Read the session · 16 min
A real problem and a bad solution
So Samuel gets old. And he does the exact thing that the man he replaced did. He puts his sons in the job. And verse 3: "Yet his sons did not walk in his ways but turned aside after gain. They took bribes and perverted justice."
Took. There's that word again. Different sons, same verb, same building. I want to be fair to Israel here, because we tend to read chapter 8 as if the elders are being whiny. They're not. Look at what they've actually got. Samuel is old. His sons are on the take. The last time a judge's sons were on the take, the nation lost a war, lost the ark, and lost thirty thousand men. They have watched this movie. They know how it ends.
So verses 4 and 5. The elders come to Ramah and say: "Behold, you are old and your sons do not walk in your ways. Now appoint for us a king to judge us like all the nations."
The first half of that sentence, is it true? Yes. The second half, is it a good idea? Hold onto the gap between those two answers. That gap is the whole chapter.
Now. "Like all the nations." It shows up twice, verse 5 and verse 20, and the writer wants you to notice. Here's the first thing. That phrase is not new. It's almost word for word out of Deuteronomy 17, where Moses says, when you come into the land and you say "I will set a king over me like all the nations around me," you shall set a king over you whom the LORD chooses. Tsumura walks through the overlap and also the differences, and the differences are interesting: Deuteronomy is worried the king might be a foreigner, which isn't the issue here, and Deuteronomy forbids stockpiling horses, which nobody mentions here.
But the headline is this: the Torah already anticipated a king. God is not caught off guard in chapter 8. Israel having a king was always on the table.
So if kingship isn't the problem, what is? This is the best answer I've found, and it comes from Joyce Baldwin, following a scholar named Jonathan Walton. Ask what "like the nations" actually meant in that world. Not politically. Religiously.
The kings around Israel were not secular men. Every one of them had a god. And the deal was roughly this: the king houses the god, builds him a temple, keeps him fed with sacrifices, maintains the whole operation. And in exchange, when the king wants to do something, the god backs him. Walton's line is worth memorizing: "When the king calls the gods out to battle, the gods comply."
You see what that is. That's a vending machine with a throne on it. You put in the sacrifices, you pull the lever, the god comes out and fights for you.
And here's the part that should make the hair on your neck stand up. Israel already tried that. Four chapters ago. They went and got the ark and dragged it into a battle so God would have to show up and win.
They lost the ark and a woman named her baby "Where is glory?" So Baldwin's conclusion, and I think she's right: the elders are not asking for better administration. They are asking to be the kind of nation whose God can be managed. They want a king like the nations, which requires a god like the gods. And Yahweh is not that.
That's why verse 7 lands the way it does. "And the LORD said to Samuel, 'Obey the voice of the people in all that they say to you, for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them.'"
Not "they've hurt your feelings, Samuel." They've fired me. Two small things in there worth your time. One. Verse 6 in the ESV says "the thing displeased Samuel." Tsumura points out the Hebrew is more literal than that: the matter was evil in Samuel's eyes. And if Samuel knew Deuteronomy 17, and he did, then what upset him wasn't that they asked. It was how they asked and why.
Two, and this is the one I can't get past. God says, they have rejected me. And in the same breath: obey their voice. Stephen Chapman asks the question straight out, and I'm going to give it to you exactly as he puts it. From the very beginning God is prepared to grant their request while being fully opposed to its aim. Why?
And notice, verse 9, God doesn't tell Samuel to just warn them. Chapman catches the Hebrew: Samuel is to "witness against" them. That's courtroom language. It puts this scene in the same company as Joshua telling Israel "you are witnesses against yourselves," and Isaiah being sent to a people who won't listen. This isn't a warning meant to change their minds. It's testimony being entered into the record.
Count the takes
As you read Samuel's warning, notice how often he says "he will take." What is this king going to cost them? He will take your sons. He will take your daughters. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards. He will take a tenth of your grain. He will take your servants and your best young men and your donkeys. He will take a tenth of your flocks.
And then verse 17 ends: "and you shall be his slaves." Eli's sons, at the altar, with the fork. What did the servant say when a worshiper pushed back? "I will take it by force."
Same word. Israel is standing in front of a prophet who is describing, in advance, in detail, a government that will do to them exactly what the corrupt priesthood did to them. And they say yes.
He just read them the price tag and they took the deal anyway. What's something you wanted badly enough that you paid a price you knew about going in? What is the security you want most right now, and what is it actually costing you? Samuel's warning reaches past the price to what happens after they've paid it.
Verse 18, the last thing Samuel says. "And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves, but the LORD will not answer you in that day."
Chapter 3 verse 1, the word of the LORD was rare, and verse 21, God restored it. Chapter 28 verse 6, where a king begs God for a word and gets nothing.
That's this. Right here. Samuel just told them, in chapter 8, that it ends in silence. The book told you the ending in advance and nobody heard it.
Verses 19 and 20. "But the people refused to obey the voice of Samuel. And they said, 'No! But there shall be a king over us, that we also may be like all the nations, and that our king may judge us and go out before us and fight our battles.'"
There it is again. Like all the nations. And listen to the job description they give the king: go out before us and fight our battles. That is God's job in this book. That is literally what God just did in chapter 7 when he thundered. They are asking for a man to do the thing God had done for them eight verses ago.
Verse 22. God says, obey their voice, make them a king. And Samuel sends everybody home.
The man who lost the donkeys
Chapter 9, verse 1. "There was a man of Benjamin whose name was Kish, the son of Abiel..." Where have you heard an opening like that? Think back to the first verse of the book.
Chapter 1, verse 1: "There was a certain man of Ramathaim-zophim... whose name was Elkanah, the son of Jeroham." Baldwin catches this. The book restarts. Important man, genealogy, then the person we actually care about. Chapter 1 gave us Hannah. Chapter 9 gives us Saul.
And how is Saul introduced? Verse 2. "A handsome young man. There was not a man among the people of Israel more handsome than he. From his shoulders upward he was taller than any of the people."
That's it. That's the whole résumé. He's good-looking and he's tall. That word "tall." In Hebrew it's gaboah, high. Where else have you heard that word in this book? Go back to Hannah's song in chapter 2.
Verse 3: "Talk no more so very proudly." Literally, don't speak so high, so high. And verse 7: "The LORD makes poor and makes rich; he brings low and he exalts." Brings low and lifts high.
Hannah sang that God brings the high down and lifts the low up. That's the thesis of the whole book. And now Israel picks a king, and the only thing the narrator tells us about him is that he is high.
Chapman asks the right question and refuses to answer it: is Saul's height a sign of God's favor, or a sign that he's going to need God to bring him down?
And the irony gets thicker. Chapman points out that Saul's size ends up being the source of his insecurity, not his confidence. Watch for it. In verse 21 of this chapter Saul says "I'm from the smallest tribe, the humblest clan, why are you saying this to me?" The tallest man in Israel has the smallest self-image in Israel. That combination is going to destroy him.
Okay. The donkeys. Verse 3. Kish loses some donkeys and sends his son to find them. And this is a genuinely funny chapter if you let it be. They search Ephraim. Nothing. They search Shalishah. Nothing. They search Shaalim, Benjamin, Zuph. Nothing. Three days. And in verse 5 Saul says, let's go home, my dad's going to stop worrying about the donkeys and start worrying about us.
And then the servant says, verse 6, hang on, there's a man of God in this city, everything he says comes true, maybe he can tell us where to go.
Who in this story knows who Samuel is? Look at the servant, and then at the young women at the well in verse 11. The servant knows. The girls hauling water know. The future king of Israel does not.
And then it gets better. Verse 7, Saul says, well, we don't have a gift to bring him. And the servant pulls out a quarter shekel of silver and says, I've got this. The servant is funding the expedition. Saul contributes nothing to this story except his height.
Now the part that isn't funny at all. Verses 15 and 16. The day before Saul shows up, God had already told Samuel: tomorrow I'll send you a man from Benjamin, and you shall anoint him prince over my people Israel, and he shall save my people from the Philistines, "because I have seen my people, because their cry has come to me."
Look at that. God is annoyed with the request in chapter 8 and God has compassion on the people in chapter 9. Both. In the same book, four verses apart in your Bible. He calls them "my people" three times in two verses. The request was a rejection of him and he is still moved by their cry.
That's the thing about this stretch of the book that people miss. Chapters 8 and 12 say the request was sin. Chapters 9 through 11 say Saul is God's provision. Older scholars used to solve that by cutting the book into a pro-king source and an anti-king source and assigning the chapters out. You don't have to do that, and I don't think you should. Chapman reads the book as it stands and lets both be true: the asking was faithless, and God's answer was generous. Both. That's not a contradiction. That's most of my prayer life.
Then 9:22 through 10:1, Samuel feeds him the portion that was set aside, tells him the donkeys are already found, and pours oil on his head. And 10:6, the Spirit of the LORD rushes on him and he prophesies with the prophets, and people who know him say, verse 11, "Is Saul also among the prophets?"
Remember that line. It comes back in chapter 19 and it means something very different the second time. And then 10:16, Saul goes home, his uncle asks what happened, and Saul tells him about the donkeys. "But about the matter of the kingdom, of which Samuel had spoken, he did not tell him anything."
He just doesn't mention it.
Hiding in the baggage
Samuel calls everybody to Mizpah. And before he crowns anybody, verse 18 and 19, he makes them say it out loud one more time: God brought you out of Egypt, God delivered you, "but today you have rejected your God, who saves you from all your calamities. And you have said to him, 'Set a king over us.'"
Then they cast lots. Tribe by tribe, clan by clan, man by man. Benjamin. Matri. Saul the son of Kish. Here's a detail Bergen catches that I'd never noticed. The only other time in Scripture that a single individual is picked out by that exact narrowing-down-by-lot procedure is Joshua 7, when they're hunting for Achan after the disaster at Ai.
The last time Israel ran this ceremony, they were finding out who'd sinned. Bergen thinks that's deliberate, that the narrator is coloring the coronation with the memory of an execution. I think he's right, and either way it's in the text.
And then verse 21. They pick Saul. And Saul is not there. Verse 22. They have to ask God where he is. And God says: "Behold, he has hidden himself among the baggage."
Is that humility, or is that fear? It's worth asking before you decide what to make of Saul. Okay. Here's where the commentators land, and it's not where most sermons land. Tsumura says flatly that this isn't shyness. Saul knew how the lot process was going; he watched it narrow to his tribe, then his clan. He had time. He made a deliberate effort to hide so he would not be found, and Tsumura thinks it was fear of the responsibility. Bergen goes further: Saul's absence from his own coronation foreshadows a reign that will keep vacating the responsibilities of the job.
And look at the pattern. He didn't tell his servant. He didn't tell his uncle. He's not at his own coronation. Three times now, the man avoids the thing.
I'm not going to be too hard on him, because I've hidden in the baggage. You have too. But I want to name the difference, because it matters for the rest of this book. Humility knows who it is and doesn't need you to know. Fear doesn't know who it is and hopes nobody finds out. Saul is the second one. And a man who is terrified of being seen, who is also the tallest man in the room, is going to spend his whole reign managing how he looks. That's chapter 13. That's chapter 15. That's chapter 18.
They pull him out. Verse 23. And the narrator tells you the one thing about him again: "he was taller than any of the people from his shoulders upward."
Twice now. The book has told us exactly one fact about this man, twice. And Bergen has one more observation here, and it's uncomfortable. Everywhere else in Scripture, the people described as tall are the ones outside the covenant. The Anakim. Goliath, eventually. Israel's new king is being described with the vocabulary the Bible usually saves for Israel's enemies.
Verse 24. Samuel says, "Do you see him whom the LORD has chosen? There is none like him among all the people." And everyone shouts "Long live the king!"
Both halves of that are true at once. The LORD did choose him. And "there is none like him" is a sentence this book has used before, in chapter 2 verse 2, about God. Now it's about a tall man.
Then verse 25, and it's quiet but don't skip it. Samuel tells the people the rights and duties of the kingship, writes it in a book, and lays it up before the LORD. Bergen notes that this is the first document anybody explicitly deposits before the LORD since Joshua. Which means nobody wrote anything down before God for the entire period of the judges. That whole era, and not one document. That's a quiet indictment of about three hundred years.
And the chapter ends, verse 27, with some worthless fellows saying "how can this man save us?" and despising him and bringing him no present. And Saul held his peace.
He lets an insult go. The elders' complaint in 8:5 is completely legitimate. Samuel is old, his sons are corrupt, and they have already watched that exact situation destroy the nation once. Does a legitimate problem justify the solution they reached for? How do you tell the difference between a real need and a wrong fix? That's the question their story leaves with you.
Israel had a real problem and asked for the wrong thing, and God gave it to them. They wanted a king like the nations, which meant they wanted a God like the gods. Housed, fed, managed, and obligated to show up when called. And God, who is not that, said yes to the request anyway and sent them a tall man who was hiding behind the luggage.
You can get exactly what you asked for and find out it was the answer to a prayer you should not have prayed. God says "they have rejected me" and in the same breath says "give them what they asked for." Is that mercy or judgment? And here's the harder half: have you ever gotten something you prayed for and only found out later which one it was? The next chapter keeps us from making the answer too simple.
And here's the thing that keeps me from despairing over chapter 8. God says: I'm sending you this man, and he will save my people, "because I have seen my people, because their cry has come to me."
They rejected him and he heard them anyway. He was angry about the request and moved by the people making it. That's the God of this book. He is not a vending machine, which means you cannot control him. And he is not indifferent, which means you do not have to.
Some of you are in chapter 8 right now. You've got a real problem. Not an imagined one, a real one. And you are reaching for something that will take your sons and your daughters and your fields, and somebody who loves you has already told you the price, and you're going to do it anyway.
The book didn't talk Israel out of it either. But I'll tell you what the book does say. Verse 18: you will cry out, and the LORD will not answer you in that day. And also, one chapter later: I have seen my people, and their cry has come to me.
Both of those are in your Bible, eleven verses apart. Which one you're living in has a lot to do with whether you're asking God to serve you or asking God to be God.