1 Samuel 8:4-11, (12-15), 16-20, (11:14-15) and Psalm 138  • Genesis 3:8-15 and Psalm 130  • 2 Corinthians 4:13-5:1  • Mark 3:20-35

1 Samuel 8 is one of those passages (there are several) that brings to my attention, every time I read it carefully, the differences between enlisting the Bible to one’s cause and submitting to the Bible as a collection of texts that interrogates the reader. Because I’m a Christian, the canonical Scriptures do this work in ways that other texts do not, but certainly there are other books in my life–Shakespeare’s tragedies, the Gilgamesh, Kazantzakis’s novels, and the 14th-century Samurai stories Tales of the Heike come to mind immediately–whose details and complexities invite me to study them as I would any museum piece and also whose complexities and details examine me in some way, leaving me questioning myself as much as I reflect on what’s going on inside the text.

In the case of 1 Samuel 8, the details that leave me questioning myself are the ones that I forget between readings. Why do I never remember, until I reread, that the elders of Israel come to Samuel not out of national ambition but because they know that Samuel is getting old and won’t be around forever? Why don’t I remember that, when YHWH speaks to Samuel, YHWH never mentions Samuel’s corrupt sons? Why don’t I remember that YHWH never addresses the possible future in which Samuel’s sons, like Eli’s before, lead the whole nation into destruction?

Instead, until I re-read this story, I remember it as a warning about the drive to monarchy, the ambition to be like the other nations. That’s in there, to be sure, but I forget that what the elders of Israel want–the elders, not the crowds–is to discharge their duties, to preserve the good things that YHWH has done for Israel, partially to rise in prominence among the great cities of Canaan but also so that there might be an Israel for those not yet born.

None of this changes the things that YHWH and Samuel say about the coming king, of course, but they do put a different frame around them. In the pulsing, drums-of-doom repetition of “he will take” in verses 11 and 13 and 14 and 15 and 16 and 17, Samuel lays down precisely what Solomon, that king who does these things AFTER he receives his much-vaunted “wisdom,” will do to the people of Israel. To be like other nations in 1 Samuel 8 turns out to be a temptation no less deadly than the temptation in the other Old Testament reading for this week, the temptation to be like God in Genesis 3.

But even if both are deadly, the motivations for this one seem to be different: these elders of Israel, who drop out of the story when I remember it and come back only when I read it again, act not from ambition but from fear. They want a king who will fight their battles not because those battles will be glorious but because they remember the years of Samuel’s youth, those times when the Philistines threatened time and again to end Israel and with Israel the promises that YHWH made to Israel.

They remember the stories of the generations after Ehud and after Deborah and after Gideon and after Samson, and they know that, while YHWH might send another judge or another prophet, there’s no guarantee. Nations come and nations go, and the nations that stand the strongest fighting chance are the ones that have the organization and the leadership to fight back when the fight comes to them.

Of course I’d like to think of myself as the exception, the one who would rather stand faithful with YHWH rather than looking to the other nations and wondering whether we should become more like them.

But re-reading 1 Samuel 8 reminds me, no matter how much I’d like to forget, that faithfulness is not guaranteed either.

Featured Image: Kozenitzky, Lidia. King Saul, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=56828 [retrieved May 27, 2024]. Original source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:TheKingSaul.jpg.