This summer Living Word Lutheran Church read together the
first book of Samuel in the Hebrew Testament. Since we did not complete that
series in worship, I offer a few thoughts to “wrap it up”—although it is part 1
of 2, so it isn’t actually over! Keep reading!
A complaint I often hear about the Hebrew Testament is that
it is so violent, and the violence is often attributed to/blamed on God. Yes,
there is a lot of blood in 1 Samuel. I think the stumbling block is not the
content of the stories as much as our expectation of them. If we expect the
Bible to be “guidance and advice on how to live our lives” in 2015 so that we
“get to heaven” (ugh! That’s another blog post!), then all the violence seems
very unnecessary and doesn’t help us understand our world. But the Bible isn’t
about our world—it’s about a long ago and far away world, and how God
interacted with it. From that we have a clue about how God interacts with us,
including expectations, so it’s still valuable. All that to say, I think the
violence is included because it is what God’s people knew in that world. They
were attacking and being attacked from many directions. Having a king, like
other nations had, was part of the attempt to alleviate the violence by having
an organized military and a united kingdom under the leadership of one person,
chosen by God for the job. But life was very violent. Because we live in
middle-class white America, we have trouble understanding the pervasiveness of
this violence; other cultures live similarly every day.
So, David is going to be king, which we know, but Saul, the
current king, does not. Again we see that David is unwilling to harm the Lord’s
anointed king, even though he knows that favor has been withdrawn from Saul.
Saul does not know that David has been anointed, and has no such scruples for
not harming him. Saul stalks David repeatedly; David twice has the opportunity
to kill Saul, but refuses, instead taking something (a corner of his cloak, his
sword and water jug) as proof that he had been so close.
This does not mean David is anti-violence. In chapter 25 he
is quick to seek vengeance on Nabal (whose name means “fool”) for an insult. In
later chapters, he joins forces with the Philistines against the Israelites and
slaughters villages whole so there are no survivors left to tell his tales. He
seems to play one side against the other to win friends and protection, as if
he has to guarantee election to be king.
The book ends with Saul being fatally wounded by the
Philistines and falling on his own sword to end his agony (a slightly different
end to Saul begins the next book, 2 Samuel). Still, he is respected enough as
king that his beheaded body is retrieved and buried.
So what are we to learn from this story? David is regarded
as “faithful” because, despite his violence, he honors the statutes of the
Lord, which Saul had forsaken. Saul repents several times, and promises not to
harm David, but then pursues him once again. David seems loyal only to God and
to himself, making agreements with Saul, Jonathan, and the Philistines on
various occasions. He is concerned about being forced to worship other gods
when Saul places him in exile by continuously hunting him; he does not want to
die unfaithful.
I think this is a story about David, and how he came to be
king. God is part of the story, instrumental in David’s success and Saul’s
downfall. It is part of the memory of Israel, and helps us to understand the
progression of faithfulness. Just because it is in the Bible doesn’t mean it’s “good”
or redemptive, and it doesn’t mean we’re supposed to be like this. We are
supposed to love David (maybe less in the next book!) as the greatest king
Israel ever knew, and the prototype, perhaps, for the Messiah (which is why the
folks in the New Testament stories are so surprised and disappointed at Jesus’
almost exclusive non-violence).
One thing I think we can learn is that the violence, while
real and certainly part of the larger culture of the time, didn’t work. We see,
looking at a long arc of this history, that even God’s kings will kill each
other to get what they want. We are still surrounded by violence—probably more
people get killed in our state every day than were killed in these episodes. We
are immune to the violence around us—in the news, in video games, in TV and the
movies—because it’s “out there” somewhere (if we’re lucky). The people of
Israel could not escape violence, as we see it everywhere in these stories, and
these are supposedly their best stories that shaped their identity. We too
cannot escape violence; how do we respond to threat, terrorism, violence in our
own time and place? Will the memory of our stories seem as shocking to those
who read them in the future as these stories seem to us? Will we have any
heroes? Will God be part of the story?
