King Saul—A Bungler from the Beginning

When creating the first woman, God says, “I will make [the man] a helper fit for him” (Genesis 2:18).¹

Emphasizing the words “for him,” the famous 11th-century Jewish exegete known as Rashi (Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac) commented on this verse: “If he is worthy—a help; if he is not worthy—against him, for strife.” Rashi’s suggestion is that a man will get the spouse he deserves.

The same can be said, I will argue, for a people and its leader: The people will get the kind of leader they deserve. That, at least, is the seldom-noticed meaning of the appointment of Israel’s first king, Saul.

Saul was made king in response to popular demand: “Give us a king over us to judge us like all the other nations” (1 Samuel 8:19–20), the Israelites ordered Samuel. The people were thus rejecting God’s more direct leadership through charismatic judges who arose from time to time in response to God’s call. They were also rejecting the leadership of God’s prophet and judge, Samuel. In effect, they were inviting God to designate a king fit for an ungrateful, rebellious people.

When God reluctantly consented, he instructed Samuel to “make for them a king” (1 Samuel 8:22). The stress is on “for them,” that is, a king fit not for me (God) but a king fit for them. As Rashi might have phrased it, “a king against them, for strife.”

Saul is usually characterized as the great tragic figure of the Bible. Perhaps. But I will argue that for the biblical author, Saul was flawed from the outset. Through an extraordinary use of allusion and narrative analogy, the biblical author portrays Saul as a leader who was thrust into the kingship as God’s revenge for the people’s rejection of God in their demand for monarchy.

In contrast to conventional wisdom, according to which Saul’s fortunes plummeted as David’s rose,^a I believe that from the first Saul is characterized as a preposterous choice for king, a catastrophe in statecraft whose initial depiction and earliest activities show him to be a poor substitute even for the succession of judges with whom the people became so disillusioned. Saul was indeed the king the people deserved.

The allusions begin with Saul’s very introduction. He is a Benjaminite, the son of Kish (1 Samuel 9:1), from the town of Gibeah (1 Samuel 10:26). These seemingly neutral genealogical and geographic references in fact recall a fairly recent incident (in narrative time) that preceded Saul’s accession to the throne. A few decades before the establishment of the Israelite monarchy, a grotesque and genocidal civil war erupted among Israel’s twelve tribes. Known as the Benjaminite war, this civil war, like so many wars since, was triggered by a ghastly local incident that escalated into a massive bloodletting. In the end the tribe of Benjamin, Saul’s tribe, was nearly wiped out.

The incident, told in Judges 19, occurred in Saul’s hometown, Gibeah of Benjamin. A Levite and his concubine stop for the night in Gibeah and are graciously taken in by an old man. Later in the night, a group of men from the town beat on the old man’s door, demanding that the Levite be made available to them for homosexual rape. To satisfy the men, the concubine is pushed out onto the street and gang-raped until morning, when the Levite finds her broken body in a heap at the entrance to the house. If she is not already dead, she dies on the journey to the Levite’s house.² Upon arriving home, the Levite “took a knife, and grasping his concubine he cut her into twelve pieces, limb by limb, and sent her throughout the territory of Israel.” The people respond immediately: “Never has such a thing happened or been seen from the day the Israelites came out of the land of Egypt to this day!” (Judges 19:29–30).

The concubine’s body serves as a call to arms. A war of revenge follows in which the tribe of Benjamin is virtually eradicated and the town of Gibeah, where the outrage takes place, is totally destroyed.

So repulsive to the biblical narrator is the concubine’s rape that he fashions his tale after the story of Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 19). Just as in that story, strangers arrive in a town seeking a place to stay for the night in what we know to be a village of the damned; and a mob of depraved men surrounds the house where the strangers have lodged, demanding a victim for homosexual rape. In both Sodom and Gibeah, female substitutes are offered. The Sodom rapists refuse the offer of Lot’s two virgin daughters (Genesis 19:8–9), but in Gibeah the men are less particular and accept the Levite’s concubine as a stand-in lust offering (Judges 19:25).

In Sodom, God quickly carries out the destruction of the community of sinners through a storm of fire and brimstone (Genesis 19:24). In Gibeah, the united force of the tribes of Israel (except, of course, that of Benjamin) achieve much the same end. All the men, women, children and even cattle of the Benjaminites are put to the sword. Only the 600 men who have fled survive, having hidden in the Rock of Rimmon (Judges 20:47).

Without women, the tribe of Benjamin is doomed to extinction. The warring Israelites, we learn, have vowed to prohibit their women from marrying Benjaminites (Judges 21:1).

As luck would have it, however, the town of Jabesh-Gilead is not included in the oath, for Jabesh-Gilead, alone among the Israelite settlements, did not respond to the Israelite muster against the Benjaminites and therefore did not participate in the oath regarding the sexual isolation of Benjamin (Judges 21:8–9). Benjamin’s extinction is thus avoided. The Israelites, belatedly concerned about Benjamin’s predicament, decide to kill the inhabitants of Jabesh-Gilead for failing to answer the muster against the Benjaminites, sparing only 400 young virgins who are made available as wives for the surviving Benjaminites at a dance-festival at Shiloh.³ The surviving Benjaminites rebuild their towns, presumably including Gibeah, where Saul is later born.

The story ends with the following sentence, which concludes the Book of Judges: “In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did as he pleased” (Judges 21:25). Next comes the Book of Samuel and the anointing of Saul as Israel’s first king.

It is a reasonable inference that the first king of Israel was the son or grandson of one of the 600 Benjaminite survivors of the civil war, very possibly with a mother or grandmother from among the virgins Jabesh-Gilead. It also seems clear that the author 1 Samuel 9–15, which depicts Saul’s rise to the throne and his subsequent repudiation by God, deliberately linked the beginning of Saul’s tale to the story of the Benjaminite civil war.

Let us look at some of the evidence suggesting the irony of Saul’s selection and the connections with the events of the civil war.

To begin, Saul’s father, Kish, is described as a man of valor (khayil) in 1 Samuel 9:1. The same word is used to describe the men of Benjamin who were slaughtered in the civil war (Judges 20:44, 46). Clearly, the author wants to draw our attention to the legacy of Saul’s Benjaminite heritage.

When Samuel first tells Saul that he has been selected as king, Saul reminds Samuel that he is from Benjamin, “the smallest of the tribes of Israel…and my family the least of all the families of Benjamin” (1 Samuel 9:21). This is generally regarded as reflecting Saul’s modesty. However, it may well be that Saul, against the background of Benjamin’s recent brush with total extinction, is registering incredulity more than humility.

The people themselves, it might be supposed, are equally incredulous at the choice of Saul, a Benjaminite. They have requested a king for themselves, but God has, amazingly, designated a man from the most despised tribe, and, as Saul knows, from the most repugnant city since Sodom.

Saul’s only apparent virtue is his size. Later, with stunning irony, even this “vertical virtue” is disclaimed when God directs Samuel, in choosing Saul’s successor, to pass over Jesse’s eldest son, Eliab, for a smaller man: “Look not…on the height of stature…for a man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7).

After anointing Saul in private, Samuel calls the people together in Mizpah to confirm the selection. Ironically, Mizpah is where the tribes mustered at the beginning of the Benjaminite war not many decades earlier (Judges 20:1). Now they are there to recognize as king a man from the tribe that was nearly exterminated for a crime that could only be compared to that of Sodom and Gomorrah.

At Mizpah, Saul is re-chosen, as it were, by a lottery of step-wise elimination (1 Samuel 10:20–21). First, the tribe of Benjamin is chosen by lot; then the clan of Matrites; then, from that clan, Saul.

It is, I think, significant that the only biblical precedent for such a selection technique is found in Joshua 7, involving the story of Achan and his violation of the ban after the battle of Jericho. Following their victory at Jericho, the Israelites are defeated in a skirmish at Ai. The Lord explains that Israel has been defeated because someone violated the divine ban (herem) against making use of booty from Jericho (Joshua 7:11). Joshua identifies the Israelite who ignored the ban (one Achan, who could not resist taking some gold and silver from Jericho) using the same procedure that would later be employed in Saul’s selection. In short, a technique for criminal identification—choosing by lot—is co-opted for identifying Saul as king. And the choice of king falls on a Benjaminite, indeed a Gibeahite, a resident of the town where the Levite’s concubine had been raped, where the terrible war had begun.

It is also interesting to note that, once identified, Achan is killed, along with his entire house—just as Saul will eventually be killed along with his entire house for violating the herem in sparing Agag, the king of the Amalekites, following their defeat (1 Samuel 15:21–23). But that is getting ahead of the story.

Let us return to Mizpah. When Saul, a symbol of the supposed Benjaminite dynasty, is designated by the lottery, he is found hiding amid the baggage (1 Samuel 10:22), like the 600 Benjaminite survivors of the civil war who hid at the Rock of Rimmon.

Saul’s first challenge as king comes when Nahash the Ammonite besieges the city of Jabesh-Gilead, probably the birthplace of Saul’s mother or grandmother. Saul responds to the news of the siege of Jabesh-Gilead by dismembering a yoke of oxen and sending the pieces among the various tribes, with a warning that he will do the same to the cattle of recalcitrant draftees.

Saul’s muster-by-dismemberment echoes the action of the Levite, who used the pieces of the raped concubine to muster the tribes against Benjamin. Even the same phraseology is used: “And he [Saul, in the case of Jabesh-Gilead; the Levite, in the case of the raped concubine] sent [the pieces] throughout the territory of Israel” (1 Samuel 11:7; Judges 19:29). The people respond to Saul’s summons “as one man” (1 Samuel 11:7), the same phrase used in the war against the Benjaminites (Judges 20:1). Very likely, when the tribes receive the pieces of oxen from Saul, they recall with a shiver the last catastrophe involving dismemberment.

Through repeated allusions to the horrific Benjaminite war, the biblical narrator casts aspersions not just on monarchy, but on Saul. Saul’s first act as king, the rescue of Jabesh-Gilead, is so tainted by resonances of the Benjaminite civil war as to deprive it of any positive value. Even in moments of apparent triumph, Saul’s background, character and deeds bear the seeds of his destruction. Saul’s tendency to failure in his later career has been widely recognized. In fact, his lineage and his first act as king presage his later calamities.

Saul derives as little political benefit from his victory over the Amalekites as he had from his rescue of Jabesh-Gilead. Saul destroys Amalek and captures its king, Agag (1 Samuel 15:7). In contravention of the divine ban (as in the account of Achan at Jericho), however, Saul spares Agag and the best of the sheep and oxen. When confronted by Samuel, Saul explains that the animals are intended for sacrifice to the Lord. But he has no explanation for sparing Agag. This is the last straw for God and Samuel. Saul is rejected as king.

Some commentators have sought to excuse Saul on the ground that regicide was forbidden, a taboo supposedly reflected in the refusal of Saul’s armor-bearer to kill Saul on Gilboa (1 Samuel 31:4). But this supposed taboo does not stand up under scrutiny. Both the greatest judge, Gideon, and the only other Benjaminite judge, Ehud, have no compunction about regicide (on Gideon, see Judges 8:21; on Ehud, see Judges 3:21–22). If Gideon and Ehud did not refuse to kill enemy kings, surely Saul should not have reservations, certainly none that cause him to defy the word of God.

Perhaps the most caustic denunciation of Saul is contained in the famous Goliath episode. At this time David is already in court service. Goliath suggests a test of champions instead of a battle of troops, which are already assembled for war. Goliath is precisely the kind of colossal antagonist we might expect Saul to vanquish in a sort of heavyweight championship fight: “[W]hen [Saul] stood among the people, he was taller than any of the people from his shoulders upwards” (1 Samuel 10:23). Yet Saul, a giant himself, does not take the field against the Philistine, leaving the work to David.

Saul’s ignoble behavior in avoiding the fight with Goliath is emphasized by the ludicrous scene in which he—a king—stoops to playing David’s armor-bearer, almost crushing the young David under the weight of the King’s oversized armor (1 Samuel 17:38–39). In the final irony of the Goliath story, we discover that the key to victory over Goliath is David’s skill with a sling. Not only is Saul big and powerful, but the Benjaminites as a group are said to possess uncanny proficiency with the sling. As we are told in Judges 20:16, “Every one of them [Benjaminite warriors] could sling a stone at a hair and not miss.” Thus Saul forgoes the personal battle with the Philistine giant despite his own formidable size and his probable competence with the weapon David uses to kill Goliath.

Saul is the king installed by God to comply with the people’s demand that they have a king for them (1 Samuel 8:19–20). Later, in announcing David’s selection, God says to Samuel, “I have provided a king for myself” (1 Samuel 16:1). In many ways, this opposition tells the story of Saul. Saul is, unfortunately, a king befitting the people who demanded him.

The density of allusions to earlier heroes and villains (only some of which are outlined here) makes Saul’s reign seem a poor substitute for the judges of the prior period. As is often observed, once David comes on the scene, Saul is portrayed only negatively. But the unfavorable portrayal of Saul is in the text from the beginning.

God is urged to select a king by the clamor of the people who reject the kingship of God. “They have rejected me,” God says in 1 Samuel 8:7. The biblical narrator, using every literary device at his disposal, shows that by selecting Saul, God—the jealous god—exacts his revenge on an unfaithful people: God gives them, to paraphrase Rashi “a king against them, for strife.”

Saul is often depicted as a tragic hero brought down by some large weakness. This characterization implies a kind of greatness, a heroic dimension marred by a combination of fate, the gods, or, in our case, the God of Israel, as well as by Saul’s own flaws. The biblical narrator, however, does not in fact present Saul in this tragic guise. Rather, Israel’s first king is portrayed as a hapless fool thrust into the kingship as God punishes his people for demanding a monarchy.

But the Saul episode can be read as tragic, as containing the dignity and significance of tragedy, if we look at the story differently. Certain changes in interpretation are fundamental enough to alter our perspective completely, as is illustrated in an anecdote about a ship at sea: An admiral, at the helm of a battleship, sees a light approaching in the darkness. Having confirmed that he is on a collision course, the admiral sends a signal to the unknown vessel: “Alter your course 20 degrees to starboard.” The reply comes back: “Alter your course 20 degrees to starboard.”

Frustrated, the admiral sends the message, “I am an admiral, so alter your course 20 degrees to starboard.” As the light comes closer, the reply comes: “I am a Seaman Second Class. You alter your course 20 degrees to starboard!” Furious, the admiral signals, “Alter your course immediately. I, sir, command a battleship.” Back through the gloom comes the final reply: “You alter your course immediately. I, sir, am on a lighthouse.”

Commentators have quite properly seen a tragic element in the story of Saul. Yet that element does not involve the career of Saul himself or even the events surrounding the rise of David. Rather, we need to re-read Saul’s tale as presenting not his but Israel’s tragedy. The all-too-human Saul, though far from a tragic hero in himself, embodies the troubled saga of Israel’s early relationship with God.

When creating the first woman, God says, “I will make [the man] a helper fit for him” (Genesis 2:18).1