Samuel: Chapter 16

 

The spirit moves

and leaves a void

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If the previous chapter closed with Samuel's ceaseless mourning till the day of his death, this chapter opens with God's impatient demand, How long will you grieve for Saul?--a rejection of the intimacy and merging between the king-maker and king. God's solution is a brutal break.  Samuel is to crown another king--and must acknowledge that the man he grieves so deeply could and would kill him:"if Saul hears of it he will kill me." There are fatal boundaries to this all-encompassing relationship.

The two annointings are paralleled. Both take place after a zevach, a public sacrifice; both are defined by the same leitworts : sh'l'kh (send); r'e'h (sight). Both kings are described with the appellation t'v, good. Yet these surface parallels serve to heighten the contrast. If Saul is sent in a quest for his father and finds Samuel, Samuel is sent to find David: one is introduced as a hero, the other discovered by a process of elimination. If Saul is accompanied by a naar servant, David is the naar. 

There is to be none of the destructive intimacy between Samuel and this second king: if Samuel is foretold of Saul's arrival, he must arrive at David after running through all his brothers. It is God who takes the active role, and Samuel must discover whom God chose. There is no private communion on the roof: David is anointed within the presence of his brothers. There is no final kiss, no series of signs. Instead, Samuel, having fulfilled his function, leaves. 

Yet the dangerous intimacy persists, but now moves to a different triangle. The codependency between Saul and Samuel is replaced by a linkage between Saul and David. Having been crowned, God's spirit imbues (tz'l'kh--a root that also implies success) David--and vacates Saul. Hanna, in the prayer after Samuel's birth, defines a world in flux, where one side of a binary constantly transforms to its opposite.  There is no going back to what Saul once was: after being anointed, he became another man.  With the departure of the kingship and God's spirit, the void in Saul is invaded by an evil spirit (a force that returns us to the saga of Abimelech, the first man who sought to be king, also destroyed by an "evil spirit").  This spirit can be calmed only by David, the positive to Saul's negative. The two kings are bound together in a single sine curve, two sides of one reality, bound together by Saul's love for his own replacement.