King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel (Ballantine Reader's Circle) (6 page)

Then, curiously, Samuel conducted a drawing of lots among the twelve tribes of Israel with the apparent purpose of selecting the man who would be king.
¹⁹
Since God had already directed Samuel to anoint Saul as king,
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the lottery was something of a sham. Still, the people watched as the first lot fell to the tribe of Benjamin, the second lot fell to the clan of Matri, and then the drawing of lots continued among the members of the clan, man by man, until the young man named Saul was finally selected, just as Samuel had known all along.

But at the moment of his selection, Saul was nowhere to be seen. As if to signal the sorry fate that awaits Saul, the biblical
author gives us a moment of burlesque that makes Saul seem like a fool rather than an anointed king.

“Will the man be coming back?” a befuddled Samuel asked God.

“There he is,” said God, “hiding among the baggage.” (1 Sam. 10:22) (NEB)

At the very moment when he was to be acclaimed as the first king of Israel, Saul was cowering behind the baggage that was piled up around the encampment of the Israelites at Mizpah. Thus tipped to Saul's whereabouts by God himself, Samuel flushed the reluctant king out of his hiding place and presented him to the crowd.

“Do you see him whom Yahweh has chosen,” asked Samuel, calling attention to the tall young man who now stood in plain sight and loomed head and shoulders above the rest of the crowd, “that there is no one else like him among all the people?”

“Long live the king!” cried the mob, satisfied at last to have a king of their own like all the other nations of the world. (1 Sam. 10:22–25) (AB)

Still, Saul was not acclaimed by every man among the people of Israel. Rabbinic tradition depicts him as a giant, tall and imposing, but we may suspect that some doubters in the crowd looked on him and saw only a gawky youth. The ancient rabbis regarded Saul as a model of humility because he hid from his own coronation, but some of the Israelites would have seen it as a sign of timidity or perhaps even cowardice. To them, the ass-herder who stumbled into kingship hardly seemed worthy of the honor.

“Saul went to his house in Gibeah, and there went with him men of valour, whose hearts God had touched,” the Bible reports. “But certain base fellows said: ‘How shall this man save us?’ And they despised him.” (1 Sam. 10:26–27)

Saul's kingship was quickly put to the proof by an act of aggression and a threatened atrocity from one of the traditional enemies of
Israel, the king of neighboring Ammon.
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The army of the Ammonite king boldly encamped outside Jabesh-Gilead, one of the frontier towns of Israel on the far side of the Jordan River, and the enemy king threatened to attack and destroy the town. Panic-stricken by the sight of the approaching army, the townspeople offered to submit to the rule of Ammon, but the enemy king responded with contempt to their offer to make peace through abject surrender.

“On this condition will I make it with you,” the king of Ammon taunted, “that all your right eyes be put out.” (1 Sam. 11:2)

The town elders begged for a respite of seven days in which to consider the grotesque offer, and the king of Ammon inexplicably consented. Messengers were promptly dispatched to Saul with a desperate plea for rescue. They found the newly crowned king at work in the fields of Gibeah, trudging behind a brace of oxen.

What King Saul did next offers a glimpse into the unsettled politics of ancient Israel in the earliest days of monarchy. Israel was still only a loose and informal confederation of tribes, not a national state, and the newly minted king could not count on mustering up an army by issuing a call to arms to the various tribes. So Saul chose to use threat and coercion to create a national army to go to the rescue of the besieged border town of Jabesh.

The same bloody gesture had been used once before to raise an army in Israel, when the Levite traveler hacked the dead body of his concubine into pieces in the very same town of Gibeah to incite a punitive campaign against the tribe of Benjamin. Now the first king of Israel—ironically, a Benjaminite—used a similar signal to raise a national army to go to war against the Ammonites. The
grotesque call to arms had worked once before, and according to the Bible it worked again.

“And the dread of the Lord fell on the people,” the Bible confirms, crediting the fear of God rather than the more palpable threat issued by Saul himself, “and they came out as one man.” (1 Sam. 11:7)

An army of 330,000 soldiers rallied to the king's call. Saul, suddenly transformed from a plodding farmer into a daring battlefield commander, was inspired to send the embattled people of Jabesh a message that rang with kingly bravado. “Tomorrow, by the time the sun is hot,” Saul promised them, “ye shall have deliverance.” (1 Sam. 11:9)

Saul proved to be an able tactician. The enemy was put to rout by a surprise attack, “so that two of them were not left together.” (1 Sam. 11:11) Yet even at the moment of triumph, Saul was reminded that his political adversaries remained at large in Israel. A crowd approached Samuel and demanded the blood of the Israelites who had dared to oppose Saul's kingship. “Who is he that said: ‘Shall Saul reign over us?’ ” they railed at the old prophet. “Bring the men, that we may put them to death.”

Saul himself silenced their call for vengeance, adopting the statesmanlike stance that a victor in battle can afford to strike. “There shall not a man be put to death this day,” he declared, “for today the Lord hath wrought deliverance in Israel.” (1 Sam. 11:13) Saul resolved to take advantage of the momentary surge of enthusiasm among the people: a second convocation was held, this time in the city of Gilgal, and “there they made Saul king before the Lord.” (1 Sam. 11:15)
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All of these ceremonials and convocations, of course, are profoundly at odds with what we have been taught to believe about the deity who is described in the Hebrew Bible. God is supposed to be all-powerful, but it turned out that his designation of Saul to be king of Israel was not enough to make it so—Samuel was obliged to engage in politicking and public relations in order to put Saul on the throne and keep him there. God is supposed to be all-knowing, but the Almighty apparently did not foresee that Saul would bungle the kingship that Samuel procured for him. God, it seems, is perfectly capable of making a mistake, and he made one when he instructed Samuel to anoint Saul. The twice-crowned king of Israel was already doomed.

Saul's tactical victory in a skirmish with the king of Ammon did nothing to warn off the enemy that represented a far greater threat to Israel—the Philistines. The Bible suggests that the Philistines so dominated Israel that they were able to forbid metalsmithing lest the Israelites make swords or spears for themselves. “No blacksmith was to be found in the whole of Israel,” the Bible reports. “The Israelites had to go down to the Philistines for their ploughshares, mattocks, axes, and sickles to be sharpened.” Only Saul and his son Jonathan possessed proper weapons, and the rest of the Israelites were forced to content themselves with crude darts and flint-edged weapons. (1 Sam. 13:19–20, 22, 14:13) (NEB)

The kingdom of Saul, in fact, was occupied territory. Even Gibeah, the town where Saul lived and reigned, remained under the authority of a governor appointed by the Philistines. And Saul was unable or unwilling to engage in a war of liberation against the Philistines. He had dismissed the bulk of his army after the encounter with the Ammonites, and he commanded only three units of picked men. But his son Jonathan, brave but impulsive, acted on his own initiative and singlehandedly assassinated
the governor of Gibeah. Word quickly reached the Philistines: “The Hebrews have revolted.” (1 Sam. 13:3)

Jonathan's act of political terrorism forced his father's hand. Saul summoned the demobilized soldiers of his army to rally at a place called Michmash. But the Philistines fielded a far more powerful force, and Saul's fresh muster began to slip out of camp. At last, Saul found himself with an army of only six hundred men, and he faced three thousand charioteers, six thousand cavalrymen, and “an army like the sand on the seashore in number.” (1 Sam. 13:5) (AB) To strengthen the resolve of the few who remained under his command, Saul decided to make a blood offering to Yahweh.

His pious impulse, however, took a bad bounce. Samuel had already instructed the king to await his arrival so that the holy man himself could officiate over the solemn ritual of sacrifice. Saul was to wait seven days, but a full week passed and Samuel had not yet arrived. So the king, full of anxiety and out of patience, acted on his own initiative. “Bring the holocaust
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and the communion offering to me!” he ordered. (1 Sam. 13:9) (AB) And then, just as the victims of sacrifice were going up in smoke on the altar of Yahweh, Samuel showed up.

“What have you done?” Samuel demanded in horror at the sight of the burnt-offering.

“When I saw that the army had begun to drift away from me and that you did not come in the appointed number of days and that the Philistines were gathering at Michmash,” the young king burbled in a desperate effort at self-justification, “I said to myself, ‘Now the Philistines will come down against me at Gilgal—but I have not entreated the Lord's favor!’ So I took it upon myself to offer up the holocaust.”

“Thou hast done foolishly,” scolded Samuel. If Saul had only heeded the command of Yahweh as conveyed by Samuel, his kingdom would have lasted forever. “But now thy kingdom shall not continue,” the old prophet warned. “The Lord hath sought him a man after his own heart, and the Lord hath appointed him to be prince over his people.” (1 Sam. 13:13–14)

The reign of King Saul was already in sharp decline, and those who had so recently anointed him—God
and
Samuel—were ready to abandon him. A man of God's own choosing, a man after God's own heart, his identity as yet unrevealed, would replace him on the throne of Israel.

The man who would be king is David.

Saul and his army triumphed over the Philistines in the battle of Michmash in spite of his botched sacrifice to Yahweh and the dire words of Samuel. Saul then continued to campaign successfully against all the traditional enemies of Israel, not only the Philistines but also the armies of Moab, Edom, and Ammon,
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three kingdoms that lay along the eastern frontier of the land of Israel. He fought, too, against the feared and hated Amalekites, a nomadic tribe of the Judean desert that had harried the Israelites during their wanderings in the wilderness. But as it turned out, Saul's campaign against the Amalekites was the occasion for one final blunder, and Saul forfeited the favor of God once and for all.

Samuel had passed along to Saul some very specific and exceedingly bloodthirsty instructions on how to wage war against the Amalekites. “I am resolved to punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel, how they attacked them on the way up from Egypt,” God instructed Samuel to tell Saul. “Go now and fall upon the Amalekites and destroy them, and put their property under ban.” (1 Sam. 15:2) (NEB) The “ban” to which the biblical text refers—the Hebrew word is
herem
—was “the grimmest of the rules of Israelite holy war,”
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and the functional equivalent of what the modern world calls genocide, as Yahweh himself made plain. “Spare no one,” Samuel commanded Saul in the name of God. “Put them all to death, men and women, children and babes in arms, herds and flocks, camels and asses.” (1 Sam. 15:2) (NEB)

Saul raised a new army—the Bible reports that the army of six hundred now swelled to some two hundred thousand men—and
marched against the Amalekites. He dutifully and mercilessly put to the sword all but one of the Amalekites. But he was not dutiful or merciless enough to please the cranky and demanding Yahweh, and God's patience finally ran out.

First Saul allowed the Kenites, a tribe of nomadic coppersmiths who lived in the same precinct, to flee into the wilderness before the killing of the Amalekites began in earnest. Moses had married a Kenite woman and fathered his two sons with her, and now Saul recalled that the Kenites had “showed kindness to all the children of Israel, when they came up out of Egypt.” (1 Sam. 15:6)
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Next Saul spared the life of the king of the Amalekites, apparently recognizing a kindred spirit in a fellow monarch. Finally he set aside “the best of the flock and the herd—the fat ones and the young ones—and every good thing” as a prize of war for himself and his victorious army. (1 Sam. 15:9) (AB)

God was enraged by Saul's refusal to obey his plain order to kill
every
living thing among the Amalekites—men, women, and children, and their cattle, too. “I repent of having made Saul king,” God confided to his prophet, “because he has turned his back on me and has not obeyed my commands.” (1 Sam. 15:10–11) (NEB)

Samuel trekked out to find Saul and deliver the news of God's displeasure. As it happened, the unsuspecting king had just finished building a monument to himself and offering some of the booty he had seized from the Amalekites as a sacrifice to Yahweh. Foolish and vain, Saul had apparently talked himself into believing that he had been compliant enough to keep Yahweh's favor.

“May you be blessed by Yahweh!” Saul hailed the prophet. “I have carried out Yahweh's command.” (1 Sam. 15:13) (AB)

“What then is this bleating of sheep in my ears? Why do I hear the lowing of cattle?” demanded a sarcastic Samuel, pointedly reminding Saul that he was supposed to have slain the very cattle that now idled in the pens where they were being kept for the pleasure of the king and his men. “The Lord sent you with strict instructions to destroy that wicked nation, the Amalekites; you were to fight against them until you had wiped them out.
Why then did you not obey the Lord? Why did you pounce on the spoil and do what was wrong in the eyes of the Lord?” (1 Sam. 15:18–19) (NEB)