Chapter 13 begins with the war against Philistia. Following a brief description of Saul’s three-thousand man army, with one thousand troops in the south under the command of Jonathan, we immediately see Jonathan take initiative and attack the Philistine stronghold at Geba. We learn that the Philistines whom Jonathan has provoked are a much stronger force, with either three thousand chariots and six thousand footman to Jonathan’s under-equipped force of one thousand. As military confrontation nears, Saul becomes frightened, and instead of waiting for Samuel to perform a sacrifice to God, he does it himself. For this, Samuel rebukes Saul and promises that instead of Saul getting to found the Israelite monarchy, the throne will be taken away and given toward a man who obeys God.

After Saul’s failing his military is again described, but this time as an even smaller force of only six hundred men in one place. Nevertheless, Jonathan shows extraordinary initiative and valor and goes, with only one another man, against an entire Philistine garrison, rallying Israel and putting the Philistines to flight. Again, Saul steps in and acts rashly. This time, he utters a curse, with a death penalty attached to it, on anyone who eats before the battle is over. Jonathan, not hearing of the curse, unwittingly eats some honey. As the people faint, they are tempted into sinning by eating raw animals when they finally are allowed to eat. Saul hastily tries to clean up the situation, but when he gets around to building an altar to God, God refuses to respond by giving guidance. Trying to find the root of the problem, Saul discovers that, like Jephthah before him, his rash oath during a military campaign against Israel’s enemies has snared his child. Like Jephthah, Saul decides that it would be better to kill his own child than to suffer the possible penalty for going back on his word. Saul faces a minor mutiny, in which his own people force him not to kill Jonathan. So now, both Saul and his son have fallen under a curse, and the people are discontented.

The conclusion to the war with Philistia is that Saul spends the rest of his life fighting Philistia and other regions but never winning a decisive battle. (As we will later learn, it was the Philistines who finally kill both Saul and his son, significant because it was war against the Philistines in which Saul lost the favor of God and condemned himself and his son to death.) The chapter closes with yet a third description of Saul’s army, this time no numbers being mentioned at all. Instead, we are simply told about a single man in the army, Saul’s cousin Abner. Even after Saul’s death, Abner will be a conniving fellow whose feud with Joab causes David trouble. The very last verse of chapter fourteen notes that Saul began taking all the valiant men to be part of his army, as Samuel had predicted a king would do in his speech rebuking Israel for seeking a king.

In chapter fifteen, Samuel goes to Saul and re-affirms Saul’s kingship, commanding him that God has decided Saul should completely wipe out the Amalekites. This could be seen, depending on how one reads it, as God giving Saul a second chance to be an obedient king. Samuel commands complete destruction for the Amalekites, including the destruction of every living animal among them. Instead, Saul simply spares the Amalekite king and kills all the people, keeping their animals and refusing to destroy them. God becomes frustrated and sends Samuel to confront Saul. Saul first lies to Samuel, and then when pressed makes excuses for his disobedience. Samuel rebukes Saul for his greed, and points out that even if Saul’s excuse of intending to use the animals for sacrifice were true, this is nonetheless forbidden, as God values obedience more than sacrifice. Saul begs Samuel to ask God for forgiveness, still making new excuses about fearing the people. In the last war, God refused to grant Samuel military advice. In this war, Samuel refuses to pray for forgiveness for Saul. Samuel himself kills Agag, whom Saul refused to kill, and leaves Saul for the last time.

Having left Saul behind, Samuel is in mourning. God answers that instead of continuing to mourn, Samuel’s next step is to anoint a new king. Following a pattern long established in the Bible, God chooses the least child, the youngest, to be king, refusing all the older ones whom Samuel thought were leadership material. Samuel anoints David king and the spirit of God comes upon David. Meanwhile, the spirit of God has left Saul, and a distressing spirit is in its place. Saul, in agony, seeks out someone to play the harp for him to soothe him, and David is chosen. David comes highly recommended: he is a skilled musician, a brave warrior, a man of war, a careful speaker — in contrast to Saul’s rashness — and a good-looking guy. The text, by the way, has so far told us twice that David is a handsome person. So Saul, not knowing that he is inviting his replacement into his presence, takes David from his family and brings him to the palace. If David were a rash fellow, it would be tempting at this point to declare himself king and foment himself a rebellion. He could even claim justification, because David has been chosen as king and God has foretold the end of Saul’s reign. But David follows the general principle throughout the Bible that great men of God do not seize authority, but rather wait patiently and allow God to do his work his own way. David serves Saul so well that he quickly becomes Saul’s chief assistant.

It is at this time that Saul’s constant enemies, the Philistines, again show up, this time with a champion named Goliath, who demands that someone come out to fight him. Saul, with all Israel, is greatly afraid, and no one comes out to fight Goliath for forty days. Now, we are told that David, as he does from time to time, was away from Saul keeping his father’s sheep in Bethlehem while his brothers were down at the battlefield among the passive frightened Israelite camp. When he arrives, David finds that Saul is utterly paralyzed by fear, neither willing to take on the Philistine army now their strongman. In desperation, Saul has offered his daughter to any man who can kill Goliath, but there’s still no takers even for the opportunity to marry into the royal family. When David does arrive, sent on an errand to bring bread and cheese to his brother’s, he finds Israel in this state and says plainly that this is a shameful embarrassment. Saul, who has now shown himself repeatedly incompetent at prosecuting battles, unfaithful to God, and provoking a mutiny among his own people in the last Philistine conflict, David offers to go.

Beyond the exact details of what’s going on, let’s consider the larger context. In previous encounters with the much larger Philistine force, Saul’s heir Jonathan has taken the initiative and attacked the Philistines. Now that Saul’s dynasty has been replaced by David, David is the new heir to the throne. David, by doing the thing that was previously Jonathan’s signature move in taking on the Philistines against increasingly bad odds, steps into Jonathan’s metaphorical shoes by taking on the Philistines at this new and higher level of bad odds. The historian is very subtle here in the way he communicates things. David going out against Goliath is not only about God’s ability to defeat a larger enemy. That’s already been established. David going out to fight Goliath is about David taking the place of Jonathan. That’s why, for the first time in the history of Saul’s conflict with the Philistines, Jonathan is not even mentioned at this point. Furthermore, remember how Saul had offered his daughter in marriage? David is taking him up on that offer, and thereby making himself a part of the royal family. The historian is establishing David’s claim to the throne so that later, when Jonathan and Saul are gone, David will be the logical replacement. But that’s another story.

David kills Goliath and chops of his head, and, like when Jonathan fought before, the victory of a lone man leads to the fleeing of the Philistines and the Israelites in hot pursuit, killing them left and right. Classic Jonathan material. Afterward, Saul asks Abner, ‘Whose son is this?’ Abner says, ‘I dunno.’ They track David down and Saul asks him, ‘Whose son are you?’ Now, if we read the text as face value, Saul is confused about something he knew perfectly well a chapter before when he summoned David son of Benjamin and became a good friend of him. So one possibility is that these two stories are from two different sources, two different stories which explain David’s introduction to Saul in two different ways. While the historian who compiled these stories together tried to make them compatible by explaining David’s initial absence in the second story as a typical visit home, the historian was too sloppy to fully integrate the stories, and left behind a tell-tale contradiction.

I give the deuteronomistic historian — that’s what we’ll call the guy or group of guys who gave us the extended history contained in the similar and sequential books Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings — more credit than that. We’ve already shown that the historian has an extremely subtle way of making points about David’s replacing Jonathan through little details, and he’s about to do so in just one more verse again, so perhaps there’s another way to see this. Have you ever had a friend who did something so incredibly stunning and amazing that you had to ask, ‘Who isthis guy?’ Of course, that doesn’t mean that you don’t know who they are, it means that you are coming to realize there’s a lot more to them than you previously thought. For example, when Jesus calmed the stormy see with his voice, his disciples asked ‘Who is this guy? Even the wind and sea obey him!’ Now the last thing the text is trying to say here is that the disciples did not know that he was Jesus of Nazareth, a talking preaching. No, what they meant was that they did not realize that he was the man commissioned by God to overturn the kingdoms of the world and vindicate God’s plan by rising from the dead as Lord of the World. They didn’t know his full identity, and in a moment they realized that they had not fully wrapped their heads around him before they saw him calm the sea. (They didn’t understand him after the incident, either, but that’s another story.)

So, on a plain level, I think Saul is asking something quite close to what we mean in English when we say, Who is this guy? But there might yet be more hidden in the phrase. For one thing, we have established, I think, that the historian sees David’s war on the Philistines as a signpost pointing toward David’s replacement of Jonathan in God’s future plans. If so, there is a bit of irony in the king asking ‘Whose son is this?’ when his own son is being replaced. David’s answer, that he is the son of an otherwise unknown man, Jesse the Bethlehemite, is also an exercise in contrasts, David the son of nobody behaving as though he were a brave prince like Jonathan, the son of the king. Also, if I may go way, way out on a limb, there’s the fact to consider that the Israelites thought of God and the rightfully anointed king of Israel as having a father-son relationship. In the second Psalm, which is first about the coronation of a Davidic king, about the enthronement of David’s line, God says to the king, ‘I have set my king upon my holy hill of Zion [the city David took] . . . I said, You are my son, today I have begotten you.’ If the language of Psalm 2, the language about divine sonship, is the language used at the inauguration of a king, I would not be surprised if the historian was thinking of the implicit answer ‘God’ to ‘Whose son are you.’ David, ever humble and unwilling to take on God’s anointed king Saul, answers his earthly father, turning down an opportunity to claim the throne.

The very next verse, 18:1, begins with the narrator noting that David and Jonathan became very close friends, so much so that ‘the soul of Jonathan was bound up with David’s soul, and Jonathan loved him as he loved his own soul.’ If that’s not substitutionary language, I don’t know what is! This historian is an incredible writer. He could so easily be pedantic and tell us directly what’s going on here, but he encodes his message, which makes it all the more powerful. He hits this theme again in the next verse, verse 2, ‘Saul took him that day and would not let him go back any more to his father’s house.’ Right after bringing up David’s lowly parentage, then his intimate friendship with Jonathan and how close their souls were and how Jonathan loved David like himself, now Saul takes David away from his original father and takes him for his own. The hints are getting really, really strong as to where things are going. ‘Then Jonathan and David made a covenant, because he’ — guess what’s about to be repeated? — ‘loved him as his own soul.’ The historian might as well be drawing an equals sign ( = ) between Jonathan and David. Then, in the ultimate visualization of David stepping into Jonathan’s shoes, or at least everything else Jonathan wore, ‘Jonathan stripped off the robe that was on him, and gave it to David, and his clothing, and even his sword, bow, and girdle.’ It seems, at this point, that Jonathan knows on some level that David is going to replace him, and is perfectly accepting of this. Immediately following we see David going wherever Saul goes, and David being accepted in the eyes of everyone. One could almost imagine a smooth transition, Saul handing over his kingdom to his adoptive son David, Jonathan giving his approval, and all going well. Almost. But Saul has a temper.

The next thing that happens is that when Saul is returning from battle, a bunch of women came from all throughout Israel and started singing and dancing. Dancing women tend to signal trouble in the Bible, as when the dancing women got kidnapped by Saul’s fellow Banjamites in Judges, or when Herod, another non-Davidic king of Israel who sought to kill the Davidic king of Israel, was pleased by the dancing of Salome. Wow. Those parallels are stronger than I thought. They merit more looking into at some point. Anyhow, what the dancing women say alarms Saul. They sing, ‘Saul has slain his thousands / and David his ten thousands.’ Saul’s ego is wounded. ‘They have ascribed ten thousands to David, but mere thousands to me.’ And then Saul realizes what’s been going on under his nose, and says, ‘What more can he have but the kingdom.’ The text tells us that ‘Saul eyed David from that day forward.’

Saul, who had already demonstrated his wishy-washiness with the Amalekites, and had underscored his tendency to do things have way by repeatedly beating but never definitively beating the Philistines, does what he is wont to do and halfway deals with the challenge of David. When David is playing harp for Saul against, Saul gets the crazy look in his eye and tries to pin David against the wall with a spear. David escapes twice, but, notably, does not fight back. Now, it is already established that Saul had a history of friction with his subjects, that his mind was a bit crazy, that God was no longer with him. And David was handsome, the ladies liked him, the menfolks liked him, had God with him, and was well-established in battle. But David is a classy guy. He not only refuses to make a play, but continues to faithfully work for the man who tried to kill him.

Saul, having failed at personally killing David, then puts him in charge of some soldiers — a very questionable way of dealing with a rival — and sends David out to fight. David defends the people, defeats the enemy, and becomes even more of a popular folk hero. Now, Saul had not at this point yet given David his daughter. So he offers David his daughter Merab, on the newly added condition that if David takes Merab, he must agree to keep fighting for the king, in hopes that the Philistines will eventually destroy David. (Significantly, the end Saul hopes for David comes upon Saul himself.) David politely declines, considering himself unworthy to be the king’s son-in-law, an almost ridiculous humility for a man chosen as God’s king. When Saul finds out that his daughter Michal has fallen for David, he decides again to try to marry David into the family, this time thinking to himself that ‘she will be a trap for him,’ which I imagine speaks volumes about Saul and Michal’s relationship. This time, David caves in and marries Saul’s daughter, simultaneously making himself a sort of son to the king and also getting himself into a relationship which would be very troublesome to him in the future. This is also the first foreshadowing of what later turns out to be a terrible and consistent problem of bad judgment with regard to women in David’s life. But I’m getting ahead of myself now. Back to 1 Samuel.

In return for marrying Michal, the king demands a dowry of one hundred Philistine foreskins. In this time period, the only significant neighbor of Israel which did not circumcise was the Philistines, so bringing adult foreskins was a sure-fire way of proving that one had killed as many Philistines as one had claimed. Further, by sending David out to kill and desecrate the bodies of a hundred of the king’s more powerful enemies, Saul was trying to get David killed. No dice. God’s with David, and so David marries Michal. Saul is even more afraid, and as David continues to defeat the Philistines, David’s fame rises all the more.

But I think one word was forgotten. And that’s ‘and a span’ [2]. A span is about a nine-inch unit of measurement. If we add to this a cubit of 17 or 18 inches (and while cubits do get longer than this, I’ve never known them to get shorter), the littler Goliath still stands impressively tall, at somewhere around 6’7” to 6’9”. If you’ve ever known someone in that height range, you’ll know that sort of person is intimidatingly large even to a 5’10” Anglo-Saxon like myself. If the Israelites were in the 5’3” range for males, I have no doubt at all that the word giant would seem appropriate for a Goliath towering. Even a little Goliath of 6’7”.

[1] I once had a disturbing conversation with some black supremacists / apocalyptic cultists who assured me that modern scholarship has shown Goliath to have actually been at least eighteen feet tall. These folks did not, however, introduce me to any of these scholars, so I’ll just have to take their word for it.

[2] If you thought you just caught me referring to a three-word phrase as a ‘word’, please give me a break. For the literal-minded, perhaps it will suffice to point out that ‘and a span’ is indeed one word, ‘vazaret’. Or, if you want to go a less literalistic route, consider that in Hebrew texts, ‘word’ could often refer to something said, as opposed to a lexical unit.

Joshua was near Jericho, and he lifted up his eyes, and he looked, and there was a man standing standing in front of him, sword drawn in his hand. Joshua walked over to him. Are you for us, or for our adversaries.

The man said, No.

No. I am the commander of the armies of Jehovah.

I squirm to this day at such an answer. I want it to be said,

Yes. Yes, I am on your side. No, I am not on the side of your adversaries. I am here to do what I am here to do.

Is it possible I am reading too much into a single word found in an English translation of a Hebrew work? Yes.

But whether what I am seeing is or is not the intent of the human author of Joshua at the moment that he wrote that particular phrase, it is a faithful representation of one of God’s most clear self-expressions.

A brother came quarreling to the second Joshua, Jesus, and asked him for an answer to a property dispute between him and his brother. Are you with me, he asked, or with the other.

And like the Joshua before him, this Joshua refused to stay within the bounds of the question he was asked.

I am grateful to them both.

This is the ordinance of the Passover. No foreigner may eat of it, but every man’s ebed who is bought for money, when you have circumcised him, he is to eat of it. A foreigner and a hired servant will not eat of it. It is to be eaten in one house; do not carry any of the flesh out from your house. Do not break a bone of it. All the congregation of Israel will keep it.

Leaving aside the technicalities and the very modern concern that circumcising an employee might be a violation of something we like to call ‘human rights’, let’s look at what the text is saying about the ebed, who is bought for money. First of all, notice that it is assumed that the ebed is a foreigner. This is key, because the Torah took measures to try to prevent the enslavement of Israelites, by limiting terms of slavery, through legal release clauses, through a seven-year time limit, and through the application of the death penalty to those who trafficked Israelites. But, though this passage does not explicitly sanction the enslavement of foreigners, it assumes that it will happen and seeks to regulate that enslavement. It is key to note that the foreign ebed is expected to be circumcised. In our culture, that’s a dreadful violation of basic decency in the employer-employee relationship. In ancient Israel, what this meant was that the foreign ebed was to be included in the congregation of Israel. As such, he had full Passover rights, unlike a foreigner who was hired labor (a sakhir). And perhaps most importantly, the Israelite family was required to share this most important statement of Jewish identity, this family meal, with the slave.

The implication of the passage was that assumption of control over someone, even a non-Israelite, required definite protections for the individual whose freedom was impaired — protections that were not needed by a general worker. Further, if the people of Israel allowed the implications of Exodus 12:44 to work themselves out fully, any sort of racial or ethnic generational slavery would become impossible.

It has been said that American supporters of slavery in the ante-bellum United States were selective in their interpretation of the Bible, in that they only looked at Old Testament passages, instead of at the New Testament. But Exodus 12:44 is reason to believe that even a look at the spirit of Old Testament passages is sufficient to condemn American chattel slavery.

Reading Exodus 10 this morning, I began to suspect that Mr. Alinsky may have patterned his negotiating style on that of Moses more closely than he lets on. In Exodus 10, Moses is engaged in a negotiation on behalf of the children of Israel with Pharaoh. He follows Alinsky’s playbook flawlessly. He starts by demanding something far bigger than he can reasonably expect to receive given his status, but threatens the powers that be economically. Pharaoh finally caves, and at that very moment it is revealed that Moses has been negotiating in bad faith. Though at first he has merely asked for permission to go sacrifice to Jehovah, Moses demands not only the right to take the flocks and herds of the Israelites along, but even goes so far as to demand that Pharaoh give him offspring of his own to kill, so that the Israelites can carry out their sacrifices at no personal expense to themselves. He he. Pharaoh still doesn’t know what’s coming.

When I read Alinsky before, I saw perhaps too little similarity between the political methodology of Alinsky and the political methodology of the Bible’s heroes.

Take my feet, and let them be swift and beautiful for thee.

Praying for fast and pretty feet seems, well, shallow, if the biblical allusion is not explained. The words make sense, however, if one is familiar with Romans 10. Paul, writing about the need for proclamation of the gospel, says,

For whoever will call on the name of the Lord will be saved. How will they call on him in whom they have not believed? How will they believe in him whom they have not heard? How will they hear without a preacher? And how will they preach unless they are sent? As it is written: ‘How beautiful are the feet of those announce the good news of peace, who announce joyful news of good things!’

Paul, to underscore the importance of the proclamation of the gospel, uses an excellent bit of imagery from Isaiah to illustrate. He is quoting a passage from Isaiah 52, where Isaiah is dealing with the problem of Israel’s exile. Looking forward to a day when Jehovah would set straight all that was wrong in the world, Isaiah drew a picture of a return, a time when God’s people would no longer be oppressed. He pictured the news of Jehovah’s triumph spreading, as news did in those days, on the swift feet of messengers the victory and reign of Jehovah throughout the earth.

How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of the bringer of good news, who makes known salvation, who says to Zion, ‘Your god reigns!’ 8 The voice of the watchmen! They lift up their voice; together they sing: for they will see eye to eye when Jehovah returns to Zion. 9 Break forth into joy, sing together, you waste places of Jerusalem, because Jehovah has comforted his people, he has redeemed Jersualem. 10 Jehovah has made bare his holy arm to the eyes of all the nations; and all the ends of the earth have seen the salvation of our god.

The prophet, of course, is not excited about the visual attractiveness of feet. The ‘feet of the bringer of good news’ is the poetic image of the coming glorious day of Jehovah. It is the solution to the problem of exile. For Paul, the true end of exile, the victory of God, and the proclamation of the victory of God were all being worked out through the spreading of the gospel. This, for Paul, inaugurated the reign of God (or, kingdom of God) which the prophets had looked forward too.

Now, when we sing, ‘Take my feet, and let them be swift and beautiful for Thee,’ we know what we’re singing about. We are praising God for bringing us back from the oppression of the world, we are thanking him for establishing his kingdom among us, and we are asking him to make us effective bringers of that good news to the world around us.

I have to wonder whether this interpretation was made before or after Hebrews 11:

By faith Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac . . . convinced that God was able to raise him up [from the dead], and figuratively speaking, he did receive him back from the dead.

If my hunch is right, the author of Hebrews also took note of ‘we will return’, and decided that what Abraham anticipated was not a prevention of his son’s death, but resurrection. But I’m just guessing.

Now, if in English I told you that I was raised “in the small towns of west central Ohio,” you would, I think, assume that I lived in several small towns. And so should we assume that Lot lived in both Sodom and Gomorrah? That depends on exactly what the Hebrew bahen “in them” means.

If we take it as though it were a modern English statement, we could perhaps be forgiven for thinking that Lot had moved from Gomorrah to Sodom, or maintained residences in both locations. But the Hebrew preposition ב, “in,” is capable of expressing a range of meaning not fully captured by the English in, including approximating among.

So I suspect that Genesis 19:29 tells us nothing about how many specific locations Lot may have inhabited. I suspect that a truer translation would be something along the lines of “the cities where Lot lived.” I think that better preserves the ambiguity of the Hebrew text as to Lot’s exact dwelling(s).

An approach similar or identical to mine is followed by the NIV and NLT. But many versions retain “in”: NRSV, ESV, NASB, ASV, KJV, Douai, Darby, and Young’s.

He brought back all the goods, and also brought back his relative Lot and his goods, along with the women and the people.

The women and the people?  What’s that supposed to mean?  Surely, I thought to myself, the Hebrew word for “people” must mean “men.”  Because “the women and the men” would make sense, and would not seem so insulting as a distinction between “women” and “people”.  But in Hebrew, they are called et hanashim v’et ha’am.  So the word “people” is singular!

The New English Translation reads “the women and the rest of the people.”  The rest of, says the footnote, is “supplied for clarity.”  Is that indeed a good translation, or a cop-out?  I don’t know.

But let me get a bit risky and engage in some speculation.  Looking at Genesis 14:16, we find that all those rescued from Kedorlaomer are divided under three headings:  (1) Lot, (2) the women, and (3) the people.  I suggest a different meaning for the three than that found in the NET bible, a reading which seems to me more natural.

Lot is Abram’s nephew, “the women” are Lot’s wife and daughters, and “the people” are the natives of the region.

Is Acts 2 in tension with capitalism?  Not in the governmental sense of the word.  Indeed, a principled capitalist would be outraged if anyone interfered with any group’s decision to pool resources and pursue need-based allotment.  Where the principled governmental capitalist must draw the line, however, is when someone tries to establish such a system of sharing by forcing other people into it.  That’s where it ceases being charity and becomes robbery.