1 Samuel

Israel asks for a king and gets one, and the book is an extended argument about what that means. It opens with a childless woman praying so hard that the priest thinks she is drunk, and her song about God bringing down the mighty and raising the poor is the programme for everything after it: a corrupt priestly house falls, a nation demanding to be like the other nations is warned and then given exactly what it asked for, a tall and impressive king is rejected for disobedience, and a shepherd nobody thought to call in from the field is anointed instead. The kingship question is never settled in one direction — chapters 8 and 12 treat the request as a rejection of God, and chapters 9 to 11 treat Saul as God's own gift to a people he had heard crying — and the book keeps both. Its second half is one of the finest sustained narratives in ancient literature: two men on opposite trajectories, a friendship that survives a father's jealousy, and a fugitive who twice has his enemy at knifepoint and twice will not strike. It ends on a battlefield with a king falling on his own sword.

Themes

• The Lord kills and makes alive — Hannah's song states the book's logic before the story starts: bows broken, the hungry filled, the poor lifted from the dust to sit with princes.
• Give us a king — The demand is granted, condemned and blessed in the same book. Samuel calls it rejection of God; God tells him to listen; and the king he anoints is God's own choice.
• To obey is better than sacrifice — The sentence Saul's reign turns on (15:22). Both of his failures are about doing something religious instead of the thing commanded.
• The Spirit given and taken — The Spirit rushes on Saul and later departs from him; it comes on David from the day of his anointing. The two movements are stated in one verse (16:13-14).
• Man looks at the outward appearance — Said of the anointing at Bethlehem (16:7), in a book that has been describing kings by their height since chapter 9.
• I will not stretch out my hand — David spares Saul twice, in a cave and in a camp, and refuses to take the throne by killing for it — the argument the whole second half is making.
• Friendship across a throne — Jonathan is the heir who defends the man replacing him, and the covenant he makes outlives them both.

Outline

• 1. Hannah's vow — A childless woman prays without a sound, is accused of drunkenness, and gives back the son she asked for.
• 2. My heart exults — A song about reversals, a priestly family taking meat by force, and a man of God announcing the end of a house.
• 3. Speak, for your servant hears — A boy who does not yet know Yahweh hears his name three times in a night, and has to deliver a verdict on the man who raised him.
• 4. The glory has departed — A defeat, the ark carried into battle like a talisman, and a daughter-in-law who names her son for what has been lost.
• 5. Dagon fell on his face — Seven months of trouble in Philistine cities, and a statue that keeps ending up prostrate before the box it was meant to loot.
• 6. Two milk cows — A test devised by Philistine priests: two cows with calves shut up at home, and nobody driving them.
• 7. Ebenezer — Twenty years of longing, water poured out at Mizpah, and a stone set up between two towns to mark how far help has come.
• 8. Like all the nations — Elders ask for a king; Samuel is told it is God they are rejecting, and to warn them exactly what a king will take.
• 9. Looking for donkeys — A tall young man out searching for lost animals walks into an appointment nobody told him about.
• 10. Hiding among the baggage — An anointing, three signs, prophesying with a band of prophets — and a public lottery in which the winner has to be dragged out.
• 11. The Spirit came mightily on Saul — A besieged town, an ultimatum about right eyes, an ox cut in pieces, and the one clean victory of Saul's reign.
• 12. Whose ox have I taken? — Samuel audits his own record in public, calls for thunder in the middle of harvest, and refuses to stop praying for people he has just rebuked.
• 13. You have done foolishly — An army melting away, a sacrifice offered before the prophet arrives, and a kingdom that will not continue.
• 14. Nothing restrains Yahweh — A son who attacks a garrison with one armour-bearer, and a father whose rash oath nearly kills him.
• 15. To obey is better than sacrifice — A command about Amalek, a partial obedience explained as worship, and a torn robe that becomes a sign.
• 16. Yahweh looks at the heart — Seven brothers pass and none is chosen; the youngest is fetched from the sheep — and then plays the harp for the man he is replacing.
• 17. The battle is Yahweh's — Forty days of a champion's challenge, armour that does not fit, five smooth stones, and a boy who talks more than he fights.
• 18. Saul eyed David from that day — A song sung by women with the wrong arithmetic in it, a spear thrown twice, and a bride price paid in Philistine foreskins.
• 19. Michal let David down through the window — Three escapes in one chapter, and a king who ends up prophesying naked in front of the prophet he came to arrest.
• 20. The arrows — A friendship tested at a festival meal, a code arranged in a field, and a parting neither man wants.
• 21. The showbread and the sword — A fugitive lies to a priest, takes holy bread and the sword he once used, and escapes a Philistine king by feigning madness.
• 22. Doeg the Edomite — Four hundred desperate men in a cave, and eighty-five priests killed for giving bread to a man they thought was on the king's business.
• 23. The rock of escape — A city rescued and then unsafe, an ephod that answers questions, and a pursuit broken off by a Philistine raid.
• 24. I will not stretch out my hand — A cave at En Gedi, a corner cut from a robe, and a king who weeps and calls his hunted rival more righteous than himself.
• 25. Abigail — A rich fool refuses food to men who guarded his shepherds, and his wife rides out to stop a massacre with an argument.
• 26. The spear at his head — A second chance to kill, taken as far as the sleeping king's pillow, and refused again.
• 27. Among the Philistines — Sixteen months in enemy service, raids reported as something else, and a king who thinks he has David for good.
• 28. The medium at Endor — A king who outlawed mediums consulting one at night, and a prophet who tells him nothing he had not already been told.
• 29. Sent back — Philistine commanders refuse to fight beside a Hebrew, which keeps David off the field where his king dies.
• 30. David strengthened himself — A burned town, stolen families, a mutinous army, and a rule about the share belonging to those who stay with the baggage.
• 31. On Mount Gilboa — Three sons dead, a king on his own sword, and the men of Jabesh Gilead walking all night to bring the bodies home.

Chapters

• 1 Samuel 1 — A woman who cannot have children prays so intensely and so silently that the priest assumes she is drunk. What she asks for she gives away — and the book's whole argument about God lifting the powerless starts with her.
• 1 Samuel 2 — Hannah sings about a world where bows break and the barren bear seven, and the chapter immediately starts proving it: a priestly dynasty is taking meat by force from the offerings and is about to be ended, while a boy in a linen ephod grows up in front of them.
• 1 Samuel 3 — The word of Yahweh was rare in those days; there was no frequent vision. Then a boy who does not yet know Yahweh hears his own name three times in the night, and the first message he is given is a verdict on the man who taught him to answer.
• 1 Samuel 4 — Israel loses a battle, decides the problem is that the ark was not there, and fetches it — treating the sign of God's presence as a device that guarantees victory. The result is thirty thousand dead, the ark captured, and a name given to a baby: the glory has departed.
• 1 Samuel 5 — The ark spends seven months in Philistine territory and no Israelite is involved. It is put in Dagon's temple as a trophy and the statue keeps falling over; then the cities that hold it start getting sick, and each one sends it somewhere else.
• 1 Samuel 6 — Philistine priests design a controlled experiment. Put the ark on a new cart with gold offerings, hitch two milk cows that have never been yoked and whose calves are shut up at home, and let them go: if they walk to Israel, this was God; if they turn back to their calves, it was chance.
• 1 Samuel 7 — Twenty years pass in one verse, and then Samuel gets the thing chapters 4 to 6 could not produce: not a recovered object but a changed nation. Put away the foreign gods, he says, and they do — and the stone he sets up afterwards names the whole period.
• 1 Samuel 8 — The elders ask for a king and give two reasons — your sons don't walk in your ways, and we want to be like all the nations — and the second one is what the book keeps returning to. Samuel takes it as a rejection of himself; God tells him it is not.
• 1 Samuel 9 — The other account of how Israel got a king, and it reads nothing like chapter 8. A young man goes out to look for lost donkeys, fails to find them, and is about to give up when a servant suggests asking the local seer — and walks into a meal prepared for him with the best portion already set aside.
• 1 Samuel 10 — A private anointing with a flask of oil, three signs that all come true the same day, and then a public lottery at Mizpah in which the man chosen has hidden himself among the baggage. The book gives the monarchy both a secret beginning and an embarrassing one.
• 1 Samuel 11 — Saul's one unambiguous success, and it is genuinely impressive. A town under siege is offered terms that involve having their right eyes gouged out; the news reaches a man ploughing a field; the Spirit comes on him, and thirty-six hours later the siege is broken and the doubters want the objectors executed.
• 1 Samuel 12 — Samuel's farewell is also an audit. He calls the nation as witnesses against himself — whose ox have I taken, whom have I defrauded — and having established that he leaves office clean, he uses that standing to say that asking for a king was wickedness, and then promises to keep praying for them anyway.
• 1 Samuel 13 — Saul's first failure, and the circumstances are genuinely awful: a Philistine army with chariots as numerous as sand, his own troops deserting into caves and across the Jordan, and a prophet who has not arrived on the seventh day. He offers the sacrifice himself, and Samuel walks in as he finishes.
• 1 Samuel 14 — Jonathan attacks a garrison with one companion on the theory that nothing restrains Yahweh from saving by many or by few — and it works. Then his father imposes an oath that nobody may eat until evening, and spends the rest of the day undoing his own victory.
• 1 Samuel 15 — The final break, and it turns on a distinction Saul cannot see. He is told to devote Amalek to destruction; he keeps the king and the best of the animals and explains that they were for sacrifice — and the answer is the sentence the book is remembered for: to obey is better than sacrifice.
• 1 Samuel 16 — Seven sons pass in front of the prophet and none is chosen; the one who is has not been called in from the sheep. And then the chapter does something almost unbearable: the boy anointed to replace the king is hired to play the harp for him.
• 1 Samuel 17 — Forty days of a champion issuing the same challenge, an army that has grown used to it, and a delivery boy who arrives with bread and cheese and asks the question nobody else is asking: who is this uncircumcised Philistine, that he should defy the armies of the living God?
• 1 Samuel 18 — A song sung by women with the wrong arithmetic in it — Saul his thousands, David his ten thousands — and from that day the king watches him. The chapter runs the same cycle four times: David succeeds, Saul fears him more, and the fear produces a new plan to have him killed.
• 1 Samuel 19 — Three escapes in one chapter — a son's intervention, a wife's window, and a prophet's company — and the last one ends with the king himself stripped and prophesying on the ground for a day and a night, which is either mercy or humiliation and the text does not say.
• 1 Samuel 20 — Two friends design a test to find out whether the king actually means to kill one of them, and the answer arrives in the form of a spear thrown at the other. The arrows in the field are a code, and the code turns out to be unnecessary because they meet anyway.
• 1 Samuel 21 — A fugitive with no supplies lies to a priest, eats the bread reserved for priests, and leaves carrying the sword he took off Goliath — and then walks into the home town of the man he killed with it and escapes by pretending to be insane.
• 1 Samuel 22 — David acquires an army of the desperate — everyone in distress, in debt or discontented — and Saul, in the same chapter, massacres a town of priests for a kindness one of them showed without knowing what he was doing.
• 1 Samuel 23 — David rescues a town and then has to ask God whether the town will hand him over — and the answer is yes. The chapter is about a fugitive who keeps asking questions and keeps getting answers, and about the difference between the help God gives and the loyalty people offer.
• 1 Samuel 24 — A cave, a king relieving himself, and a hunted man close enough to cut a corner off his robe — and the argument of the whole second half of the book is made in the sentence that follows: Yahweh forbid that I should stretch out my hand against Yahweh's anointed.
• 1 Samuel 25 — Between two chapters in which David spares the king, the book puts a chapter in which he very nearly kills a private citizen over an insult — and is stopped by a woman who rides out to meet him with two hundred loaves and an argument.
• 1 Samuel 26 — The same choice as chapter 24, made harder. This time David walks into the camp at night, stands over a sleeping king with a spear stuck in the ground by his head, and has a volunteer offering to do it for him with one stroke — and he still refuses.
• 1 Samuel 27 — David gives up. I shall now perish one day by the hand of Saul, he says, and goes over to the Philistines — where he spends sixteen months raiding southern tribes and reporting to his patron that he has been raiding Judah.
• 1 Samuel 28 — The king who expelled the mediums goes to one in disguise at night, because God has stopped answering him. What he gets is the same verdict he was given in chapter 15, delivered with a date attached — and the chapter's last scene is a woman making him eat.
• 1 Samuel 29 — The Philistine commanders refuse to take a Hebrew into battle against Israel, and Achish has to send David home — which spares him from being on the field where his king dies, and from having to decide what he would have done.
• 1 Samuel 30 — David comes home to a burned town, missing families and an army talking about stoning him — and the chapter turns on one clause: David strengthened himself in Yahweh his God. Then he asks a question, gets an answer, and makes a rule that outlasts him.
• 1 Samuel 31 — The end comes quickly and without commentary: the army routed on Mount Gilboa, three sons dead including Jonathan, and a king who asks his armour-bearer to kill him and then falls on his own sword. The last act of the book is a rescue mission by the town he saved in chapter 11.

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