Eerdmans Commentary on the Bible: First and Second Samuel

Graeme Auld, James D. G. Dunn

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781467453516
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Commentary

This extract from the Eerdmans Commentary on the Bible provides Auld's introduction to and concise commentary on First and Second Samuel. The  Eerdmans Commentary on the Bible presents, in nontechnical language, the best of modern scholarship on each book of the Bible, including the Apocrypha. Reader-friendly commentary complements succinct summaries of each section of the text and will be valuable to scholars, students, and general readers.
 
Rather than attempt a verse-by-verse analysis, these volumes work from larger sense units, highlighting the place of each passage within the overarching biblical story. Commentators focus on the genre of each text—parable, prophetic oracle, legal code, and so on—interpreting within the historical and literary context.
 
The volumes also address major issues within each biblical book—including the range of possible interpretations—and refer readers to the best resources for further discussions.
 

1 and 2 Samuel

Graeme Auld

INTRODUCTION

There are two common types of strategy for reading the books of Samuel. They are related to each other, but they must also be distinguished. Literary approaches focus on the text. Since the text is an ancient text, we will need some historical background to help us set it in its time and read it better. However, our main concern is how best to respond to the text’s invitation to enter its own world as created by its author or authors. Historical approaches do require literary awareness but have different interests. They may use the book as evidence for the period in which it was written or completed. If major sources or separable elements can be detected, these may be studied for traces of that earlier time in which they were written. And, of course, they may use the book as evidence for the still earlier period on which it reports. If I come on a twentieth-century textbook which claims to offer a representative selection of eighteenth-century studies of the fifteenth century, I will be interested not only in the twentieth-century choice made and commentary offered but also in the eighteenth-century views of the fifteenth century and what may or may not be learned about the fifteenth century itself.

In the Hebrew Bible (HB), as in most English Bibles, these books are called the two books of Samuel. However, in the Septuagint (LXX) and some other ancient traditions, they are but the first two of four books called Kingdoms; that is, Samuel and Kings are clearly recognized as a connected story. And it is the overlapping fates of the first two kings which dominate these first two books. Though in the Hebrew tradition they bear the name of Samuel, it is David’s story which is the biggest—the biggest in Samuel or Kings—stretching from 1 Samuel 16 to 1 Kings 2. And Saul’s story bulks almost as large and is further spread out: introduced in 1 Samuel 9, he dies in 1 Samuel 31; but his shadow and the shadow of his house remain over the story of David till 2 Samuel 21, or even 1 Kings 2. It is not these two kings, however, but rather Samuel who anointed them, who is remembered in the Hebrew title.

And that title is at home in the wider context of our books, for the HB calls Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings the Former Prophets. Just as Elijah and Elisha, not Solomon and his successors, are the heroes of the books of Kings, so Samuel may be said to edge both Saul and David off center stage even in their own play. Prophecy is an important theme of the books of Samuel. Not only do Nathan and Gad play an important role after Samuel is gone, but a number of significant relationships are probed in scene after scene: of prophet and medium; of prophet and seer; of prophet and prophets; and of prophecy and kingship.

Another important theme of the book is Yahweh’s “people.” The meaning of “Israel” is flexible, now including and now excluding Judah. Sometimes, in fact, “the people” refers to David’s own foreign guards and not to Israelites of any description. Tensions between north and south, which are more obvious from the rift between Jeroboam and Rehoboam after the death of Solomon (1 Kings 12 onward), are already anticipated both in the rivalry between northern Saul and southern David and in Absalom’s appeal to the north in his rebellion against his father.

The reading of the books of Samuel that follows invites readers to keep track of all of these issues: literary and historical approaches, kingship and prophecy and the people of God—and all from a novel perspective. I have become persuaded that we can still reconstruct from the largely parallel biblical accounts of the monarchy in the biblical books of Samuel-Kings and of Chronicles the source that both share—simply by identifying as their major source the accounts that both tell.

This source, which I call “The Book of Two Houses” (the house of Yahweh and the house of David), began with the death of Saul and ended with the removal to Babylon of the last descendant of David who would rule in Jerusalem. Near its start was the story of David’s arrival in Jerusalem and the transfer of the ark to that city soon afterward. And at its finish the fall of the city some four hundred years later, and the despoiling of its temple, were reported. It is this shared source material which we find much expanded but still recognizable in Samuel-Kings and in Chronicles. However, it begins only where 1 Samuel ends, with the death of Saul (ch. 31); the Book of Two Houses bulks larger in Kings than in Samuel.

Much of Samuel, on this account, was composed as a greatly enlarged introduction to the story of the houses of David and Yahweh, anticipating its main themes. That means in turn that, to read properly 1 Samuel especially, we already have to know how the later story develops, which tells of Israel’s and Judah’s kings and prophets.

1 Samuel

COMMENTARY

Hannah, Eli, and Samuel (1 Samuel 1–3)

There is no richer material in the book than in its opening chapters. They resonate with many other passages, in Samuel and elsewhere in the Bible. They anticipate key themes of Samuel, and of Kings as well. The story starts with Samuel’s birth to long-barren Hannah. The aged priest Eli first misunderstands her, then blesses her after her prayer. Eli’s scoundrel sons offer a sad contrast to his new attendant dedicated by his mother: Samuel grows up in Yahweh’s presence; Hophni and Phinehas slight the Deity. The divine summons to Samuel is first misunderstood by Eli as well as the lad; but once Samuel hears, it is an oracle against Eli that he receives. The third chapter ends with a note on Samuel’s maturity and Yahweh’s support of him—especially relating to the efficacy of his word.

Yet that account of the story line gives little indication of its riches. Two principal strategies assist a more adequate reading. Many elements of the story are readily compared or contrasted with episodes elsewhere in Samuel or biblical narrative: if we read side by side the birth of the two nazirites Samson and Samuel, or the vows of Jephthah and of Hannah, this helps detect the specific flavor of each. Then there is much wordplay—and that has to be recovered from the Hebrew text.

If we are told about the special circumstances of a character’s birth, as in ch. 1, we are led to expect that he will be prominent in the story as it develops. In the story of Eli and his sons (ch. 2), we are reminded before the royal story ever begins

•that a dynasty can lose divine favor, as will the house of Saul and every royal house in northern Israel; and what about the house of David?

•that a father can be blamed for the excesses of his sons, like David(?)

•that a servant in the house can become the new leader, like David; but also like Jeroboam and like Jehu.

In the story of the divine call to Samuel (ch. 3), we encounter a more dense concentration of significant words relating to prophecy than anywhere else in the Bible.

Ch. 1 Hannah’s name is related to and evokes the common word ḥen, or “favor.” Yet not only is she not favored with children of her own, but her rival wife Peninnah taunts her regularly with her lack of them, and especially at the time of feasting. Her husband loves her, and his name means “creator god”; yet even the marriage of “creator god” and “favor” does not result in children. Naomi’s neighbors showed good sense and good taste in rating daughter-in-law Ruth better than seven sons (Ruth 4:15). Elkanah betrays his lack of both when he claims to be better than ten (1:8). Hannah must have thought that, like her, he too was ill named.

We have not yet been told that Eli is old (2:22) or not able to see well (3:2). However, when we first meet him (1:14) we find that he lacks insight, and he misinterprets Hannah’s behavior after the feast from his official seat at the temple. Hannah is so desperate for success in having a son that she is prepared to vow a male child back to God. The word “nazirite” is not said, but it is suggested by the similar Hebrew word for “vow” and by the promise that no razor will be used on his head. The priest has added to the hurt, taking her distress and prayer for the drunken babbling of someone who has feasted too well. But strong drink would have been as inappropriate for her as for the wife of Manoah (Judg 13:7). The full import of her spirited retort is lost on us till the next mention of Eli’s sons (2:12); they are “Sons of No Use,” but she denies being a “Daughter of No Use.” Eli now responds (1:17) as a priest should to a suppliant at his temple, with an assurance of a divine answer to her prayer. And Hannah responds—is it to Eli or to the god whose representative he is?—with the hope that her situation may at last reflect her name: “May your servant find ḥen in your eyes.”

They go home after formal worship the next day. The common Hebrew euphemism for sexual union—“Elkanah knew Hannah his wife”—is all the more striking when we read it in 1:19 for two reasons. The one is the suggestion we have already noted in 1:5 and 8 that Elkanah’s love for Hannah was deficient in understanding. And the other is that, while her husband “creator god” (Elkanah) “knows” Hannah, the deity Yahweh “remembers” her. Yet the child is not called Zechariah (“Yahweh remembers”), as we might have expected. Several natural expectations of an experienced Bible reader are disappointed when he is given the name “Samuel.”

This name has left commentators over the ages puzzling even more because it does not fit straightforwardly the explanation Hannah offers. The problem is less that the second part of Samu-el is “El,” or God, rather than the Yahweh of whom Hannah has asked him (1:20). More surprising is that “Saul,” not “Samuel,” is the meaning of the Hebrew for “asked.” Samuel most naturally means “God is his name”; however, it has also been claimed to mean “he who is of God,” or “heard of God,” or even to be a contraction of “asked of God.” But Hannah’s clear hint at Saul’s name will be no accident, even if it comes as a surprise. Just as the story of Eli and his family alerts us to the fate of royal dynasties which will come and go in the story to follow, so Hannah’s account of Samuel’s name reminds us that the fates of Samuel and Saul were desperately commingled, and that Saul, too, was asked for and desperately wanted by his people, who badgered their god for a king.

Hannah absents herself from the next annual pilgrimage and in fact stays at home with Samuel till he is weaned, perhaps aged two or three. Elkanah does make the journey as usual; but what is reported of his purpose is puzzlingly brief: “to sacrifice the regular sacrifice and his vow.” These last words can be read as meaning that the annual sacrifice was the result of a vow by Elkanah; and yet we suppose that such a sacrifice was obligatory on all householders. Another interpretation assumes that two actions are meant although only one verb is used. “His vow,” offered at Shiloh, may then be shorthand for his endorsement of his wife’s vow; and this would be in line with Numbers 30, which makes a father or husband responsible for his daughter’s or his wife’s vows or pledges. When Hannah does come again to Shiloh, she approaches Eli deferentially, reminds him of their earlier meeting, and demonstrates the answer to her prayer. As Eli then had spoken for Yahweh, so now he takes custody of the lad left to minister to Yahweh (1:27–28; 2:11).

Ch. 2 We might have supposed that it was with her husband that Hannah came to bring Samuel to the shrine, but Elkanah is not specifically mentioned till “he” goes home (2:11). It is she who addresses Eli, and it is she who “prays to” Yahweh (2:1–10). The Song of Hannah is the first of four poems which play an important role within the two books of Samuel. The Song of Hannah, David’s lament over Saul and Jonathan (2 Sam 1:19–27), and the last words of David (2 Sam 23:1–7) are of similar length. The Song of David (2 Sam 22:2–51), which is also Psalm 18, is a very much longer piece.

Hannah’s words are introduced as her prayer, and yet Yahweh is mostly spoken of in the third person and is explicitly addressed only in 2:1–2. Indeed, it is others (whether human or divine, “you” is left unspecified) that are spoken to in v. 3. Yahweh’s stability and support are prominent at the beginning and end of the song. At the center, a series of contrasts is the theme: these verses (4–8) appear to have most immediate relevance to the Hannah we read of in the opening chapter.

The lack of a close fit between the poem and its immediate literary context can be differently evaluated. At the local level, the first ten verses of this chapter might not be missed if they were not there. And talk at the end about a king and an anointed one (“messiah” in Hebrew) introduces a theme which will not be developed till several more chapters have elapsed. Yet Hannah’s son will become chief “judge” of Israel and will anoint Israel’s first two kings, and these two kings will be depicted in a whole series of contrasts. However, it is not till we read the Song of David, almost as close to the end of the books of Samuel as Hannah’s song is to their opening, that we more fully appreciate the strategy of our storyteller: several of the themes introduced briefly here are more generously developed there. Looking more widely afield, Mary’s song in Luke 1:46–55 (the Magnificat) resumes many of Hannah’s themes.

Samuel ministering to Yahweh (2:11), Samuel the son of “Favor” who is no daughter of “No Use,” immediately puts our storyteller in mind of two veritable “Sons of No Use” (v. 12). This fairly common Hebrew phrase for types we would call scoundrels or wastrels is doubly suitable for Hophni and Phinehas, for the letters that spell the Hebrew for “use” are the same three letters that spell Eli, but in a different order. The narrator is either hinting that they are no proper sons of Eli, or in fact that Eli himself is No Use. Again, and in immediate contrast to the young lad Samuel ministering before Yahweh, it was through their servant lads that they oppressed the people at sacrifice: demanding more than the due priestly share of the meat. So angry is our storyteller at the behavior of his characters that he begins to write with the exaggeration of those who must have complained at them: “Give the priest meat for him to roast. He will not take boiled meat from you, but raw.”

After a further brief reminder of Samuel’s acceptability before Yahweh and of Eli’s blessing of Elkanah and Hannah (2:18–21), we are returned to Eli and his sons. Despite his great age, Eli heard of their behavior and remonstrated with them—yet, if the text is in order, his scolding was barely coherent: the stuttering Hebrew is hard to translate but may suggest enfeebled age or impotent rage or both. Yet, if so, we should note that he returns to neatly balanced speech in a pithy warning (v. 25a). What he says, however, seems oracular to the point of obscurity. Yet three comments should be made. (1) His warning may be specifically directed to these renegade priests. If one person sins against another, there can be a divine appeal—after all, part of the business of priests was to manage such appeals. But when it is against Yahweh himself that a priest sins, what then? (2) Even if this is the primary issue, the more general point is at least suggested as well: humans in dispute can appeal to (a) god; but if you fall foul of Yahweh, to whom do you turn? (3) This is the first mention of the theme of sin among humans and between humans and the Deity; it is repeated and varied throughout the books of Samuel, and it comes to a climax at the very end in the report of David’s sin over counting his people.

These few verses (2:22–25) are capped by an even shorter note (v. 26) that Samuel was growing physically and in the respect of both Yahweh and humans. Chs. 1 to 3 end with much more extended developments of these two themes. First, an unnamed “man of God” comes to Eli and in Yahweh’s name utters a comprehensive threat against him and his house (2:27–36). He is reminded that his tribe was chosen at the time of the exodus from Egypt as sacrificial priests and of the grant to them of the burnt offerings. He is also accused of honoring his sons more than Yahweh, and not stopping them from taking the best parts of the meat that were Yahweh’s own due. The remnant of his family are to watch a new faithful and enduring priestly house take their place. Much of the significant language is drawn from the promises to David’s house; and the story deftly anticipates two themes from 2 Samuel: the remnants of Saul’s family watching the establishment of David, and the older priestly families giving way to Jerusalem’s Zadokites. No response from Eli is reported, and nothing else is said.

Ch. 3 The story of young Samuel’s call appears at first to show no knowledge of the visit of the man of God. The unusualness of visions or the receipt of Yahweh’s word is emphasized (v. 1). Does this underscore the significance of what has just been said to Eli? Or does it help explain what is so important—and so unexpected—about Samuel’s strange experience? It is a remarkably finely crafted chapter. Several rare words are set together, illuminating each other and reflecting flashes of light from more distant parts of the biblical collection. To change the image from jewelry to theater, the stage set is very carefully explored with much slower deliberation (vv. 1–3) than is common in biblical narrative, which is often more active and economical. Nothing happens till the LORD calls (v. 4).

Yet even when we pay close attention to the detail, we cannot be confident that we know what is being said, or how many things are being suggested. Young Samuel was attending to Yahweh “before Eli”: Was he serving Yahweh in preference to Eli? better than Eli served? under Eli’s supervising eye? Yahweh’s word was “precious”: because held in high esteem? or because virtually nonexistent? And does the unique verbal form, used to describe what vision was not, mean “diffused” or “broken through”? Was it not widespread, or had it not begun? And, whatever the answer to that last question, should we hear in this unique form an echo of the very similar and no less unique verb rendered “is let loose” in Prov 29:18, which is also immediately preceded by the identical Hebrew for “absence of vision”? Eli is in the right place (even if inactive?), but what first appears to describe the enfeeblement of age also suggests an inactive inner eye, the absence of second sight. The divine lamp not yet extinguished, and the haunting reminder that it could be, catches a reflection of the horror of David’s champions at the other end of the book of Samuel that his death would extinguish the lamp of Israel (2 Sam 21:17). (And even if nr [“lamp”] is not just an alternative spelling of nyr, that latter word important in the divine promise relating to the house of David is also suggested.)

The divine call that begins the action (3:4) develops hints from the setting (1). “Called” (wyqrʾ) is a word that sounds like “precious” (yqr), and it is addressed to Samuel, not to Eli. Yet it is Eli who first discerns what is going on (v. 8)—and we in turn are helped to discern the implicit recognition offered to Eli in this wording, when we remember the proverb that calls the man of discernment “precious in spirit” (Prov 17:27). We are told for the first time, when Samuel is sent back for the third time, that he, like Eli (3:2), is lying in his “place” (v. 9)—we learned earlier (v. 3) that he lay in Yahweh’s shrine, where the divine ark was.

What follows is a quite remarkable statement for the Bible to make: Yahweh came and “took his stand,” or position. It is a commonplace in the Bible for humans (or even divine beings, as in Job 1) to “take their stand” before Yahweh, but not the other way around. The nearest parallel is the case where Yahweh’s agent takes his stand in the road to block Balaam’s passage (Num 22:22). The uniqueness of the statement adds to the significance of the summons. Yet the third call itself is said to have been like the former ones. Was it from a closer position? Or was the closeness of the divine approach only fully declared this third time?

The magnitude of the threat is suggested by the reaction of those who will hear...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface (James D. G. Dunn and John W. Rogerson)
• Abbreviations
• 1 and 2 Samuel
• Get the complete commentary!