Lecture 34: The Demand for a King: Rebellion, Providence, and the Bookends of Samuel

The lecture, section by section

1. Bookends: two singers, one hope

   Commentators have long seen the frame: Hannah's song near the book's opening and David's great song of praise in 2 Samuel 22 form a grand inclusio. Hannah sings, there is no rock like our God; David answers across the decades, the Lord is my rock and my fortress. And both do the same thing with their own deliverances: they read them as portents. Hannah's reversal points forward to the strength God will give his king, his anointed; David, who is that anointed, sees in his victories the pattern of what God will do for his anointed, for David and his seed forever, through the greater king still to come.

2. The last words of David

   A second poem follows: David's last words in 2 Samuel 23, spoken as the man raised on high, the anointed of the God of Jacob, the sweet psalmist through whom the Spirit spoke. He who rules righteously in the fear of God is like the morning light, and David's reign knew that blessing; but verse 5, best read as a statement, confesses, truly my house is not so with God. Neither David nor his sons will embody the righteous ruler. Yet, he sings, God has made with me an everlasting covenant, ordered in all things and secured, and the covenant, not the house's record, carries his hope, while the worthless are swept away like thorns.

3. The book ends with a humbled king

   Hannah's poem flowed out of a narrative in which a barren woman was exalted; David's poems flow into a final narrative in which a self-exalting king is judged and brought low. The census of 2 Samuel 24, numbering an army no command required him to number, was glory-seeking, and it kindled the Lord's anger. Tellingly, when Chronicles later tells David's story it records only this one sin, not Bathsheba, not Uriah, because the census is the sin that proves David a mere man like every other king. Samuel and Kings show David warts and all, answering the exiles' question, why did this happen; Chronicles will highlight the line's faithfulness, answering, what hope remains. The plague halts at a threshing floor David buys, the future temple site, and the book closes with the Lord alone exalted: the Messiah will be David's son, but David is not the Messiah.

4. Three men, and a hinge

   The structure is agreed on all sides: Samuel in the first seven chapters, roughly his first sixty years, until Israel tells the old prophet what the Lord once told aging Moses; Saul from his appointment through his failure in chapters 13 to 15; David from his anointing through his rise, his reign, seven and a half years in Hebron and thirty-three in Jerusalem, and the closing review. The one debated seam is chapter 8, which ends the Samuel narrative and begins Saul's at once; call it a hinge and both sides are satisfied. For Saul's forty years the course follows Acts 13, on the reasoning that Paul, a Benjamite named for the king, would know his ancestor's reign.

5. Which text are we reading?

   Samuel raises a preliminary question few books raise as sharply: alongside Jeremiah, it shows the most significant textual divergences in the Old Testament, with a notably different Septuagint and more Masoretic marginal readings than any other book. The course's working position, with Tsumura's commentary: the Masoretic Text is the one text with a describable ancestry reaching toward the autograph, it underlies the standard English translations, and it will be trusted unless strong contextual reasons say otherwise.

6. The great issue: ambivalent, negative, or something else

   Now the book's most debated question: what is the narrator's stance toward Israel's demand for a king? Skeptics read the text as contradictory, two sources, one pro-monarchy and one anti, stitched together; the polite word is ambivalent. Position B observes, accurately, that the text tends negative: Yahweh himself tells Samuel, they have not rejected you but me, ranking the demand with every apostasy since Egypt, and Samuel's covenant address in chapter 12 calls it this evil, with unseasonable thunder and rain as heaven's underline.

7. Saul, the natural king

   The negative reading is reinforced by how Saul enters: choice, handsome, and taller than any of the people, the ancient world's very image of a mighty warrior king, and one of only two men in all of Samuel described by height, the other being Goliath. He comes from a substantial Benjamite family, cannot find his father's donkeys, and does not even know who Samuel is until his servant tells him. When the lot procedure, deliberately echoing the discovery of Achan's sin, singles him out, he is hiding among the baggage, which Essex reads not as humility but as the first sign of a man who struggles to accept the will of God, the struggle chapters 13 to 15 will finish. His victories, chapter 11 insists, came by the Spirit rushing upon him, never by his natural endowments.

8. Position C: right desire, wrong way

   But the text cannot be simply anti-king, because Deuteronomy 17 stands behind it. Moses foresaw the day Israel would say, I will set a king over me like the nations, and God provided for it: you shall surely set a king over you, only he must be the Lord's choice, an Israelite brother, and utterly unlike the nations' kings, no multiplied horses, wives, or gold, a man who writes out his own copy of the Torah and reads it all his days, fearing God and never exalted above his brothers. Read 1 Samuel 8 with that in view and the rebellion locates itself precisely: appoint for us a king to judge us like all the nations. The desire was proper and prophesied; the manner was anti-Torah, the motive, a king to fight our battles, was distrust of the Yahweh who had been winning them, and the timing ran ahead of God's chosen line, for David was not yet born. Like Jacob grasping a promised blessing by deceit, Israel pursued a right desire the wrong way.

9. Test the desire, and the means

   The principle falls out directly, and Essex presses it home to men preparing for ministry: God cares about both the correctness of your desires and the path by which you pursue them. Wanting to preach is a proper desire; forcing doors God has not opened is Israel's sin in miniature. Let God open the doors. And over it all stands the older Torah principle: you meant it for evil, God meant it for good, for the kingship Israel demanded sinfully was the very kingship God intended to establish.

10. The procedure of the king

    Samuel's warning in chapter 8, the king will take your sons, your daughters, your fields, your tenth, until you cry out and the Lord will not answer, unfolds over a century. Saul's small kingdom ran on the spoil of victory; David's empire added vassal tribute from conquests and treaties reaching toward the Euphrates; Solomon inherited the streams of tribute, and when his apostasy brought military reversals, the tribute thinned while the court's appetite did not. So Rehoboam, pressed for relief, raised the load instead, and at 1 Kings 12 the crying out Samuel predicted finally sounds, splitting the kingdom, after which two royal houses had to be fed. The economics of a king like the nations worked out exactly as the prophet said.

11. Kings measured by Torah

    Saul proves the warning in person: the tall king begins the multiplying of wives and wealth, and when his army melts away in chapter 13 his grasping after strength drives him into the disobedience that costs the dynasty, a self-seeking heart laid bare. David is the counterpoint and the complication: a conflicted man of strong passions who wants to do it Yahweh's way, is right when he does, and wrong, sometimes gravely, when he does not. Every king after them, in both kingdoms, will be tinged to some degree with being a king like the nations.

12. Two closing questions

    Did that generation even know Deuteronomy 17? The text leaves it open: perhaps knowing rebellion like Sinai's, perhaps untaught ignorance like the third generation of Judges, and Samuel's failure with his own sons cuts both ways; either way, the sin stands, a right desire pursued against Torah. And does Saul's fall threaten the security of God's elect? No, Essex answers: Saul was chosen to an office, and chosen in part as judgment, you want a king like the nations, here he is, not to salvation; the text never discloses his eternal state, because that is not its point, and no analogy runs from Saul's office to the believer's election.

1. Hannah and David both treated their own deliverances as previews of what God would do through his Anointed. What deliverance in your own story could you learn to read that way, as evidence pointed at Christ rather than a private happy ending?

2. Right desire, wrong way: Israel wanted what God had promised and grasped it against his instruction. Where are you currently tempted to force a door God has not opened, and what would waiting his way actually require?

3. The book ends with David humbled and the Lord alone exalted, and the temple site bought at the place of mercy. Why is it good news, and not merely sobering, that even the best of God's servants is not the Messiah?