1 Samuel: The People Ask for a King

At a Glance

Who wrote it: Unknown. It is named after the prophet Samuel, who dies partway through it. It is part of the long history from Joshua to Kings, built from older stories about Saul and David.

When: It is set in the 1000s BC. It was edited into its present form in the 600s and 500s BC. In my day 1 and 2 Samuel were one scroll.

Where it fits: The turn from judges to kings. It begins with Samuel, the last of the judges (1 Samuel 7:15), and ends with the death of Saul, Israel’s first king. David’s reign follows in 2 Samuel.

Where I quote it: David eating the holy bread (Mark 2:25–26, retelling 1 Samuel 21:1–6). Luke gives my mother a song built on Hannah’s (Luke 1:46–55; 1 Samuel 2:1–10).

If you only read three chapters: 1 Samuel 2, 1 Samuel 8 and 1 Samuel 17.

Words to Know

Anointed — in Hebrew mashiach, which gives you the word Messiah. In Greek it is christos, which gives you Christ. In this book it means a king, crowned by having oil poured on his head.

Ark of the covenant — the sacred chest that held the tablets of the Law.

Philistines — a people on the southern coast, Israel’s great enemy in this book.

Show bread — twelve loaves set out before God in the sanctuary each week, to be eaten only by the priests.

The Book in Brief

1 Samuel tells how Israel got its first king, and how David, the man who would replace him, rose to fame.

Chapters 1 to 7 belong to Samuel. His mother Hannah cannot have children. She prays at the sanctuary at Shiloh and promises the child to God. When Samuel is born, she brings him to serve the old priest Eli, whose own sons are corrupt. As a boy, Samuel hears God calling him in the night. Then the Philistines defeat Israel, capture the ark of the covenant and kill Eli’s sons, and Eli dies at the news. The ark brings plagues on the Philistine towns, so they send it back. Samuel leads Israel as prophet and judge.

Chapters 8 to 15 belong to Saul. When Samuel is old, the people demand a king. Samuel warns them what a king will take, then anoints Saul, a tall young man from the tribe of Benjamin. Saul rescues the town of Jabesh from the Ammonites and fights the Philistines, helped by his brave son Jonathan. But he disobeys Samuel twice, and Samuel tells him that God has rejected him as king.

Chapters 16 to 31 belong to David. Samuel anoints the shepherd boy David in Bethlehem. David comes to court to play the harp for Saul, kills the Philistine giant Goliath, becomes Jonathan’s closest friend and marries Saul’s daughter Michal. Saul grows jealous and tries to kill him, and David runs. He lives as an outlaw with a band of men in the hills and the wilderness, and twice he spares Saul’s life. Samuel dies. In the end David takes refuge with the Philistine king of Gath.

On the eve of a great battle, Saul goes to a woman at Endor who calls up the dead, and Samuel rises to tell him he will lose. The Philistine lords send David away before the fighting, and he goes back to rescue his men’s families from an Amalekite raid. On Mount Gilboa the Philistines defeat Israel. Jonathan is killed, and Saul falls on his own sword.

My followers called me the Christ. The word is Greek, and it translates the Hebrew mashiach, anointed. In this book you learn what it meant.

When Samuel makes Saul king, he takes a flask of oil and pours it on Saul’s head (1 Samuel 10:1). When he chooses David, he does the same (1 Samuel 16:13). An anointed one was a king. When David refuses to kill Saul, even though Saul is trying to kill him, it is because Saul is the LORD’s anointed (1 Samuel 24:6).

So when people called me Christ, they were calling me a king. The Romans understood that perfectly. That is what they wrote over my cross.

Hannah’s song

The book opens with a woman who cannot have children. Hannah prays in the sanctuary so hard that the priest thinks she is drunk. She gives birth to Samuel and gives him to God’s service.

Then she sings. Listen to what she sings about:

The LORD makes poor and makes rich. He brings low, he also lifts up. He raises up the poor out of the dust. He lifts up the needy from the dunghill to make them sit with princes (1 Samuel 2:7–8).

Now listen to the song Luke gives my mother when she is carrying me:

He has put down princes from their thrones, and has exalted the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things. He has sent the rich away empty (Luke 1:52–53).

Luke built my mother’s song on Hannah’s. Two women, a thousand years apart, singing that God turns the world upside down. I was raised in that song before I could speak.

Give us a king

When Samuel grows old, the people come to him and say, Now make us a king to judge us like all the nations (1 Samuel 8:5).

God tells Samuel that the people are not rejecting him. They have rejected me as the king over them (1 Samuel 8:7). And God tells Samuel to warn them what a king will do.

So Samuel tells them. A king will take your sons for his chariots and his army. He will take your daughters to be his perfumers, cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and give them to his officials. He will take a tenth of your grain and your flocks. He will take your servants and your donkeys. And you will be his servants (1 Samuel 8:11–17).

You will cry out in that day because of your king whom you will have chosen for yourselves; and the LORD will not answer you in that day (1 Samuel 8:18).

The people said they wanted a king anyway. They got one.

Go deeperWhat the kings of Canaan really took

Samuel’s list of what a king will take is not just a prophet’s nightmare. It reads like a description of how kings in that part of the world really ran their kingdoms.

In 1928 a farmer ploughing near the coast of Syria broke into an ancient tomb, and archaeologists soon uncovered Ugarit, a Canaanite city-kingdom destroyed early in the 1100s BC. Its archives held thousands of clay tablets, among them the legal records of its kings, written in Akkadian. In 1956 the scholar Isaac Mendelsohn set these records beside Samuel’s warning (1 Samuel 8:11–17). The kings of Ugarit drafted men for their chariots and for forced labor. They took fields and vineyards and gave them to their officials. They collected a tenth of the harvest. Mendelsohn argued that Samuel was describing the real Canaanite kingship of his age, not a tyranny imagined by a later writer.¹ Others still think the speech was shaped later, with the forced labor of Solomon in mind (1 Kings 5:13–14; 12:4).²

Israel’s own law tried to put a fence around the king. Deuteronomy says that he must not multiply horses, wives, or silver and gold, and that he must copy out the Law and read it all his life, that his heart not be lifted up above his brothers (Deuteronomy 17:16–20). Solomon, the richest king Israel ever had, gathered all three (1 Kings 10:14–29; 11:3).

Obedience and sacrifice

Saul starts well and falls apart. He is jealous, impatient and afraid.

When Saul disobeys a command and then tries to make up for it by offering sacrifices, Samuel tells him, Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice (1 Samuel 15:22).

Hosea says something close, centuries later: I desire mercy, and not sacrifice (Hosea 6:6). I quoted Hosea’s line twice to the Pharisees (Matthew 9:13; 12:7). The idea that God wants your life, not your offerings, is old in my scriptures.

You should also know what Saul disobeyed. In 1 Samuel 15, God commands the destruction of the Amalekites, man and woman, infant and nursing baby (1 Samuel 15:3). Saul spares their king and the best livestock, and for this he loses his kingdom. It is one of the hardest chapters in the scriptures, and I will not explain it away.

The heart

God sends Samuel to Bethlehem to anoint a son of Jesse. Jesse’s sons pass in front of Samuel one by one, tall and handsome, and each time God says no.

God tells Samuel, I don’t see as man sees. For man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart (1 Samuel 16:7).

The one God chooses is the youngest, who is not even there. He is out in the fields with the sheep. They have to send for him. His name is David.

Goliath

Then comes the most famous fight in the world. The Philistine giant Goliath challenges Israel, and David, a boy with a sling, kills him with one stone (1 Samuel 17).

Two honest things about that story.

First, his height. In the Hebrew text your Bible usually follows, Goliath is six cubits and a span, about nine feet nine inches. In the oldest copy we have, among the Dead Sea Scrolls, and in the Greek translation, he is four cubits and a span, about six feet nine inches.³ Still a giant to a farm boy. Not a monster.

Second, look at 2 Samuel 21:19. There the Hebrew text says a man named Elhanan, also from Bethlehem, killed Goliath the Gittite. Chronicles later smooths this over by saying Elhanan killed the brother of Goliath (1 Chronicles 20:5).⁴ Two stories about who killed the giant both survived in my scriptures, and nobody threw either one out.

Go deeperThe shorter Goliath story in the Greek Bible

There is a third thing worth knowing about the Goliath story, and it is bigger than the other two.

Read 1 Samuel 16 and 17 straight through, and something is odd. At the end of chapter 16, David is already at Saul’s court, playing the harp for him, and Saul makes him his armor bearer (1 Samuel 16:21–23). Then in chapter 17 David is back with the sheep. After he kills Goliath, Saul asks his general, Abner, whose son is this youth? (1 Samuel 17:55), as if he had never seen him.

The oldest form of the Greek translation does not have this problem, because it does not have those verses. It tells a much shorter story. It leaves out David’s errand to bring food to his brothers, Saul’s question about whose son he is, the scene where Jonathan gives David his robe and his sword, and several other passages in chapters 17 and 18. In all, about forty to forty-five percent of the Hebrew story is missing.⁵

Which came first? In 1986 four scholars published a book in which each argued his own answer. Two of them, Dominique Barthélemy and David Gooding, held that the shorter text was cut down from the longer one, perhaps to remove its difficulties. The other two, Johan Lust and Emanuel Tov, held that the Greek preserves an older and shorter Hebrew story, and that the longer Hebrew text was made by weaving a second account of how David came to Saul into the first.⁵ The question is still open. Either way, the scriptures came down to me in more than one form.

The man in debt

When Saul turns on David, David runs. He becomes an outlaw in the hills.

Look at who joins him. Everyone who was in distress, everyone who was in debt, and everyone who was discontented, gathered themselves to him; and he became captain over them (1 Samuel 22:2).

Israel’s greatest king started out as the leader of a band of debtors. My people never forgot that about him.

Go deeperOutlaws in the hills

David’s band of debtors and malcontents had a long history behind it.

More than three hundred years earlier, the kings of Canaan were writing to Pharaoh in Egypt and complaining about the Habiru. The word did not name a nation. In letters and records from Mesopotamia to Egypt, it meant people who had fallen out of the ordinary order of things: runaways, refugees, ruined men, and bands of fighters who hired themselves out to whatever lord would keep them.⁶

Scholars have long noticed how much David’s band looks like one of these. Men in distress and debt gather to a leader in the wilderness (1 Samuel 22:2). They live by protection and by raiding (1 Samuel 25:15–16; 27:8–9). When Saul presses too hard, David takes his six hundred men over to the Philistine king of Gath, who gives him a town of his own (1 Samuel 27:2–6). In the book of Judges, Abimelech and Jephthah led bands like this, and of Jephthah the book says, Outlaws joined up with Jephthah, and they went out with him (Judges 11:3).⁶

Then there is the word Hebrew. In 1 Samuel the Philistines call the Israelites Hebrews, and once the book mentions the Hebrews who were with the Philistines before, who changed sides in the middle of a battle (1 Samuel 14:21). Some scholars once thought the Habiru and the Hebrews were simply the same people. Most now think they were not. But some think that in a few of these stories, Hebrew still carries a trace of the old meaning: an outsider, a man without a place.⁷

The holy bread

On the run, David comes alone to the priest at Nob and asks for bread, saying his young men are waiting nearby. The only bread there is the show bread, the holy loaves only priests may eat. The priest gives it to him (1 Samuel 21:1–6).

When the Pharisees attacked my friends for picking grain on the Sabbath because they were hungry, I pointed to this story. Did you never read what David did, when he had need, and was hungry—he, and those who were with him? How he entered into God’s house at the time of Abiathar the high priest, and ate the show bread (Mark 2:25–26).

And here I have to be honest with you. In 1 Samuel, the priest is not Abiathar. It is his father, Ahimelech. Either I misspoke, or Mark did. When Matthew and Luke retell the story, they quietly leave the name out (Matthew 12:3–4; Luke 6:3–4).⁸

The point stands either way. When people were hungry, the holy bread fed them. The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath (Mark 2:27).

Two chances to kill a king

Twice David has Saul at his mercy, once in a cave and once asleep in his camp, and twice he refuses to kill him (1 Samuel 24 and 26). He cuts off a corner of Saul’s robe to prove he could have, and even that troubles his conscience.

The book ends with Saul dead on Mount Gilboa, fallen on his own sword after a lost battle (1 Samuel 31:4). The people got the king they asked for, and he died the way kings usually die.

Check It Yourself

Look up: 1 Samuel 8:10–18.

You will find: a list of everything a king will take from you, delivered before Israel ever had one.

Then compare 1 Samuel 21:1–6 with Mark 2:25–26. Find the priest’s name in each.

The Short Version

• Anointed means Messiah in Hebrew and Christ in Greek. In this book it means a king with oil on his head.
• Hannah’s song about God lifting the poor is the model for my mother’s song in Luke.
• Samuel warned that a king would take your children, your fields and your harvest, and the people chose one anyway.
• Two different men kill Goliath in my scriptures, and the giant’s height differs between manuscripts.
• I used David eating the holy bread to defend the hungry, and in Mark the priest’s name is wrong.