1 Samuel 17:(1a, 4-11, 19-23), 32-49 and Psalm 9:9-20 or 1 Samuel 17:57-18:5, 18:10-16 and Psalm 133  •  Job 38:1-11 and Psalm 107:1-3, 23-32  • 2 Corinthians 6:1-13  • Mark 4:35-41

I was seventeen years old when I first attempted to read Homer’s Iliad, and I thought myself very clever when I noticed that, when the Trojans and Achaeans met on the battlefield outside the city walls, they challenged each other to single combat in the same manner that Goliath challenged Saul.

Thirty years later I’m still too frequently tempted to think myself very clever.

Certain questions started occurring to me on this read that never did when I read the Goliath episode before: what would have happened if Israel just charged all at once? Would they have lost out on something? What were the respective strengths of the assembled forces? If five or six of Saul’s fighters–maybe the sons of Jesse, maybe not–had wolf-packed the giant, couldn’t the fighters behind the giant have taken him down at the legs while the ones in front focused on staying out of the spear’s reach?

Of course, 1 Samuel isn’t interested in answering those questions. Saul has to take the challenge to single combat as inescapable because that’s the only way that David gets to rise to prominence so rapidly. Likewise, David doesn’t even get to the battlefield if Saul’s army doesn’t have the weird supply-line that seems to supply the front. As so many have observed, Biblical narrative, especially Old Testament narrative, tends to sacrifice extensive detail for a breathless, urgent pace. But that’s only part of the picture. 1 Samuel does provide some details that add to the confusion: David doesn’t just appear at the front. He goes there with provisions provided by the family of Jesse. (As a child it didn’t strike me as odd that individual families were sending food to the battlefield.) But he doesn’t hand the provisions directly to his brothers; there’s some official of Saul’s there–the shwmr hklim–who collects the provisions and then disappears from the story. And so more questions emerge: how often was David making this journey to carry parched grain and cheese to the battlefield? Were shepherd boys swarming in from all over Palestine? Just from Bethlehem? What kept Saul from recruiting a division of sling-toting shepherd-boys to ambush the Philistines’ supply lines and break up their camp during those forty days? Is the provisions-officer a permanent position or something that one becomes by drawing lots?

Nope. 1 Samuel is still not interested in my ideas.

What 1 Samuel does note is that the name YHWH is all over this battlefield. David is saying that name from the first moment he comes into contact with Saul. And when David insults king and army for their lack of zeal for that name, Saul never mentions the last time he heard that name in 1 Samuel’s story. This is silence again, but it’s a different kind of silence. As David calls forth that name in combat with the giant and in his boast that the giant will not stand and in his grand display of holy confidence, Saul knows that the same name, just two chapters before in our chapter-divided books, has forsaken him twice in three chapters. Whatever YHWH does for Israel going forward, Saul will not see the benefits, or if he does, those benefits will all end in his family’s rejection. Whether Saul’s sense of tactical urgency in 1 Samuel 13 earns YHWH’s wrath or whether Saul’s deficiency of bloodlust that keeps him from murdering a prisoner of war, the Amalekite king, in 1 Samuel 15 turns YHWH against him, either storyline seems to place Saul in a terrible place even before the songs of David begin at the end of this battle. If the armor-plated spear-monster kills the boy, the gods of the Philistines (in whose name Goliath has cursed Israel) triumph that day. If the boy-shepherd kills the Homeric metal-monster, Saul’s fallen favor cannot remain a secret.

Unlike my tactical suggestions, Saul’s silence in the face of YHWH’s name seems like it would interest 1 Samuel a fair bit, yet Saul’s mind in this episode remains a mystery. The Old Testament is funny that way: long-running traditions read the Psalms as the interior life of David, and Exodus presents Moses’s conversations with YHWH when Moses is the only human character present, effectively giving us a view of Moses’s mind. But many other characters, even important ones like Saul, we have to guess at more often that not. When Saul sends David to the lines, is he foreshadowing David’s own mindset when the King of Jerusalem sends Uriah the Hittite to his death? Does his sending David reflect resignation rather than plotting? If so, does he imagine himself resigning to the force of personality he sees in the young man before him? To a God who not only rejects him but insists that Saul play a key role in his own demise?

Here’s the sense that I get: 1 Samuel does not talk of battlefield logistics and tactics because the book is not interested in them. 1 Samuel does not describe Saul’s mental state not for lack of interest but because we readers, in the first generation to hear these words and for centuries after, benefit more when we encounter Saul indirectly, seeing his actions but not receiving his thoughts, whether in narrative prose or Psalmic verse. When we slow down and pay attention to Saul in these episodes, we encounter terrible human possibilities: a human being might see God’s wrath approaching over years, not seconds. A human being might have a chance to murder someone to stave off the judgment of that same God, never quite sure whether the violence will slow down the approaching doom but always knowing what murder does to the soul of the murderer. A human being whose ambition never rose to seizing the throne might nonetheless become monstrous and murderous when men and God come to take away the unwanted prize.

1 Samuel 17 shines the spotlight on the rising David, and the Old Testament does not turn that spotlight on anyone else until Solomon buries the old man all those years later. But like Samuel before him, Saul does not get the gift of a clean or a happy departure.

Featured Image: Swanson, John August. David and Goliath, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=56540 [retrieved June 2, 2024]. Original source: Estate of John August Swanson, https://www.johnaugustswanson.com/.