Lecture 33: The Themes of Samuel: Anointed Ones, and the God Who Humbles and Exalts

The lecture, section by section

1. Worship front and center

   Judges said almost nothing of tabernacle, priest, or ark, because its subject was Israel's turning away. Samuel opens inside Israel's worship: Elkanah going up yearly to sacrifice to the Lord of hosts at Shiloh, where the tabernacle had settled into a more permanent center. The ark, unmentioned through Judges, now drives whole chapters: carried to battle, captured, triumphant over the Philistines' god in their own temple, sent home, a blessing or a curse according to how it is handled. And Shiloh's eventual destruction clears the way for the place Deuteronomy promised God would choose.

2. Priests judged and renewed

   Eli's house opens the book and falls under judgment; through Samuel, priestly ministry is reformed and sacrifice restored. The kings are then measured by it: Saul slaughters the priests at Nob and leaves the ark parked at Kiriath-jearim for his whole reign; David gathers the priests, and the moment Jerusalem is his, brings the ark up to the capital in 2 Samuel 6. Care for the worship of Yahweh becomes one of the book's sharpest lines between the rejected king and the man after God's heart.

3. The word returns

   Since Joshua's farewell, and Joshua only restated Moses, no sustained prophetic voice had addressed all Israel; the era offered only fleeting men of God, one in Judges, one bringing Eli his sentence. Then the Lord reveals himself to Samuel at Shiloh, and from Dan to Beersheba all Israel knows a prophet is confirmed among them: the first ongoing prophetic ministry since Moses himself. The kings are measured here too: Saul resists the word until, deserted by his own choice, he seeks revelation from a medium and receives only doom; David is given Gad and then Nathan, and, tellingly, listens.

4. Hannah names the anointed

   Until this book, anointing belonged to the tabernacle's vessels and priests. It is Hannah, that great theologian, who first applies the word to the coming king: the Lord will give strength to his king and exalt the horn of his anointed, the parallelism making king and anointed one the same figure. Samuel then anoints first Saul, then David; David reveres Saul precisely as the Lord's anointed; and the title runs forward through the prophets and Daniel to the ultimate Anointed One. Alongside mashiach stand nagid, the ruler God designates, and melek, the king in his authority, three words tracing choice, appointment, and office, with Genesis 17, Genesis 49, and Numbers 24 echoing behind them all.

5. Samson begun, Samuel finished

   Samuel is the Old Testament's unsung hero, and his first work is finishing another man's assignment. The Samson cycle never closes: Samson, who toyed with his calling, in Essex's paraphrase, only began to deliver Israel from the Philistines and became the first judge to die in battle, leaving no rest for the land. The narrative signals the handoff from its first verse: there was a certain man, whose wife was barren, the very formula that opened the Samson story. And the cycle finally completes at 1 Samuel 7: the Philistines subdued, the hand of the Lord against them all the days of Samuel, who then judges Israel on his circuit from Ramah.

6. The second Moses

   Bergen's commentary catalogs the echoes: like Moses, Samuel is judge and prophet at once; leads Israel to victory by his word rather than his sword; builds an altar; is a Levite, not a priest, yet performs priestly acts in a season when Aaron's line lay spiritually bankrupt; has two unworthy sons; appoints leaders from outside his family; and stands as the great transitional figure. He is not the prophet like Moses of Deuteronomy 18, but he is thoroughly Moses-like, and his work is a restoration of the Mosaic pattern: 1 Samuel 7:3 to 4, put away the foreign gods and the Ashtaroth and serve him alone, is the deliberate reversal of Judges 2, and Israel obeys.

7. A reformation that held for a season

   Samuel is the reformer of the Former Prophets, and his reformation outlives him: open idolatry does not return to center stage until Solomon's fall in 1 Kings 11. Even faithless Saul kept the ban so firmly he could hardly find a medium when he wanted one, though household idols lingered in secret, in Saul's own family and through Michal into David's. One flaw, though, Samuel shares with the era and with David after him: his sons turn out worthless, Israel's old Achilles heel from Judges 2, the faith not passed to the children, and their corruption becomes Israel's pretext for demanding a king.

8. Saul: victorious to the last battle

   Read the war record and Saul is a puzzle: from the Ammonites of chapter 11 through Moab, Zobah, Amalek, and the Philistines, he never loses a battle until his last, though the faith that won some belonged to Jonathan or to David. He protected and enlarged Israel's borders for forty years, and the point is not Saul's genius but God's faithfulness: Israel asked for a king to fight their battles, and God honored the office. Nor did Yahweh desert Saul first; the departure the narrative traces from chapter 16 to 31 is Saul's, spiritual, then psychological, then physical, until the night at Endor leaves him utterly spent, and the battlefield of Gilboa finishes what the desertion began.

9. Hannah's key: brought low, lifted up

   The book's third great theme is announced in Hannah's song and traced in a classic article the notes cite: exaltation and humiliation. Proud Peninnah is humbled and barren Hannah exalted, and Hannah reads her own story as the way God always works, the Lord brings low, the Lord also exalts, ending her song at his king, his anointed. Then the pattern rolls: Eli's proud house falls as the boy Samuel rises; the Philistines exulting over the captured ark are humbled by it; Saul is raised to the throne and brought down by disobedience; David, humbled for years under Saul's spear, is exalted to the kingdom; then David and his sons are humbled in turn, until the census pride of 2 Samuel 24 humbles even David, and the book ends with the Lord alone exalted, and a plague halted at a threshing floor that will carry the temple.

10. The Davidic covenant

    The fourth theme gathers the others: God's ultimate choice is David, better than Saul, and in 2 Samuel 7 God binds himself by covenant to David's house. By chapter 23 David himself knows he is not the ultimate Anointed One; the covenant points past him, which is exactly the tension that propels the book of Kings. Essex's purpose statement for Samuel: Yahweh established a human monarchy over his theocratic nation Israel and guaranteed its future through his covenant with David.

11. The faithful priest who is not the Messiah

    A question about Phinehas opens a favorite text. The man of God promises Eli that God will raise up a faithful priest and build him an enduring house, and most commentators leap to Christ, without finishing the sentence: this priest will walk before my anointed always. He is not the anointed; he serves in the anointed's presence. The fulfillment runs through Zadok, installed when Solomon expels Eli's line in 1 Kings 2, and onward, Ezekiel 44 and 45 being the witness, to a Zadokite priesthood serving when Messiah reigns. Christ is indeed a priest, but after Melchizedek, per Psalm 110, not Aaron; and the everlasting priestly covenant with Phinehas from Numbers 25, unfulfillable in Christ's Aaron-less priesthood, becomes, Essex notes, one of Scripture's strongest and most overlooked arguments for a future millennial fulfillment.

12. A golden age, and a word to the weary

    Put the pieces together and the era from Samuel through Solomon's early reign becomes the Old Testament's golden age, Israel more like her millennial future than at any other point, until Solomon's idolatry begins the long descent that Kings will narrate. Essex closes pastorally, straight from the chart of David's dark years: between anointing and throne David despaired of ever being king, while Saul deteriorated step by step to Gilboa. His word to exhausted students preparing for ministry is the book's own lesson wearing work clothes: seminarians come in two varieties, so be a David, not a Saul; the humbling season is real, and the God of Hannah's song still exalts.

1. Hannah interpreted her own small deliverance as a window into how God runs all of history, and ended her song at the Messiah. What would it look like to read your own answered prayers with that kind of theological reach?

2. Eli, Samuel, and David were all mighty in Israel and weak at home, the old Achilles heel of Judges 2. Why does passing faith to children prove so hard for even the most publicly faithful, and what guards against it?

3. Be a David, not a Saul: two men under pressure, one deteriorating away from God, one despairing yet calling on him. In your current season of waiting or weariness, which direction are you actually drifting, and how can you tell?