Samuel 19: In Writing

Sit in secret. Close the door.

Brood with fist clenched

ready to spear each fear

only for it to slip into the shadows.

Outside,  the night stalks.

Check the sleeping shapes of your children
So silent, they could be simulacra
bodies yielding beneath your touch.
Study their stirs like tea leaves.

The wind shrieks unintelligible

propheciesm as the floor flees

before your feet, and you teeter

at the edge of the sudden pit.

Samuel: Chapter 19

Now you lie, exposed, stripped

what bare forked thing is this?

 For full chapter, click here

Saul's hidden antipathy towards David moves into the open--and the fissures in the royal family gape into ravines under the pressure. Saul urged his son Jonathan and all his courtiers to kill David. But Saul’s son Jonathan desired David exceedingly. The repetition of the filial bond emphasizes the dual pull. Jonathan tries not to make a choice by advocating for David, but manages only to shove the hatred back into hiding: David serves Saul "as before"--and Saul tries to murder him while he plays, exactly as before.

Jonathan willingly stripped himself of pomp and weapons in his love for David; Saul is inexorably stripped--metaphorically, then literally. First his family falls away: his son, Jonathan, loves David; his daughter, Michal, whom Saul thought to use as a “snare” to trap David, entraps her father’s men instead.

If Saul's kingship was originally defined by the boundaries of the "burial" of his ancestress Rachel, he now finds himself trapped in a funhouse version of his ancestress's life. Why did you deceive me? he asks Michal, echoing Jacob's cry at finding Rachel replaced by Leah. The terafim that Rachel stole from her father are used by Michal to deceive him, stealing David away--and pushing against the very bounds of his kingship.

Next, Saul is stripped even of Samuel, the king-maker so enwined with him. Even though Samuel mourns Saul's fall “till the end of his days”, it is David he provides with succor. In doing so, he turns the signs of Saul's kingship against him. Saul’s third sign that he would be king is that he would prophesy and become another man--a transformation so complete it becomes proverbial: is Saul too amongst the prophets?. Now that transformative experience of being taken over by the spirit of God is cheapened, as every group he sends to arrest David are similarly overtaken by prophecy. When Saul at last comes himself, he too is possessed: mitnabe is a reflexive form, as his prophecy fuels his tranformation, which intensifies his possession by God's spirit. This second possession does not return him to himself. Instead, he is literally stripped, rolling naked on the floor. His interaction with God's spirit is indicative of the kingship as a whole: an external imposition that tranformed him, is revealed as a destructive breaking of the bondaries of self.

Samuel 18: In Writing

 And when you are stripped

of cloak and sword

armor gone

skin exposed to the gathering storm--

and the storm always gathers

always upwelling swirls of

did he eat? who did he hurt?

does he cry? Why this rains?

Your soul feeding his soul

as your life fed his life

invistble ubilical pulsing between you

worry, love, exhaustion,knowlge

that some day it will be severed

and what will be left of you?

Samuel: Chapter 18

 The bonds that tie, entwine, ensnare

Who holds the edge

and what is left over?

For full chapter, click here

The entire royal family is drawn into David's orbit. 

If Saul was the first to "love" David, now Jonathan's soul is "bound wth the soul of David""--an echo of Jacob's all-consuming love for Jonathan's ancestor Benjamin--his soul is bound with his soul (Genesis 44:30). "Jonathan loved David as himself," and indeed they are doppelgängers, David's fearless charge toward Goliath foreshadowed by Jonathan's own sortie against the Philistines, both united by an imminent sense of God's presence and involvement. Now the nation's former beloved hero strips himself to give all to the new beloved, taking "off the cloak and tunic he was wearing... together with his sword, bow, and belt." 

As Jonathan gives all in love, Merav, Saul's older daughter, is offered to David as a wife, and  Michal, his other daughter, "fell in love with David." The text is silent about whether David loves back. Vayichrot, the verb used for the covenant between Jonathan and David, is in the singular, indicating either complete merging--or one-sidedness.  

To Saul, this is fatal attraction. The bons of love are a "snare", which he can only hope to turn against David rather than get caught in himself (regardless of the cruelty to his own daughter).    

The dancing women--recalling the ambiguous salvation of Saul's tribe after the incident in Geva--are the trigger that turns love to jealousy, which quickly transforms to fear. Vayar 'see,'  'fear' is part of a key lexical set that revolves around eyes: who is seeing the whole picture, and who is right to be afraid?

David's playing, formerly a healing intimacy, becomes an opportunity for growing paranoia and attempted murder, as Saul attempts in vain to literally pin down his enigmatic rival.  In the end, all he can do is "remove" David, as God has removed himself from Saul.