Old Testament · History
From judges to kings, Samuel anoints Saul, Saul falls, and a shepherd boy fells a giant.
The hinge between the judges and the kings, told through three overlapping lives: Samuel, the last judge; Saul, the first king; and David, the one who waits. The people ask for a king so they can be like the other nations, which is precisely the wrong reason, and God grants the request while making clear what it will cost. What is easy to miss is how sympathetic Saul's collapse is. He begins as a modest man hiding among the baggage and ends consulting a medium at night because God has stopped answering, and the book does not gloat. Notice also that David spares Saul twice while Saul hunts him, and that the last thing David does in the book is grieve for the man who tried to kill him.
If you remember one thing
Israel asks for a king so it can be like the nations, and gets exactly that. Then God gives it a shepherd instead, and the difference between the two men is the argument of the book.
“For man looks at the outward appearance, but Yahweh looks at the heart.”
1 Samuel 16:7
1 Samuel 15
The command to destroy Amalek entirely, and Saul's rejection for sparing the king and livestock.
1 Samuel 28
Saul consults a medium at Endor and Samuel appears. The text does not explain what happened, and interpreters have never agreed.
Named here rather than skipped. Where Christians read a passage differently, we say so instead of choosing for you.
Everyone here has a write-up, drawn from the same records that explain the names while you read the text.
Israel's first king, given when the people demanded one 'like the nations.' Tall and promising, Saul started well but unraveled, offering an unlawful sacrifice, sparing what God had devoted to destruction, and hunting David out of jealousy. Rejected by God through Samuel, he ended by consulting a medium and falling on his own sword at Gilboa.
The shepherd-poet who killed Goliath, outlasted Saul's jealousy, and united the tribes with Jerusalem as his capital. A man after God's own heart, yet his adultery with Bathsheba and its cover-up cost him dearly. God promised his throne would endure forever, the covenant the Messiah would fulfill.
Given to the tabernacle as a small boy after his mother's prayer, and called by name in the night. He judged Israel, anointed both Saul and David, and warned the nation plainly what a king would cost them before giving them one anyway.
A woman who prayed for a son so intensely that the priest assumed she was drunk, then gave the child back to God's service when he was weaned. Her song of reversal, where the proud are brought down and the hungry filled, is closely echoed centuries later in Mary's Magnificat.
Saul's son and heir, and David's closest friend, who protected the man who would take his own throne. He died with his father and brothers at Gilboa, and David's lament for him is one of the great elegies in Scripture.
The giant of Gath who challenged Israel's army for forty days and was killed by a shepherd with a sling. The text is careful about his armor and his reach, which is what makes the choice of weapon the point.
A woman of quick judgment who rode out with provisions to stop David from slaughtering her husband's household over an insult, and talked him down. When her husband Nabal died, David married her.
Called David's seer, he advised him during the years on the run and later brought him the three-fold choice of judgment after the census.
Eleazar's son, who ended a plague at Peor by driving a spear through an Israelite man and a Midianite woman, and was granted a covenant of lasting priesthood. A second Phinehas, son of Eli, was a corrupt priest who died carrying the ark into battle.
The priest who raised Samuel, and who failed to restrain his own sons when they stole from the offerings and abused the women serving at the entrance. Warned that his house would fall, he answers only that the LORD should do what seems good.
A man of the hill country of Ephraim with two wives, Hannah and Peninnah, who went up yearly to Shiloh to worship. His question to his grieving wife, am I not better to you than ten sons, is either tender or tone-deaf depending on how you read it.
Saul's father, of Benjamin, whose lost donkeys sent his son on the errand that ended with Samuel anointing him king. Abner, Saul's cousin and army commander, held the northern kingdom together for two years after Saul's death before being murdered by Joab.
The king David fled to twice while running from Saul. The first time David escaped by feigning madness, scratching at the doors and letting saliva run into his beard. The second time Achish gave him Ziklag and came to trust him completely, while David raided elsewhere and lied about where he had been.
A Bethlehemite of Judah, Boaz's grandson, whose eight sons were paraded before Samuel until the youngest was fetched from the sheep. His eldest, Eliab, is the one Samuel assumed was the choice, and who later snaps at David for coming to the battle line.
A rich sheep owner at Carmel who insulted David's men after they had protected his shepherds, and whose wife Abigail intercepted David's raiding party with food and a speech that talked him out of a massacre. Nabal died ten days later.
David's two priests. Abiathar had escaped the massacre at Nob and joined David in the wilderness, carrying the ephod. Zadok's line came from Eleazar. At Solomon's accession Abiathar backed Adonijah and Zadok backed Solomon, and Abiathar was removed.
The priest who gave David the consecrated bread and Goliath's sword, not knowing he was a fugitive. Doeg the Edomite reported it, and Saul had eighty-five priests killed along with the whole town. Only Abiathar escaped.
A man of Jezreel who refused to sell Ahab his ancestral vineyard, since the law treated family land as inalienable. Jezebel arranged false witnesses, had him stoned, and handed the land to her husband.
Games built on this book’s people and story.
