonathan are, to put it succinctly, that he loved Jonathan. So David has walked
verbally around this event, inviting various others to picture it alongside
444
him. As he did in the case of Saul, David chooses his point of praise for
Jonathan unexpectedly.
Finally, the refrain from the lament, spoken at the beginning, end and
between the verses for father and son (vv. 19, 25, 27) intones and remarks
repeatedly the heart of the poem, that warriors have fallen, chief among
them, the son and grandsons of the gibbor hayil/Kish of Benjamin. The Hebrew 'how' is not a question so clearly as is its English counterpart, the
Hebrew 'how' serving more as a exclamatory comparative than an interrogative. But in this long narrative of dynastic sons, the emphasis has narrowed from that and why the mighty have fallen to the more precise question of how it has come about, in the actual moment of the king's death.
The how/ '<?&here invites reflection and speculation upon what has been and
is being said and hence is not so far removed from the two tasks that the
'how' does in English. Let me conclude with a summary of just that point.
6. Conclusions
My thesis has been that the manner of the king's dying serves as the architectonic point of not only this last set of material but of the whole riddle of
Saul's reign. I have claimed that the circumstances of the late sixth century
have driven the basic genre choice, which was to make a pre-David king
serve as a cipher for the whole monarchic experience, specifically to
prompt reflection on the non-viability of monarchic leadership for the
future. That is, the characterization of Saul has needed to, and managed to,
suggest succinctly the inherent weakness of the institution as experienced
over time, primarily (though not exclusively) in the long tenure of the
Davidic line. Though the Saul figure might have done this task more allegorically and transparently, in fact, the suggestions of homology between
Saul and kingshipdynastic kingshiphas been worked primarily at the
level of imagery and subtle language play. The persistent if conflicted asking for a son, the tendency for such sonseven if weak and ineffectual,
unlikelyto go bad, the inevitability of the tall and arrogant to tumble, the
incapacity for answerability all marble the narrative of Saul's rule. But the
designing artist of this story, granted in eager partnership with myself as
reader of it, has chosen a single criterion by which the king's value may be
assessed: the extent to which, ruminating on the words of instruction which
articulate in so many ways the relationship between Israel and YHWH, the
king sustains it. Saul's failure to keep his charge also striates his royal
career, enhanced by his inability to sustain relationship with any, his own
445
self included. So, king/ship fails and must end. The question is, how? How
will the mighty fall?
As we review again (please refer back to my Introduction and Chapter 2
for more detail) what little we know of post-exilic circumstances, it seems
clear that a legitimate king lives on, granted, way past his 'date of expiration'. His plausible heirs become involved, at least initially, in matters of
the return of the exiles to the land, at least in the narratives we have. It
seems as undeniable that they do not long survive, their place taken over
by priestly leadership, perhaps by something more democratic. What is not
made clear in the narratives is precisely what happened, how an institution
so traditional as kingship shall have sunk post-exile without much of a
trace. In absence of that detail, my guess, or wager, is that the options are
in fact presented to us in the Saul story, specifically where David ruminates on the manner of the king's death (26.10-11). As already laid out,
David supposes that the king may die of natural causes, which does not
really settle the matter if he has heirs. Saul does not die of natural causes,
and it does not seem likely that Jehoiachin will have terminated the
Davidic line simply by his own passing either. God is the second possibility for ending the monarchy, and I sense that the DH chooses not to rely
on that hope either, given the quite permissive character God has demonstrated in this long story.
Though the most likely, perhaps the most tempting option is that the
individual or group in position to take over be the one to deliver the blow
to the predecessor. The story of Saul and David has spent considerable
time on that option and, to my way of interpreting, given it sophisticated
nuance. It does not happen in the case of Saul and David, though the narrative dallying with the guilt of David for the death of Saul continues past
Saul's death, longer still, perhaps. It is not difficult to understand why a
riddle will wish to suggest both the attractiveness of the option that 'David
kills Saul' but even more strongly the reasons why such a move would be
self-defeating for any leadership. The DH continues to associate the move
with David and his sons. Rather unexpectedly, the fourth optionthat the
external foes of the king bring him downgets extended consideration in
the final stages of the Saul story. It is clear enough that the Philistines, his
perennial nemesis, have some agency in Saul's death. But the whole point
of contestation and controversy involves whether the foreignerPhilistine
archers or a lone Amalekitedispatches the king. The Amalekite claims
the role for himself, a claim which is undercut by the narrator's recital, by
the motif of cross-claims of significance of the royal death between Philis-
446
tia and Jabesh Gilead, and by the gestures of David which overwhelm the
Amalekite's claim. David's poem, not very explicit on the agency of the
collapse of the mighty, allows an inference that the Philistines have
brought it about, though he actually does not say so specifically. As I have
argued, the issue is not about facts but about representation. The artist
shaping Saul into a cautionary symbol throws the weight of evidence onto
the events as related in 31.3-6 without eliminating alternatives completely.
In the last analysis, at the final moment, it is up to the king himself. Saul,
wholly in character, would pass the responsibility to another if another
would accept it. But failing that, he takes matters into his own hands and
falls, ultimately, by his own choice.
That his death and the 'how of it' is not wholly his choice is obvious; so
too is the impression that had he had other options to reach for, it would be
characteristic of him to try to do so. So how the mighty fall is, in my view,
of their own choice, answerably. Ishbosheth, the unexpectedly appearing
last son of Saul, pre-imaged in the infant Ichabod, reinscribed in the ephemeral Mephibosheth (Jonathan's son), recognizable in the brief careers of
Sheshbazzar and Zerubabbel, is ultimately not viable. The Saul dynasty is
brought down when Saul falls on his sword. The Davidic line comes to an
end with some deed of resignation (unknown to us) by Jehoiachin. Not his
first choice, I would hazard, but his decision, a deed bearing his signature.
That our story of Saul has to continue the story of royal rule is obvious,
given the incontrovertible presence of Davidic kings in the biblical narrative and elsewhere in evidence. But as that long story ends in Babylon,
Davidic monarchic leadership is proleptically made redundant. It is too late
for reform, and other options for termination would be worse. In a certain
sense, just as the collapse of 'proto-king' Eli is attended by a mourning man
of Benjamin, so the death of'proto-king' Saul is attendedin fact shared
by his armor-bearer, who in an earlier scene was none other than David
(16.21). How are the mighty fallen is exactly what is made known to us.
The final discussion concerns a strand of my narrative started in my
Introduction and seemingly, perhaps, rather neglected since. It involves
another 'how?' question. How is it that the Saul I have helped sketch had
it in him to choose his death? How is it arguable that his death sets the
architectonic for his life? How can I offer a reflection on the relationship
of Saul and YHWH, which seems so very minimal? And, finally, what are
my readerly interests in that facet of the death of King Saul? Why have I
chosen to read the story of the human Saul as I have done?
A CONCLUSION
Generally speaking, how one views the authority of the Bible is closely
dependent on one's imaging of God; the way a reader relates to God will
decisively shape how that reader relates to the Bible... The doctrine of God
is one of the most important conversations in church and academy at the
present time, and the role of the Bible in thinking through God-issues arises
again and again.
Terence E. Fretheim (1998: 97)
For Bakhtin, the self must be understood as a dynamic, embodied and restlessly creative entity that strives to attribute meaning and value to its life
and surroundings.
Michael Gardiner (2000: 49)
1. Preliminary Considerations
In this final part of my study of Saul, I return to the final (third) section of
my Introduction. There I raised questions and offered opinions about the
relationship between biblical studies and biblical spirituality, issues which
are closely linked to the question of my own reader position. I have nothing
else to say on the topic of DH and nothing further to add about the historical circumstances tangled with the production and first reception of 1 Samuel. Bakhtin's views on the construction of the hero and the self in the
processes of authoring and reading will be relevant here, but ploughed in,
so to speak, rather than discussed in themselves again. My book-long thesis
has been that the representation of Saul skillfully presents him as both an
institutional riddle and a coherent human being. Having done my best to
present Saul as institutional riddle, I will bring to greater visibility now the
second part of my contention and give a fuller accounting of my reading of
'human Saul', focusing specifically on my particular construction of the
relationship of Saul and God. Such a project falls also under the rubric of a
study of the nature of the self.
My intent has been to do an interpretation of a text that is radically
grounded in all I have learned from Bakhtin, that is in appreciative conver-
448
sation with certain current work in biblical studies, and that brings into
play as well the dynamics of biblical spirituality, specifically its interest in
transformative reading. Biblical spirituality's valuing of the participating
subject as well as its insistence on self-implication is not wholly different
from the challenge rendered recently to biblical (and other humanities)
studies by ideology criticism: that we, reading, make our interests and assumptions as explicit as possible, acknowledge their influence on our reading, and exploit them responsibly. In what I say here, I will speak for
myself but with the sense that it will be useful for others as well. As I have
already indicated, I start as a committed Roman Catholic Christian, in fact
as one who believes in and hungers for a God who is active in the cosmos,
benign toward creatures, and intensely desirous of interactive dialogue
with all that is.1 Such a conviction is not simply a matter of biblical testimony, though many texts testify to others' similar experience and sense of
God. My construction of God's being comes via many pathways, of which
the biblical narrativeScripture in my tradition and belief systemis one
way: privileged, crucially important, necessary, though not wholly sufficient in itself. Terence Fretheim is one who makes very clear that the many
generations of believers in God do not simply derive their faith from the
text, one-sidedly. In fact the faith of generations of believers both rises
from the text but also comes in many other ways which continue to affirm
the value of biblical texts as Scripture. That is, readers' assumptions and
interests sustain the text's authority as well as draw sustenance from it.2
Fretheim suggests that the point of departure is our experience of God
which helps us construe texts, not the inverse (1998: 97-111). I would
emend his point to say that the process goes on reciprocally, dialogically,
and that it is not simply our past commitment but in fact our present and
growing projects which may give even greater shape to how we read biblical texts.
Let me be a bit more explicit about my interests and projects. In the language of the West-Cady-Dworkin legal hermeneutics, I am of the 'naturalist' school, affirming the normative character of the biblical text but as alert
as I can be to its sometimes harmful effect in the past and its potential to
continue to (be marshaled to) sanction violence, oppression, disrespectful
and unhealthy anthropology and theology. I feel strongly that, as an edu1. I first heard the expression 'hermeneutics of hunger' from Kathleen O'Connor.
2. By not discussing here the topic of revelation, inspiration, and canonicity I do
not imply that those factors are not relevant to those of who hold them. For the best
specific treatment of these matters, see Schneiders 1999: 27-63, Chapter 2.
A Conclusion
449
cated practitioner of biblical studies, it is my responsibility to bring the

Bible's resources to bear for the good. As a teacher of seminarians as well
as doctoral students, I wish to challenge and help them to be able to work
with the Bible critically, as alert as possible to the many factors assisting
and constraining interpretation in the twenty-first century. I go so far as to
discourage from enrolling in my classes those who do not want to face
these challenges or admit honestly and take on issues that are likely to
grieve others, if not themselves. When I work with 'ordinary readers', who
tend to be well-educated (though rarely in biblical studies), I try to combine the serious issues posed to the biblical text with a confidence that 'it'
can meet them well, on the whole. I do not consider it a gain when someone slams the Bible shut for the last time, or demotes it from being a book
to be taken with seriousness and respect. There are several language systems for talking about the Bible's basic genre, and multiple problems, to
be sure. But given that the people I work with are all seriously committed
to religion in one way or another, dismissing the Bible is not likely to be a
good move. Repositioning it in relation to other values and everything else
in relation to it is healthy, usually necessary, sometimes painful, eventually
satisfying and productive, as many who have done and continue to do it
can attest. Insofar as the Bible is, for 'my' co-readers, a privileged access
to God, continuous repositioning will be necessary in that relationship as
well.
To be a bit more specific. When I am looking to talk about God and
Saul, which is my final step in this book, my aim is to make such material
useful or relevant for those who are open to and seek relatedness with
God. I am not myself asking the Bible to serve as a basis for social change,
except insofar as that as individuals and groups draw from it the wherewithal to live more generously in relation to others. For whatever reasons,
feminist criticism is not the base of what I do either; it is vitally important,
contributes often to my work, but does not drive my reading foundationally. If I have a 'label-able' point of departure, it is (Gandhian) nonviolence, as suggested already, into which radical social change and feminism
can fit. So the individual/ personal or social/political dichotomy is refused.
The deep relatedness of the individual to God is a sine qua non, but so is
the social dimension constitutive for responsible appropriation, that is, for
transformative reading.
A key matter that opens up here is the fraught question of the representation of God, specifically, to put it bluntly, the relationship between the
'real God' and the 'biblical (textual) God'. It seems that, since I am stipu-
450
lating my positions rather than arguing them out, the case can be presented
as follows. Many generations of believers (Jews and Christians, in this
case) have testified to a nonproblematic continuity between the two.
Almost needless to saybut important to make explicitexactly what the
link is between 'God' and 'Bible God' has varied. This is, I think, a place
to say boldly that over time, the assumptions and projects of believers who
read and draw from biblical texts diverge widely, have changed substantially. If, as I like to think, we are talking about many people standing on
the shoulders of others. Though all are linked vertically, the vistas that
generations see and speak horizontally, the contexts and assumptions each
era brings to the biblical text, change from one age to another, such that
hermeneutical continuity can seem tenuous. To make the point a bit more
visible: readerswhoever we areask questions which derive from experience and assumptions condign with our cultural worldview. If, for example, most of the extant testimony of the long pre-critical period (roughly
the first 16 or so centuries of the present era) assumed that the biblical text
was unified as God's authoring voice and useful primarily for assisting the
spiritual life that was understood in terms of repair of a basic fracture, then
the Bible was pressed into service to guide the personal transformation of
believers. Narrative details tended to function allegorically or typologically
to assist that project of conversion, re-integration, transformation. Once
the cluster of events called the scientific revolution, the enlightenment, the
Protestant reformation and the age of exploration changed radically the
assumptions and worldview of those who wrote about and engaged biblical texts, the questions and goals of interpretation took a fundamental
turn toward the historical, verifiable referents of much material (I am talking primarily about the Hebrew Bible here).
Our contemporary era has a widerand even a fundamentally differentframe than did the ancients and so is not content to work allegorically. But neither are many of those involved any longer willing to reduce
our biblical questions primarily to the realm of the visible and factual, the
extensively referential project that has dominated scholarship from the
seventeenth century. As I investigate what the ancients (various of them)
have seen in 1 Samuel, I can scarcely relate to a good deal of it, nor do I
think my particular questions and consequent strategies would have been
meaningful to them, were they to have somehow known of them. But there
is continuity, resting not simply on hermeneutics, even biblical hermeneutics, but is a matter of belief in 'Bible God' accessed more widely than
from the text itself but heavily dependent on it as well. A huge amount of
A Conclusion
451
what any of usnot simply our individual selves but our erascome to
ask and expect, and to read dialogically with biblical texts comes from the
issues of our culture.
So what the ancients do with Saul and God has, in some ways, little to
do with what I am doing, since our eras have such radically different
issues. But what remains constant and ever-deepening is the quest for a
God who wishes us well.3 How we organize hermeneutics and the procedures by which we interpret will grow and change over time. The viewing
of Israel's kings as a type for Jesus the Christ does not work well, in my
view, in this present moment. Nor do Origen's concern to interpret the
Endor passage in terms of the resurrection of the dead, medieval Jewish
concern about the illegality of cremating (royal) corpses, or the effort to
diagnose Saul's specific malady in terms of medieval physiology.4 These
observations are related to issues vital and relevant for those interpreters
but not for me. Similarly, the many historical knots which comprise the
stories of kings are intriguing for scholars who love to disentangle mysteries of ancient cultures. But when the study stops at such goalslet alone
when their processes seem basically flawed or vastly overreachedsuch
strategies seem woefully insufficient to some readers, myself included. It
is much more likely that a reading of Saul which brings out the anguish of
his struggle with the silence and implacability of God will be useful to contemporary readers of the biblical text as Scripture. The question, specified,
comes down to something like this: What can a believing Christian of the
stripe I have just claimed constitutes and situates me, utilizing the methodologies I espouse, draw of value from Saul and God and share with those
with whom I read? When I work with that specific relationship, which
develops (so to speak) over a whole biblical book, I am not making generalizations about God, either the common theological ones (God as omniscient, omnipotent, impassible) nor even the general biblical claims (God as
3. I think in some ways we ask better questions as time goes on, as we are standing higher (benefiting from more shoulders) and can see more; on the other hand, I
think we lose as well, for example in this case, a certain intuition about the unity of
God and the urgency of the God-quest for human life.
4. For these studies, see Saeb0 1996: 523 (for Origen, who was eager to demonstrate how the real Samuel is who appears, not a phantasm); see Saeb0 2000: 81-82
(for the anonymous Jewish commentator who insisted that the people of Jabesh cannot
have burned the bodies of Saul and his sons and so it must mean that goods were
burned) and 2000:375 (for the diagnosis of Saul's malady as melancholia, an excess of
back bile, similar to the appearances of epilepsy).
452
on the side of the poor, as merciful, as electing Israel, and the like). I will
read Saul and God specifically, interrelated (such as they are), though not
as if the book stands alone. How God does with Saul and Saul with God
is not the same as God and Jeremiah, or Job, Hagar and Ruthbut not
wholly separable either.
The discussion is often set up in terms of the Bible's authority, though I
do not think that is the heart of the question. Fretheim usefully asks: Is
every biblical portrayal of God reliable, trustworthy? It depends, I think,
what we are asking such portrayals to make manifest. Fretheim opines, as
have others, that readers like me have no problem in affirming that the
Bible is not very specifically reliable about science. I am even comfortable
affirming that it is not very trustworthy in regard to history (as I made
clear in my Introduction). Here, however, we need to make a distinction
between what the writers and early readers thought and what we may
think. That the biblical authors did not know Einstein's physical universe
is obvious, and so it is no longer feasible to ask their narratives to be adequate in any detail to those factors. What they thought about their/Israel's
past is a more complex question, already touched upon in the Introduction.
What they did or did not think is one thing, and what scholars have construed is another. It seems fair to say that, previously, Old Testament scholars have pushed biblical narratives to ante up historically specific and
accurate information that is not likely to be available from biblical pages.
That is, the text has often been pressed to yield information on which it
remains steadfastly mute. The mistaken categories may be ours rather than
the Bible's. But in any case, I do not press it for much historical accuracy
and have little utilized the historical classics of the field for my work on
kingship. The question, as Fretheim puts itthe 'myth of certainty' that he
seeks to question (1998: 99)is whether it is legitimate to presume that
some data is reliably true, bolted down in the ship for the crossing. I am
not sure, at least in Old Testament/Hebrew Bible terms, that such is the
case. I suspect what we sometimes mean when making that presumption
can be traced to the hope that we have been lashed securely to the mast
and will not be lost to the siren songs we can hear while the ship is crossing! And there is no guarantee in that quarter either, so far as I can see.
So is the portrayal of God in the story of Saul reliable, trustworthy? If
the underlying assumption includes the presence of a reliable transcript of
their actual relationship, then no. This narrative offers a representation of a
relationship, authored in particular circumstances, and serving a set of purposes, as already mentioned several times. Or at least that is how I am
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reading and reauthoring it, with the help of Bakhtin. So the question may
be: Reliable in what aspect? Biblical studies might seek the textual referents in one way, biblical spirituality in another. The paths tend to diverge,
and my choice here, in this final section, is to follow the interests of spirituality. How is the God-Saul relationship drawn and available to me in
language, for me to construct and share with others? It is part of my stipulations that the biblical text is a privileged place for having such an encounter with God, privileged in the sense of W.C. Smith.5 Does God
resemble the portrayal of the deity offered in 1 Samuel? That depends on
how we seeco-author while readingGod in those pages. I will say it is
a useful portrait, startlingly relevant in terms of God's silence to Saul and
the positions Saul takes up in relation to God. Textual indeterminacy is
part of the nature of the language which we interpret, though that factor is
not the root of the matter under consideration. A better way to put the question is to ask how we shape in language our experience of relatedness to
include, in this case, God as a pole of relationality. But part of what I am
maintaining is that the portrayal of God is rich, textured, ambivalent in
many ways, compatible to some extent with other biblical texts but not the
same as, not easily subsumed with them. The silence of God with Saul and
the apparently dysfunctional nature of their relationship is not perhaps the
Bible's default on God's relatedness. Some will find God abusive with
Saul and urge that the passages are harmful. Indeed, another part of our
own era's coming of age has been the honesty to admit that some texts are
potentially toxic, not merely inaccurate in terms of science and history.
The Bible is replete with texts about God that render the deity oppressive
and violent, at least at the surface, toward women, foreigners, the environment. And whether that was the intent of the authoring, it is too often the
impact. Such a claim must be faced squarely. In fact, we need to take open
responsibility for reading those text better, if we can do so. These are not
simply 'dead letter' texts that some may not mind leaving in the Bible, like
the texts on temple sacrifice or, for Christians, the discussion of categories
of clean and unclean food. Some of the God as commander-in-chief material is still quite active, as we know from listening to certain of our contemporaries. That such reading is powerful we can see from the effects of
its being marshaled in the service of violence. So, portrayals about God
are not, for me, of the same caliber as food laws. For some, the fear is that
5. Smith's sense of Scripture is that it does not simply tell of encounters between
God and human beings but actually mediates the mysterious engagement. Scripture is
what humans do, and not simply in the past.
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such weighting of material makes a slippery slope. If we begin to hedge on

the reliability of certain portrayals of divine reality, open the door to some
nuance, then all is lost. But that is not my contention. Rather than being a
choice between a rigid stance and an inevitably slippery slide to mush, I
think the vast multiplicity of portraiture of God has several gifts to bestow
when we take the discourse seriously and attend to it carefully. The multiplicity is highly useful.
First, certain responses to the difficulties of God's portrayal are not
viable, in my view. To assert of pretend that there is no problem, to override the narrative difficulties by asserting dogmatic categories, to insist that
the problems root not in the text but in interpreters, to try simplistically to
rectify the problems of the narratives, or to emend simply to please ourselvesnone of these alternatives is acceptable. Nor is it adequate, for me,
anyway, simply to do a 'paper God'God simply as a character in a narrative. That strategy has its value, not least for dislodging some old chestnuts about God (specifically those maintained abstractly). But in the last
analysis, I do not find it adequate. Rather, the difficulties implicit in certain
portraits of God, such as we find them, need to be faced and acknowledged, worked with methodological consistency and with imagination.
The next question is: How and to what end? How: celebrate the multiplicity of portrayals of God, especially the sense of working amid a variety of
texts. The Bible itself is clear that there is not one wholly adequate portrayal of God. We can note and make use of the fact that certain texts
make explicit the questioning of what God is like. That is, the 'story level'
prompts the discussion among certain biblical characters of whether or not
assertions about God are coherent, reliable, surely in 1 Samuel itself and in
the wider Bible as well. It is the very process of engaging the text, reading
it dialogically instead of monologically, co-shaping it rather than accepting its address as 'given', reading answerably and without alibi, that opens
up the possibility of transformation, which is one of the clearest goals and
foundations of biblical spirituality.
That reading has effects, can change individuals and groups, even whole
cultures (change for good or ill) is key (Fretheim 1998 is useful on these
various topics, as is Schneiders 1999). Part of answerable reading is
querying and taking responsibility for what we are seeing and saying. How
am I reading and with what effect? Who gains, who loses, what is vilified,
what valorized? When I notice the dissonance and non-fits between various parts of biblical narrative, a number of things are in line to happen.
The crunch between merciful and vengeful God flags issues, helps us
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notice what is a problem, obviates the dangers of taking the language and
imagery literalistically and univocally, that is, idolatrously. The resulting
stimulus to imagination is especially crucial. Are there limits on imagination? In one sense, no. I can interpret as I see fit, but I myself want to be
mindful that my readings need to resonate in some way with tradition (in
just what way is up to me to enunciate). I wish to be constructive, not to
add more grief to the universe by my readings. So, I can be creative, put
forth my construction, see reactionsbut I want to be responsible. And
yet in another way, there are limits on my imagination, in that my reading
will have most integrity if it is in accord with what I best think, not just by
myself, but in discussion with others. The point for me is not to show how
deserving 1 am of an orthodoxy or political correctness award but to be as
fully answerable for my reading as I know how to be. Such a reading will
arise from what I know experientially and from what I have been deeply
committed to, will involve self-knowledge and most likely compunction.
A useful device with the language about God is to ask, as one does with
metaphors: How is the symbolthe representation of Saul-with-God, in
this caselike and how is it unlike the subjectthe referent, the capacity
and manner of God to interact with human beings, in this case? When we
are dealing with an apparent non-fit, we need to sort again: Does the
symbol really cease to work to evoke insight, or in fact is the apparent dissonance part of the valuable redescription which generates new seeing,
self-knowledge, change, transformation? As I have tried to do throughout,
I need to take into account several things: the angle of portrayal (whose
appraisals are involved), the genre (what are the dynamics of a hymn
which is part of liturgy, what is operative in a parable), rhetorics (with their
particular strategies), characterization of human beings (in all its richness).
Metaphors and other clearly image-laden language have their own peculiar
workings, which we must shape from our own experience. It seems to me
that part of such 'imag(in)ing' (as Fretheim calls it) calls on me to indicate
what I am doing as clearly as I can do, to stay provisional and not pompous.
2. God-Linked Discourse in 1 Samuel
It is necessary and useful to go back quickly over the story we have read to
bring out the quality of the language that shows relatedness to God. The
main lines of authorial choice are easily summarized in seven points. First,
as we look at discourse, it is noteworthy that God speaks directly in the
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Saul story (1 Sam. 1-2 Sam. 1) basically on only seven occasions (some
22 verses).6 The first and last are the least relevant to the character Saul. In
these framing speeches God addresses Samuel directly (and preliminarily
five times by name) to announce divine plans for the Elides (3.11-14);
toward the end of the story, when David asks God specific questions
relating to strategy (23.2, 4, 11, 12; 30.8), God replies directly, making
prominent the lack of any such reply to Saul's similar requests for information. Beyond those two moments, God also addresses Samuel about the
divine response to the people's request for a king (8.7-9, 22), gives the
prophet clear information about God's choice of the first individual to be
king (9.16-17), points out (when asked) that the 'anointee' is hiding among
the gear (10.22). God tells Samuel of the divine regret for making Saul
king after the Amalekite disobedience (15.11), directs the prophet as to the
identity of the second king (16.1-3,7,12). That is all there is. Most notable
is absence of any discourse addressed to Saul. God under-relates with
Saul, insofar as God speaks only o/Saul and never with him. It is a pattern
shown changed in the representation of the David-YHWH relationship.
The contrast is clear, if not particularly comprehensible. Second, there is
surprisingly little direct quoting of God by other characters (about 14
verses). A Man of God announces God's intent to destroy the Elides (2.2736). Samuel quotes God's review of relations with Israel formally at 10.18
and gives directions to Saul regarding the Amalekites at 15.2-3, 18.
David's men quote God directly at 24.4. Again, the most notable point to
me is the paucity of reported discourse.
Third, what is represented in profusion (more than 200 verses) is character speech about God, where God's words or viewpoint are given indirectly, in reporting speech. Many participate in this exercise. The narrator
has pride of place for assertions and interpretations about what God thinks,
feels, intends (making such comments in about two thirds of the chapters,
for a total of some 66 verses). Running alongside the narrator is Samuel,
who speaks for God, starting at ch. 7 and continues to do so heavily until
David is chosen in ch. 16; Samuel has one more opportunity to speak for
God in ch. 28 (his total comes to about 72 verse portions). Other characters we may call minor (everyone is grouped here except Samuel, Saul,
David and Jonathan) who speak for God include Hannah, Eli, Elqanah,
6. All of these numbers are approximate, since sometimes a portion of a verse

includes a reference, or a single verse includes two references, and so forth. The point
is to see some ratios and patterns.
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Doeg, Ahimelech, Abigail, Abishai and unnamed characters: elders, people, boys/armor-bearers, servants, David's men, the spirit wifeall of
whom contribute approximately 45 verses of opinion about God; foreigners have 14 verses. David speaks of or to God in 34 verses, Jonathan
in 13. It is not important, I think, to catalogue again the detail of what they
say, but it is crucial that all the players talk about God steadily and quite
diversely.
Here I would call attention (fourth point) to the variety of comments
made about God's activity, not simply the content but the many forms or
genres in which such theologizing occurs: vows and promises are made, as
well as prayers uttered, hymns sung, and covenants cut, all of which invite
and presume God's participation, usually explicitly. Blessings, curses, and
affirmations often include God. God is made judge of situations, asked to
select or indicate, to somehow signal a preference. Lots are utilized, also
counting on God's participation. What God thinks, sees, feels, has done in
the past is copiously offered in character speech about God. What God
will do is announced but also queried. To give a rough idea, discourse with
God as a named reference occurs in some 337 of the 837 verses of the narrative under review here, taking up more than one-third of the language.
Construction of God is ubiquitous and varied, especially compared to the
direct discourse of God or even of God's official speaker, the prophet
Samuel.
We may summarize, fifth, how Saul talks about God. The king's 'theology' is intermittent if not quite steady. Saul addresses God directly only
twice: in 14.37 to ask a question to which there is no reply, and a bit later
(14.41) at the scene where the king casts lots between his own kin and the
rest of the people and receives an indication of 'guilt' on the Saulide side.
For the rest of his speech, Saul talks about or almost at God: in 9.7, about
procedures in relation to the man of God; in 11.13, to give credit to God
for the victory of Jabesh Gilead over the Ammonites; at 13.12, to stew over
whether or not he should sacrifice without Samuelrelating his process
retrospectively to Samuel when he explains, implying that God would
expect the move the king makes; at 14.18-19, to start an inquiry with the
ark/ephod when the Jonathan-induced battle with the Philistines begins; at
14.34, when he says the non-blood-draining soldiers have sinned against
God; in 14.39, in an oath promising to have his son die if that is what the
lot suggests; and at 14.44, to confirm he will follow through since Jonathan
has been designated as guilty. Saul talks about God throughout ch. 15: at
v. 13, to bless Samuel; in vv. 15 and 20-21, to refer to his plan to sacrifice
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'ban items' to God; in w. 24-25 and 30, to acknowledge his offense and to
request pardon so he may continue his sacrifice (Saul's most egregious
'lapse' comes here, where in speech with the prophet Saul refers to 'your
God'); in 17.39 to bless the young David who is on his way to face
Goliath in 18.17, to name as God's battles the ones David needs to fight to
win Merab; in 19.7, to reprieve David from the death Saul had in mind; in
22.13, to accuse the priest Ahimelech of inquiring of God for David; in
23.7, to rejoice that God had helped him corner David; and at 23.21, to
bless those informants who seemed to assist. In 24.18-19, Saul talks in
terms of God's helping handle David's presence and begs that God reward
David, and blessing him by God in 26.25. Saul's last talk of God clusters
in ch. 28, where he wants access to the realm of the non-human in vv. 7-8
and 12-14, swears by YHWH that he will not harm the woman assisting
him to do so (v. 10). Saul's most forthright statement about God comes in
28.15, where Saul says in reply to Samuel's asking why he summoned
him, 'I am in great distress, for the Philistines are warring against me, and
God has turned away from me and answers me no more, either by prophets
or by dreams; so I have summoned you to tell me what I should do'.
As already suggested, and I think hardly arguable, Saul's discourse as
well as his character zone more generally shows a failure in general relationality, an increasing picture of royal isolation as the king steadily drives
people from him. His words and those of others around him make evident
that he is not a very effective leader of his people. Similarly, I would suggest he is shownsoundedto be utterly incapable of, unsuccessful in his
relating with God. This inability embeds his 'institutional' failure to do the
'one thing needful', to mind well the relationship between YHWH and
Israel. It comes as no surprise that one who relates clumsily with fellow
humans does badly with God. Saul is drawn to 'do selves', his own and
others, poorly. A sixth contention: the spirit of God (always managed in
the story by the narrator) assists Saul while he is the legitimate king, but
by taking him over, as it were. God's spirit animates Saul without his discernible collaboration, drives him, as it were, instead of working with him.
It is analogous to the non-speaking of God with Saul. Once Saul has been
fired and David anointed, YHWH'S spirit shifts to David and turns hostile
to Saul-struggling-to-stay-king. Finally, seventh, the only extra-human
presence in the story that deals with Saul as a subject is the spirit wife,
who manages the realm of the dead (dealt with statistically above as a
minor character).
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3. How Are the Mighty Fallen?

In the first six chapters of the long narrative of 1 Samuel (Polzin's two
parables), God's relationality with Israel via dynastic sons is previewed.
The characters talk conflictedly and constructively about having sons in
language which implicates God, who may or may not be active in the ways
they suppose. But as we look, a la Bakhtin, for response and co-shaping of
their language, there is little coming back from God. God may be described
variously as silent, patient, permissive, aloof, disconnected. The divine portrait is complex but verbally one-sided, etched in these vignettes almost
entirely from the outside. There is an outcome from the multiplicity of
God-talka sonbut that boy cannot be easily factored to get at the poles
of his production. As suggested above (my Chapter 1), the cacophony of
asking voices moves chaotically, not in substantial synchrony with each
other, so that various characters 'speak' the child somewhat at angles to
each other. A similar one-sided effort to manage a primarily reactive God
can be seen in all the discussion about the fate and agency of the ark, where
the characters all seem to grope in the dark for some way of coping with
its power that will avoid harm. If, as suggested, the ark represents the bond
between deity and people, the humans understand it little.
But the YHWH-community relationship enters a new and slightly more
straightforward genre when the clamor for a king requires action. Its
dynamics are these: the people ask the prophet for a king, excluding from
the consultation their incumbent divine king. The process mines, deepens,
the problem of relatedness. That overlooked divine figure reacts very
strongly, but God, too, resists a direct confrontation with the people, perhaps drawing off the sense of Deut. 5.24-33, where the people have preferred to have an intermediary rather than hear for themselves. In any case,
the peoples' choice to address Samuel without direct address to God is
compounded when God bypasses them in a similar way. The problem of
communication tangles additionally when Samuel's communication of
God's viewpoint is inadequate (at least as we hear the dialogue, distinct
from the summary). The prophet fails to bring back all of the information,
notably the divine reaction, in a timely way, a blurting which articulates
more of the rejection pattern that the people had always maintained, God
tells Samuel. The project of bringing God and Israel into deeper relatedness is off to a poor start, except that the narrative has made clear the
nature of the problem: How do humansprophets includedand God
shape utterances? But God has again, perhaps somewhat passively, gone
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along with a flawed project, even assisted with it by designating the man
for the monarchic job. What we need to notice is the flawed relationality
that runs through the whole transaction, continues to mark efforts to rem
edy what is wrong. Though kingship can, theoretically, go well, the very
pigment of the representation suggests that it will not. To put that point
another way: if a major part of what is needed is a leader to care for the
God-Israel relationship, then de facto this stunted transaction does not seed
it. If means and ends are interconvertible, then the king(ship) will not be
able to accomplish its main purpose.
But God designates Saul as king, with what criteria it is difficult to
guess, since they evidently remain completely hidden. I like the possibility
that Saul is hinted as the unnamed man of Benjamin who had run the news
of catastrophe at Ebenezer (ch. 4), when the ark is lost. In this imaginative
move, 'the Saul' is in a position to have learned something crucial in what
he has witnessed and reportedand from what he saw when he announced
his news at Shiloh. But however that may be, the discourse between Samuel and the designated royal figure focuses upon height, and even God
mentions that topic when selecting the Saul replacement. The possibility
that God set up the first choice so that he would fail cannot be excluded
(see Gunn [1980: 115-31] Exum [1992: 16-42] and Fretheim [1985] for
their sense of this possibility), but it is not my reading, since I do not suppose that is God's way of acting. Representationally, this Saul story is an
after- the-fact language portrait of a failed monarchic project, and so that
is how it has to be drawn. The most important thing to notice as the watershed failures (chs. 13-15) occur, is that, once again, there is an intermediary. No discourse between Saul and God is offered. Saul's two culticmilitary deeds that lead up to the rejection of his line's perpetuity and his
own rule are rooted in the relationship with God that is weak and not
subject-engaged. Whether a set-up or not (by deity, king, or prophet) the
'first firing' is contextualized in Saul's indecision regarding what God
wants in terms of sacrifices. Samuel tells Saul that he misread God. In tha
event, God remains silent, and Saul misconstrues. In the second part of the
same event (war with the Philistines [chs. 13-14]) the same dynamic
occurs repeatedly. Jonathan and Saul read God in diverse ways, and Saul
is offbeat (even as Jonathan is offside). Saul seems slow to start, hesitant
to continue, uncertain as to where his men are and whether he should
inquire of God. When the battle progresses well, Saul misspeaks, misclaims the battle as his, misvows, his son miseats and the hungry men misslaughter. When Saul discovers it, he blames them; and when he finally
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does ask God for a reading, God has nothing to say. In response to the
question Saul entrusts to the lots, the fault is laid on Jonathan. And though
Saul has vowed to follow through by executing the guilty, that does not
happen either. It is a classic picture of cross-purposes, apparently unintentional but still digging its channel deep as it goes.
The low point between Saul and God is perhaps the second cultic-military engagement, where Saul is given a primordially sacred task and fails
at it. Since I have already talked about the scene of ch. 15 in detail, what I
want to mention here is the portrayal of the Saul-YHWH relationship.
Saul fouls up the directionsperhaps not deliberately but in the event,
skillessly. Saul is not intuitive about interpreting God, suffers from lack of
practice, dearth of experience. When the king erects a monument to himself, alibis himself and blames others when confrontedagain perhaps
with plausible righteousnesshe demonstrates that he has not understood
the implications of his charge. When Saul calls the deity 'your God', it is
particularly painful to hear. The ensuing discussion brings out two more
key things. First, what Saul sees as a minor infraction which can be repented of so that sacrifice can proceed is, at least in Samuel's view and
actually in God's, a major miscue. It makes a definitive breach between
King Saul and God. And second, the language that the prophet calls upon
to name these deeds that Saul would twist away from is the heavy, accusatory phraseology of rebellion, idolatry, sorcery, outsized words for the
technicality that Saul is able to admit. As the narrative moves on, it is clear
that Samuel's take is the relevant one. By the end of the three chapters and
two episodes, God has moved beyond the kingship of Saul and started another phase of the monarchy project by selecting David. The link between
deity and first king is such that God walks past Saul, who ducks God's
utterance.
This whole next long phase of the story (chs. 16-27) is rich, as I have
already been at pains to show. But in terms of the divine-human relatedness, its main point is simple. God will not remove Saul, though David is
the king. Saul will not vacate, though the discourse makes clear how his
reign becomes narrowed to a quest to simply hold his place. God assists
David by talking with him directly, at least toward the end of the escape of
David when David addresses several questions about survival tactics to
God. The Saul struggle with God continues, in that Saul clearly wants to
stay king. Saul, whether with full and explicit recognition or not, puts himself at cross-purposes with God, becomes massively resistant to what God
has saidin our hearing once directlyand via Samuel into Saul's ears.
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The pattern is doubled: when at first God chooses Saul, Saul resists. And
later when God is intent on 'unchoosing' Saul, Saul hangs on. That Saul
fails cosmically in his institutional task of the one thing needful is clear
except when viewed as a riddle. That is, Saul makes a poor king except
insofar as he makes visible what is wrong with monarchy (cannot fulfill its
most central responsibility), at least in the experience of Israel and arguably a bit more generally than that. At the human level, personally he is a
failure too, at least in his relationships, which are not done well, at least
until the very end. What saves this figure is his capacity to make certain
things manifest. Throughout this long phase, when Saul talks of God it is
largely boilerplate language: blessings, oaths, references to others' inquiry
of God, claims of what God has done, claims that are at least on occasion
demonstrably not the case.
The cross-purposes animate and motivate all that collapses or implodes
in the reign of Saul. Though the long version of DH sets up the royal failure more in terms of worship offenses, and the major and minor pre-exilic
(named book) prophets who (presumably) run alongside DH talk to some
extent in terms of social injustice and perhaps even more in terms of international matters, what the Saul story shows is the fracture of relatedness.
Saul constructs his own self poorly and others worse. God sits it out with
Saul, draws back, or simply moves on. Though it is clear to us, reading,
that God is promoting the David-kingship, I do not think we have seen
Saul know it until his last night on earth. We heard Saul allow a moment
of insight when he declaims at 18.8, rhetorically and disapprovingly, that
David has all but the kingdom. But this is not really information accepted
and internalized, since Saul bends his energies throughout to thwart David
in just that project. Saul concedes David's position toward the end (24.20),
but again we might say not definitely, since David still indicates fear for
his life (27.1whether honestly or not is impossible to pronounce). And
in any case, that Saul can see David as a usurper is not the same thing as
seeing him as God's anointed. I think part of the representation of Saul
and God is that Saul does not know much of what YHWH isgranted, God
has not shared very much. We may recall here that Deut. 17.19 has
recommended a lifetime of royal reading that would have been instructive
on the topic.
Given this very underdeveloped, tenuous Saul-God linkage, the likelihood for change is not high. So where will any forward motion come from?
I think the possibility emerges right at the end of Saul's life. When he sees
the Philistines moving and massing, he is fearful, as described intensely in
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28.4-6. Saul's desperation is such that he seeks help from the dead,
illegally but effectively. What opens the window here, as the narrator underlines and Saul speaks directly, is the king's acknowledged fear, his articulated desperation, his facing a divine silence that apparently he can no
longer bear. And then the disguise, where Saul constructs himself as a nonking, goes on a quest, thus symbolically and non-verbally conceding God's
preference. Saul's changing of clothes is an utterance of sorts, a tentative
response to God's blunt if wordless pressure. Whom is Saul fooling here?
The question is wrongly phrased: For whom are Saul's secular clothes?
Intent we can only guess at. But effect: I think Saul slips past his royal self
and is shown in a position to catch sight of, to feel a sense of another
option. As already discussed in my ch. 8, Saul's shock in the Endor scene
comes when he hears not that David is king but that God has been the
designer of it. Why this is so disquieting to Saul that he collapses is difficult for readers to appreciate, since it is such old news to us. My sense
my authoring of Saulhas been that he is shown consistently good at putting aside or rising above what he does not wish to acknowledge; he ducks
when unwelcome words fly towards him. We have seen him do it repeatedly. That Samuel told him once that his heirs would not succeed him
(13.14) and once that his rule was over (15.23) may seem to Saul to have
come to nothing, given the fact that from his own angle, his reign continues and David is (chased) out of range. But to learn that not David, not the
many others Saul has accused but God has been Saul's real opponent is
another matter. The narrator relates that the prophet-delivered news shocks
Saul, who topples over, rilled with fear and non-strength, partly but not
wholly due to hunger.
First afraid, then shocked. The next entry to transformation for Saul
comes when someone offers to give him strength. Again, this seems simple, perhaps obvious'you may as well eat while you are here'but it is
much more significant, I think. As I review the whole story of Saul and
others, particularly from his first Samuel encounter onwards, there is no
parallel to this moment. Assuming, as I do, that ch. 25 is a blunt parable
portraying Saul and his intimate others, whatever his own deficiencies, he
is consistently ill-treated by others. Even his allies who try to help him
catch David (ch. 23) are not really his helpers, since that move to eliminate
YHWH'S anointed is not Saul's to make. When the spirit wife, whom I
identify as a wisdom character, gives him a gift, Saulthough first refusingaccepts it. She gets close where no one else has succeeded for some
time, perhaps ever. 'Just eat', she says; you owe me that much.
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The effect of her gift blossoms in Saul's last deed, which requires great
courage. He goes into battle, outnumbered, knowing he will fail. He fights
well and bravely, since he survives the deaths of his three sons. That the
narrator reports this scene undramatically ought not remove it from our
evaluation as a heavy event for a father and a king. When he is alone except for one companion, Saul tries for the last time to evade responsibility.
But, that attempt missing its mark, Saul acts for himself, decisively, without any of his usual revisions. The gift he has been given and has accepted
provides him the strength to do what he needs to do. As already offered,
this move makes sense in the 'institutional riddle' side of Saul, who needs
to resemble Jehoiachin and resolve the end of a dynasty. But at the human
level, it is also well done, and, in my view, a very artful, even profound
way to draw Saul's last moment. The issue is transformation, even if on
the banzai scale. He is offered the gift because there is space for it, opened
up by acknowledged fear, especially by Saul's change of clothes, and then
by the shock of learning something painful that he does not immediately
divert. Saul mentions missing God only at the end of his life, and what he
names that he wants from God is information. I stretch his desire to include relationality. The rather stunted dealings between king and deity do
not change very much at the end, do not reverse in any dramatic way. Saul
does not call out for God and God does not make any new moves, except
that a Sophia character isagainst all expectationdiscernible on the
scene. No one can accuse Samuel of going mushy and romantic at the end.
Tough love is what Saul gets from his prophet, or perhaps just tough talk.
There is no deathbed conversion. Saul does not, Hezekiah style (2 Kgs
20), beg more time. It is perhaps not the greatest exit of a human being, but
it could have been far worse. Now the biblical spirituality question presses,
can in fact double-voice from 1 Sam. 10.27: How can this save us?
4. 'How Can This Help Us?'
The starting point of such interpretation is clearly not simply standard
exegesis of texts. Reading that aims to be transformative toward the ultimate horizon of God rises from a context of daily, immediate, prosaic,
engaged negotiation. Life lived attentively and intentionally grounds such
reading, understanding, and the making of meaning. Language is perhaps
the best place to see, to practice, and to 'grow' such be-ing, both our own
discourse and our interaction with great literature. Participation in discourse exercises consciousness, involves us in intersubjectivity, gives us
A Conclusion
465
multiple, constant opportunities to live participatively, to engage seriously,

to practice imagination. Textsbiblical texts and those speaking intimately
about God and human beingsare great places for our engagement. We
address questions to them and attend carefully as they communicate back
to us, which they do by their language dynamics (which are social, and so
forth), rich in associations from the many places where they have lived. As
the process goes on, I see the text differently and myself differently as
well. Change happens, insight increases, transformation can begin to take
place toward whatever horizon of being we are oriented. Such processes
have driven this whole reading of Saul, as I hope is clear.
That granted, how do I know how to read God and Saul? In Bakhtin's
understanding of aesthetics, I stand outside of the characters in a narrative
like 1 Samuel and read from my particular spot, listening to the discourse
but with a high stake in what I am interpreting. I am not utterly overlapping
them or inhabiting their subjectivity from the inside but drawing them as I
watch them external to me; so to no small extent, I am reading myself, but
not simply that either. The textual Saul and YHWH, beautifully drawn by
an ancient poet, are far from ink-blots. Bakhtin's insistence upon the author's continued relevance, unusual for the late twentieth century, is actually his respect for the authoring process and the durable language art it
offers to interpreters. In any case, I bring the accumulation of all that I have
become and am and place it in dialogue with, in this case, the story of Saul.
As I read 'him', interact with him-and-God against the horizon that includes the Saul character, I place form around him, give him edges, (trans)form and reshape what I find in the language of the text. What I am doing
while reading is to impose form, not once-for-all, dogmatically and finalizingly, but tentatively, provisionally, dialogicallyand not simply in concert with the text but in conversation with many other diverse readers as
well. This movement, which can of course be exploitative, is at its best
generous, benevolent, enriching. Optimally, we enter a subject-subject
relation with what we are authoring/reading, learn much about that other
and about our self. In collaboration with other readersancient commentators, live scholars, diverse 'ordinary readers'we approach the text. As
I deal with Saul-and-God, I take their 'other's' viewpoint and experience
'sympathetically'which does not mean uncriticallyand wager or try
out my sense of it, modifying as I go. This is where the Gandhian nonviolence is so useful, since it makes visual at every level, from intensely personal to widely social, how I am reading and authoring both myself and
the other as I go. The changes, transformation such as occurs, are not likely
466
to remain wholly invisible. The story mediates the experience of orienting

more deeply into God, even if sometimes primarily in negative space.
A major part of what I draw is a result of my particular experience,
whatever I have to draw on that is most authentically experienced by me,
has as much integrity as I can see, is as self aware and honest as I can be.
Crucial in this reading effort is to resist the temptation to simply rest content to accept the given, to read 'theoretist-ally', to import 'store-bought'
categories in my reading, to read inauthentically in some way. There are
various possibilities for this kind of inauthenticity: trying to talk out of
what I do not know, or have not researched is one way. I may simply borrow the cultural categories and experience of others, which may be in
vogue at the moment, or of course speak dishonestly in some less subtle
way. How I read is not unrelated to culture but is not simply others' efforts
and not my own. I must read in terms of what I know to be true. There are
a number of scholarly interpretations of this story where the reading shows
that God sets up Saul to fail, where Saul becomes God's scapegoat, and so
forth. I see that as a legitimate narrative possibility, but my reading of
Godwhich is nourished by the biblical text but arises from many other
avenue of experiencedoes not prompt me in that direction. The categories of culture shape and influence us mightily, but they do not do our
job for us. So the act of reading, interpreting Saul is literally to make meaning, to engage with, interact with, construct and reauthor what I find in the
text. This, I believe, is where I must query, scrutinize with great care, the
horizon toward which I am most fundamentally orienting my life.
Why I should bother, expend such energy at such a deep creation is, for
Bakhtin, a matter of love and art. What we best love we struggle to aestheticize, respectfully, because of our regard for it. We are, again, dealing
both with our own self-portrait and with the representation of what we
deeply love. The gain is insight from moving as close as we can to the
'eyes' of the other, but simultaneously not relinquishing our own vantage
point to do so. Such interpretation has to be done respectfully, neither
simply imposing my sense onto the other nor allowing the other to swamp
and subsume me. In a word, it is done dialogically. I have not been a king,
or a man, or an Israelite, and so forth. But the realm of the silence of God,
the human laziness about God, difficulty of intimacy with God, the resistance of our sort of creature to God when we fear our projects are not
God'sthese I know. One can group biblical characters into those very
few who are represented as having a direct and unmediated face-to-face,
mouth-to-ear relationships with God and the many who do not. Most non-
A Conclusion
467
biblical people I know class themselves with the latter and larger pile. At
the very least, St Augustine speaks for most of us when heeven he
talks of his love for God as 'late'. It is a good descriptor.
What is the result of such reading? My interpretation of Saul-with-God,
attentive to all that has preceded, takes a turn as I mark the moment when
Saul opens a window a tiny crack and is blown suddenly across the room
so that his grip on his own agenda is loosened enough for someone to help
him. Such reading is a practice, a fruit, and an opening to transformation.
That is, my construction of God-with-Saul draws from and enhances my
own relatedness with God, allows Saul to be not a model or an allegory
but familiar terrain which, by shifting suddenly, opens up for me fresh
insight, new opportunity to explore. This pattern which certain biblical
characters, sensitively sketched, make visible, can perhaps be titled mirror
hermeneutics. A well-known and beloved friend is given and grasps a fundamentally fresh opportunity, and something shifts. I, co-authoring such a
moment, deepen my own self-knowledge and shift correspondingly, in this
case toward a more profound awareness of the huge mystery of God's
being with creatures. The fallings of Saul, the eleventh-hour collapse of at
least some of his stubborn resistance to the workings of God's project in
his life, is arguably transformative for him and offers a similar choice to
his careful readers.
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1999
' Postscript: The Laws of Physics and Pan-Deuteronomism', in Schearing and
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2000
'The Trouble with Kingship', in dePury, Romer and Macchi (eds.), 2000:
286-314.
476
Meyers, C.
1994
1995
Miller, C.
1996
'Hannah and her Sacrifice: Reclaiming Female Agency', in A. Brenner (ed.),

A Feminist Companion to Samuel and Kings (The Feminist Companion to
the Bible, 5; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press): 93-104.
'An Ethnoarchaeological Analysis of Hannah's Sacrifice', in Wright,
Freedman and Hurvits (eds.), 1995: 77-91.
The Representation of Speech in Biblical Hebrew Narrative: A Linguistic

Analysis (Atlanta: Scholars Press).
Miller, P.D. and J.J.M. Roberts
1977
The Hand of the Lord: A Reassessment of the 'Ark Narrative' of 1 Samuel
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press).
Miscall, P.D.
1983
The Workings of Old Testament Narrative (Philadelphia: Fortress Press).
1986
1 Samuel: A Literary Reading (Bloomington: Indiana University Press).
Morson, G.S.
1994
Narrative Freedom and the Shadows of Time (New Haven: Yale University
Press).
1999
'Bakhtin, Genres and Temporality', in Emerson (ed.), 1999: 171-89.
Morson, G.S. and C. Emerson
1989
Rethinking Bakhtin: Extensions and Challenges (Evanston, IL: Northwestern
University Press).
1990
Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation ofaProsaics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press).
1997
'Extracts from a Heteroglossary', in Mascovi (ed.), 1997: 256-72.
Mullen, E.T.
1993
Narrative History and Ethnic Boundaries (Atlanta: Scholars Press).
Murray, D.F.
2001
'Of All the Years the Hopesor Fears? Jehoiachin in Babylon (2 Kgs 25.2730)',JBL 120:245-65.
Nelson, R.D.
'Josiah in the Book of Joshua', JBL 100: 531-40.
1981
1997a
Joshua: A Commentary (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press).
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''Herem and the Deuteronomic Social Conscience', in M. Vervenne and J.
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Newsom, C.A.
2000
'Bakhtin', in A.K.M. Adam (ed.), Handbook of Postmodern Biblical Interpretation (St Louis, MO: Chalice Press).
Nichol, G.G.
1998
'David, Abigail and Bathsheba, Nabal and Uriah: Transformations within a
Triangle', SJOT12: 130-45.
Niditch, S.
1996
Oral World and Written Word: Ancient Israelite Literature (Louisville, KY:
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Nielsen, G.M.
1998
'The Norms of Answerability: Bakhtin and the Fourth Postulate', in M.M.
Bell and M. Gardiner (eds.), Bakhtin and the Human Sciences: No Last
Words (London: Sage): 214-30.
Bibliography
2000
Nohrnberg, J.
1995
Noll, M.
1999
O'Connor, M.
1980
1995
Palmieri, G.
1998
Patterson, D.
1993
Pleins, J.D.
1992
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1989
1993
Prior, M.
1997
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1996
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1996
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1999
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1997
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1998
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1996
477
'Action and Eros in the Creative Zone: Kant, Weber and Bakhtin', Dialogism 4: 34-53.
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2000
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478
Rose, M.
2000
Rosenberg, J.
1986
Sacchi, P.
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' Deuteronomistic Ideology and Theo logy of the Old Testament', in de Pury,
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1999a
1999b
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1994
'The "Repentance" of God in the Books of Samuel, Jeremiah, and Jonah',

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1997
'Who Loved Whom? A Note on 1 Samuel XVI 21', VT47: 554-56.
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1995
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Yee, G.
1988
'The Anatomy of Biblical Parody: The Dirge Form in 2 Samuel 1 and Isaiah
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Young, B.H.
1998
The Parables: Jewish Tradition and Christian Interpretation (Peabody, MA:
Hendrickson).
INDEXES
INDEX OF REFERENCES
BIBLE
Old Testament
Genesis
2-3
12-25
29-31
45
69
316
37-50
50,66
41
69
Exodus
2.23
17.14-17
17.18-20
17.19
18
18.10-11
18.15-22
18.19
20.19
23.9-14
25.17-19
25.19
8-11
10.6-17
149
149
149
405
256
Leviticus
11.29
152
Joshua
2
83
3-6
3^1
6-8
3.7
3.9
Numbers
3.27-31
31
31.26
139, 151
32
66
8.23
Deuteronomy
459
5.24-33
250
9.13-21
10
10.2-5
13
14.3-8
16.18-20
17
17.14-20
128
139
201
152
181
128, 180,
186,212,
213,258
12, 185,
212,220
182
213
462
201
418
426
185
386
140
251
251
128
9
Judges
2.11-19
3.31
13-16
14-16
14
14.14
16-21
19-21
207,214
20.21
20.25
20.27-28
20.27
20.35
20.44
20.46
215
215
156
129
215
215
215
214
215
21.11
1 Samuel
1-7
1-3
137,287
443
420
359
9.1-21
9.8-15
10-12
11.35
66
67
189
245
203, 214,
215
158
5
6-9
6
9
287
69
69
423
19
21
141
139
128
250
250
141
69, 137
128, 160
55, 56, 63,
72-74, 79,
107, 114,
116, 119,
128, 145,
161, 162,
180, 193,
195, 292,
394, 417,
429
325, 441
259, 456
1.1-2.12
1.1-2.11
94
83, 89, 91,
111
482
1 Samuel (cont.)
1.1-8
83
139
1.1-3
1.2-7
88
1.3
86
1.6-7
88
86
1.9-18
1.11
86,95
1.12
87
432
1.15-16
1.16
88,91
1.17
87
1.19-28
83
1.20
87
1.22
95
1.25-27
86
1.27
87, 423
1.28
87, 428
2
85,401,
403, 420
2.1-10
92
2.3-10
435
2.5
258, 432
2.7-8
280
2.7
146
2.11-3.21
106
2.11
83, 86,
102
2.12-3.21
102, 103
2.12-17
102
2.18-21
102
102
2.22-25
2.25
140, 255
2.27-36
102, 198,
357
2.30
257
2.34
292, 437
2.35
135
2.36
331
3-14
236
3
140, 190
3.19
378
3.21-4.1
135
3.21
137
4-7
116, 119
126, 127,
130,131,
161, 162

4-6
4.1-11
4.1
4.2
4.3-7.2
4.3-18
4.3
4.4-9
4.4
4.5
4.6
4.7
4.10-11
4.11-18
4.11
4.12-22
4.12-20
4.12-18
4.12
4.13-14
4.17-18
4.18
5-6
5.1-2
5.3-5
5.6
5.7-8
5.9
5.10-12
5.11
6
6.1
6.2-9
63, 115,
118, 130
137, 180,
191,394,
417,423
114, 127,
128, 140,
142, 143,
161, 185
243, 420,
437, 460
159
131, 133
135, 158
159
136
133
292
137, 144,
149
139
117
117
117
133
142, 437
82
117,292
143
133
437
192, 242
143
292
128, 146,
257, 280,
432, 435
133
145
146
147
148
148
149
149
129
150
150
6.6
6.10-11
6.12-13
6.13-16
6.17-18
6.19-21
6.21-7.1
7
7.1-3
7.1
7.2-4
7.2
7.3
7.5-13
7.5-12
7.5
7.12
7.13-14
7.14
7.15-17
7.15
8-12
8.1-5
8.1-3
8.4-5
8.4
8.5-6
8.5
8.6-9
8.6
8.7-8
8.7
133, 153
153
154
154
133, 155
155
156
118, 129
134, 137,
191
136
135
157
133,157
134
159
159
211
131, 133
160
137
160
182
8, 13, 163
176, 177,
187, 194,
205,214
113, 176,
178-80,
183, 187
91, 193,
196,211,
244,251,
318,354,
463
178, 180,
182
160, 292
216
181
182,258
211
178, 182,
212
186, 190
186, 188,
211
74, 255,
Index of References
8.8
8.9
8.10-20
8.10-18
8.10-17
8.10
8.11-19
8.11-18
8.11-17
8.11
8.12
8.14
8.16
8.17
8.18
8.19-20
8.19
8.20
8.21-22
8.21
8.22
9-11
9-10
9
9.1-3
9.3
9.4-10
9.5-10
9.5
9.6-8
278
189
74, 183,
187, 198,
211
178, 184,
187, 195
354
400
185
187
184, 187,
190
184,285
196, 198,
282
212,354
354
196, 206
185, 190
190, 202,
253
185,216,
258
183,211
182,202,
215,300,
350,418
178, 185
186,354
74, 178,
183, 187,
202,212
176-78,
187, 192,
193, 196,
207, 220
177,277
55,216,
244, 292,
433
195
196, 198
197
241, 284
197, 198,
219
198
9.6
9.7
9.8
9.9
9.10
9.11-14
9.11
9.14
9.15-17
9.15
9.16-17
9.16
9.17-10.13
9.17
9.18-26
9.18
9.19-10.8
9.19
9.20
9.21
9.22-25
9.22-24
9.22
9.27
10
10.1
10.2
10.3-4
10.4
10.5-13
10.5-6
10.5
10.6
10.7-8
10.7
198,201
165, 199,
212,219,
457
198
199, 204
219
200
165,219
204
202
354
239, 258
198,215,
288, 350
204
212,350
441
165,219
281
198
165, 190,
202, 205,
208,213,
220, 255
165,205,
210,219,
254, 308
206
432
282
198
184,215,
219,230,
244
198, 206,
254
165, 197
285
349
318
209
236, 350
207, 208
219,23739, 249,
254
207
483
10.8
10.9-12
10.9-10
10.9
10.10-12
10.10
10.11-13
10.11-12
10.11
10.12
10.13-14
10.13
10.14-16
10.14
10.15
10.16
10.17-27
10.17
10.18
10.19
10.20-24
10.22
10.23
10.24
10.25
10.27
11
11.1-11
11.5-11
11.5
11.6
11.7
11.9
208, 237,
243, 276
282
208, 209
318,319
334
208,215
209
216,279,
321
165,249,
435
165
249, 350
209
210
165
198
198,210,
219
211
183, 190,
202, 350
189
211,216,
278
321
165,286,
435, 442
281,442
165,212,
216
187, 195,
212
165,213,
216,279,
464
180, 189,
215,219,
244, 279,
302,401,
436
213
283
165,219
318,319
216,219
214
484
1 Samuel (cont.)
11.12-15
215,216,
254
11.12-13
279
165
11.12
214,219,
11.13
457
11.14-12.25 216
12
177-80,
183, 184,
188-90,
192, 193,
195-97,
215-17,
219,244,
258, 387
12.1-4
178, 187
12.1
187
12.2
181
12.3-4
180
12.3
165, 187
12.4-5
190
12.4
187
12.5
178, 187
12.6-25
179
12.6-19
178, 188
12.6
188
12.10
178, 188
12.11
188
12.12-13
189
12.12
178, 188
12.13-15
190
12.14-15
189,213,
239, 258
12.14
278
12.17
165, 180
12.18
178, 183,
188-90
12.19
189, 190,
198,202,
279
12.20-25
178, 189,
213
12.20
278
12.24-25
258
12.24
264
12.25
252, 264,
387,418,

12.26
13-15
13-14
13
13.1
13.2-4
13.2
13.3
13.5-14
13.5
13.6
13.8-13
13.8-12
13.9
13.11-14
13.11-12
13.12
13.13-14
13.13
13.14
13.15-22
13.16
13.19-22
13.20
14
14.1-23
14.1-15
14.7
14.11
14.18-19
422, 434
190
223, 23032, 234,
259, 460
137,235,
423, 460
137,223,
237, 246,
248, 254,
255,261,
277, 279,
345, 353,
385
243, 248
236
240
241
237
236, 240
242, 430
243
259
238, 257
260
253
250, 457
260, 300,
344, 363,
430,431
257,381
281,340,
379, 463
240
240
286
381
234, 246,
248, 261,
301,331,
339, 347,
355,401,
426
240
287, 336
231,336
243
457
14.24-46
14.24
14.26
14.27
14.29
14.32
14.33-34
14.34
14.36-46
14.37
14.38-46
14.39
14.40
14.41
14.43
14.44
14.45
14.47-52
14.47-51
14.48
15
15.1-3
15.1
15.3-33
15.3
15.4-9
15.8-33
15.10-31
15.10-13
15.10
15.12
15.13-21
15.13
15.14-15
15.14
15.15
15.16
243, 245,
259
253
256
349
247
254
253
457
246
457
292
253, 457
231
253, 457
253
253, 457
279,313
248, 249
279
249
223, 234,
237, 246,
249,261,
277, 279,
345, 353,
372, 390,
401,42527, 430,
438, 457,
461
251
253
292
254
251
279
252
252
254
396
259
253, 254,
457
253
254
457
253
Index of References
15.17-21
15.20-21
15.22-29
15.22-25
15.22-23
15.23
15.24-25
15.26-27
15.26
15.27-28
15.27
15.28-31
15.28
15.29
15.30
15.32-35
15.35
16-27
16-19
16
16.1-13
16.1
16.2
16.3
16.6-12
16.6-9
16.6-7
16.7
16.8
16.9
16.10
16.11
16.12
16.13-16
16.13-14
16.13
254
457
431
255,261
426, 430
278, 363,
463
256, 458
256
278, 300,
344
380
378
257
260,281,
284, 300,
312,338
280
458
257
279
431,461
262, 263,
319,321,
397
241,287,
291,321,
325,353,
366, 377,
426
263, 277,
278, 320
278, 280,
284
279
276
363
334
284
203, 280
156
289
289
285
281
318
283, 334
282,381
16.14-17.54
16.14-23
16.15-16
16.15
16.16-18
16.16-17
16.16
16.17
16.18
16.19-22
16.19
16.20
16.21
16.22
16.26
16.33
16.56
17-18
17
17.1-11
17.8-9
17.8
17.12-23
17.13
17.17
17.23-24
17.24-30
17.25-27
17.25
17.26
17.27
17.28
17.29
263, 282
278, 299
284
284
293
302
308
284, 289,
292
299, 381
285
285, 289,
292
285, 349
285, 286,
300,310,
334, 336,
345, 363,
434, 446
286, 289,
292
289
289
289
350
127, 145,
277, 278,
286, 287,
294, 296,
349, 383,
397
286
286
288
287
156
349
288
288
304, 308,
342
301,302,
304, 306
288,301,
302
301
288
334, 380
485
17.31-39
17.32-37
17.32
17.34-37
17.34
17.36
17.39
17.40-54
17.45-47
17.54
17.55-18.16
17.55-18.4
17.55-58
17.55-56
17.55
17.58
18-19
18
18.1-5
18.1-4
18.1
18.2
18.3-4
18.3
18.4
18.5
18.6-9
18.7-19
18.7-8
18.7
18.8-9
18.8
18.10-11
18.10
293
386
293, 308
377
293
284, 293,
302, 308
290, 458
290
302
349
263,291
291
277, 293,
342, 439
293
296, 308
293, 308,
397
383, 397
244, 277,
287,313,
335-37,
353, 364,
383
300, 339,
354, 384,
400
334
335
293,335
294, 335
335
319,336,
346, 378
294, 299,
300, 302,
305,310
295
305
424
441,443
382
398, 432,
462
297,313,
318
318
486
1 Samuel (cont.)
18.11
302
18.12-16
297, 299,
334
18.13-16
310
18.13
302
334
18.15-23
18.16
305
18.17-19.17 263, 301
304
18.17-19
18.17
301,302,
305, 334,
350, 458
18.18
305, 307,
342
18.20-30
302
18.20-29
334
18.20-27
305
18.20
302, 305
18.21
303,310,
334, 390
18.22
303, 304
18.23
306, 342
18.24
308
18.25
309,310
18.26-27
310
18.28-29
310
18.28
316
18.29
311,334,
339, 364,
377, 384
18.30
311
19-23
398
19-21
353
19
321,335,
383
19.1-7
311,334,
335, 345,
354, 355,
363
19.1
311,318
19.2
315,334,
399
19.4-7
344
19.4-5
312
19.4
344
19.5
350
19.6
335

19.7
19.8-10
19.8
19.9-10
19.9
19.10
19.11-18
19.11-17
19.11
19.12
19.14
19.15
19.17
19.18-24
19.18
19.19-24
19.20-24
19.20
19.21
19.24
20-31
20-26
20-23
20
20.1-42
20.1-23
20.1-3
20.1
20.2
20.3-4
20.3
20.5-9
20.5-8
20.6
20.8
20.10-17
390, 458
313,318
350
334
318
334, 368
334
314
315,316,
318,334
316
316,318
316,318
303,316,
401
263,318
316
334
334
318
318
378, 435
262
337
323, 325,
326,331
241, 293,
301, 326,
330, 333,
347, 354,
362, 383,
384, 390,
397, 401,
404, 432
333
333
334
344, 380,
399
354, 363
336
344, 391
337
340
341, 342,
346
343
250
20.10-11
20.10
20.12-17
20.12-16
20.13
20.14-17
20.14-15
20.16
20.17
20.18-23
20.20-23
20.22
20.24-34
20.24-26
20.27-29
20.27
20.29
20.30-34
20.30-31
20.30
20.31
20.32
20.35-42
20.35-36
20.37
20.38-39
20.40
20.41-42
20.42-22.5
20.42-21.8
20.42
20.45
21-29
21-22
21
21.1-22.5
21.1-9
21.1
21.3-6
21.4-7
21.7
21.8
21.9-14
21.10-15
21.11
22
338
340
339, 354
346
417
384, 442
294,401
377
366
340
346, 354
346
341
341,349
342
390
344
343, 401
363
335, 366
381,432
380
345
346
346
346
346
346
347
347
354,401,
442
347
137
439
347, 383
326, 347
347
347
348
348
350
350
350
363
424,441,
443
339, 360,
Index of References
22.1-5
22.2
22.3
22.6-23
22.6-19
22.7-8
22.8
22.9-10
22.13
22.14-15
22.18
22.20-23
22.23
23-26
23
23.1-14
23.6
23.7
23.8-12
23.10-12
23.10
23.14
23.15-18
23.15
23.16-17
23.17-18
23.17
23.19-29
23.19
23.20-29
23.21
23.22-23
23.24
23.25
383,401,
426
352, 364
284
350
352
326, 352
353
353, 398
401
335,365,
381,390
355
355,381,
401,458
355
430
353, 357
399
290
326,331,
359, 368
375, 38385, 392,
394, 404,
426, 463
359, 365
430
360, 377
383,385,
458
430
377
399
399
360, 365
399
294
383
366, 384
391,401
361,366
368
368
458
384
396
361
23.27
23.28
24-26
24
24.1-2
24.1
24.2-3
24.2
24.3
24.4-5
24.4
24.5-7
24.5-6
24.5
24.6-8
24.6-7
24.6
24.7-8
24.7
24.8-21
24.8-15
24.8-9
24.9-22
24.9-16
24.9-12
24.9-10
24.9
24.10-13
24.10
361
390, 399,
422
326, 359
362, 367
369, 372
388, 407,
439
368, 370
371,37376, 385
388, 392
393, 395
397, 398
403, 407
374
368
374
368
374, 379
399
374
374, 377
79, 385
388,391,
402
379
374
374, 377
378,385,
388,391,
402, 408
379
374
386,391,
408, 435
374
386
388
374, 388
380
388
374, 388
386
380
380, 399
386
380, 399
487
24.11
24.12
24.13-15
24.13
24.14-16
24.14
24.15
24.16-21
24.16
24.17-22
24.17-19
24.18-20
24.18-19
24.19
24.20-22
24.20-21
24.20
24.21-23
24.21-22
24.21
24.22
24.23
25
25.2-4
25.4-9
25.4
25.5-13
25.5
25.7
25.10-12
25.12-13
25.13
25.14-31
25.14-22
25.15
25.18-20
25.21-22
408
381,408
381,408
381
381,408
381
390, 396
390, 408
375
408
375
390
390
381,458
383
384, 442
394
383, 390
391,408,
432, 462
384
394
390, 408
375,381,
422
375, 422
63, 354
368,37174, 382
392-96,
401,407,
408,417,
426, 439
463
396
395
408
396
408
399
395
398
395
395
398
399
399
395
488
1 Samuel (cont.)
25.21
401
25.22
408
25.23-35
402
402
25.25
25.26-29
409
25.26
403, 408
25.28-31
403, 409
25.28-29
408
25.29
399, 403,
409
25.31
395
25.32-35
404
25.33-34
395
25.36-38
395, 404
25.36
404
25.38-39
422
25.39-44
405
25.39-42
395, 409
25.39
409
25.43
344, 405
26
352, 370
371,37376, 378,
384, 388
392-95,
397, 398
403, 407
26.1-2
374, 384
26.1
368
26.2
399
26.3-7
374
26.3-5
385
26.8-9
374
26.8
385,391,
398, 402,
408
26.9-11
386, 406
26.9
408
26.10-11
374, 394,
395, 434,
445
26.10
191,411,
422, 439
26.11-12
374
26.11
387, 435
26.12
298
26.13-16
374

26.14-25
26.14-16
26.16
26.17
26.18-20
26.20-21
26.21
26.22-24
26.23-24
26.23
26.25
27-31
27
27.1
27.4
27.5-28.2
27.29-30
28
28.1
28.4-6
28.4
28.7-8
28.8
28.9-10
28.10
28.12-14
28.12
28.13-14
28.14
28.15-19
28.15
28.16
28.19
28.20
29-30
29
29.1-11
388
389
389, 408
375, 389
374
399
375, 390,
391
374
408
408
375, 408,
422,458
236,416
354,411,
412,41618,426
399, 422,
424, 462
422
416
422
201,236,
412,416,
417,419,
425-27,
431,458
424, 425
463
425
458
378, 427
428
458
458
417
429
435
429
429, 458
431
431
431,432,
435
412
354, 416,
418,426
417
29.1
29.3-5
29.5
29.8
29.11
30
30.1
30.11
30.17
31
31.1-7
31.1-6
31.2
31.3-6
31.4
31.7
31.8-10
31.8
31.11-13
31.11-12
136,424,
425
424
441,443
424
424
354,416,
418,424,
425, 438
417
417
417,425
223, 236,
287, 290,
292, 347,
406, 416,
417,419,
425, 438,
441, 442
434, 436
412
156,401
446
345, 434,
442
412,441
435, 437
435
436, 437
215
2 Samuel
1
1.1-6
1.1
1.2-4
1.6-10
1.8
1.9
1.13-16
1.19-27
1.19
1.21
55, 357,
411,412,
416,417,
419,435,
440, 456
436
437
437
438
438
438
439
440
441, 443,
444
442
489
Index of References
1.22
1.23
1.24
1.25
1.26
1.27
2-A
1
2.5-6
2.27-36
3.11-14
5
5.17-25
5.21
6
6.2
7
8.7-9
8.22
9
9.16-17
10.18
10.22
11-12
12
12.1-12
13-14
14
14.1-20
15.2-3
15.11
15.18
16
16.1-3
16.7
16.12
17
19
23.2
23.4
23.11
23.12
24.4
28
442
347
443
444
443
444
292
441
215
456
456
423
137
141
129, 134,
153
157
456
456
456
337
456
456
456
66
67,314
66
352
67
66
456
456
456
337, 456
456
456
456
284
337
456
456
456
456
456
456
30.8
I Kings
3.16-28
8
11-12
11.30
14
20
22-24
22
2 Kings
6
18.31-32
20
22
25
25.27-30
456
66
129
352
256
427
427
129
427
66
66
464
201
16,418,
420
16
1 Chronicles
3.17-24
3.17-18
6.11-13
6.18-20
8.29-40
9.35-44
17
16
83
83
18
18
2 Chronicles
28.18
154
Ezra
1.8-11
1.8
2.2
3.2
3.8
4.2-3
5.2
5.14-16
5.15
6.7
17
17
17
17
17
17
17
17
17
17
Nehemiah
7.7
12.1
12.47
17
17
17
Esther
4.14
433
Psalms
91
295
Proverbs
1-9
9.1-6
433
433
Isaiah
5.1-7
14.4-6
32.6
66
66
396
Jeremiah
3-5
5.17
18-19
66
66
66
Ezekiel
16
17
18.32
66
66
106
Daniel
5.24-28
66
Hosea
6.6
255
Haggai
2.20-23
17
Zechariah
4.6-10
12.10-14
17
18
New Testament
Luke
14
10.42
INDEX OF AUTHORS
Ackerman, D. 71, 130, 132, 163, 192,

326,411
Ackerman, J. 112, 138, 156, 185, 186,
204,212,241,243
Adlam, C. 28
Albertz, R. 139
Alter, R. 197, 198, 207, 231, 238, 245,
251, 257, 258, 279-82, 285, 288,
294, 302, 304, 315, 343, 348, 349,
399, 424, 434, 437, 442
Amit, Y. 250
Angert-Quilter, T. 419,433
Ayers, C. 174,370
Bach, A. 84, 163
Bailey, R.C. 74,93,223
Bakhtin, M.M. 23, 24, 28, 56-59, 62-64,
75-78, 119-22, 126, 163, 165-73,
226-29, 265, 268, 270-74, 327, 368,
369,412-14
Bakon, S. 294
Bar-Efrat, S. 143, 200, 253, 280, 283,
284
Berlin, A. 145,317,348,399
Beuken, W.A.M. 428-31
Bialostosky, D. 59,77
Boyle, M.O. 404,405
Brenner, A. 399,433
Brettler, M.Z. 66, 249, 432
Brueggemann, W. 283, 294, 424
Camp, C.V. 13,433
Campbell, A.C. 1,6,346,353
Ceresko, A.R. 290
Clark, K. 23, 24, 27, 58, 75, 76, 78, 121,
165, 166, 172, 226, 228, 265, 268,
271,273,329,412-14
Coates, R. 28, 44, 45, 47, 167-69, 171,
174,274
Coats, G.W. 306
Coggins, R. 427
Craig, K.M. Jr 223, 246, 334, 426, 430
Dallenbach, L. 68, 144
Davies, P.R. 3, 5
Deist, F. 182,204
dePury, A.T. 1
Dietrich, W. 2
Dop, E. 28, 76
Dothan, M. 117, 146, 147, 152, 153
Dothan,T. 117, 146, 147, 152, 153
Downey, M. 30, 31
Edelman, D.V. 10, 18, 182, 186, 204,
236, 241, 244, 248, 251, 255, 279,
283-85, 287, 288, 290, 293-96, 300,
306, 312, 315, 317, 333, 348, 349,
354, 357, 360, 378, 380, 381, 388,
390, 392-94, 425, 430, 434, 437
Edenburg, C. 374,392
Ehrlich, C.S. 118
Emerson, C. 20, 25, 28, 58, 60, 61, 75,
77, 120-22, 166, 172, 225-29, 265,
268-73, 275, 328, 329, 370, 412
Eppstein, V. 209
Eskenazi, T.C. 10, 17, 18
Esler,P. 205
Eslinger, L. 138, 140, 142, 153, 154, 156,
182, 189-91, 196,204,205,212,
214,215
Exum, J.C. 112, 235, 239, 283, 302, 314,
317,319,426,427,435,460
Falconer, R. 121, 123
Farrell, J.P. 120, 122, 123
Fewell, D.N. 317,443
Index of Authors
Fokkelman, J.P. 84, 87, 136, 138, 143,
144,147, 151, 152, 181, 191,204,
205, 207, 212, 213, 216, 223, 236,
237, 241, 244, 245, 249, 251, 254,
258, 280, 281, 285, 286, 288-90,
295, 297, 302, 304-307, 313, 315,
316, 318, 333, 339, 343, 346, 348,
349, 353, 358, 368, 374, 378, 380,
382, 385, 388, 389, 392, 394, 404,
405, 416, 419, 424, 426, 427, 429,
436, 437, 439
Fox, E. 87, 198, 208, 257, 262, 283, 290,
294, 360, 402, 405, 442
Freedman, D.N. 440
Fretheim, I.E. 223, 447, 448, 452, 454,
460
Fritsch, C. 256
Frohlich, T.E. 30,31,33
Gardiner, M.E. 447
Garsiel, M. 159, 196, 307, 352, 396
George, M.K. 440
Gerbrandt, G.E. 12, 13, 186
Gitay,Y. 116
Gitin, S. 118
Gnuse,R.K. 105
Gordon, R.P. 196, 374, 392, 423
Green, B. 19,47,302,326,418
Greenstein, E.L. 68, 69, 112
Gunn, D.M. 181,182,201,238,239,
244, 262, 279, 317, 351, 360, 376,
378, 380, 386, 388, 400, 424, 427,
433, 434, 443, 460
Halpern, B. 405
Haught,J.F. 46
Haynes, D. 227
Hirschkop, K. 19, 26, 28, 77, 172, 227-29
Hoffman, Y. 10
Holladay, W.L. 440
Holquist, M. 23-27, 58, 75-78, 121, 165,
166, 172, 226, 228, 265, 268, 271,
273, 329, 412-14
Hopkins, M.F. 273
Japhet, S. 10, 17, 18
Jobling,D. 73, 74, 79, 103, 112, 118,
137, 141, 150, 158, 160, 181, 186,
491
235, 238, 239, 241, 249, 279, 285,

287, 294, 314, 315, 323, 344, 351,
358, 367, 383, 392, 399, 401, 404,
405, 422, 423,427
Johnson, E. 46
Jones, M.V. 230,271,275
Kelly, A. 227, 228, 414, 416
Kent, T. 57, 58, 62, 76, 77, 272
Kessler, J. 281,405
Klancher,J. 269,271
Klein, R.P. 83, 86, 87, 137, 138, 146,
151, 154, 156,158, 181, 188,214,
236, 237, 243, 248, 249, 294, 295,
306, 318, 319, 350, 374, 380, 405,
427
Kleven,T. 437
Knauf, A. 2
Knoppers, G.N. 1, 11
Koczanowicz, L. 24, 26, 414
Kruger,P.A. 257
Ladin,J. 120-25
Leithart, P.J. 404
Levenson, J.D. 344, 392, 396, 399, 405
Linville, J.R. 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 12, 15, 198,
211
Long, V.P. 237, 238, 243, 245, 246, 251,
252, 254-56
Lyke, L.L. 67
Lynch, R.A. 229
Makhlin, V. 413
Malul,M. 436
McCarter, P.K. Jr 83-88, 92, 135, 138,
149, 151, 156-58, 190, 196-98,214,
236, 240, 244, 246, 249, 251, 257,
285, 295, 307, 333, 350, 353, 378,
385, 386, 405
McKenzie, S.L. 2, 8, 11, 188, 190, 198
Medvedev, P.N. 56,59,76
Meyers, C. 92
Miller, C. 298,307,311
Miller, P.D. 141, 148
Miscall, P.D. 85, 138, 149, 153, 158, 160,
181,182,185,213,214,238,241,
243, 244, 248, 251, 254, 257, 280,
287, 304, 306, 326, 350, 357, 358,
492
361, 388, 389, 393, 399, 404, 411,

423,424,431
Morson, G.S. 25, 58, 60, 61, 75, 77, 12022, 125, 126, 166, 172, 225-29, 265,
268-73, 275, 328, 329, 369-71, 412
Mullen, E.T. 1, 9, 10
Murray, D.F. 16
Naumann, T. 2
Nelson, R.D. 68,250
Newsom, C.A. 264, 272, 273
Nichol, G.G, 392, 396, 400
Niditch, S. 5
Nielsen, G.M. 23, 27, 28, 174, 226-29
Nohrnberg, J. 68
Noll, M. 8
O'Brien, M.A. 1, 6, 13
O'Connor, M. 295,440
Palmieri, G. 171,274
Patterson, D. 169, 170, 173
Pleins, J.D. 246, 300, 305, 339, 345
Polzin, R. 1,9, 55, 56, 72-74, 80, 84, 85,
87,91,93, 100, 101, 116, 128-30,
136, 141, 145, 156, 176, 177, 184,
187, 191, 205, 230, 231, 238, 276,
277, 280, 281, 284, 303, 318, 319,
323, 330, 331, 337, 367, 372, 373,
383, 387, 390, 392, 396, 399, 403,
416-18, 435, 437, 439, 441, 442
Prior, M. 3
Prousser, O.K. 378
Pyper, H. 66, 144, 145, 205, 248, 309,
314,357,389,396,436,439
Rehak, C.E. 411
Reis, P.T. 427, 428, 430, 432
Renfrew, A. 265,266
Revell, E.J. 295,316
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Barbara Green How Are The Mighty Fallen A Dialogical Study of King Saul in 1 Samuel JSOT Supplement Series 2003 PDF

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JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT

Sheffield Academic Press

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How Are the

Journal for the Study of the Old Testament

Copyright 2003 Sheffield Academic Press

During her term as Dean of the Graduate Theological Union, Margaret R.

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'A DIFFERENT CLAY': GENRE CONSIDERATIONS AND 1 SAMUEL 1-3

SAUL'S SKIN: THE AUTHORING OF A KING

How Are the Mighty Fallen?

INCAPACITY FOR ANSWERABILITY:

AT THE EDGE: SAUL'S DISCOURSES OF DESIRE (1 SAMUEL 16-19)

'ONLY I AM LEFT TO TELL THE TALE' :

SLUNG FROM THE HOLLOW OF A SLING:

David Noel Freedman (ed.), The Anchor Bible Dictionary

How Are the Mighty Fallen?

How Are the Mighty Fallen?

least a modest if indirect contribution to make in that sphere by insisting

How Are the Mighty Fallen?

How Are the Mighty Fallen?

proceed in terms of my basic methodology of genre in particular, which

How Are the Mighty Fallen ?

Mullen proceeds to demonstrate ways in which the DH can be seen to

the contribution of the Deuteronomic legislation on the king,14 and how

How Are the Mighty Fallen?

How Are the Mighty Fallen?

How Are the Mighty Fallen?

that of his successor and uncle Zedekiah. The Babylonians themselves,

How Are the Mighty Fallen?

in the absence of those exiled early in the century. The question to be

How Are the Mighty Fallen?

How Are the Mighty Fallen?

How Are the Mighty Fallen?

Clark and Holquist offer two attempts to position the concept:

The concept is specifically modern, arising in the twentieth century's

thought to reconceptualize epistemology the better to accord with the new

How Are the Mighty Fallen?

Why is dialogism helpful, and what proceeds differently for us as a

How Are the Mighty Fallen?

the making, provides a serious and deep critique of Bakhtin, or perhaps

How Are the Mighty Fallen?

or rely on assumptions that undergirded earlier worldviews. But neither

paschal mystery of Jesus Christ, in the context of the Church community

How Are the Mighty Fallen?

on the many differences among readers. Even historically focused biblical

How Are the Mighty Fallen?

How Are the Mighty Fallen?

For her, the biblical text mediates an encounter with God.

How Are the Mighty Fallen?

medium of meaning (in some cases, of revelation). What gave rise in

How Are the Mighty Fallen?

How Are the Mighty Fallen?

to read uncritically, thematically, selectively in terms of what they already

How Are the Mighty Fallen?

does Schneiders, upon New Testament texts. Undeveloped in her writing

them systematically in Chapter 8 to demonstrate the consistence of his

34. Coates 1998: 98, makes a similar point.

How Are the Mighty Fallen?

festation of God's care for humans in the incarnation is made so unique

becomes Bakhtin's preferred mode of talking about authoring a hero as the

How Are the Mighty Fallen?

a historical context, granted one that is hypothetical but not necessarily