1 Samuel — themes & analysis

1 Samuel opens with a woman in a sanctuary, weeping. Hannah is the wife of Elkanah, of Ramathaim-zophim in the hill country of Ephraim. He has another wife, Peninnah, who has children. Hannah does not. The other woman provokes her every year when they go up to the sanctuary at Shiloh. Hannah weeps and will not eat. Her husband's well-meaning attempt to console her — am I not more to you than ten sons — does not help, as the text quietly notes.

In distress of soul she goes to the sanctuary and prays silently, only her lips moving — a striking detail, since prayer in this period was almost always aloud. The silent prayer is so unfamiliar that the priest Eli, watching her from his seat by the doorpost, assumes she is drunk and rebukes her. She corrects him. I am a woman deeply troubled, she says. I have been pouring out my soul before the Lord. Eli accepts the correction and blesses her. She goes home, conceives, and bears a son, whom she names Samuel — heard of God.

When the boy is weaned she brings him back to Shiloh and gives him to the Lord, in fulfilment of her vow. Then she sings. The Song of Hannah — My heart exults in the Lord, there is no Rock like our God — is one of the most influential poems in the Hebrew Bible. Its argument is the reversal of fortunes: the bows of the mighty are broken, but the feeble gird on strength; the Lord raises the poor from the dust; he lifts the needy from the ash heap to make them sit with princes.

The Magnificat in Luke's Gospel, the song of Mary at the Visitation, is essentially a Christian rewriting of the Song of Hannah, with the same vocabulary and the same theological move. The poem is announcing, in a barren woman's song over an unexpected son, the theme that will run through the entire book: God's choices fall on the small, the hidden, the unlikely. Samuel will be such a one. David, the youngest of eight sons, will be such a one. The book opens with the song that explains why.

Where to follow it: 1 Samuel 1 (Hannah's prayer and vow), 1 Samuel 2 (the Song of Hannah), 1 Samuel 3 (the call of Samuel as a boy).

Chapter 8 is the pivot of 1 Samuel. Samuel has grown old. His sons, whom he has appointed as judges, take bribes and pervert justice. The elders of Israel come to Samuel at Ramah and say: you are old, and your sons do not follow in your ways; appoint for us a king to govern us, like other nations. The thing displeases Samuel, but he prays. The Lord answers: they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them. Listen to their voice — only solemnly warn them, and show them the ways of the king who shall reign over them.

What follows is one of the most remarkable political speeches in the Hebrew Bible. Samuel tells the people what a king will do. He will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and give them to his servants. He will take one tenth of your grain and your flocks. And you yourselves will be his slaves.

The verb take is the rhythmic centre of the speech — eight times in eight verses. The speech is not anti-government in the abstract; it is precise. A king will be an institution that takes. A king will appropriate the produce of your labour and the lives of your children for purposes that are not yours. The reader who knows the rest of the Hebrew Bible — Solomon's forced labour, Rehoboam's tax revolt, Jezebel's murder of Naboth for the vineyard the king wants — recognizes the speech as a prophecy that comes true in detail.

And the people insist anyway. We are determined to have a king over us, so that we also may be like other nations, and that our king may go out before us and fight our battles. The book lets the request stand. It does not condemn monarchy outright — the rest of the Hebrew Bible will be unable to do without a king when there is one. But it has named what a king will cost, in advance, in the voice of the prophet who anointed the first one. The whole subsequent history of monarchy in Israel reads in part as a long footnote to this chapter.

Where to follow it: 1 Samuel 8 (the request and the warning), 1 Samuel 9 (Saul found by Samuel), 1 Samuel 12 (Samuel's farewell speech).

Saul is introduced in chapter 9 as a young man of the tribe of Benjamin, the smallest of the tribes. He is the son of Kish, head and shoulders taller than any other Israelite, sent out to look for some lost donkeys. In the course of the search he comes to the town where Samuel is. The Lord has already told Samuel — the day before — to expect him. Saul appears in the gate. Samuel anoints him privately the next morning, kisses him, and tells him a series of signs that will confirm the call.

His early career is mixed. He is publicly chosen by lot at Mizpah but cannot be found at first because he has hidden himself among the baggage. He delivers Jabesh-gilead from the Ammonites and is acclaimed king at Gilgal. Then the trouble begins. In chapter 13 Saul is facing a Philistine army; Samuel has told him to wait seven days for him to come and offer sacrifices. The seventh day passes, the army is melting away in fear, and Samuel has not come. Saul, in panic, offers the burnt offering himself. Samuel arrives just as he has finished. You have done foolishly, Samuel says. The Lord would have established your kingdom forever, but now your kingdom shall not continue.

In chapter 15 the disqualification is sealed. Saul is sent to wage war on the Amalekites under the herem ban — total destruction. He defeats them but spares Agag the king and the best of the livestock. To obey is better than sacrifice, Samuel tells him, in the line that has echoed through every later moral tradition. Because you have rejected the word of the Lord, he has rejected you from being king. Samuel hews Agag in pieces with his own hand, goes home to Ramah, and never sees Saul again until the day of his death.

The rest of the book watches Saul deteriorate. The spirit of the Lord departs from him; an evil spirit torments him; David is brought into court to play the harp and ease his moods. Saul's paranoia grows — he tries to kill David with a spear, he hunts him through the wilderness. In the end, abandoned by Samuel and by God, he consults a medium at Endor and asks her to bring up Samuel from the dead. Samuel comes up and tells him that tomorrow he and his sons will be with him. The next day they are. Saul falls on his own sword on Mount Gilboa. He is one of the most psychologically realized characters in any ancient narrative — a man given everything, who could never quite hold it.

Where to follow it: 1 Samuel 9 (Saul's introduction), 1 Samuel 13 (the unauthorized sacrifice), 1 Samuel 15 (the rejection), 1 Samuel 28 (the medium at Endor), 1 Samuel 31 (the death of Saul).

The Philistine army is encamped at Socoh in Judah. Saul's army is camped on the opposite hill, with the valley of Elah between them. Each morning and each evening for forty days the Philistine champion comes out and shouts a challenge: choose a man to fight me, and the loser's people will be the winner's slaves. The text is careful to give his measurements. He is six cubits and a span — about nine feet — and his armour is described in unusual detail: a bronze helmet, a coat of mail weighing five thousand shekels, greaves, a javelin, a spear with a shaft like a weaver's beam and an iron head weighing six hundred shekels. The detail is meant to oppress. The narrative dwells on the size and the weight.

David is at home in Bethlehem keeping his father's sheep — his three older brothers are with the army. Jesse sends him to take provisions and bring back word. He arrives just as Goliath is shouting his daily challenge. He hears the men talking about the reward — great wealth, the king's daughter, exemption from taxes. He asks more than once. His oldest brother Eliab loses his temper. Saul hears about him and sends for him.

The central exchange between David and Saul is among the finest pieces of dialogue in ancient narrative. Saul tells him he cannot fight; he is only a youth. David's answer is the speech that has been quoted for three thousand years: Your servant used to keep sheep, and whenever a lion or a bear came and took a lamb from the flock, I went after it and struck it down. The Lord who saved me from the paw of the lion and the paw of the bear will save me from the hand of this Philistine.

Saul tries to give David his own armour. David puts it on, walks a few steps, takes it off — he cannot move in it. He goes down to the brook, picks up five smooth stones, takes his sling, and walks across the valley. The stone strikes Goliath in the forehead. He falls face down. David pulls Goliath's sword from its sheath and cuts off his head. The chapter is brilliantly paced: forty days of waiting, the slow build of the descriptions, the walk across the valley, and then — in three verses — the killing. David and Goliath has become available to every later language as a metaphor for the smaller force defeating the larger by guile and faith, and the chapter earns that status on every reading.

Where to follow it: 1 Samuel 16 (the secret anointing of David), 1 Samuel 17 (David and Goliath), 1 Samuel 18 (David enters Saul's court).

Jonathan is Saul's eldest son, the heir to the kingdom that has just been forfeited. By every conventional measure of self-interest, he should be David's enemy. Instead, from the moment they meet in chapter 18 — just after the killing of Goliath — the soul of Jonathan was bound to the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul. He gives David his royal robe and armour, his sword and his bow and his belt. He makes a covenant with him.

The friendship is tested across multiple chapters. When Saul tries to kill David with a spear at table, it is Jonathan who first refuses to believe the report and then, after testing his father, confirms it. Their farewell scene in chapter 20, in the field by the stone Ezel, is one of the great parting scenes in any literature. Jonathan has shot the arrow past his servant boy as the prearranged signal that David must flee. The boy is dismissed. David comes out from hiding. They embrace and weep, the text says, until David wept the more.

They meet only once more in the book — in chapter 23, in the wilderness of Ziph, when Jonathan finds David hiding and strengthens his hand in God. He says: do not fear, for the hand of my father Saul shall not find you, and you shall be king over Israel, and I shall be next to you. The line is the central declaration of the friendship. Jonathan, the rightful heir by the conventions of his society, accepts that he will not be king and that David will, and accepts it without bitterness because he loves the man whose kingdom it will be.

When Jonathan dies on Mount Gilboa at the end of the book, David's lament for him in 2 Samuel 1 becomes one of the most quoted passages in the Hebrew Bible. Saul and Jonathan, beloved and lovely, in life and in death they were not divided. I am distressed for you, my brother Jonathan; greatly beloved were you to me; your love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women. The book of 1 Samuel is the foundation of one of the great pictures of male friendship in any literature — built scene by scene over more than ten chapters.

Where to follow it: 1 Samuel 18 (the covenant made), 1 Samuel 19 (Jonathan defends David), 1 Samuel 20 (the farewell at Ezel), 1 Samuel 23 (the meeting in the wilderness).